Emerald Tablets of Thoth: Who Was Doreal, and Are They Real?
A 1930s occult teacher who claimed to have found and translated emerald tablets written by Thoth, a priest-king from Atlantis.
The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean is a 1930s book by Maurice Doreal, an American occult teacher. He said he found and translated the tablets at Giza in 1925; scholars regard it as a modern composition.
Maurice Doreal was the name used by Claude Doggins, an American occult teacher born in 1898 who died in 1963. Around 1930 in Denver he founded the Brotherhood of the White Temple, which taught a blend of Theosophy, Atlantis lore and his own revelations. In the late 1940s he moved the group to a mountain site near Sedalia, Colorado and predicted a nuclear war.
His best-known work is The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean. Doreal said that in 1925 he found the tablets at the Great Pyramid of Giza and translated them. In the text, Thoth is a priest-king of Atlantis who flees its destruction, builds the Great Pyramid, and records his wisdom on thirteen emerald tablets, describing the Halls of Amenti deep in the earth, the Children of Light, and hostile beings from other dimensions.
The book is modern. Its language, cosmology and ideas come from early 20th-century esotericism, Theosophy and pulp fiction, not from Egyptian sources, and no one other than Doreal has ever produced the tablets. It is still widely shared online, often confused with the genuine medieval Emerald Tablet of Hermes, which is a short alchemical text.
Doreal matters to this site as a case study. His book shows how a real ancient figure, Thoth, and a real alchemical relic, the Emerald Tablet, can be fused with Atlantis into a new myth that many readers take for ancient scripture. It also shows how quickly a modern text can acquire an aura of antiquity.
Doreal relocated his followers to the Colorado mountains to wait out a nuclear war he predicted for 1953.
Scholars regard the Emerald Tablets of Thoth as a 20th-century composition; there is no evidence of any tablets, and the Thoth it describes is unknown to Egyptian texts.
