The Antediluvian World
by
Ignatius Donnelly
Part 5 out of 8
New Mexico, of which the cut on p. 265 is an illustration.
We also find this figure repeated upon vase from a Mississippi Valley
mound, which we give elsewhere. (See p. 260.)
It is found upon many of the monuments of Central America. In the
Treasure House of Atreus, at Mycenæ, Greece, a fragment of a pillar was
found which is literally covered with this double spiral design. (See
"Rosengarten's Architectural Styles," p, 59.)
This Treasure House of Atreus is one of the oldest buildings in Greece.
We find the double-spiral figure upon a shell ornament found on the
breast of a skeleton, in a carefully constructed stone coffin, in a
mound near Nashville, Tennessee.
Lenormant remarks ("Anc. Civil.," vol. ii., p. 158) that the bronze
implements found in Egypt, near Memphis, had been buried for six
thousand years; and that at that time, as the Egyptians had a horror of
the sea, some commercial nation must have brought the tin, of which the
bronze was in part composed, from India, the Caucasus, or Spain, the
nearest points to Egypt in which tin is found.
Heer has shown that the civilized plants of the lake dwellings are not
of Asiatic, but of African, and, to a great extent, of Egyptian origin.
Their stone axes are made largely of jade or nephrite, "a mineral which,
strange to say, geologists have not found in place on the continent of
Europe." (Foster's "Prehistoric Races," p. 44.)
Compare this picture of a copper axe from a mound near Laporte, Indiana,
with this representation of a copper axe of the Bronze Age, found near
Waterford, Ireland. Professor Foster pronounces them almost identical.
Compare this specimen of pottery from the lake dwellings of Switzerland
with the following specimen from San José, Mexico. Professor Foster
calls attention to the striking resemblance in the designs of these two
widely separated works of art, one belonging to the Bronze Age of
Europe, the other to the Copper Age of America.
+-------------------------------------+---------------------------------+
| FRAGMENT OF POTTERY, LAKE | FRAGMENT OF POTTERY, SAN JOSÉ, |
| NEUFCHATEL, SWITZERLAND. | MEXICO. |
+-------------------------------------+---------------------------------+
These, then, in conclusion, are our reasons for believing that the
Bronze Age of Europe has relation to Atlantis:
1. The admitted fact that it is anterior in time to the Iron Age
relegates it to a great antiquity.
2. The fact that it is anterior in time to the Iron Age is conclusive
that it is not due to any of the known European or Asiatic nations, all
of which belong to the Iron Age.
3. The fact that there war. in Europe, Asia, or Africa no copper or tin
age prior to the Bronze Age, is conclusive testimony that the
manufacture of bronze was an importation into those continents from some
foreign country.
4. The fact that in America alone of all the world is found the Copper
Age, which must necessarily have preceded the Bronze Age, teaches us to
look to the westward of Europe and beyond the sea for that foreign
country.
5. We find many similarities in forms of implements between the Bronze
Age of Europe and the Copper Age of America.
6. if Plato told the truth, the Atlanteans were a great commercial
nation, trading to America and Europe, and, at the same time, they
possessed bronze, and were great workers in the other metals.
7. We shall see hereafter that the mythological traditions of Greece
referred to a Bronze Age which preceded an Iron Age, and placed this in
the land of the gods, which was an island in the Atlantic Ocean, beyond
the Pillars of Hercules; and this land was, as we shall see, clearly
Atlantis.
8. As we find but a small development of the Bronze Age in America, it
is reasonable to suppose that there must have been some intermediate
station between America and Europe, where, during a long period of time,
the Bronze Age was developed out of the Copper Age, and immense
quantities of bronze implements were manufactured and carried to Europe.
CHAPTER IX.
ARTIFICIAL DEFORMATION OF THE SKULL.
An examination of the American monuments shows (see figure on page 269)
that the people represented were in the habit of flattening the skull by
artificial means. The Greek and Roman writers had mentioned this
practice, but it was long totally forgotten by the civilized world,
until it was discovered, as an unheard-of wonder, to be the usage among
the Carib Islanders, and several Indian tribes in North America. It was
afterward found that the ancient Peruvians and Mexicans practised this
art: several flattened Peruvian skulls are depicted in Morton's "Crania
Americana." It is still in use among the Flat-head Indians of the
north-western part of the United States.
In 1849 a remarkable memoir appeared from the pen of M. Rathke, showing
that similar skulls had been found near Kertsch, in the Crimea, and
calling attention to the book of Hippocrates, "De Aeris, Aquis et Locu,"
lib. iv., and a passage of Strabo, which speaks of the practice among
the Scythians. In 1854 Dr. Fitzinger published a learned memoir on the
skulls of the Avars, a branch of the Uralian race of Turks. He shows
that the practice of flattening the head had existed from an early date
throughout the East, and described an ancient skull, greatly distorted
by artificial means, which had lately been found in Lower Austria.
Skulls similarly flattened have been found in Switzerland and Savoy. The
Huns under Attila had the same practice of flattening the heads.
Professor Anders Retzius proved (see "Smithsonian Report," 1859) that
the custom still exists in the south of France, and in parts of Turkey.
"Not long since a French physician surprised the world by the fact that
nurses in Normandy were still giving the children's heads a sugar-loaf
shape by bandages and a tight cap,
STUCCO BAS-RELIEF IN THE PALACE OF PALENQUE.
while in Brittany they preferred to press it round. No doubt they are
doing so to this day." (Tylor's "Anthropology," p. 241.)
Professor Wilson remarks:
"Trifling as it may appear, it is not without interest to have the fact
brought under our notice, by the disclosures of ancient barrows and
cysts, that the same practice of nursing the child and carrying it
about, bound to a flat cradle-board, prevailed in Britain and the north
of Europe long before the first notices of written history reveal the
presence of man beyond the Baltic or the English Channel, and that in
all probability the same custom prevailed continuously from the shores
of the German Ocean to Behring's Strait." ("Smithsonian Report," 1862,
p. 286.)
Dr. L. A. Gosse testifies to the prevalence of the same custom among the
Caledonians and Scandinavians in the earliest times; and Dr. Thurman has
treated of the same peculiarity among the Anglo-Saxons. ("Crania
Britannica," chap. iv., p. 38.)
PERUVIAN SKULL.
CHINOOK (FLAT-HEAD), AFTER CATLIN.
Here, then, is an extraordinary and unnatural practice which has existed
from the highest antiquity, over vast regions of country, on both sides
of the Atlantic, and which is perpetuated unto this day in races as
widely separated as the Turks, the French, and the Flat-head Indians. Is
it possible to explain this except by supposing that it originated from
some common centre?
The annexed out represents an ancient Swiss skull, from a cemetery near
Lausanne, from a drawing of Frederick Troyon. Compare this with the
illustration given on page 271, which represents a Peruvian flat-head,
copied from Morton's "Ethnography and Archæology of the American
Aborigines," 1846. This skull is shockingly distorted. The dotted lines
indicate the course of the bandages by which the skull was deformed.
The following heads are from Del Rio's "Account of Palenque," copied
into Nott and Gliddon's "Types of Mankind," p. 440. They show that the
receding forehead was a natural characteristic of the ancient people of
Central America. The same form of head has been found even in fossil
skulls. We may therefore conclude that the skull-flattening, which we
find to have been practised in both the Old and New Worlds, was an
attempt of other races to imitate the form of skull of a people whose
likenesses are found on the monuments of Egypt and of America. It has
been shown that this peculiar form of the head was present even in the
fœtus of the Peruvian mummies.
Hippocrates tells us that the practice among the Scythians was for the
purpose of giving a certain aristocratic distinction.
HEADS FROM PALENQUE.
Amedée Thierry, in his "History of Attila," says the Huns used it for
the same reason; and the same purpose influences the Indians of Oregon.
Dr. Lund, a Swedish naturalist, found in the bone caves of Minas-Geraes,
Brazil, ancient human bones associated with the remains of extinct
quadrupeds. "These skulls," says Lund, "show not only the peculiarity of
the American race but in an excessive degree, even to the entire
disappearance of the forehead." Sir Robert Schomburgh found on some of
the affluents of the Orinoco a tribe known as Frog Indians, whose heads
were flattened by Nature, as shown in newly-born children.
In the accompanying plate we show the difference in the conformation of
the forehead in various races. The upper dotted line, A, represents the
shape of the European forehead; the next line, B, that of the
Australian; the next, C, that of the Mound Builder of the United States;
the next, D, that of the Guanche of the Canary Islands; and the next, E,
that of a skull from the Inca cemetery of Peru. We have but to compare
these lines with the skulls of the Egyptians, Kurds, and the heroic type
of heads in the statues of the gods of Greece, to see that there was
formerly an ancient race marked by a receding forehead; and that the
practice of flattening the skull was probably an attempt to approximate
the shape of the bead to this standard of an early civilized and
dominant people.
Not only do we find the same receding forehead in the skulls of the
ancient races of Europe and America, and the same attempt to imitate
this natural and peculiar conformation by artificial flattening of the
head, but it has been found (see Henry Gillman's "Ancient Man in
Michigan," "Smithsonian Report," 1875, p. 242) that the Mound Builders
and Peruvians of America, and the Neolithic people of France and the
Canary Islands, had alike an extraordinary custom of boring a circular
bole in the top of the skulls of their dead, so that the soul might
readily pass in and out. More than this, it has been found that in all
these ancient populations the skeletons exhibit a remarkable degree of
platicnemism, or flattening of the tibiæ or leg bones. (Ibid., 1873,
p.367.) In this respect the Mound Builders of Michigan were identical
with the man of Cro Magnon and the ancient inhabitants of Wales.
The annexed ancient Egyptian heads, copied from the monuments, indicate
either that the people of the Nile deformed their beads by pressure upon
the front of the skull, or that
EGYPTIAN HEADS.
there was some race characteristic which gave this appearance to their
heads. These heads are all the heads of priests, and therefore
represented the aristocratic class.
The first illustration below is taken from a stucco relief found in a
temple at Palenque, Central America. The second is from an Egyptian
monument of the time of Rameses IV.
The outline drawing on the following page shows the form of the skull of
the royal Inca line: the receding forehead here seems to be natural, and
not the result of artificial compression.
Both illustrations at the bottom of the preceding page show the same
receding form of the forehead, due to either artificial deformation of
the skull or to a common race characteristic.
We must add the fact that the extraordinary practice of deforming the
skull was found all over Europe and America to the catalogue of other
proofs that the people of both continents were originally united in
blood and race. With the couvade, the practice of circumcision, unity of
religious beliefs and customs, folk-lore, and alphabetical signs,
language and flood legends, we array together a mass of unanswerable
proofs of prehistoric identity of race.
PART IV.
THE MYTHOLOGIES OF THE OLD WORLD A RECOLLECTION OF ATLANTIS.
CHAPTER I. TRADITIONS OF ATLANTIS.
We find allusions to the Atlanteans in the most ancient traditions of
many different races.
The great antediluvian king of the Mussulman was Shedd-Ad-Ben-Ad, or
Shed-Ad, the son of Ad, or Atlantis.
Among the Arabians the first inhabitants of that country are known as
the Adites, from their progenitor, who is called Ad, the grandson of
Ham. These Adites were probably the people of Atlantis or Ad-lantis.
"They are personified by a monarch to whom everything is ascribed, and
to whom is assigned several centuries of life." ("Ancient History of the
East," Lenormant and Chevallier, vol. ii., p. 295.), Ad came from the
northeast. "He married a thousand wives, had four thousand sons, and
lived twelve hundred years. His descendants multiplied considerably.
After his death his sons Shadid and Shedad reigned in succession over
the Adites. In the time of the latter the people of Ad were a thousand
tribes, each composed of several thousands of men. Great conquests are
attributed to Shedad; he subdued, it is said, all Arabia and Irak. The
migration of the Canaanites, their establishment in Syria, and the
Shepherd invasion of Egypt are, by many Arab writers, attributed to an
expedition of Shedad." (Ibid., p. 296.)
Shedad built a palace ornamented with superb columns, and surrounded by
a magnificent garden. It was called Irem. "It was a paradise that Shedad
had built in imitation of the celestial Paradise, of whose delights he
had heard." ("Ancient History of the East," p. 296.) In other words, an
ancient, sun-worshipping, powerful, and conquering race overran Arabia
at the very dawn of history; they were the sons of Adlantis: their king
tried to create a palace and garden of Eden like that of Atlantis.
