PART FOUR
SEARCHING FOR THE FOUNTAINHEAD
 

17 - Megalithic England: The Atlantean Dimensions
 

A Conversation with John Michell

J. Douglas Kenyon

Among those who have argued in their writings that there was once a great and shining. albeit forgotten-to-history. fountainhead of civilization whose ghosts even now continue to haunt us. few have been more eloquent than John Michell.

The author of more than a score of works on ancient mysteries. sacred geometry. UFOs. unexplained phenomena. and the like. Michell is familiar to American readers primarily through his visionary classic The View Over Atlantis (a revised and rewritten version of this book. published in 1995. is entitled The New View Over Atlantis).

The Earth Spirit comprises Michell's profusely illustrated essays on the ways. shrines. and mysteries of the subtle animating forces of the planet and their near universal celebration since the dawn of time.

Michell argues that across much of the earth are ancient earthworks and stone monuments built for an unknown purpose. and that their shared features suggest they might be part of a worldwide system that he believes served the elemental science of the archaic civilization that Plato called Atlantis.

Michell suggests. in this connection. that the most significant modern discovery is that of leys. a mysterious network of straight lines that link the ancient places of Britain and have their counterparts in China. Australia. South America. and elsewhere.

In The New View Over Atlantis, the Cambridge-educated scholar's vision of a high megalithic civilization with a mastery of principles far beyond present-day understanding is so thoroughly and beautifully worked out that it becomes difficult, if not impossible. to credit orthodox notions that the sources of our megalithic heritage were but Stone Age hunter-gatherer societies with little on their primitive minds but survival and procreation.

In detailed descriptions of phenomena such as the precise terrestrial and celestial alignments of ancient monuments long ley lines, advanced ancient sciences of numbers and sacred geometry. and sophisticated prehistoric engineering.

Michell paints a picture of a vast and coherent worldwide order beyond anything imaginable today.

"We live within the ruins of an ancient structure," he wrote in the first edition of The New View Over Atlantis, "whose vast size has hitherto rendered it invisible."

Emerging from current research is the awesome image of an ancient structure so great that its outlines have heretofore escaped understanding, one patiently awaiting our ascent to a sufficient height whence its masterful design, stretched out beneath us, can at last be appreciated.

Colin Wilson described The View Over Atlantis as,

"one of the great seminal books of our generation  - a book which will be argued about for generations to come."

In an interview with Atlantis Rising, Michell was asked if he had been keeping up with the new research by Graham Hancock, Robert Bauval, and others into celestial alignments of the monument of Egypt's Giza plane with the constellation Orion and other stars.

He has, and hears an echo of evidence he has found in British sites in "much older stone," where alignments with significant stars also indicate the route of the soul after death.

"Everywhere in the ancient world you see this terrific obsession with death, reflected in the orientation of monuments," he observes. To him it seems plain that the ancients possessed a kind of science of immortality along the lines that Graham Hancock has suggested.

Unlike Colin Wilson, who theorizes that the ancients possessed advanced psychic faculties but had no technology as we understand the term, Michell believes it is very clear that they did.

He sees it in their elaborate work of sitting and constructing monuments well before the pyramids, and he sees it in their highly developed sciences of numbers and geometry.

"It's truly just extraordinary that so many numerical harmonies are put into basically very simple structures," he marvels, "and how they designed others to concentrate on the long term. In this very beautiful pattern is implied the kind of philosophy that says we can construct, here on Earth, the path to the heavens."

He cites the frequent use of the number 12, as in the twelve tribes of Israel and a connection with the twelve signs of the zodiac, hinting at an attempt to order life on Earth according to the pattern of things in the heavens.

The question of technology becomes more pressing, but even more difficult to answer, when one considers how the giant stones of ancient sites were actually cut, tooled, and moved.

"It is a mystery, actually," he concedes, "this incredible precision. And again in megalithic times, the extraordinary weights involved - raising blocks of one hundred tons or more, transporting them, and setting them up. They used terrific labor ingenuity and, no doubt, principles that aren't recognized today."

Could such principles have included some kind of levitation?

"There are very persistent references from the Classical writers to the power of sound," he says, "of the use of song and music and tone to make things lighter, work songs where there's a rhythm got up, where you can move things without a lot of effort."

Whatever lost secrets the ancients may have possessed, Michell believes that we can recover them and, in fact, will, when the time is right.

"Human ingenuity is such that we can do anything we want. If [the ancient knowledge] was actually needed, then it would return again. There's no doubt about that," he says.

As to the suggestion that we may have been left hidden caches of records such as the legendary Hall of Records in Egypt, he thinks it very likely that such treasure troves exist, but is not certain we will recognize them when we see them.

"Plato went on about a certain canon of law possessed by the ancient Egyptians by which numerical proportions and musical harmonies. which dominate a society. enable it to continue on the same level for literally thousands of years," he explains.

