James Lewis Thomas Chalmers Spence (1874-1955) was a Scottish journalist, poet, author, folklorist, and occult scholar. He was a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, and Vice-President of the Scottish Anthropological and Folklore Society. He was also founder of the Scottish National Movement. Spence's researches into the mythology and culture of the New World, together with his examination of the cultures of western Europe and northwest Africa, led him to the question of Atlantis. During the 1920s he published a series of books which sought to rescue the topic from the occultists who had more or less brought it into disrepute. Spence died in Edinburgh in 1955 at the age of eighty.