The Adites are remembered by the Arabians as a great and civilized race.
"They are depicted as men of gigantic stature; their strength was equal
to their size, and they easily moved enormous blocks of stone." (Ibid.)
They were architects and builders. They raised many monuments of their
power; and hence, among the Arabs, arose the custom of calling great
ruins "buildings of the Adites." To this day the Arabs say "as old as
Ad." In the Koran allusion is made to the edifices they built on "high
places for vain uses;" expressions proving that their "idolatry was
considered to have been tainted with Sabæism or star-worship." (Ibid.)
"In these legends," says Lenormant, "we find traces of a wealthy nation,
constructors of great buildings, with an advanced civilization,
analogous to that of Chaldea, professing a religion similar to the
Babylonian; a nation, in short, with whom material progress was allied
to great moral depravity and obscene rites. These facts must be true and
strictly historical, for they are everywhere met with among the
Cushites, as among the Canaanites, their brothers by origin."
Nor is there wanting a great catastrophe which destroys the whole Adite
nation, except a very few who escape because they had renounced
idolatry. A black cloud assails their country, from which proceeds a
terrible hurricane (the water-spout?) which sweeps away everything.
The first Adites were followed by a second Adite race; probably the
colonists who had escaped the Deluge. The centre of its power was the
country of Sheba proper. This empire endured for a thousand years. The
Adites are represented upon the Egyptian monuments as very much like the
Egyptians themselves; in other words, they were a red or sunburnt race:
their great temples were pyramidal, surmounted by buildings. ("Ancient
History of the East," p. 321.) "The Sabæans," says Agatharchides ("De
Mari Erythræo," p. 102), "have in their houses an incredible number of
vases, and utensils of all sorts, of gold and silver, beds and tripods
of silver, and all the furniture of astonishing richness. Their
buildings have porticos with columns sheathed with gold, or surmounted
by capitals of silver. On the friezes, ornaments, and the framework of
the doors they place plates of gold incrusted with precious stones."
All this reminds one of the descriptions given by the Spaniards of the
temples of the sun in Peru.
The Adites worshipped the gods of the Phœnicians under names but
slightly changed; "their religion was especially solar... It was
originally a religion without images, without idolatry, and without a
priesthood." (Ibid., p. 325.) They "worshipped the sun from the tops of
pyramids." (Ibid.) They believed in the immortality of the soul.
In all these things we see resemblances to the Atlanteans.
The great Ethiopian or Cushite Empire, which in the earliest ages
prevailed, as Mr. Rawlinson says, "from the Caucasus to the Indian
Ocean, from the shores of the Mediterranean to the mouth of the Ganges,"
was the empire of Dionysos, the empire of "Ad," the empire of Atlantis.
El Eldrisi called the language spoken to this day by the Arabs of
Mahrah, in Eastern Arabia, "the language of the people of Ad," and Dr.
J. H. Carter, in the Bombay Journal of July, 1847, says, "It is the
softest and sweetest language I have ever heard." It would be
interesting to compare this primitive tongue with the languages of
Central America.
The god Thoth of the Egyptians, who was the god of a foreign country,
and who invented letters, was called At-hothes.
We turn now to another ancient race, the Indo-European family--the Aryan
race.
In Sanscrit Adim, means first. Among the Hindoos the first man was
Ad-ima, his wife was Heva. They dwelt upon an island, said to be Ceylon;
they left the island and reached the main-land, when, by a great
convulsion of nature, their communication with the parent land was
forever cut off. (See "Bible in India.")
Here we seem to have a recollection of the destruction of Atlantis.
Mr. Bryant says, "Ad and Ada signify the first." The Persians called the
first man "Ad-amah." "Adon" was one of the names of the Supreme God of
the Phœnicians; from it was derived the name of the Greek god "Ad-onis."
The Arv-ad of Genesis was the Ar-Ad of the Cushites; it is now known as
Ru-Ad. It is a series of connected cities twelve miles in length, along
the coast, full of the most massive and gigantic ruins.
Sir William Jones gives the tradition of the Persians as to the earliest
ages. He says: "Moshan assures us that in the opinion of the best
informed Persians the first monarch of Iran, and of the whole earth, was
Mashab-Ad; that he received from the Creator, and promulgated among men
a sacred book, in a heavenly language, to which the Mussulman author
gives the Arabic title of 'Desatir,' or 'Regulations.' Mashab-Ad was, in
the opinion of the ancient Persians, the person left at the end of the
last great cycle, and consequently the father of the present world. He
and his wife having survived the former cycle, were blessed with a
numerous progeny; he planted gardens, invented ornaments, forged
weapons, taught men to take the fleece from sheep and make clothing; he
built cities, constructed palaces, fortified towns, and introduced arts
and commerce."
We have already seen that the primal gods of this people are identical
with the gods of the Greek mythology, and were originally kings of
Atlantis. But it seems that these ancient divinities are grouped
together as "the Aditya;" and in this name "Ad-itya" we find a strong
likeness to the Semitic "Adites," and another reminiscence of Atlantis,
or Adlantis. In corroboration of this view we find,
1. The gods who are grouped together as the Aditya are the most ancient
in the Hindoo mythology.
2. They are all gods of light, or solar gods. (Whitney's Oriental and
Linguistic Studies," p. 39.)
3. There are twelve of them. (Ibid.)
4. These twelve gods presided over twelve months in the year.
5. They are a dim recollection of a very remote past. Says Whitney, "It
seems as if here was an attempt on the part of the Indian religion to
take a new development in a moral direction, which a change in the
character and circumstances of the people has caused to fail in the
midst, and fall back again into forgetfulness, while yet half finished
and indistinct." (Ibid.)
6. These gods are called "the sons of Aditi," just as in the Bible we
have allusions to "the sons of Adab," who were the first metallurgists
and musicians. "Aditi is not a goddess. She is addressed as a queen's
daughter, she of fair children."
7. The Aditya "are elevated above all imperfections; they do not sleep
or wink." The Greeks represented their gods as equally wakeful and
omniscient. "Their character is all truth; they hate and punish guilt."
We have seen the same traits ascribed by the Greeks to the Atlantean
kings.
8. The sun is sometimes addressed as an Aditya.
9. Among the Aditya is Varuna, the equivalent of Uranos, whose
identification with Atlantis I have shown. In the vedas Varuna is "the
god of the ocean."
10. The Aditya represent an earlier and purer form of religion: "While
in hymns to the other deities long: life, wealth, power, are the objects
commonly prayed for, of the Aditya is craved purity, forgiveness of sin,
freedom from guilt, and repentance." ("Oriental and Linguistic Studies,"
p. 43.)
11. The Aditya, like the Adites, are identified with the doctrine of the
immortality of the soul. Yama is the god of the abode beyond the grave.
In the Persian story he appears as Yima, and "is made ruler of the
golden age and founder of the Paradise." (Ibid., p. 45.) (See "Zamna,"
p. 167 ante.)
In view of all these facts, one cannot doubt that the legends of the
"sons of Ad," "the Adites," and "the Aditya," all refer to Atlantis.
Mr. George Smith, in the Chaldean account of the Creation (p. 78),
deciphered from the Babylonian tablets, shows that there was an original
race of men at the beginning of Chaldean history, a dark race, the
Zalmat-qaqadi, who were called Ad-mi, or Ad-ami; they were the race "who
had fallen," and were contradistinguished from "the Sarku, or light
race." The "fall" probably refers to their destruction by a deluge, in
consequence of their moral degradation and the indignation of the gods.
The name Adam is used in these legends, but as the name of a race, not
of a man.
Genesis (chap. v., 2) distinctly says that God created man male and
female, and "called their name Adam." That is to say, the people were
the Ad-ami, the people of "Ad," or Atlantis. "The author of the Book of
Genesis," says M. Schœbel, "in speaking of the men who were swallowed up
by the Deluge, always describes them as 'Haadam,' 'Adamite humanity.'"
The race of Cain lived and multiplied far away from the land of Seth; in
other words, far from the land destroyed by the Deluge. Josephus, who
gives us the primitive traditions of the Jews, tells us (chap. ii., p.
42) that "Cain travelled over many countries" before he came to the land
of Nod. The Bible does not tell us that the race of Cain perished in the
Deluge. "Cain went out from the presence of Jehovah;" he did not call on
his name; the people that were destroyed were the "sons of Jehovah." All
this indicates that large colonies had been sent out by the mother-land
before it sunk in the sea.
Across the ocean we find the people of Guatemala claiming their descent
from a goddess called At-tit, or grandmother, who lived for four hundred
years, and first taught the worship of the true God, which they
afterward forgot. (Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. iii., p. 75.) While
the famous Mexican calendar stone shows that the sun was commonly called
tonatiuh but when it was referred to as the god of the Deluge it was
then called Atl-tona-ti-uh, or At-onatiuh. (Valentini's "Mexican
Calendar Stone," art. Maya Archæology, p. 15.)
We thus find the sons of Ad at the base of all the most ancient races of
men, to wit, the Hebrews, the Arabians, the Chaldeans, the Hindoos, the
Persians, the Egyptians, the Ethiopians, the Mexicans, and the Central
Americans; testimony that all these races traced their beginning back to
a dimly remembered Ad-lantis.
CHAPTER II
THE KINGS OF ATLANTIS BECOME THE GODS OF THE GREEKS.
Lord Bacon said:
"The mythology of the Greeks, which their oldest writers do not pretend
to have invented, was no more than a light air, which had passed from a
more ancient people into the flutes of the Greeks, which they modulated
to such descants as best suited their fancies."
This profoundly wise and great man, who has illuminated every subject
which he has touched, guessed very close to the truth in this utterance.
The Hon. W. E. Gladstone has had quite a debate of late with Mr. Cox as
to whether the Greek mythology was underlaid by a nature worship, or a
planetary or solar worship.
Peru, worshipping the sun and moon and planets, probably represents very
closely the simple and primitive religion of Atlantis, with its
sacrifices of fruits and flowers. This passed directly to their colony
in Egypt. We find the Egyptians in their early ages sun and planet
worshippers. Ptah was the object of their highest adoration. He is the
father of the god of the sun, the ruler of the region of light. Ra was
the sun-god. He was the supreme divinity at On, or Heliopolis, near
Memphis. His symbol was the solar disk, supported by two rings. He
created all that exists below the heavens.
The Babylonian trinity was composed of Idea, Anu, and Bel. Bel
represented the sun, and was the favorite god. Sin was the goddess of
the moon.
The Phœnicians were also sun-worshippers. The sun was represented by
Baal-Samin, the great god, the god of light and the heavens, the creator
and rejuvenator.
"The attributes of both Baal and Moloch (the good and bad powers of the
sun) were united in the Phœnician god Melkart, "king of the city," whom
the inhabitants of Tyre considered their special patron. The Greeks
called him "Melicertes," and identified him with Hercules. By his great
strength and power he turned evil into good, brought life out of
destruction, pulled back the sun to the earth at the time of the
solstices, lessened excessive beat and cold, and rectified the evil
signs of the zodiac. In Phœnician legends he conquers the savage races
of distant coasts, founds the ancient settlements on the Mediterranean,
and plants the rocks in the Straits of Gibraltar." ("American
Cyclopædia," art. Mythology.)
The Egyptians worshipped the sun under the name of Ra; the Hindoos
worshipped the sun under the name of Rama; while the great festival of
the sun, of the Peruvians, was called Ray-mi.
Sun-worship, as the ancient religion of Atlantis, underlies all the
superstitions of the colonies of that country. The Samoyed woman says to
the sun, "When thou, god, risest, I too rise from my bed." Every morning
even now the Brahmans stand on one foot, with their hands held out
before them and their faces turned to the east, adoring the sun. "In
Germany or France one may still see the peasant take off his hat to the
rising sun." ("Anthropology," p. 361.) The Romans, even, in later times,
worshipped the sun at Emesa, under the name of Elagabalus, "typified in
the form of a black conical stone, which it was believed had fallen from
heaven." The conical stone was the emblem of Bel. Did it have relation
to the mounds and pyramids?