 

"Ancient civilization lasted far longer than we can conceive of today, so it seems to me that the whole society was based upon an understanding of the harmonies by which the universe is laid. And acting upon these by corresponding rituals. and that sort of thing. could hold the society together through crises."

However, he concedes, being sufficiently developed to appreciate the wisdom of such laws may be another matter.

The possibility that we may have begun. at least in some quarters. to resonate in harmony with the ancient chords of wisdom could open the door to a return of ancient wisdom. In religious stories such as the Revelation of Saint John. Michell sees the description of a "New Jerusalem" coming down ready-made through a parting of the heavens as the manifestation of an awakening and a wholesale change from the patterns of a previous age.

Such a revelation comes, he believes, from nature, and "it is invoked," he says.

"When we need it. we ask for it and it comes. Today. when people are so uncertain. I think we are looking for a truth and understanding that is beyond this world of chaos - of secular theories. and of all the scientific theories that follow one after the other but never establish anything - we're looking for the higher truth that is always there. When we ask for that, we'll get that."

In a chaotic world where dissonance and dissonant music apparently reign supreme. there seems little hope that such a force can be overcome, but Michell remains optimistic.

"It will overcome itself," he says.

 

"Certainly it has always been recognized that music is the most powerful of the arts. As Plato said. forms of government eventually follow the forms of music. That's why the ancients were very careful in controlling music - no cacophony was allowed.

 

The same music was heard at festivals every year and people were held under a kind of enchantment [whereby] the mind was held under one influence.

"Music is by far the most powerful means for therapy. Certainly the music - and the other art forms too - that we see now threatens chaos in society. It's a vessel that not only reflects what happens but also actually determines what will happen.

 

As to what will come about. I have no idea. I think more and more it's in the hands of God and that there is now working out an alchemical process and that changes come about through nature - through the natural process of cause and effect.

 

Things are chaotic and we have a reaction and a yearning for a source of order - there's a quest for that and an invocation of that, and then there follows a revelation'"

Can the hoped-for change come without cataclysm?

"Every man-made thing. every created thing comes to an end sooner or later," Michell says.

 

"It's as inevitable as tomorrow's sunrise that all these fruits shall have lain down. That which is artificial does not last long. Look at the fall of Communism. It seemed so assured. so completely in control. and it vanished practically overnght. destroyed by its own inherent contradictions. People just couldn't stand it anymore. It's so like the description of the fall of Babylon [in Saint John's Revelation].

 

One day it's going with all its wealth. parading its splendor. and the next day it's as if it never had been. There is no doubt that all the institutions we know will collapse. As to how orderly this process will be? The further we go into megalomania and dependence on artificial systems. the more drastic will be the reaction."

Michell sees a clear parallel between the destruction of Babylon described in the Book of Revelation and Plato's description of the fall of Atlantis, and he believes the story is a warning about the danger in certain ordering:

"Plato made it very clear he's describing a geometrical pattern. the ground plan of Atlantis. which is actually not adequate - like a man-made thing - based on the number 10. where his ideal city was based on the number 12. He saw in Atlantis the mortal element prevailed and it collapsed...

"It is about an error in the foundation law." Michell says. "which became more and more exaggerated and eventually led to the downfall of the whole thing. Life is bringing us through this process of revelation what was not even conceivable one hundred years ago or less - the idea of there being a cosmological pattern expressible numerically. geometrically. beautifully. which is the best possible reflection of the cosmos. That process establishes perfect patterns in one's own mind and then later on becomes the pattern for society.

"Then. of course. again over many generations. what began as a revelation becomes the iron law and becomes unjust and leads to that process whereby the ideal turns into Babylon and is fit for destruction. The best possible cosmological pattern that is kept up in the institutes of society will enable the society to last for a very long time. but no material thing lasts forever. Eventually it turns into dust."

But the good news, says Michell, is that human nature will always outlive any system of tyranny imposed upon it and, like the phoenix, will rise again.

Today, he believes, we are living like bats in the ruins of a haunted house among the relics and ruins of the past. not just physically but also mentally, caught in outmoded forms of thought. If one is going to free oneself from the age-old spells, Michell says, one must challenge the dominant myths as he once did, with the most dominant theory of biology, evolution.

"It's not exactly that they are wrong." he explains.

 

"It's that they are partial and arbitrary. That's the way they teach in school and college. You have to challenge them to get anywhere near adjusting your mind to the reality of things. If you take to heart anyone's scientific explanation, you will have an uneasy life: for, as you know, the theories that are portrayed as certainties are always changing.

 

If you believe what they tell you in school now, by the time you get to be my age you'll be very old-fashioned indeed."

18 - Plato, the Truth

How Does the Credibility of the Best-Known Chronicler of Atlantis Stand Up?

Frank Joseph

The Egyptian legend of Atlantis also current in folk-tale along the Atlantic seaboard from Gibraltar to the Hebrides and among the Yorubas in West Africa is not to be dismissed as pure fancy.
ROBERT GRAVES

THE GREEK MYTHS

As the only surviving report from antiquity describing Atlantis.

