A writer known chiefly through his collaboration
Leslie is catalogued by Cornell University Library as Joseph Benjamin Leslie, born in 1851, but a fuller account of his family, education and death has not been securely established. The most informative surviving account of his work is his own introduction to Submerged Atlantis Restored. There he presents himself as a participant in Spiritualist investigation, seeking to connect science, philosophy and continued life after death.
He dates Carrie C. Van-Duzee’s involvement in the project to 1906 and thanks her for more than four years of assistance. He describes private séances in which she received much of the book’s supposedly prehistoric vocabulary, while he obtained other terms directly through his own impressions. His account also places him in charge of literary and artistic details. A notice in Light in February 1912 offers copies directly from Leslie at a Los Angeles address.
How the lost continent was reconstructed
The held edition was published by the Austin Publishing Company in Rochester, New York, in 1911. Its alternative title, Links and Cycles, reflects the argument that material and spiritual life form a connected system. The opening treats an Over Spirit and Over Soul as sources of existence; the much longer reconstruction of Atlantis supplies mountains, cities, alphabets, musical notation, airships, government and religion.
Leslie attributes the communications received through Van-Duzee chiefly to a spirit called Alem Prolex and those received by himself to a purported Phoenician spirit. He acknowledges that financial limits forced a substantial reduction of the manuscript. The resulting volume still brings together narrative, diagrams, verse and extensive comparisons with later cultures. Its detail expresses his confidence in spirit testimony; it does not independently establish the existence of the civilisation described. The work belongs to the Spiritualist literature of recovered prehistory, where revelations were used to fill gaps beyond the surviving historical record.