Sun-worship was the primitive religion of the red men of America. It was
found among all the tribes. (Dorman, "Origin of Primitive Superstitions,
p. 338.) The Chichimecs called the sun their father. The Comanches have
a similar belief.
But, compared with such ancient nations as the Egyptians and
Babylonians, the Greeks were children. A priest of Sais said to Solon,
"You Greeks are novices in knowledge of antiquity. You are ignorant of
what passed either here or among yourselves in days of old. The history
of eight thousand years is deposited in our sacred books; but I can
ascend to a much higher antiquity, and tell you what our fathers have
done for nine thousand years; I mean their institutions, their laws, and
their most brilliant achievements."
The Greeks, too young to have shared in the religion of Atlantis, but
preserving some memory of that great country and its history, proceeded
to convert its kings into gods, and to depict Atlantis itself as the
heaven of the human race. Thus we find a great solar or nature worship
in the elder nations, while Greece has nothing but an incongruous jumble
of gods and goddesses, who are born and eat and drink and make love and
ravish and steal and die; and who are worshipped as immortal in presence
of the very monuments that testify to their death.
"These deities, to whom the affairs of the world were in trusted, were,
it is believed, immortal, though not eternal in their existence. In
Crete there was even a story of the death of Zeus, his tomb being
pointed out." (Murray's "Mythology," p. 2.)
The history of Atlantis is the key of the Greek mythology. There can be
no question that these gods of Greece were human beings. The tendency to
attach divine attributes to great earthly rulers is one deeply implanted
in human nature. The savages who killed Captain Cook firmly believed
that he was immortal, that he was yet alive, and would return to punish
them. The highly civilized Romans made gods out of their dead emperors.
Dr. Livingstone mentions that on one occasion, after talking to a
Bushman for some time about the Deity, he found that the savage thought
he was speaking of Sekomi, the principal chief of the district.
We find the barbarians of the coast of the Mediterranean regarding the
civilized people of Atlantis with awe and wonder: "Their physical
strength was extraordinary, the earth shaking sometimes under their
tread. Whatever they did was done speedily. They moved through space
almost without the loss of a moment of time." This probably alluded to
the rapid motion of their sailing-vessels. "They were wise, and
communicated their wisdom to men." That is to say, they civilized the
people they came in contact with. 'They had a strict sense of justice,
and punished crime rigorously, and rewarded noble actions, though it is
true they were less conspicuous for the latter." (Murray's "Mythology,"
p. 4.) We should understand this to mean that where they colonized they
established a government of law, as contradistinguished from the anarchy
of barbarism.
"There were tales of personal visits and adventures of the gods among
men, taking part in battles and appearing in dreams. They were conceived
to possess the form of human beings, and to be, like men, subject to
love and pain, but always characterized by the highest qualities and
grandest forms that could be imagined." (Ibid.)
Another proof that the gods of the Greeks were but the deified kings of
Atlantis is found in the fact that "the gods were not looked upon as
having created the world." They succeeded to the management of a world
already in existence.
The gods dwelt on Olympus. They lived together like human beings; they
possessed palaces, storehouses, stables, horses, etc.; "they dwelt in a
social state which was but a magnified reflection of the social system
on earth. Quarrels, love passages, mutual assistance, and such instances
as characterize human life, were ascribed to them." (Ibid., p. 10.)
Where was Olympus? It was in Atlantis. "The ocean encircled the earth
with a great stream, and was a region of wonders of all kinds." (Ibid.,
p. 23.) It was a great island, the then civilized world. The encircling
ocean "was spoken of in all the ancient legends. Okeanos lived there
with his wife Tethys: these were the Islands of the Blessed, the garden
of the gods, the sources of the nectar and ambrosia on which the gods
lived." (Murray's "Mythology," p. 23.) Nectar was probably a fermented
intoxicating liquor, and ambrosia bread made from wheat. Soma was a kind
of whiskey, and the Hindoos deified it. "The gods lived on nectar and
ambrosia" simply meant that the inhabitants of these blessed islands
were civilized, and possessed a liquor of some kind and a species of
food superior to anything in use among the barbarous tribes with whom
they came in contact.
This blessed land answers to the description of Atlantis. It was an
island full of wonders. It lay spread out in the ocean "like a disk,
with the mountains rising from it." (Ibid.) On the highest point of this
mountain dwelt Zeus (the king), "while the mansions of the other deities
were arranged upon plateaus, or in ravines lower down the mountain.
These deities, including Zeus, were twelve in number: Zeus (or Jupiter),
Hera (or Juno), Poseidon (or Neptune), Demeter (or Ceres), Apollo,
Artemis (or Diana), Hephæstos (or Vulcan), Pallas Athena (or Minerva),
Ares (or Mars), Aphrodite (or Venus), Hermes (or Mercury), and Hestia
(or Vesta)." These were doubtless the twelve gods from whom the
Egyptians derived their kings. Where two names are given to a deity in
the above list, the first name is that bestowed by the Greeks, the last
that given by the Romans.
It is not impossible that our division of the year into twelve parts is
a reminiscence of the twelve gods of Atlantis. Diodorus Siculus tells us
that among the Babylonians there were twelve gods of the heavens, each
personified by one of the signs of the zodiac, and worshipped in a
certain month of the year. The Hindoos had twelve primal gods, "the
Aditya." Moses erected twelve pillars at Sinai. The Mandan Indians
celebrated the Flood with twelve typical characters, who danced around
the ark. The Scandinavians believed in the twelve gods, the Aesir, who
dwelt on Asgard, the Norse Olympus. Diligent investigation may yet
reveal that the number of a modern jury, twelve, is a survival of the
ancient council of Asgard.
"According to the traditions of the Phœnicians, the Gardens of the
Hesperides were in the remote west." (Murray's "Manual of Mythology," p.
258.) Atlas lived in these gardens. (Ibid., p. 259.) Atlas, we have
seen, was king of Atlantis. "The Elysian Fields (the happy islands) were
commonly placed in the remote west. They were ruled over by Chronos."
(Ibid., p. 60.) Tartarus, the region of Hades, the gloomy home of the
dead, was also located "under the mountains of an island in the midst of
the ocean in the remote west." (Ibid., p. 58.) Atlas was described in
Greek mythology as "an enormous giant, who stood upon the western
confines of the earth, and supported the heavens on his shoulders, in a
region of the west where the sun continued to shine after he had set
upon Greece." (Ibid., p. 156.)
Greek tradition located the island in which Olympus was situated "in the
far west," "in the ocean beyond Africa," "on the western boundary of the
known world," "where the sun shone when it had ceased to shine on
Greece," and where the mighty Atlas "held up the heavens." And Plato
tells us that the land where Poseidon and Atlas ruled was Atlantis.
"The Garden of the Hesperides" (another name for the dwelling-place of
the gods) "was situated at the extreme limit of Africa. Atlas was said
to have surrounded it on every side with high mountains." (Smith's
"Sacred Annals, Patriarchal Age," p. 131.) Here were found the golden
apples.
This is very much like the description which Plato gives of the great
plain of Atlantis, covered with fruit of every kind, and surrounded by
precipitous mountains descending to the sea.
The Greek mythology, in speaking of the Garden of the Hesperides, tells
us that "the outer edge of the garden was slightly raised, so that the
water might not run in and overflow the land." Another reminiscence of
the surrounding mountains of Atlantis as described by Plato, and as
revealed by the deep-sea soundings of modern times.
Chronos, or Saturn, Dionysos, Hyperion, Atlas, Hercules, were all
connected with "a great Saturnian continent;" they were kings that ruled
over countries on the western shores of the Mediterranean, Africa and
Spain. One account says:
"Hyperion, Atlas, and Saturn, or Chronos, were sons of Uranos, who
reigned over a great kingdom composed of countries around the western
part of the Mediterranean, with certain islands in the Atlantic.
Hyperion succeeded his father, and was then killed by the Titans. The
kingdom was then divided between Atlas and Saturn--Atlas taking Northern
Africa, with the Atlantic islands, and Saturn the countries on the
opposite shore of the Mediterranean to Italy and Sicily." (Baldwin's
"Prehistoric Nations," p. 357.)
Plato says, speaking of the traditions of the Greeks ("Dialogues, Laws,"
c. iv., p. 713), "There is a tradition of the happy life of mankind in
the days when all things were spontaneous and abundant. . . . In like
manner God in his love of mankind placed over us the demons, who are a
superior race, and they, with great care and pleasure to themselves and
no less to us, taking care of us and giving us place and reverence and
order and justice never failing, made the tribes of men happy and
peaceful . . . for Cronos knew that no human nature, invested with
supreme power, is able to order human affairs and not overflow with
insolence and wrong."
In other words, this tradition refers to an ancient time when the
forefathers of the Greeks were governed by Chronos, of the Cronian Sea
(the Atlantic), king of Atlantis, through civilized Atlantean governors,
who by their wisdom preserved peace and created a golden age for all the
populations under their control--they were the demons, that is, "the
knowing ones," the civilized.
Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates these words ("Dialogues,
Cratylus," p. 397): "My notion would be that the sun, moon, and stars,
earth, and heaven, which are still the gods of many barbarians, were the
only gods known to the aboriginal Hellenes. . . . What shall follow the
gods? Must not demons and heroes and men come next? . . . Consider the
real meaning of the word demons. You know Hesiod uses the word. He
speaks of 'a golden race of men' who came first. He says of them,
But now that fate has closed over this race,
They are holy demons upon earth,
Beneficent averters of ills, guardians of mortal men.'
He means by the golden men not men literally made of gold, but good and
noble men; he says we are of the 'age of iron.' He called them demons
because they were dah'mones (knowing or wise)."
This is made the more evident when we read that this region of the gods,
of Chronos and Uranos and Zeus, passed through, first, a Golden Age,
then a Silver Age--these constituting a great period of peace and
happiness; then it reached a Bronze Age; then an Iron Age, and finally
perished by a great flood, sent upon these people by Zeus as a
punishment for their sins. We read:
"Men were rich then (in the Silver Age), as in the Golden Age of
Chronos, and lived in plenty; but still they wanted the innocence and
contentment which were the true sources of bu man happiness in the
former age; and accordingly, while living in luxury and delicacy, they
became overbearing in their manners to the highest degree, were never
satisfied, and forgot the gods, to whom, in their confidence of
prosperity and com fort, they denied the reverence they owed. . . . Then
followed the Bronze Age, a period of constant quarrelling and deeds of
violence. Instead of cultivated lands, and a life of peaceful
occupations and orderly habits, there came a day when every where might
was right, and men, big and powerful as they were, became physically
worn out. . . . Finally came the Iron Age, in which enfeebled mankind
had to toil for bread with their hands, and, bent on gain, did their
best to overreach each other. Dike, or Astræa, the goddess of justice
and good faith, modesty and truth, turned her back on such scenes, and
retired to Olympus, while Zeus determined to destroy the human race by a
great flood. The whole of Greece lay under water, and none but Deucalion
and his wife Pyrrha were saved." (Murray's "Mythology" p. 44.)
It is remarkable that we find here the same succession of the Iron Age
after the Bronze Age that has been revealed to scientific men by the
patient examination of the relies of antiquity in Europe. And this
identification of the land that was destroyed by a flood--the land of
Chronos and Poseidon and Zeus--with the Bronze Age, confirms the view
expressed in Chapter VIII. (page 237, ante), that the bronze implements
and weapons of Europe were mainly imported from Atlantis.
And here we find that the Flood that destroyed this land of the gods was
the Flood of Deucalion, and the Flood of Deucalion was the Flood of the
Bible, and this, as we have shown, was "the last great Deluge of all,"
according to the Egyptians, which destroyed Atlantis.
The foregoing description of the Golden Age of Chronos, when "men were
rich and lived in plenty," reminds us of Plato's description of the
happy age of Atlantis, when "men despised everything but virtue, not
caring for their present state of life, and thinking lightly of the
possession of gold and other property;" a time when, as the chants of
the Delaware Indians stated it (page 109, ante), "all were willingly
pleased, all were well-happified." While the description given by Murray
in the above extract of the degeneracy of mankind in the land of the
gods, "a period of constant quarrelling and deeds of violence, when
might was right," agrees with Plato's account of the Atlanteans, when
they became "aggressive," "unable to bear their fortune," "unseemly,"
"base," "filled with unrighteous avarice and power,"--and "in a most
wretched state." And here again I might quote from the chant of the
Delaware Indians--"they became troubled, hating each other; both were
fighting, both were spoiling, both were never peaceful." And in all
three instances the gods punished the depravity of mankind by a great
deluge. Can all these precise coincidences be the result of accident?