Plato's account is the single most important source of its kind at the disposal of investigators pursuing the lost civilization.

His version continues to attract the attention of both skeptics seeking to debunk Atlantis. and true believers who contend that every word is quite literally factual. However. an impartial reading of Plato's account as it is matter-of-factly presented in his dialogues. the Timaeus and the Critias. leaves most readers impressed that the events described so plainly might just as well be found in the more easily verified writings of Herodotus or Thucydides.

To be sure, gods, goddesses, and Titans are employed, as one may expect. to stand for the powers of nature. fate. and the remote past. just as they were called upon to do in virtually every other Greek history.

As such. the myths were metaphors more than actual religious personages. But this is largely the story of men and events well within the realm of Mediterranean experience. and does not overly tax our imagination.

The story as it stands seems far less fabulous than factual. if only for its straightforward. unadorned rendering.

As William Blackett wrote in his book Lost History of the World in 1881.

"The case is put very differently by Plato. Divested of the simplicity of story-telling. and free from the concealment of mysticism and fancy. his account of the occurrence takes the form of a great historical event."

The most common argument against the validity of the existence of Atlantis as presented in the Timaeus and the Critias is that Plato meant them to be understood merely as fictional recapitulations of his ideal state.

While he obviously admires its high culture. Atlantis was not a mirror image of the society described in The Republic. There are very significant. nay. fundamental. differences between the two. His authoritarian ideal of a regime ruled by philosopher-kings was a single. race-conscious state. not a far-flung confederation of various peoples under the old system of monarchs constrained from wielding absolute power by a counsel of royal equals.

Even if Atlantis had been tailored after his work The Republic (which it was not). the addition of unnecessary, unphilosophic material (lengthy descriptions of architecture, racetracks, etc.) could not have illustrated any ideas that were not already thoroughly covered in The Republic, and would have therefore been so much superfluous repetition. something unparalleled in any of the man's writings.

Moreover, Atlantis grows corrupt, the reason for its punishment by the gods, hardly the fate of a society Plato hoped to immortalize as his ideal.

His story achieves a more proper perspective when we understand that it was not intended to stand alone as some kind of an anomaly among his other philosophic works. but was rather the first part of an unfinished anthology concerning the major events that most shaped the history of the world until his time. It would have been. by its very nature. an interpretive history, another work on philosophy.

The Timaeus deals with the creation of the world. the nature of man. and the first civilized societies.

The Critias, which survives only in draft form. was to be a full account of the Atlanto-Athenian war and its aftermath; its final section was to describe the critical events of the recent past. up to the fourth century B.C.E. So. the Atlantis story was intended as part of a far greater project. but essentially no different in character from the rest of Plato's writings.

More significant. if his account was pure invention. it would not correspond as well as it does with accessible history. nor go on to logically fill so many gaps in our knowledge of pre-Classical antiquity by bridging such a great deal of otherwise disconnected. isolated information.

But Plato's accuracy as historian could not be verified until our own century. His description of a holy spring that ran through the Acropolis was deemed entirely mythical until the discovery of Mycenaean potsherds from the thirteenth century B.C.E. showing a fountain in the midst of the Acropolis led some researchers to reconsider his account.

Then, in 1938. renewed excavations revealed that earthquake activity had closed an underground spring beneath the Acropolis precisely where Plato said it had been.

During the 1950s. joint teams of Greek. German. and American archeologists found their reconstruction of fifth-century-B.c.E. Athens matched Plato's description of the city with unexpected exactitude.

We have, therefore, every reason to assume his description of Atlantis is just as accurate. Both his identification of the fountain at the Acropolis and his precise knowledge of Athens reflect favorably on his historical reliability.

There is also some evidence that Plato's account was not altogether unknown to the Greeks in Classical times before he set it to paper. At the Panathenaea Festival, held every year in Athens, women wore a peplum, a kind of skirt, embroidered with symbolic designs commemorating the goddess of their city.

Some of the peplum depictions represented Athena's victory over the forces of Atlantis, not a particularly remarkable fact in itself, except that the Panathenaea was founded 125 years before Plato's birth.

T he Voyage to Atlantis, rediscovered and tragically lost in modern times. was another earlier source. composed 150 years before Plato's time by Dionysus of Miletus. A few other tantalizing fragments still exist. singed scraps from the incinerated Great Library of Alexandria. such as a fleeting reference to the second-century Roman writer Elianus, whose Historia Naturalis described how the rulers of Atlantis dressed to demonstrate their descent from Poseidon.

The story was given special credence by another philosopher. Proklos. who told how Krantor. an early follower of Plato. seeking to validate the legend of Atlantis. in 260 B.C.E. personally journeyed to the Egyptian temple at Sais.

There he discovered the original tablets. which confirmed the account. Translated. they paralleled Plato's narrative detail for detail.

