An Outline of Religious Ideas in post-Atlantean Times

But there is one thing we will find that people still had in common in that post-Atlantic period: it is an echo of the much more highly developed power of memory that existed in the Atlantic period. In those days, memory was developed quite differently than it is today. People remembered further back, up to the lives of distant ancestors. They knew what such an ancestor had gone through centuries ago, just as an old man knows what he had experienced in his youth. Such memories of the ancestors shaped what can be called the religion of the ancestors, the cult of the ancestors. Ancestor worship, veneration of the ancestors, is in reality the first religion. Memory had in a sense been kept alive. This activity of memory was so great that, although individual people could not rise to the level of yoga, they could still enter into a spiritual state in which the common ancestor of a people appeared to them in dreams or in psychic states.