May we not even suppose that the very word "Olympus" is a transformation
from "Atlantis" in accordance with the laws that regulate the changes of
letters of the same class into each other? Olympus was written by the
Greeks "Olumpos." The letter a in Atlantis was sounded by the ancient
world broad and full, like the a in our words all or altar; in these
words it approximates very closely to the sound of o. It is not far to
go to convert Otlontis into Oluntos, and this into Olumpos. We may,
therefore, suppose that when the Greeks said that their gods dwelt in
"Olympus," it was the same as if they said that they dwelt in "Atlantis."
Nearly all the gods of Greece are connected with Atlantis. We have seen
the twelve principal gods all dwelling on the mountain of Olympus, in
the midst of an island in the ocean in the far west, which was
subsequently destroyed by a deluge on account of the wickedness of its
people. And when we turn to Plato's description of Atlantis (p. 13,
ante) we find that Poseidon and Atlas dwelt upon a mountain in the midst
of the island; and on this mountain were their magnificent temples and
palaces, where they lived, separated by great walls from their subjects.
It may be urged that Mount Olympus could not have referred to any
mountain in Atlantis, because the Greeks gave that name to a group of
mountains partly in Macedonia and partly in Thessaly. But in Mysia,
Lycia, Cyprus, and elsewhere there were mountains called Olympus; and on
the plain of Olympia, in Elis, there was an eminence bearing the same
designation. There is a natural tendency among uncivilized peoples to
give a "local habitation" to every general tradition.
"Many of the oldest myths," says Baldwin (" Prehistoric Nations," p.
376), "relate to Spain, North-western Africa, and other regions on the
Atlantic, such as those concerning Hercules, the Cronidæ, the
Hyperboreans, the Hesperides, and the Islands of the Blessed. Homer
described the Atlantic region of Europe in his account of the wanderings
of Ulysses. . . . In the ages previous to the decline of Phœnician
influence in Greece and around the Ægean Sea, the people of those
regions must have had a much better knowledge of Western Europe than
prevailed there during the Ionian or Hellenic period."
The mythology of Greece is really a history of the kings of Atlantis.
The Greek heaven was Atlantis. Hence the references to statues, swords,
etc., that fell from heaven, and were preserved in the temples of the
different states along the shores of the Mediterranean from a vast
antiquity, and which were regarded as the most precious possessions of
the people. They were relics of the lost race received in the early
ages. Thus we read of the brazen or bronze anvil that was preserved in
one city, which fell from heaven, and was nine days and nine nights in
falling; in other words, it took nine days and nights of a
sailing-voyage to bring it from Atlantis.
The modern theory that the gods of Greece never had any personal
existence, but represented atmospheric and meteorological myths, the
movements of clouds, planets, and the sun, is absurd. Rude nations
repeat, they do not invent; to suppose a barbarous people creating their
deities out of clouds and sunsets is to reverse nature. Men first
worship stones, then other men, then spirits. Resemblances of names
prove nothing; it is as if one would show that the name of the great
Napoleon meant "the lion of the desert" (Napo-leon), and should thence
argue that Napoleon never existed, that he was a myth, that he
represented power in solitude, or some such stuff. When we read that
Jove whipped his wife, and threw her son out of the window, the
inference is that Jove was a man, and actually did something like the
thing described; certainly gods, sublimated spirits, aerial sprites, do
not act after this fashion; and it would puzzle the mythmakers to prove
that the sun, moon, or stars whipped their wives or flung recalcitrant
young men out of windows. The history of Atlantis could be in part
reconstructed out of the mythology of Greece; it is a history of kings,
queens, and princes; of love-making, adulteries, rebellions, wars,
murders, sea-voyages, and colonizations; of palaces, temples, workshops,
and forges; of sword-making, engraving and metallurgy; of wine, barley,
wheat, cattle, sheep, horses, and agriculture generally. Who can doubt
that it represents the history of a real people?
Uranos was the first god; that is to say, the first king of the great
race. As he was at the commencement of all things, his symbol was the
sky. He probably represented the race previous even to the settlement of
Atlantis. He was a son of Gæa (the earth). He seems to have been the
parent of three races--the Titans, the Hekatoncheires, and the Kyklopes
or Cyclops.
I incline to the belief that these were civilized races, and that the
peculiarities ascribed to the last two refer to the vessels in which
they visited the shores of the barbarians.
THE EMPIRE OF ATLANTIS.
The empire of the Titans was clearly the empire of Atlantis. "The most
judicious among our mythologists" (says Dr. Rees, "New British
Cyclopædia," art. Titans)--"such as Gerard Vossius, Marsham, Bochart,
and Father Thomassin--are of opinion that the partition of the world
among the sons of Noah-Shem, Ham, and Japheth--was the original of the
tradition of the same partition among Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto," upon
the breaking up of the great empire of the Titans. "The learned Pezron
contends that the division which was made of this vast empire came, in
after-times, to be taken for the partition of the whole world; that Asia
remaining in the hands of Jupiter (Zeus), the most potent of the three
brothers, made him looked upon as the god of Olympus; that the sea and
islands which fell to Neptune occasioned their giving him the title of
'god of the sea;' and that Spain, the extremity of the then known world,
thought to be a very low country in respect of Asia, and famous for its
excellent mines of gold and silver, failing to Pluto, occasioned him to
be taken for the 'god of the infernal regions.'" We should suppose that
Pluto possibly ruled over the transatlantic possessions of Atlantis in
America, over those "portions of the opposite continent" which Plato
tells us were dominated by Atlas and his posterity, and which, being far
beyond or below sunset, were the "under-world" of the ancients; while
Atlantis, the Canaries, etc., constituted the island division with
Western Africa and Spain. Murray tells us ("Mythology," p. 58) that
Pluto's share of the kingdom was supposed to lie "in the remote west."
The under-world of the dead was simply the world below the western
horizon; "the home of the dead has to do with that far west region where
the sun dies at night." ("Anthropology," p. 350.) "On the coast of
Brittany, where Cape Raz stands out westward into the ocean, there is
'the Bay of Souls,' the launching-place where the departed spirits sail
off across the sea." (Ibid.) In like manner, Odysseus found the land of
the dead in the ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules. There, indeed, was
the land of the mighty dead, the grave of the drowned Atlanteans.
"However this be," continues F. Pezron, "the empire of the Titans,
according to the ancients, was very extensive; they possessed Phrygia,
Thrace, a part of Greece, the island of Crete, and several other
provinces to the inmost recesses of Spain. To these Sanchoniathon seems
to join Syria; and Diodorus adds a part of Africa, and the kingdoms of
Mauritania." The kingdoms of Mauritania embraced all that north-western
region of Africa nearest to Atlantis in which are the Atlas Mountains,
and in which, in the days of Herodotus, dwelt the Atlantes.
Neptune, or Poseidon, says, in answer to a message from Jupiter,
No vassal god, nor of his train am I.
Three brothers, deities, from Saturn came,
And ancient Rhea, earth's immortal dame;
Assigned by lot our triple rule we know;
Infernal Pluto sways the shades below:
O'er the wide clouds, and o'er the starry plain
Ethereal Jove extends his high domain;
My court beneath the hoary waves I keep,
And hush the roaring of the sacred deep.
Iliad, book xviii.
Homer alludes to Poseidon as
"The god whose liquid arms are hurled
Around the globs, whose earthquakes rock the world."
Mythology tells us that when the Titans were defeated by Saturn they
retreated into the interior of Spain; Jupiter followed them up, and beat
them for the last time near Tartessus, and thus terminated a ten-years'
war. Here we have a real battle on an actual battle-field.
If we needed any further proof that the empire of the Titans was the
empire of Atlantis, we would find it in the names of the Titans: among
these were Oceanus, Saturn or Chronos, and Atlas; they were all the sons
of Uranos. Oceanus was at the base of the Greek mythology. Plato says
("Dialogues," Timæus, vol. ii., p. 533): "Oceanus and Tethys were the
children of Earth and Heaven, and from these sprung Phorcys, and
Chronos, and Rhea, and many more with them; and from Chronos and Rhea
sprung Zeus and Hera, and all those whom we know as their brethren, and
others who were their children." In other words, all their gods came out
of the ocean; they were rulers over some ocean realm; Chronos was the
son of Oceanus, and Chronos was an Atlantean god, and from him the
Atlantic Ocean was called by tho ancients "the Chronian Sea." The elder
Minos was called "the Son of the Ocean:" he first gave civilization to
the Cretans; he engraved his laws on brass, precisely as Plato tells us
the laws of Atlantis were engraved on pillars of brass.
The wanderings of Ulysses, as detailed in the "Odyssey" of Homer, are
strangely connected with the Atlantic Ocean. The islands of the
Phœnicians were apparently in mid-ocean:
We dwell apart, afar
Within the unmeasured deep, amid its waves
The most remote of men; no other race
Hath commerce with us.--Odyssey, book vi.
The description of the Phæacian walls, harbors, cities, palaces, ships,
etc., seems like a recollection of Atlantis. The island of Calypso
appears also to have been in the Atlantic Ocean, twenty days' sail from
the Phæacian isles; and when Ulysses goes to the land of Pluto, "the
under-world," the home of the dead, he
"Reached the far confines of Oceanus,"
beyond the Pillars of Hercules. It would be curious to inquire how far
the poems of Homer are Atlantean in their relations and inspiration.
Ulysses's wanderings were a prolonged struggle with Poseidon, the
founder and god of Atlantis.
"The Hekatoncheires, or Cetimæni, beings each with a hundred hands, were
three in number--Kottos, Gyges or Gyes, and Briareus--and represented
the frightful crashing of waves, and its resemblance to the convulsions
of earthquakes." (Murray's "Mythology," p. 26.) Are not these hundred
arms the oars of the galleys, and the frightful crashing of the waves
their movements in the water?
"The Kyklopes also were three in number--Brontes, with his thunder;
Steropes, with his lightning; and Arges, with his stream of light. They
were represented as having only one eye, which was placed at the
juncture between the nose and brow. It was, however, a large, flashing
eye, as became beings who were personifications of the storm-cloud, with
its flashes of destructive lightning and peals of thunder."
We shall show hereafter that the invention of gunpowder dates back to
the days of the Phœnicians, and may have been derived by them from
Atlantis. It is not impossible that in this picture of the Kyklopes we
see a tradition of sea-going ships, with a light burning at the prow,
and armed with some explosive preparation, which, with a roar like
thunder, and a flash like lightning, destroyed those against whom it was
employed? It at least requires less strain upon our credulity to suppose
these monsters were a barbarian's memory of great ships than to believe
that human beings ever existed with a hundred arms, and with one eye in
the middle of the forehead, and giving out thunder and lightning.
The natives of the West India Islands regarded the ships of Columbus as
living creatures, and that their sails were wings.
Berosus tells us, speaking of the ancient days of Chaldea, "In the first
year there appeared, from that part of the Erythræan Sea which borders
upon Babylonia, an animal endowed with reason, by name Oannes, whose
whole body (according to the account of Apollodorus) was that of a fish;
that under the fish's head he had another head, with feet also below,
similar to those of a man, subjoined to the fish's tail. His. voice too
and language was articulate and human, and a representation of him is
preserved even unto this day. This being was accustomed to pass the day
among men, but took no food at that season, and he gave them an insight
into letters and arts of all kinds. He taught them to construct cities,
to found temples, to compile laws, and explained to them the principles
of geometrical knowledge. He made them distinguish the seeds of the
earth, and showed them how to collect the fruits; in short, be
instructed them in everything which could tend to soften manners and
humanize their laws. From that time nothing material has been added by
way of improvement to his instructions. And when the sun set, this
being, Oannes, retired again into the sea, and passed the night in the
deep, for he was amphibious. After this there appeared other animals
like Oannes."