Krantor was a prominent scholar at the Great Library of Alexandria. the center of Classical learning. where the story of Atlantis was generally regarded as a credible episode in history by the leading minds of the age, including the chief chronicler of the Roman Empire, Strabo.

Long before its destruction. the Great Library apparently contained a good deal of supportive materials that almost universally convinced its researchers that Plato had described an actual city in the "outer ocean."

It was only after the success of the Christian revolution that the facts concerning Atlantis. like most of "pagan" civilization, were lost. The story was condemned as heresy because it was not found in the Bible and because it supposedly predated God's creation of the world in 5508 B.C.E., a date arrived at by the curious chronology of Christian theologians.

The subject remained closed until the discovery of America, when so many mysterious parallels between the New World and the Old reminded scholars of Plato's Atlantic empire.

Among the first was a sixteenth-century explorer and cartographer, Francisco Lopez de Gomara, who was struck by descriptions of an "opposite continent" (America) in the Timaeus. But the Alexandria of Classical antiquity was, after all, only seventy-five miles from Sais, and any investigator who wished to verify the details of Plato's account did not have to travel far to read the tablets at the Temple of Neith.

According to the Roman historian Marcelinus (330-395 C.E.), scholars at the Great Library knew of a geologic convulsion that,

"suddenly, by a violent motion, opened up huge mouths and so swallowed up portions of the Earth, as in the Atlantic sea, on the coast of Europe, a large island was swallowed up."

The historiographer Theopompus believed Plato's story, as did the famous naturalist Pliny the Elder.

The original source materials they once possessed, lost since the collapse of Classical civilization, and the fragmentary evidence remaining to us argue consistently on behalf of Plato's credibility.

As Zadenk Kukal, a modern critic of the dialogues, has written,

"It is probable that even if Plato had not written a single line about Atlantis, all the archeological, ethnographic, and linguistic mysteries that could not be explained would lead to some primeval civilization located somewhere between the cultures of the Old and New Worlds."

R. Catesby Taliaferro writes in the foreword to the Thomas Taylor translation of the Timaeus and the Critias,

"It appears to me to be at least as well attested as any other narration in any ancient historian. Indeed, he [Plato], who proclaims that 'truth is the source of every good both to gods and men,' and the whole of whose works consist in detecting error and exploring certainty, can never be supposed to have willfully deceived mankind by publishing an extravagant romance as matter of fact, with all the precision of historical detail."

Plutarch, the great Greek biographer of the first century C.E., wrote in his Life of Solon that the Greek legislator cited in Plato's story,

"had undertaken to put into verse this great history of Atlantis, which had been told to him by the wise men of Sais."

The city itself played an important role in the Atlantis epic.

It was one of the oldest major settlements in Egypt and served as the first capital of the Lower Nile after the unification, which was around 3100 B.C.E. - in other words, at very start of dynastic, historic Egypt. As an indication of its and the Atlantean tablets' antiquity, the Temple of Neith - where they were enshrined, was established by Pharaoh Hor-aha, the first dynastic king of a united Egypt.

Even Sonchis, the obscure character who told the story to Solon, was a historical figure whose very name contributes to the authenticity of the legend.

Sonchis is a Greek derivation of the Egyptian god Suchos, known in his Nile homeland as Sebek. Sebek was a water deity who, appropriately enough, worshiped at Sais - where the Atlantis report was recorded - with his mother, Neith. It was in her temple, Plato wrote, that the tablets were preserved.

Neith was one of the very oldest of predynastic figures, the personification of the Waters of Chaos from which the Primal Mound, the First Land, arose. She was known as the keeper of the most ancient histories of both gods and men. The Minoan Mother Earth goddess and the Greek Athena are later manifestations of Neith. She fell into almost complete neglect after the passing of the Old Kingdom.

But the First Birth-Giver experienced a popular revival during the Saite Period of the twenty-sixth dynasty, when her temple and its oldest records were restored - precisely the time Plato said Solon visited Egypt. Herodotus wrote that Pharaoh Ahmose had just finished refurbishing the Temple of Neith when Solon arrived in Sais.

It is difficult to believe that Plato went to such lengths of mythic and historic detail to create a mere fable. It is no less unlikely that he suspected any connections among the priest Sonchis; the god Sebek; his mother, the goddess Neith; and their intimate relation to the story of Atlantis recorded so appropriately and unearthed in so timely a fashion at Sais.

Another point worth noting: Krantor said the story was inscribed on tablets mounted on a pillar in the Temple of Neith, while the Critias tells that the royal proclamations in Atlantis were inscribed on tablets posted to a column in the Temple of Poseidon: The one seems to reflect and memorialize the other.

There are many unquestionably authentic touches throughout the narrative.

For example, the Critias tells us that each of the wealthy leaders in Atlantean society was required to provide for the national armaments, including,

"four sailors to make up a compliment of twelve ships."