This is clearly the tradition preserved by a barbarous people of the
great ships of a civilized nation, who colonized their coast and
introduced the arts and sciences among them. And here we see the same
tendency to represent the ship as a living thing, which converted the
war-vessels of the Atlanteans (the Kyklopes) into men with one blazing
eye in the middle of the forehead.
Uranos was deposed from the throne, and succeeded by his son Chronos. He
was called "the ripener, the harvest-god," and was probably identified
with the beginning of the Agricultural Period. He married his sister
Rhea, who bore him Pluto, Poseidon, Zeus, Hestia, Demeter, and Hera. He
anticipated that his sons would dethrone him, as he had dethroned his
father, Uranos, and he swallowed his first five children, and would have
swallowed the sixth child, Zeus, but that his wife Rhea deceived him
with a stone image of the child; and Zeus was conveyed to the island of
Crete, and there concealed in a cave and raised to manhood. Subsequently
Chronos "yielded back to the light the children he had swallowed." This
myth probably means that Chronos had his children raised in some secret
place, where they could not be used by his enemies as the instruments of
a rebellion against his throne; and the stone image of Zeus, palmed off
upon him by Rhea, was probably some other child substituted for his own.
His precautions seem to have been wise; for as soon as the children
returned to the light they commenced a rebellion, and drove the old
gentleman from his throne. A rebellion of the Titans followed. The
struggle was a tremendous one, and seems to have been decided at last by
the use of gunpowder, as I shall show farther on.
We have seen Chronos identified with the Atlantic, called by the Romans
the "Chronian Sea." He was known to the Romans under the name of Saturn,
and ruled over "a great Saturnian continent" in the Western Ocean.
Saturn, or Chronos, came to Italy: he presented himself to the king,
Janus, "and proceeded to instruct the subjects of the latter in
agriculture, gardening, and many other arts then quite unknown to them;
as, for example, how to tend and cultivate the vine. By such means he at
length raised the people from a rude and comparatively barbarous
condition to one of order and peaceful occupations, in consequence of
which he was everywhere held in high esteem, and, in course of time, was
selected by Janus to share with him the government of the country, which
thereupon assumed the name of Saturnia--'a land of seed and fruit.' The
period of Saturn's government was sung in later days by poets as a happy
time, when sorrows were unknown, when innocence, freedom, and gladness
reigned throughout the land in such a degree as to deserve the title of
the Golden Age." (Murray's "Mythology," p. 32.)
All this accords with Plato's story. He tells us that the rule of the
Atlanteans extended to Italy; that they were a civilized, agricultural,
and commercial people. The civilization of Rome was therefore an
outgrowth directly from the civilization of Atlantis.
The Roman Saturnalia was a remembrance of the Atlantean colonization. It
was a period of joy and festivity; master and slave met as equals; the
distinctions of poverty and wealth were forgotten; no punishments for
crime were inflicted; servants and slaves went about dressed in the
clothes of their masters; and children received presents from their
parents or relatives. It was a time of jollity and mirth, a recollection
of the Golden Age. We find a reminiscence of it in the Roman "Carnival."
The third and last on the throne of the highest god was Zeus. We shall
see him, a little farther on, by the aid of some mysterious engine
overthrowing the rebels, the Titans, who rose against his power, amid
the flash of lightning and the roar of thunder. He was called "the
thunderer," and "the mighty thunderer." He was represented with
thunder-bolts in his hand and an eagle at his feet.
During the time of Zeus Atlantis seems to have reached its greatest
height of power. He was recognized as the father of the whole world; he
everywhere rewarded uprightness, truth, faithfulness, and kindness; be
was merciful to the poor, and punished the cruel. To illustrate his rule
on earth the following story is told:
"Philemon and Baukis, an aged couple of the poorer class, were living
peacefully and full of piety toward the gods in their cottage in
Phrygia, when Zeus, who often visited the earth, disguised, to inquire
into the behavior of men, paid a visit, in passing through Phrygia on
such a journey, to these poor old people, and was received by them very
kindly as a weary traveller, which he pretended to be. Bidding him
welcome to the house, they set about preparing for their guest, who was
accompanied by Hermes, as excellent a meal as they could afford, and for
this purpose were about to kill the only goose they had left, when Zeus
interfered; for he was touched by their kindliness and genuine piety,
and that all the more because be had observed among the other
inhabitants of the district nothing but cruelty of disposition and a
habit of reproaching and despising the gods. To punish this conduct he
determined to visit the country with a flood, but to save from it
Philemon and Baukis, the good aged couple, and to reward them in a
striking manner. To this end he revealed himself to them before opening
the gates of the great flood, transformed their poor cottage on the hill
into a splendid temple, installed the aged pair as his priest and
priestess, and granted their prayer that they might both die together.
When, after many years, death overtook them, they were changed into two
trees, that side by side in the neighborhood--an oak and a linden."
(Murray's "Mythology," p. 38.)
Here we have another reference to the Flood, and another identification
with Atlantis.
Zeus was a kind of Henry VIII., and took to himself a number of wives.
By Demeter (Ceres) he had Persephone (Proserpine); by Leto, Apollo and
Artemis (Diana); by Dione, Aphrodite (Venus); by Semele, Dionysos
(Bacchus); by Maia, Hermes (Mercury); by Alkmene, Hercules, etc., etc.
We have thus the whole family of gods and goddesses traced back to
Atlantis.
Hera, or Juno, was the first and principal wife of Zeus. There were
numerous conjugal rows between the royal pair, in which, say the poets,
Juno was generally to blame. She was naturally jealous of the other
wives of Zeus. Zeus on one occasion beat her, and threw her son
Hephæstos out of Olympus; on another occasion he hung her out of Olympus
with her arms tied and two great weights attached to her feet--a very
brutal and ungentlemanly trick--but the Greeks transposed this into a
beautiful symbol: the two weights, they say, represent the earth and
sea, "an illustration of how all the phenomena of the visible sky were
supposed to hang dependent on the highest god of heaven!" (Ibid., p.
47.) Juno probably regarded the transaction in an altogether different
light; and she therefore United with Poseidon, the king's brother, and
his daughter Athena, in a rebellion to put the old fellow in a
strait-jacket, "and would have succeeded had not Thetis brought to his
aid the sea-giant Ægæon," probably a war-ship. She seems in the main,
however, to have been a good wife, and was the type of all the womanly
virtues.
Poseidon, the first king of Atlantis, according to Plato, was, according
to Greek mythology, a brother of Zeus, and a son of Chronos. In the
division of the kingdom he fell heir to the ocean and its islands, and
to the navigable rivers; in other words, he was king of a maritime and
commercial people. His symbol was the horse. "He was the first to train
and employ horses;" that is to say, his people first domesticated the
horse. This agrees with what Plato tells us of the importance attached
to the horse in Atlantis, and of the baths and race-courses provided for
him. He was worshipped in the island of Tenos "in the character of a
physician," showing that he represented an advanced civilization. He was
also master of an agricultural people; "the ram with the golden fleece
for which the Argonauts sailed was the offspring of Poseidon." He
carried in his hand a three-pronged symbol, the trident, doubtless an
emblem of the three continents that were embraced in the empire of
Atlantis. He founded many colonies along the shores of the
Mediterranean; "he helped to build the walls of Troy;" the tradition
thus tracing the Trojan civilization to an Atlantean source. He settled
Attica and founded Athens, named after his niece Athena, daughter of
Zeus, who had no mother, but had sprung from the bead of Zeus, which
probably signified that her mother's name was not known--she was a
foundling. Athena caused the first olive-tree to grow on the Acropolis
of Athens, parent of all the olive-trees of Greece. Poseidon seems to
have had settlements at Corinth, Ægina, Naxos, and Delphi. Temples were
erected to his honor in nearly all the seaport towns Of Greece. He sent
a sea-monster, to wit, a slip, to ravage part of the Trojan territory.
In the "Iliad" Poseidon appears "as ruler of the sea, inhabiting a
brilliant palace in its depths, traversing its surface in a chariot, or
stirring the powerful billows until the earth shakes as they crash upon
the shores. . . . He is also associated with well-watered plains and
valleys." (Murray's "Mythology," p, 51.) The palace in the depths of the
sea was the palace upon Olympus in Atlantis; the traversing of the sea
referred to the movements of a mercantile race; the shaking of
POSEIDON, OR NEPTUNE.
the earth was an association with earthquakes; the "well-watered plains
and valleys" remind us of the great plain of Atlantis described by Plato.
All the traditions of the coming of civilization into Europe point to
Atlantis.
For instance, Keleos, who lived at Eleusis, near Athens, hospitably
received Demeter, the Greek Ceres, the daughter of Poseidon, when she
landed; and in return she taught him the use of the plough, and
presented his son with the seed of barley, and sent him out to teach
mankind bow to sow and utilize that grain. Dionysos, grandson of
Poseidon, travelled "through all the known world, even into the remotest
parts of India, instructing the people, as be proceeded, how to tend the
vine, and how to practise many other arts of peace, besides teaching
them the value of just and honorable dealings." (Murray's "Mythology,"
p. 119.) The Greeks celebrated great festivals in his honor down to the
coming of Christianity.
"The Nymphs of Grecian mythology were a kind of middle beings between
the gods and men, communicating with both, loved and respected by both;
. . . living like the gods on ambrosia. In extraordinary cases they were
summoned, it was believed, to the councils of the Olympian gods; but
they usually remained in their particular spheres, in secluded grottoes
and peaceful valleys, occupied in spinning, weaving, bathing, singing
sweet songs, dancing, sporting, or accompanying deities who passed
through their territories--hunting with Artemis (Diana), rushing about
with Dionysos (Bacchus), making merry with Apollo or Hermes (Mercury),
but always in a hostile attitude toward the wanton and excited Satyrs."
The Nymphs were plainly the female inhabitants of Atlantis dwelling on
the plains, while the aristocracy lived on the higher lands. And this is
confirmed by the fact that part of them were called Atlantids, offspring
of Atlantis. The Hesperides were also "daughters of Atlas;" their mother
was Hesperis, a personification of "the region of the West." Their home
was "an island in the ocean," Off the north or west coast of Africa.
And here we find a tradition which not only points to Atlantis, but also
shows some kinship to the legend in Genesis of the tree and the serpent.
Titæa, "a goddess of the earth," gave Zeus a tree bearing golden apples
on it. This tree was put in the care of the Hesperides, but they could
not resist the temptation to pluck and eat its fruit; thereupon a
serpent named Ladon was put to watch the tree. Hercules slew the
serpent, and gave the apples to the Hesperides.
Heracles (Hercules), we have seen, was a son of Zeus, king of Atlantis.
One of his twelve labors (the tenth) was the carrying off the cattle of
Geryon. The meaning of Geryon is "the red glow of the sunset." He dwelt
on the island of "Erythea, in the remote west, beyond the Pillars of
Hercules." Hercules took a ship, and after encountering a storm, reached
the island and placed himself on Mount Abas. Hercules killed Geryon,
stole the cattle, put them on the ship, and landed them safely, driving
them "through Iberia, Gaul, and over the Alps down into Italy."
(Murray's "Mythology," p. 257.) This was simply the memory of a cattle
raid made by an uncivilized race upon the civilized, cattle-raising
people of Atlantis.
It is not necessary to pursue the study of the gods of Greece any
farther. They were simply barbarian recollections of the rulers of a
great civilized people who in early days visited their shores, and
brought with them the arts of peace.
Here then, in conclusion, are the proofs of our proposition that the
gods of Greece had been the kings of Atlantis:
1. They were not the makers, but the rulers of the world.
2. They were human in their attributes; they loved, sinned, and fought
battles, the very sites of which are given; they founded cities, and
civilized the people of the shores of the Mediterranean.
3. They dwelt upon an island in the Atlantic," in the remote west. . . .
where the sun shines after it has ceased to shine on Greece."
4. Their land was destroyed in a deluge.
5. They were ruled over by Poseidon and Atlas.
6. Their empire extended to Egypt and Italy and the shores of Africa,
precisely as stated by Plato.
7. They existed during the Bronze Age and at the beginning of the Iron
Age.
The entire Greek mythology is the recollection, by a degenerate race, of
a vast, mighty, and highly civilized empire, which in a remote past
covered large parts of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America.
CHAPTER III.
THE GODS OF THE PHŒNICIANS ALSO KINGS OF ATLANTIS.