Although it fell out of use in Plato's more "democratic" times, in Periclean days and for some centuries before, wealthy men known as Trierarchoi each had to undertake the funding of a warship, complete with crew and weapons.

Of course, many more of those fragments still existed, even in Classical times, when the story was generally accepted as a historical event. One of those believers was the geographer Poseidonous of Rhodes (130 to 50 B.C.E.), who conducted his studies at Cadiz - the Gades in the Critias - in the Atlantean kingdom of Gadeiros.

Strabo wrote of him,

"[H]e did well in citing the opinion of Plato that the tradition concerning the island of Atlantis might be received as something more than fiction."

Modern critics are less generous. They continue to demean the story as nothing more than a fabulous allegory intended to dramatize principles already laid out in The Republic, with no basis in actual history except perhaps for a sketchy reference to Minoan Crete.

In 1956, however, Albert Rivand, professor of classical history at the Sorbonne, declared that both the Timaeus and the Critias embodied ancient, historic traditions, and contained results of the latest contemporary research carried out in Plato's day.

As Ivan Lissner wrote,

"That a distinguished French scholar who had spent decades studying the Platonic texts should reach this conclusion is most significant, because it invests the geographical and ontological allusions in the two books with greater weight."

Standing alone, Plato's account is simple enough. But background information on the principles in the narrative should raise it above the level of a dry report and lend the reader a feeling of living history.

More famous in his day than the author of the Timaeus and the Critias was their chief character, Solon, one of the Seven Sages, who "grew old ever learning new things" and whose name became synonymous for a wise lawgiver. Timaeus, born in Locris, in southern Italy, was an explorer and Pythagorean astronomer.

Critias the Younger was an orator, statesman, poet, philosopher, and one of the leaders of the Thirty Tyrants. He was also a first cousin of Plato's mother. A vigorous man, he died on the battlefield at Aegospotamis, in the Piraeus, in 403 B.C.E. as he approached his ninetieth birthday.

Solon's unfinished manuscript was passed on to his brother Dropides, the great-grandfather of Critias, and through succeeding generations it became something of a family heirloom.

Though these leading characters were real enough flesh-and-blood figures who related the tale with great accuracy (as mentioned above, Krantor verified Plato's version by comparing it with the original Egyptian tablets), the Timaeus and the Critias are not stenographic records of word-for-word conversations, but rather speeches organized to illustrate ideas by ordering arguments into the most logically convincing presentation, a standard exercise in the Classical schools of high rhetoric.

So when Critias says he hopes he has not forgotten all the details of the Atlantis story, the integrity of the whole narrative does not hang by the memory of an old man. Instead, Plato uses a standard rhetorical device to present his description.

More likely than not, he had Solon's unfinished manuscript in front of him as he wrote out the speeches.

He hints as much when he has Critias say,

"My great-grandfather, Dropides, had the original writing, which is still in my possession."

It is even possible Plato saw the original tablets at the Temple of Neith, as many scholars are sure he traveled to Egypt himself on at least one occasion. His narrative gains additional credence in the high standing of the men involved. No fictional improvisations, their lives were linked to the preservation of the account.

The Critias also differs from the rest of Plato's work, not only because of its incompleteness, but also, unlike in the other dialogues, Socrates does not interrupt the narrative with questions, a sign, judging from his behavior in The Republic, of agreement. Of course, he may have been saving his questions for later, but that would not have been like him.

We, however, should continue to question the story for more answers.

19 - The Aegean Atlantis Deception

Was Plato's Grand Tale Nothing More Than the Saga of an Insignificant Greek Island?

Frank Joseph

Although Atlantis has been generally associated by most investigators with the Atlantic Ocean. as a preponderance of the evidence suggests. fringe theorists have occasionally assigned the island to sometimes bizarre locations. almost always for ulterior reasons.

The latest of these eccentric interpretations gained some acceptance among professional archeologists and historians. probably because it did not disturb their modern bias against transoceanic voyages in pre-Classical times.

The theory originally belonged to a pre-World War I writer for the Journal of Hellenic Studies. K. T. Frost. who moved Atlantis from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean island of Crete. Since then. his hypothesis has been expanded by (perhaps not surprisingly) mostly Greek scholars (Galanopoulas. Marinatos. et al.) to include the Aegean island of Santorini. anciently known as Thera.

Their advocation of a Greek identity for Atlantis was the latest in an unfortunate chauvinist tendency on the part of some Atlantologists to associate their own national backgrounds with the lost civilization.

Such extra-scientific motivations for conveniently finding Plato's island in the investigator's own homeland have not done the search much credit. But the ulterior motives currently driving professional scholars of all nationalities (mostly Americans these days) to insist that Crete or its neighboring island and Atlantis are one and the same are more harmful. It is important. therefore. to understand why they want to explain away Atlantis in what has come to be known as the Minoan Hypothesis.

Thera was part of the Minoan commercial empire. and excavation on Santorini (its modern name) uncovered a high level of early civilization that once flourished there. The small island was actually a volcanic mountain that exploded in much the same way as the eruption at Krakatoa. and quite literally plunged into the sea.

The resulting two-hundred-foot-high wall of water that swept over Crete wrecked havoc among its coastal ports. while accompanying earthquakes badly damaged the inland capital. Knossos.

The Minoans were knocked so off balance by this natural disaster that they could not organize an effective resistance to Mycenaean aggression. and their civilization disappeared. absorbed in part by invaders from Greece. Seizing upon these events more than a thousand years before his time, Plato, it is suggested, modeled Atlantis directly after Crete and/or Thera as an analogy for his ideal state.

Although Thera is only a fraction of the size of his Atlantis and lies in the Aegean Sea instead of the Atlantic Ocean, which he specified. and was destroyed 7.800 years after the destruction described in the dialogues, these apparent discrepancies are handily dismissed by the assumption that Plato simply inflated his account by a factor of 10.

He did so. it is claimed. deliberately -  to make for a grander tale. his figures were mistranslated from the original Egyptian.

Both Atlanteans and Minoans. it is argued. built great palaces and powerful cities. operated thalassocracies (seaborne empires). practiced a pillar cult. traded in precious metals. and had elephants roaming about. This interpretation is not without supporting details. Eumelos. cited by Plato in the Critias as the first Atlantean king after Atlas. is echoed in the Minoan island of Melos and. in fact. is mentioned on an inscription of archaic Greek at Thera itself bearing his name.

The Minoan theorists go on to argue against the Atlantic Ocean as the correct site for Plato's island because only in the Aegean Sea have relatively small tracts of land ever suddenly disappeared beneath the surface, such as the city of Helice, in the Gulf of Corinth.

The Azores, too, are ruled out as a possible location; supposedly no islands in the area are known to have sunk over the past 72,000 years. The numerous early-flood legends, particularly the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, are cited as literary evidence for Thera's destruction.

Even the concentric arrangement of the Atlantean capital, as described by Plato, may to this day be seen in the waters of Santorini Bay.

It is true that, like Atlantis, Thera was a volcanic island and part of an advanced thalassocracy, which vanished after its chief mountain exploded and sank into the sea. But move beyond this general comparison and the Minoan Hypothesis begins to unravel. Thera was a minor colony of Minoan civilization, a small outpost, not its capital, as the dialogues have Atlantis.

Mycenaean influences from the Greek mainland did supplant Minoan culture on Crete, but the transition appears to have been largely, if not entirely, nonviolent, certainly nothing resembling the scope of Plato's Atlanto-Athenian war that raged across the Mediterranean World.

The Minoans never made a move to occupy Italy or Libya, nor did they threaten to invade Egypt, as the Atlanteans were supposed to have done. From everything scholars have been able to learn about them, the Minoans were an extremely unwarlike people more interested in commercial than military conquests, while the Atlanteans are portrayed as aggressively bellicose.

As Kenneth Caroli, a leading writer on the subject, concludes,

"Thera's candidacy as Atlantis rests largely on its cataclysmic destruction alone, while Plato's story had far more to do with a war between two antagonistic peoples than with the disaster that later overwhelmed them both."

A CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY
The Minoans operated a dynamic navy to combat piracy and keep open the sea routes of international trade, but their Cretan cities were not ringed by high walls or battlements of any kind; compare Knossos or Phaistos with the armed towers and defense-in-depth of the walls surrounding Atlantis.

Moreover, these leading cities of Minoan Crete were laid out in the architectural canon of the square grid, unlike the concentric circles upon which Atlantis was built.

Some theorists claimed to have actually seen such a concentric arrangement underwater, within the bay created when Thera's volcanic mountain collapsed into the sea.

But Dorothy B. Vitaliano, a prominent geologist specializing in volcanology with the U.S. Geological Survey, reports that the subsurface topography at Santorini,

"was not in existence before the Bronze Age eruption of the volcano; it has been created by subsequent activity which built up the Kameni Islands in the middle of the bay, to which a substantial amount of land was added as recently as 1926.

 

Any traces of the pre-collapse topography would long since have been buried beneath the pile of lava whose highest portions emerge to form these islands."

Clearly, a recent geological feature has been mistaken for an ancient city. Structures designed in concentric circles prevailed, not in the Mediterranean World, but in the Atlantic, such as the circular temples of the Canary Islands and Britain's Stonehenge.

Caroli points out that,

"the Atlantean capital lay on a substantial plain surrounded by high mountains on a large island."

Thera does not fit this description.
 

The Cretans and Therans did not plate floors, walls, and columns with metal, as Plato says the Atlanteans did.

Plato's description of Poseidon's temple implies a structure with metal-covered walls, decorative pinnacles, and at least two pillars that were metal-plated. All this sounds like a Bronze Age Phoenician temple.