Not alone were the gods of the Greeks the deified kings of Atlantis, but
we find that the mythology of the Phœnicians was drawn from the same
source.
For instance, we find in the Phœnician cosmogony that the Titans
(Rephaim) derive their origin from the Phœnician gods Agrus and Agrotus.
This connects the Phœnicians with that island in the remote west, in the
midst of ocean, where, according to the Greeks, the Titans dwelt.
According to Sanchoniathon, Ouranos was the son of Autochthon, and,
according to Plato, Autochthon was one of the ten kings of Atlantis. He
married his sister Ge. He is the Uranos of the Greeks, who was the son
of Gæa (the earth), whom he married. The Phœnicians tell us, "Ouranos
had by Ge four sons: Ilus (El), who is called Chronos, and Betylus
(Beth-El), and Dagon, which signifies bread-corn, and Atlas (Tammuz?)."
Here, again, we have the names of two other kings of Atlantis. These
four sons probably represented four races, the offspring of the earth.
The Greek Uranos was the father of Chronos, and the ancestor of Atlas.
The Phœnician god Ouranos had a great many other wives: his wife Ge was
jealous; they quarrelled, and he attempted to kill the children he had
by her. This is the legend which the Greeks told of Zeus and Juno. In
the Phœnician mythology Chronos raised a rebellion against Ouranos, and,
after a great battle, dethroned him. In the Greek legends it is Zeus who
attacks and overthrows his father, Chronos. Ouranos had a daughter
called Astarte (Ashtoreth), another called Rhea. "And Dagon, after he
had found out bread-corn and the plough, was called Zeus-Arotrius."
We find also, in the Phœnician legends, mention made of Poseidon,
founder and king of Atlantis.
Chronos gave Attica to his daughter Athena, as in the Greek legends. In
a time of plague be sacrificed his son to Ouranos, and "circumcised
himself, and compelled his allies to do the same thing." It would thus
appear that this singular rite, practised as we have seen by the
Atlantidæ of the Old and New Worlds, the Egyptians, the Phœnicians, the
Hebrews, the Ethiopians, the Mexicans, and the red men of America, dates
back, as we might have expected, to Atlantis.
"Chronos visits the different regions of the habitable world."
He gave Egypt as a kingdom to the god Taaut, who had invented the
alphabet. The Egyptians called him Thoth, and he was represented among
them as "the god of letters, the clerk of the under-world," bearing a
tablet, pen, and palm-branch.
This not only connects the Phœnicians with Atlantis, but shows the
relations of Egyptian civilization to both Atlantis and the Phœnicians.
There can be no doubt that the royal personages who formed the gods of
Greece were also the gods of the Phœnicians. We have seen the Autochthon
of Plato reappearing in the Autochthon of the Phœnicians; the Atlas of
Plato in the Atlas of the Phœnicians; the Poseidon of Plato in the
Poseidon of the Phœnicians; while the kings Mestor and Mneseus of Plato
are probably the gods Misor and Amynus of the Phœnicians.
Sanchoniathon tells us, after narrating all the discoveries by which the
people advanced to civilization, that the Cabiri set down their records
of the past by the command of the god Taaut, "and they delivered them to
their successors and to foreigners, of whom one was Isiris (Osiris), the
inventor of the three letters, the brother of Chua, who is called the
first Phœnician." (Lenormant and Chevallier, "Ancient History of the
East," vol. ii., p. 228.)
This would show that the first Phœnician came long after this line of
the kings or gods, and that he was a foreigner, as compared with them;
and, therefore, that it could not have been the Phœnicians proper who
made the several inventions narrated by Sanchoniathon, but some other
race, from whom the Phœnicians might have been descended.
And in the delivery of their records to the foreigner Osiris, the god of
Egypt, we have another evidence that Egypt derived her civilization from
Atlantis.
Max Müller says:
"The Semitic languages also are all varieties of one form of speech.
Though we do not know that primitive language from which the Semitic
dialects diverged, yet we know that at one time such language must have
existed. . . . We cannot derive Hebrew from Sanscrit, or Sanscrit from
Hebrew; but we can well understand bow both may have proceeded from one
common source. They are both channels supplied from one river, and they
carry, though not always on the surface, floating materials of language
which challenge comparison, and have already yielded satisfactory
results to careful analyzers." ("Outlines of Philosophy of History,"
vol. i., p. 475.)
There was an ancient tradition among the Persians that the Phœnicians
migrated from the shores of the Erythræan Sea, and this has been
supposed to mean the Persian Gulf; but there was a very old city of
Erythia, in utter ruin in the time of Strabo, which was built in some
ancient age, long before the founding of Gades, near the site of that
town, on the Atlantic coast of Spain. May not this town of Erythia have
given its name to the adjacent sea? And this may have been the
starting-point of the Phœnicians in their European migrations. It would
even appear that there was an island of Erythea. In the Greek mythology
the tenth labor of Hercules consisted in driving away the cattle of
Geryon, who lived in the island of Erythea, "an island somewhere in the
remote west, beyond the Pillars of Hercules." (Murray's "Mythology," p.
257.) Hercules stole the cattle from this remote oceanic island, and,
returning drove them "through Iberia, Gaul, over the Alps, and through
Italy." (Ibid.) It is probable that a people emigrating from the
Erythræan Sea, that is, from the Atlantic, first gave their name to a
town on the coast of Spain, and at a later date to the Persian Gulf--as
we have seen the name of York carried from England to the banks of the
Hudson, and then to the Arctic Circle.
The builders of the Central American cities are reported to have been a
bearded race. The Phœnicians, in common with the Indians, practised
human sacrifices to a great extent; they worshipped fire and water,
adopted the names of the animals whose skins they wore--that is to say,
they had the totemic system--telegraphed by means of fires, poisoned
their arrows, offered peace before beginning battle, and used drums.
(Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. v., p. 77.)
The extent of country covered by the commerce of the Phœnicians
represents to some degree the area of the old Atlantean Empire. Their
colonies and trading-posts extended east and west from the shores of the
Black Sea, through the Mediterranean to the west coast of Africa and of
Spain, and around to Ireland and England; while from north to south they
ranged from the Baltic to the Persian Gulf. They touched every point
where civilization in later ages made its appearance. Strabo estimated
that they had three hundred cities along the west coast of Africa. When
Columbus sailed to discover a new world, or re-discover an old one, he
took his departure from a Phœnician seaport, founded by that great race
two thousand five hundred years previously. This Atlantean sailor, with
his Phœnician features, sailing from an Atlantean port, simply re-opened
the path of commerce and colonization which had been closed when Plato's
island sunk in the sea. And it is a curious fact that Columbus had the
antediluvian world in his mind's eye even then, for when he reached the
mouth of the Orinoco he thought it was the river Gihon, that flowed out
of Paradise, and he wrote home to Spain, "There are here great
indications suggesting the proximity of the earthly Paradise, for not
only does it correspond in mathematical position with the opinions of
the holy and learned theologians, but all other signs concur to make it
probable."
Sanchoniathon claims that the learning of Egypt, Greece, and Judæa was
derived from the Phœnicians. It would appear probable that, while other
races represent the conquests or colonizations of Atlantis, the
Phœnicians succeeded to their arts, sciences, and especially their
commercial supremacy; and hence the close resemblances which we have
found to exist between the Hebrews, a branch of the Phœnician stock, and
the people of America.
Upon the Syrian sea the people live
Who style themselves Phœnicians. . . .
These were the first great founders of the world--
Founders of cities and of mighty states--
Who showed a path through seas before unknown.
In the first ages, when the sons of men
Knew not which way to turn them, they assigned
To each his first department; they bestowed
Of land a portion and of sea a lot,
And sent each wandering tribe far off to share
A different soil and climate. Hence arose
The great diversity, so plainly seen,
'Mid nations widely severed.
Dyonysius of Susiana, A.D. 3,
CHAPTER IV.
THE GOD ODIN, WODEN, OR WOTAN.
In the Scandinavian mythology the chief god was Odin, the Woden, Wotan,
or Wuotan of the Germans. He is represented with many of the attributes
of the Greek god Zeus, and is supposed by some to be identical with him.
He dwelt with the twelve Æsir, or gods, upon Asgard, the Norse Olympus,
which arose out of Midgard, a land half-way between the regions of frost
and fire (to wit, in a temperate climate). The Scandinavian Olympus was
probably Atlantis. Odin is represented as a grave-looking elderly man
with a long beard, carrying in his hand a spear, and accompanied by two
dogs and two ravens. He was the father of poetry, and the inventor of
Runic writing.
The Chiapenese of Central America (the people whose language we have
seen furnishing such remarkable resemblances to Hebrew) claim to have
been the first people of the New World. Clavigero tells us ("Hist.
Antiq. del Messico," Eng. trans., 1807, vol. i.) that according to the
traditions of the Chiapenese there was a Votan who was the grandson of
the man who built the ark to save himself and family from the Deluge; he
was one of those who undertook to build the tower that should reach to
heaven., The Lord ordered him to people America. "He came from the
East." He brought seven families with him. He had been preceded in
America by two others, Igh and Imox. He built a great city in America
called "Nachan," City of the Serpents (the serpent that tempted Eve was
Nahash), from his own race, which was named Chan, a serpent. This Nachan
is supposed to have been Palenque. The date of his journey is placed in
the legends in the year 3000 of the world, and in the tenth century B.C.
He also founded three tributary monarchies, whose capitals were Tulan,
Mayapan, and Chiquimala. He wrote a book containing a history of his
deeds, and proofs that he belonged to the tribe of Chanes (serpents). He
states that "he is the third of the Votans; that he conducted seven
families from Valum-Votan to this continent, and assigned lands to them;
that be determined to travel until he came to the root of heaven and
found his relations, the Culebres, and made himself known to them; that
he accordingly made four voyages to Chivim; that he arrived in Spain;
that he went to Rome; that he saw the house of God building; that be
went by the road which his brethren, the Culebres, had bored; that he
marked it, and that he passed by the houses of the thirteen Culebres. He
relates that, in returning from one of his voyages, he found seven other
families of the Tzequil nation who had joined the first inhabitants, and
recognized in them the same origin as his own, that is, of the Culebres;
he speaks of the place where they built the first town, which from its
founders received the name of Tzequil; he affirms that, having taught
them the refinement of manners in the use of the table, table-cloths,
dishes, basins, cups, and napkins, they taught him the knowledge of God
and his worship; his first ideas of a king, and obedience to him; that
he was chosen captain of all these united families."
It is probable that Spain and Rome are interpolations. Cabrera claims
that the Votanites were Carthaginians. He thinks the Chivim of Votan
were the Hivim, or Givim, who were descended of Heth, son of Canaan,
Phœnicians; they were the builders of Accaron, Azotus, Ascalon, and
Gaza. The Scriptures refer to them as Hivites (Givim) in Deuteronomy
(chap. ii., verse 32), and Joshua (chap. xiii., verse 4). He claims that
Cadmus and his wife Hermione were of this stock; and according to Ovid
they were metamorphosed into snakes (Culebres). The name Hivites in
Phœnician signifies a snake.
Votan may not, possibly, have passed into Europe; be may have travelled
altogether in Africa. His singular allusion to "a way which the Culebres
had bored" seems at first inexplicable; but Dr. Livingstone's last
letters, published 8th November, 1869, in the "Proceedings of the Royal
Geographical Society," mention that "tribes live in underground houses
in Rua. Some excavations are said to be thirty miles long, and have
running rills in them; a whole district can stand a siege in them. The
'writings' therein, I have been told by some of the people, are drawings
of animals, and not letters; otherwise I should have gone to see them.
People very dark, well made, and outer angle of eyes slanting inward."
And Captain Grant, who accompanied Captain Speke in his famous
exploration of the sources of the Nile, tells of a tunnel or subway
under the river Kaoma, on the highway between Loowemba and Marunga, near
Lake Tanganyika. His guide Manua describes it to him:
"I asked Manua if he had ever seen any country resembling it. His reply
was, 'This country reminds me of what I saw in the country to the south
of the Lake Tanganyika, when travelling with an Arab's caravan from
Unjanyembeh. There is a river there called the Kaoma, running into the
lake, the sides of which are similar in precipitousness to the rocks
before us.' I then asked, 'Do the people cross this river in boats?'