Atlantis featured interconnecting canals and lay close to the sea; Phaistos and Knossos are inland and have no canals. Nothing of the kind existed at Knossos or any other Minoan city. Neither of these Aegean locations had a harbor, because their lightweight ships could be hauled up on the beach, unlike the oceangoing Atlantean ships, which required the deep-water ports mentioned in the Critias.

In any case, the harbor arrangement described by Plato was impossible in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, because its main channel would have been fouled by stagnation without the ebb and flow of tides that do occur "beyond the Pillars of Heracles."

This point alone is sufficient to prove that he was describing a real place in the Atlantic Ocean, not in the Aegean.

Melos, the Minoan island associated with the king Eumelos of Plato's dialogues, is so tiny that it could never have supported the capital of an allied kingdom. Actually, we learn in the Critias that Eumelos ruled over that region closest to the Pillars of Heracles called Gades, today's Cadiz, on the Atlantic coast of Spain.

That much in Plato is certain. It takes quite a stretch of the imagination, to say nothing of the facts, to relocate Eumelos in the Aegean. Although it is the only name mentioned in the dialogues that does indeed appear in the eastern Mediterranean, no other Atlantean king finds a correspondence in that part of the world.

The island of Atlantis was supposed to have been rich in precious metals; Crete and Thera have few. Then there is the self-evident fact that Crete did not sink into the sea, as Atlantis was alleged to have done. Thera's volcanic mountain did collapse beneath the Aegean, but its island survives to this day; in the Critias, both city and island were utterly destroyed.

That rituals involving bulls were practiced by both Atlantean and Minoan civilizations proves nothing, because the animal was similarly venerated in mainland Greece, Egypt, Assyria, the Hittite empire, and Iberia, as far back as Neolithic and even Paleolithic times.
 

AN OCEAN OF SUNKEN ISLANDS
Contrary to the Minoan theorists, who assert that no sizable territories have sunk into the Atlantic Ocean, as recently as 1931 the Fernando Noronha Islands were points of contention between Great Britain and Portugal, until they sank after one week of seismic activity.

Nor was Atlantis the only island-city to have gone under the Atlantic.

The Janonius Map of 1649 identified Usedom. formerly a famous mart. which was swallowed up by the waves of the sea. The same island was mentioned five centuries earlier by the Arab cartographer Edrisi.

Actually, the town in question was Vineta on the northwest corner of the island of Usedom, near Rugen Island in the North Sea. The North Frisian island of Rungholt, although not as large as Usedom, was likewise once inhabited before it sank at about the same time.
 

Of course. none of these islands may be identified with Atlantis. but each does demonstrate that an Atlantean event was by no means beyond the geologic purview of the Atlantic Ocean.
 

A LABYRINTH OF MISINFORMATION
As for the flood legend common to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Old Testament. and early myth. it cannot have resulted from the destruction of Thera. because the deluge myth prominent in Middle Eastern civilization traces back to Sumerian origins. predating the downfall of Minoan Crete by more than a thousand years.

The Greek tradition of Theras. the mythic founder of Thera. has no elements in common with Plato's story. nor does it hint of anything remotely Atlantean.

The Minoan Hypothesis was so much in vogue among archeologists during the 1970s that the famed oceanographer Jacques Cousteau spent the better part of his time. energies. and nearly two million dollars provided by the government of Monaco searching the depths around Santorini.

Lured to the Aegean by a fashionable theory designed to dismiss Plato, not explain him.

Cousteau turned up nothing resembling Atlantis.
 

A CONFUSION OF DATES
While at first glance and from a distance the Minoan Hypothesis may appear tenable, it begins to disintegrate the closer one approaches it.

Practically point for point. an Aegean Atlantis does not match Plato's straightforward account and is uniformly contradicted by the evidence of geology. history. and comparative mythology. As a last-ditch effort to save something of their excuse for a Cretan interpretation. its advocates claim that Plato merely used the general outline of events at Thera as a vague. historical framework on which to present his notion of a consummate culture in the fictionalized guise of Atlantis.
 

But here too they err because the dialogues define Atlantis as the enemy of Plato's idealized state. So often has it been repeated that he invented Atlantis to exemplify his "ideal society."

 In any case. the ideal city Plato does describe, Megaera, is square, not circular.

But only one piece of evidence is required to invalidate the Minoan Hypothesis in a single stroke. The cornerstone its supporters depended upon was the date for the collapse of Thera's volcano into the sea. because it was this disaster. they argued. that brought down Minoan civilization in 1485 B.C.E.

The attendant tsunamis that crashed along the shores of ancient Crete. and the earthquakes that toppled her cities. were compounded by Greek armies who took advantage of the natural catastrophe to wage war on the disorganized Minoans. plunging them into a dark age from which they never reemerged.

The pivotal date was arrived at by a process of ice-core drilling.

Caroli explains:

"Ice cores reveal 'acidity peaks' at the times of major eruptions. because ash falls on the ice caps and affects their chemistry.