'No; they have no boats; and even if they had, the people could not
land, as the sides are too steep: they pass underneath the river by a
natural tunnel, or subway.' He and all his party went through it on
their way from Loowemba to Ooroongoo, and returned by it. He described
its length as having taken them from sunrise till noon to pass through
it, and so high that, if mounted upon camels, they could not touch the
top. Tall reeds, the thickness of a walking-stick, grew inside, the road
was strewed with white pebbles, and so wide--four hundred yards--that
they could see their way tolerably well while passing through it. The
rocks looked as if they had been planed by artificial means. Water never
came through from the river overhead; it was procured by digging wells.
Manua added that the people of Wambweh take shelter in this tunnel, and
live there with their families and cattle, when molested by the Watuta,
a warlike race, descended from the Zooloo Kafirs.
But it is interesting to find in this book of Votan, however little
reliance we may place in its dates or details, evidence that there was
actual intercourse between the Old World and the New in remote ages.
Humboldt remarks:
"We have fixed the special attention of our readers upon this Votan, or
Wodan, an American who appears of the same family with the Wods or Odins
of the Goths and of the people of Celtic origin. Since, according to the
learned researches of Sir William Jones, Odin and Buddha are probably
the same person, it is curious to see the names of Bondvar, Wodansday,
and Votan designating in India, Scandinavia, and in Mexico the day of a
brief period." ("Vues des Cordilleras," p. 148, ed. 1810.)
There are many things to connect the mythology of the Gothic nations
with Atlantis; they had, as we have seen, flood legends; their gods
Krodo and Satar were the Chronos and Saturn of Atlantis; their Baal was
the Bel of the Phœnicians, who were closely connected with Poseidon and
Atlas; and, as we shall see hereafter, their language has a distinct
relationship with the tongues of the Arabians, Cushites, Chaldeans, and
Phœnicians.
CHAPTER V.
THE PYRAMID, THE CROSS, AND THE GARDEN OF EDEN.
No fact is better established than the reverence shown to the sign of
the Cross in all the ages prior to Christianity. We cannot do better
than quote from an able article in the Edinburgh Review of July, 1870,
upon this question:
"From the dawn of organized Paganism in the Eastern world to the final
establishment of Christianity in the Western, the Cross was undoubtedly
one of the commonest and most sacred of symbolical monuments; and, to a
remarkable extent, it is so still in almost every land where that of
Calvary is unrecognized or unknown. Apart from any distinctions of
social or intellectual superiority, of caste, color, nationality, or
location in either hemisphere, it appears to have been the aboriginal
possession of every people in antiquity--the elastic girdle, so to say,
which embraced the most widely separated heathen communities--the most
significant token of a universal brotherhood, to which all the families
of mankind were severally and irresistibly drawn, and by which their
common descent was emphatically expressed, or by means of which each and
all preserved, amid every vicissitude of fortune, a knowledge of the
primeval happiness and dignity of their species. Where authentic history
is silent on the subject, the material relics of past and long since
forgotten races are not wanting to confirm and strengthen this
supposition. Diversified forms of the symbol are delineated more or less
artistically, according to the progress achieved in civilization at the
period, on the ruined walls of temples and palaces, on natural rocks and
sepulchral galleries, on the hoariest monoliths and the rudest statuary;
on coins, medals, and vases of every description; and, in not a few
instances, are preserved in the architectural proportions of
subterranean as well as superterranean structures, of tumuli as well as
fanes. The extraordinary sanctity attaching to the symbol, in every age
and under every variety of circumstance, justified any expenditure
incurred in its fabrication or embellishment; hence the most persistent
labor, the most consummate ingenuity, were lavished upon it. Populations
of essentially different culture, tastes, and pursuits--the
highly-civilized and the demi-civilized, the settled and nomadic--vied
with each other in their efforts to extend the knowledge of its
exceptional import and virtue among their latest posterities. The
marvellous rock-hewn caves of Elephanta and Ellora, and the stately
temples of Mathura and Terputty, in the East, may be cited as
characteristic examples of one laborious method of exhibiting it; and
the megalithic structures of Callernish and Newgrange, in the West, of
another; while a third may be instanced. in the great temple at Mitzla,
'the City of the Moon,' in Ojaaca, Central America. also excavated in
the living rock, and manifesting the same stupendous labor and ingenuity
as are observable in the cognate caverns of Salsette--of endeavors, we
repeat, made by peoples as intellectually as geographically distinct,
and followers withal of independent and unassociated deities, to magnify
and perpetuate some grand primeval symbol. . . .
"Of the several varieties of the Cross still in vogue, as national or
ecclesiastical emblems, in this and other European states, and
distinguished by the familiar appellations of St. George, St. Andrew,
the Maltese, the Greek, the Latin, etc., etc., there is not one among
them the existence of which may not be traced to the remotest antiquity.
They were the common property of the Eastern nations. No revolution or
other casualty has wrought any perceptible difference in their several
forms or delineations; they have passed from one hemisphere to the other
intact; have survived dynasties, empires, and races; have been borne on
the crest of each successive wave of Aryan population in its course
toward the West; and, having been reconsecrated in later times by their
lineal descendants, are still recognized as military and national badges
of distinction. . . .
Among the earliest known types is the crux ansata, vulgarly called 'the
key of the Nile,' because of its being found sculptured or otherwise
represented so frequently upon Egyptian and Coptic monuments. It has,
however, a very much older and more sacred signification than this. It
was the symbol of symbols, the mystical Tau, 'the bidden wisdom,' not
only of the ancient Egyptians but also of the Chaldeans, Phœnicians,
Mexicans, Peruvians, and of every other ancient people commemorated in
history, in either hemisphere, and is formed very similarly to our
letter T, with a roundlet, or oval, placed immediately above it. Thus it
was figured on the gigantic emerald or glass statue of Serapis, which
was transported (293 B.C.) by order of Ptolemy Soter from Sinope, on the
southern shores of the Black Sea, re-erected within that famous
labyrinth which encompassed the banks of Lake Mœris, and destroyed by
the victorious army of Theodosius (A.D. 389), despite the earnest
entreaties of the Egyptian priesthood to spare it, because it was the
emblem of their god and of 'the life to come.' Sometimes, as may be seen
on the breast of an Egyptian mummy in the museum of the London
University, the simple T only is planted on the frustum of a cone; and
sometimes it is represented as springing from a heart; in the first
instance signifying goodness; in the second, hope or expectation of
reward. As in the oldest temples and catacombs of Egypt, so this type
likewise abounds in the ruined cities of Mexico and Central America,
graven as well upon the most ancient cyclopean and polygonal walls as
upon the more modern and perfect examples of masonry; and is displayed
in an equally conspicuous manner upon the breasts of innumerable bronze
statuettes which have been recently disinterred from the cemetery of
Juigalpa (of unknown antiquity) in Nicaragua."
When the Spanish missionaries first set foot upon the soil of America,
in the fifteenth century, they were amazed to find the Cross was as
devoutly worshipped by the red Indians as by themselves, and were in
doubt whether to ascribe the fact to the pious labors of St. Thomas or
to the cunning device of the Evil One. The hallowed symbol challenged
their attention on every hand and in almost every variety of form. It
appeared on the bass-reliefs of ruined and deserted as well as on those
of inhabited palaces, and was the most conspicuous ornament in the great
temple of Gozumel, off the coast of Yucatan. According to the particular
locality, and the purpose which it served, it was formed of various
materials--of marble and gypsum in the open spaces of cities and by the
way-side; of wood in the teocallis or chapels on pyramidal summits and
in subterranean sanctuaries; and of emerald or jasper in the palaces of
kings and nobles.
When we ask the question how it comes that the sign of the Cross has
thus been reverenced. from the highest antiquity by the races of the Old
and New Worlds, we learn that it is a reminiscence of the Garden of
Eden, in other words, of Atlantis.
Professor Hardwicke says:
"All these and similar traditions are but mocking satires of the old
Hebrew story--jarred and broken notes of the same strain; but with all
their exaggerations they intimate how in the background of man's vision
lay a paradise of holy joy--a paradise secured from every kind of
profanation, and made inaccessible to the guilty; a paradise full of
objects that were calculated to delight the senses and to elevate the
mind a paradise that granted to its tenant rich and rare immunities, and
that fed with its perennial streams the tree of life and immortality."
To quote again from the writer in the Edinburgh Review, already cited;
"Its undoubted antiquity, no less than its extraordinary diffusion,
evidences that it must have been, as it may be said to be still in
unchristianized lands, emblematical of some fundamental doctrine or
mystery. The reader will not have failed to observe that it is most
usually associated with water; it was 'the key of the Nile,' that
mystical instrument by means of which, in the popular judgment of his
Egyptian devotees, Osiris produced the annual revivifying inundations of
the sacred stream; it is discernible in that mysterious pitcher or vase
portrayed on the brazen table of Bembus, before-mentioned, with its four
lips discharging as many streams of water in opposite directions; it was
the emblem of the water-deities of the Babylonians in the East and of
the Gothic nations in the West, as well as that of the rain-deities
respectively of the mixed population in America. We have seen with what
peculiar rites the symbol was honored by those widely separated races in
the western hemisphere; and the monumental slabs of Nineveh, now in the
museums of London and Paris, show us how it was similarly honored by the
successors of the Chaldees in the eastern. . . .
ANCIENT IRISH CROSS--PRE-CHRISTIAN--KILNABOY.
"In Egypt, Assyria, and Britain it was emblematical of creative power
and eternity; in India, China, and Scandinavia, of heaven and
immortality; in the two Americas, of rejuvenescence and freedom from
physical suffering; while in both hemispheres it was the common symbol
of the resurrection, or 'the sign of the life to come;' and, finally, in
all heathen communities, without exception, it was the emphatic type,
the sole enduring evidence, of the Divine Unity. This circumstance alone
determines its extreme antiquity--an antiquity, in all likelihood, long
antecedent to the foundation of either of the three great systems of
religion in the East. And, lastly, we have seen how, as a rule, it is
found in conjunction with a stream or streams of water, with exuberant
vegetation, and with a bill or a mountainous region--in a word, with a
land of beauty, fertility, and joy. Thus it was expressed upon those
circular and sacred cakes of the Egyptians, composed of the richest
materials-of flour, of honey, of milk--and with which the serpent and
bull, as well as other reptiles and beasts consecrated to the service of
Isis and their higher divinities, were daily fed; and upon certain
festivals were eaten with extraordinary ceremony by the people and their
priests. 'The cross-cake,' says Sir Gardner Wilkinson, 'was their
hieroglyph for civilized land;' obviously a land superior to their own,
as it was, indeed, to all other mundane territories; for it was that
distant, traditional country of sempiternal contentment and repose, of
exquisite delight and serenity, where Nature, unassisted by man,
produces all that is necessary for his sustentation."
And this land was the Garden of Eden of our race. This was the Olympus
of the Greeks, where
"This same mild season gives the blooms to blow,
The buds to harden and the fruits to grow."
In the midst of it was a sacred and glorious eminence--the umbilicus
orbis terrarum--"toward which the heathen in all parts of the world, and
in all ages, turned a wistful gaze in every act of devotion, and to
which they hoped to be admitted, or, rather, to be restored, at the
close of this transitory scene."
In this "glorious eminence" do we not see Plato's mountain in the middle
of Atlantis, as he describes it:
"Near the plain and in the centre of the island there was a mountain,
not very high on any side. In this mountain there dwelt one of the
earth-born primeval men of that country, whose name was Evenor, and he
had a wife named Leucippe, and they had an only daughter, who was named
Cleito. Poseidon married her. He enclosed the hill in which she dwelt
all around, making alternate zones of sea and land, larger and smaller,
encircling one another; there were two of land and three of water . . .
so that no man could get to the island. . . . He brought streams of
water under the earth to this mountain-island, and made all manner of
food to grow upon it. This island became the seat of Atlas, the
over-king of the whole island; upon it they built the great temple of
their nation; they continued to ornament it in successive generations,
every king surpassing the one who came before him to the utmost of his
power, until they made the building a marvel to behold for size and
beauty. . . . And they had such an amount of wealth as was never before
possessed by kings and potentates--as is not likely ever to be again."
The gardens of Alcinous and Laertes, of which we read in Homeric song,
and those of Babylon, were probably transcripts of Atlantis. "The sacred
eminence in the midst of a 'superabundant, happy region figures more or
less distinctly in almost every mythology, ancient or modern. It was the
Mesomphalos of the earlier Greeks, and the Omphalium of the Cretans,
dominating the Elysian fields, upon whose tops, bathed in pure,
brilliant, incomparable light, the gods passed their days in ceaseless
joys."
"The Buddhists and Brahmans, who together constitute nearly half the
population of the world, tell us that the decussated figure (the cross),
whether in a simple or a complex form, symbolizes the traditional happy
abode of their primeval ancestors--that 'Paradise of Eden toward the
East,' as we find expressed in the Hebrew. And, let us ask, what better
picture, or more significant characters, in the complicated alphabet of
symbolism, could have been selected for the purpose than a circle and a
cross: the one to denote a region of absolute purity and perpetual
felicity; the other, those four perennial streams that divided and
watered the several quarters of it?" (Edinburgh Review, January, 1870.)
And when we turn to the mythology of the Greeks, we find that the origin
of the world was ascribed to Okeanos, the ocean, The world was at first
an island surrounded by the ocean, as by a great stream:
"It was a region of wonders of all kinds; Okeanos lived there with his
wife Tethys: these were the Islands of the Blessed, the gardens of the
gods, the sources of nectar and ambrosia, on which the gods lived.
Within this circle of water the earth lay spread out like a disk, with
mountains rising from it, and the vault of heaven appearing to rest upon
its outer edge all around." (Murray's "Manual of Mythology," pp. 23, 24,
et seq.)
On the mountains dwelt the gods; they had palaces on these mountains,
with store-rooms, stabling, etc.
"The Gardens of the Hesperides, with their golden apples, were believed
to exist in some island of the ocean, or, as it was sometimes thought,
in the islands off the north or west coast of Africa. They were far
famed in antiquity; for it was there that springs of nectar flowed by
the couch of Zeus, and there that the earth displayed the rarest
blessings of the gods; it was another Eden." (Ibid., p. 156.)
Homer described it in these words:
"Stern winter smiles on that auspicious clime,
The fields are florid with unfading prime,
From the bleak pole no winds inclement blow.
Mould the round hail, or flake the fleecy snow;
But from the breezy deep the blessed inhale
The fragrant murmurs of the western gale."
"It was the sacred Asgard of the Scandinavians, springing from the
centre of a fruitful land, which was watered by four primeval rivers of
milk, severally flowing in the direction of the cardinal points, 'the
abode of happiness, and the height of bliss.' It is the Tien-Chan, 'the
celestial mountain-land, . . . the enchanted gardens' of the Chinese and
Tartars, watered by the four perennial fountains of Tychin, or
Immortality; it is the hill-encompassed Ilá of the Singhalese and
Thibetians, 'the everlasting dwelling-place of the wise and just.' It is
the Sineru of the Buddhist, on the summit of which is Tawrutisa, the
habitation of Sekrá, the supreme god, from which proceed the four sacred
streams, running in as many contrary directions.
It is the Slávratta, 'the celestial earth,' of the Hindoo, the summit of
his golden mountain Meru, the city of Brahma, in the centre of
Jambadwípa, and from the four sides of which gush forth the four
primeval rivers, reflecting in their passage the colorific glories of
their source, and severally flowing northward, southward, eastward, and
westward."
It is the Garden of Eden of the Hebrews:
"And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put
the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord God to
grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the
tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge
of good and evil. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and
from thence it was parted, and became into four heads. The name of the
first is Pison; that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah,
where there is gold; and the gold of that land is good: there is
bdellium and the onyx stone. And the name of the second river is Gihon:
the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia. And the name
of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth toward the east
of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates. And the Lord God took the
man and put him into the Garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it."
(Gen. ii., 8-1-5.)
As the four rivers named in Genesis are not branches of any one stream,
and head in very different regions, it is evident that there was an
attempt, on the part of the writer of the Book, to adapt an ancient
tradition concerning another country to the known features of the region
in which be dwelt.
Josephus tells us (chap. i., p. 41), "Now the garden (of Eden) was
watered by one river, which ran round about the whole earth, and was
parted into four parts." Here in the four parts we see the origin of the
Cross, while in the river running around the whole earth we have the
wonderful canal of Atlantis, described by Plato, which was "carried
around the whole of the plain," and received the streams which came down
from the mountains. The streams named by Josephus would seem to
represent the migrations of people from Atlantis to its colonies.
"Phison," he tells us, "denotes a multitude; it ran into India; the
Euphrates and Tigris go down into the Red Sea while the Geon runs
through Egypt."
We are further told (chap. ii., p. 42) that when Cain, after the murder
of. Abel, left the land of Adam, "he travelled over many countries"
before be reached the land of Nod; and the land of Nod was to the
eastward of Adam's home. In other words, the original seat of mankind
was in the West, that is to say, in the direction of Atlantis. Wilson
tells us that the Aryans of India believed that they originally came
"from the West." Thus the nations on the west of the Atlantic look to
the east for their place of origin; while on the east of the Atlantic
they look to the west: thus all the lines of tradition converge upon
Atlantis.
But here is the same testimony that in the Garden of Eden there were
four rivers radiating from one parent stream. And these four rivers, as
we have seen, we find in the Scandinavian traditions, and in the legends
of the Chinese, the Tartars, the Singhalese, the Thibetians, the
Buddhists, the Hebrews, and the Brahmans.
And not only do we find this tradition of the Garden of Eden in the Old
World, but it meets us also among the civilized races of America. The
elder Montezuma said to Cortez, "Our fathers dwelt in that happy and
prosperous place which they called Aztlan, which means whiteness. . . .
In this place there is a great mountain in the middle of the water which
is called Culhuacan, because it has the point somewhat turned over
toward the bottom; and for this cause it is called Culhuacan, which
means 'crooked mountain.'" He then proceeds to describe the charms of
this favored land, abounding in birds, game, fish, trees, "fountains
enclosed with elders and junipers, and alder-trees both large and
beautiful." The people planted "maize, red peppers, tomatoes, beans, and
all kinds of plants, in furrows."
Here we have the same mountain in the midst of the water which Plato
describes--the same mountain to which all the legends of the most
ancient races of Europe refer.
The inhabitants of Aztlan were boatmen. (Bancroft's "Native Races," vol.
v., p. 325.) E. G. Squier, in his "Notes on Central America," p. 349,
says, "It is a significant fact that in the map of their migrations,
presented by Gemelli, the place of the origin of the Aztecs is
designated by the sign of water, Atl standing for Atzlan, a pyramidal
temple with grades, and near these a palm-tree." This circumstance did
not escape the attention of Humboldt, who says, "I am astonished at
finding a palm-tree near this teocalli. This tree certainly does not
indicate a northern origin. . . . The possibility that an unskilful
artist should unintentionally represent a tree of which he had no
knowledge is so great, that any argument dependent on it hangs upon a
slender thread." ("North Americans of Antiquity," p. 266.)
The Miztecs, a tribe dwelling on the outskirts of Mexico, had a
tradition that the gods, "in the day of obscurity and darkness," built
"a sumptuous palace, a masterpiece of skill, in which they male their
abode upon a mountain. The rock was called 'The Place of Heaven;' there
the gods first abode on earth, living many years in great rest and
content, as in a happy and delicious land, though the world still lay in
obscurity and darkness. The children of these gods made to themselves a
garden, in which they put many trees, and fruit-trees, and flowers, and
roses, and odorous herbs. Subsequently there came a great deluge, in
which many of the sons and daughters of the gods perished." (Bancroft's
"Native Races," vol. iii., p. 71.) Here we have a distinct reference to
Olympus, the Garden of Plato, and the destruction of Atlantis.
And in Plato's account of Atlantis we have another description of the
Garden of Eden and the Golden Age of the world:
"Also, whatever fragrant things there are in the earth, whether roots,
or herbage, or woods, or distilling drops of flowers and fruits, grew
and thrived in that land; and again the cultivated fruits of the earth,
both the edible fruits and other species of food which we call by the
name of legumes, and the fruits having a hard rind, affording drinks and
meats and ointments . . . all these that sacred island, lying beneath
the sun, brought forth in abundance. . . . For many generations, as long
as the divine nature lasted in them, they were obedient to the laws, and
well affectioned toward the gods, who were their kinsmen; for they
possessed true and in every way great spirits, practising gentleness and
wisdom in the various chances of life, and in their intercourse with one
another. They despised everything but virtue, not caring for their
present state of life, and thinking lightly of the possession of gold
and other property, which seemed only a burden to them; neither were
they intoxicated by luxury; nor did wealth deprive them of their
self-control; but they were sober, and saw clearly that all these goods
were increased by virtuous friendship with one another, and that by
excessive zeal for them, and honor of them, the good of them is lost,
and friendship perishes with them."
All this cannot be a mere coincidence; it points to a common tradition
of a veritable land, where four rivers flowed down in opposite
directions from a central mountain-peak. And these four rivers, flowing
to the north, south, east, and west, constitute the origin of that sign
of the Cross which we have seen meeting us at every point among the
races who were either descended from the people of Atlantis, or who, by
commerce and colonization, received their opinions and civilization from
them.
Let us look at the question of the identity of the Garden of Eden with
Atlantis from another point of view:
If the alphabet of the Phœnicians is kindred with the Maya alphabet, as
I think is clear, then the Phœnicians were of the same race, or of some
race with which the Mayas were connected; in other words, they were from
Atlantis.
Now we know that the Phœnicians and Hebrews were of the same stock, used
the same alphabet, and spoke almost precisely the same language.
The Phœnicians preserved traditions, which have come down to us in the
writings, of Sanchoniathon, of all the great essential inventions or
discoveries which underlie civilization. The first two human beings,
they tell us, were Protogonos and Aion (Adam and 'Havath), who produce
Genos and Genea (Qên and Qênath), from whom again are descended three
brothers, named Phos, Phur, and Phlox (Light, Fire, and Flame), because
they "have discovered how to produce fire by the friction of two pieces
of wood, and have taught the use of this element." In another fragment,
at the origin of the human race we see in succession the fraternal
couples of Autochthon and Technites (Adam and Quen--Cain?), inventors of
the manufacture of bricks; Agros and Agrotes (Sade and Cêd), fathers of
the agriculturists and hunters; then Amynos and Magos, "who taught to
dwell in villages and rear flocks."
The connection between these Atlantean traditions and the Bible record
is shown in many things. For instance, "the Greek text, in expressing
the invention of Amynos, uses the words kw'mas kai` poi'mnas, which are
precisely the same as the terms ôhel umiqneh, which the Bible uses in
speaking of the dwellings of the descendants of Jabal (Gen., chap. iv.,
v. 20). In like manner Lamech, both in the signification of his name and
also iv the savage character attributed to him by the legend attached to
his memory, is a true synonyme of Agrotes."
"And the title of A?lh~tai, given to Agros and Agrotes in the Greek of
the Phœnician history, fits in wonderfully with the physiognomy of the
race of the Cainites in the Bible narrative, whether we take a?lh~tai
simply as a Hellenized transcription of the Semitic Elim, 'the strong,
the mighty,' or whether we take it in its Greek acceptation, 'the
wanderers;' for such is the destiny of Cain and his race according to
the very terms of the condemnation which was inflicted upon him after
his crime (Gen. iv., 14), and this is what is signified by the name of
his grandson 'Yirad. Only, in Sanchoniathon the genealogy does not end
with Amynos and Magos, as that of the Cainites in the Bible does with
the three sons of Lamech. These two personages are succeeded by Misôr
and Sydyk, 'the released and the just,' as Sanchoniathon translates
them, but rather the 'upright and the just' (Mishôr and Çüdüq), 'who
invent the use of salt.' To Misôr is born Taautos (Taût), to whom we owe
letters; and to Sydyk the Cabiri or Corybantes, the institutors of
navigation." (Lenormant, "Genealogies between Adam and the Deluge."
Contemporary Review, April, 1880.)
We have, also, the fact that the Phœnician name for their goddess
Astynome (Ashtar No'emâ), whom the Greeks called Nemaun, was the same as
the name of the sister of the three sons of Lamech, as given in
Genesis--Na'emah, or Na'amah.
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