 

Long cores by hollow pipes used as drills (some hundreds of feet in length) taken from both Greenland and Antarctica have been examined to determine the past climate of the Earth.

"By analyzing the chemistry of these cores, 'acidity peaks' can be found," he says, "many of them visible to the naked eye as dark streaks in the ice made by the ash that fell long ago.

 

Some of these cores, mainly those from Greenland, have annual layers, like tree rings, or sedimentary glacial deposits at lake bottoms. These can and have been counted back for thousands of years. The oldest of these 'long cores' was drilled in 1963 at Camp Century in north-central Greenland.

 

For years, it was the only core that went back far enough and had been studied in sufficient detail to potentially reveal the timing of Thera's eruption."

It is now understood that Thera erupted between 1623 and 1628 B.C.E., almost 150 earlier than the Minoan theorists believed.

The significance of this discrepancy renders their entire interpretation invalid, because Minoan civilization did not disappear in the wake of a natural disaster.

"By all indications," Caroli points out, "the Minoans not only survived the eruption, but reached their peak after it."

Proponents of an Aegean Atlantis call upon Egyptian history for corroboration, but here too they find contradiction to their assertion that Minoan civilization was shattered by Thera's eruption.

Pharaoh Amenhotep III dispatched an embassy to the cities of Crete and found them still occupied nearly a century after their supposed destruction. The Egyptian records were confirmed in the late 1970s when excavators around Knossos discovered evidence for the final occupation by the Minoans in 1380 B.C.E.

This was one hundred years later than even the original, incorrect date for the eruption of Thera and its assumed destruction of Aegean civilization, the alleged source for Plato's story of Atlantis.

Caroli's assessment seems conclusive:

"And so the Minoan hypothesis is left with no war, no maritime civilization destroyed by catastrophe, the wrong kind of disaster, the wrong date, and no comparable dark age as a result. What does that leave us? To my mind, not much."

20 - Atlantology - Psychotic or Inspired?

Media Stereotypes Aside. What Kind of Person Pursues Knowledge of a Forgotten Civilization?

Frank Joseph

A mainstream archeologist interviewed about Atlantis on a recent special for The Discovery Channel declared that the only people who believe in such garbage are cranks. fools. and charlatans.

His assessment is shared by conventional scientists who insist that no one of any intellectual worth would demean him- or herself by seriously considering any sunken civilization. True. virtually no university-trained researchers today are willing to risk the wrath of conservative academics not above sabotaging the careers of independent-minded colleagues.

But contrary to the establishment's defaming characterization of those interested in the historical possibility of Atlantis, the subject has for centuries attracted some of the best brains in the world, Solon, one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece, introduced social reforms and a legal code that formed the political basis of Classical civilization. He was also the first great poet of Athens.

In the late sixth century B.C.E. the great law-giver traveled to Sais, the Nile Delta capital of the twenty-sixth dynasty. where the Temple of Neith was located.
 

Here a history of Etelenty was preserved in hieroglyphs inscribed or painted on dedicated columns, which were translated for him by the high priest Sonchis.

Returning to Greece, Solon worked all the details of the account into an epic poem, Atlantikos, but was distracted by political problems from completing the project before his death in 560 B.C.E.

About 150 years later. the unfinished manuscript was given to Plato. who formed two dialogues, the Timaeus and the Critias, from it.

As one of the very greatest historical figures in Classical Greek history. Solon's early connection with the story of Atlantis lends it formidable credibility. But neither he nor Plato was the only towering figure of Classical antiquity to embrace the reality of Atlantis. Statius Sebosus was a Greek geographer and contemporary of Plato mentioned by the Roman scientist Pliny the Elder for his detailed description of Atlantis.

All the works of Statius Sebosus were lost with the fall of Classical civilization. Dionysus of Miletus. also known as Skytobrachion. for his prosthetic leather arm. wrote A Voyage to Atlantis around 550 B.C.E.. predating not only Plato. but also Solon.

A copy of Dionysus's manuscript was found among the personal papers of the historical writer Pierre Benoit. Tragically. it was lost between the restorers and borrowers who made use of this valuable piece of source material after Benoit's death.

Another Greek historian. Dionysus of Mitylene (430 to 367 B.C.E.). relying on pre-Classical sources. reported that "from its deep-rooted base, the Phlegyan isle which stern Poseidon shook and plunged beneath the waves with its impious inhabitants."
 

The volcanic island of Atlantis is suggested in the fiery (Phlegyan) isle destroyed by the sea god.

Tragically. this is all that survives from a lengthy discussion of Atlantis in the lost Argonautica. mentioned four hundred years later by the Greek geographer Diodorus Siculus as one of his major sources for information about the ancient history of North Africa. Interestingly. Dionysus was a contemporary of Plato.

A utopian novel written by Francis Bacon in 1629, The New Atlantis, was the first written discussion of Atlantis since the fall of Classical civilization and probably sparked Athanasius Kircher's interest in the subject; he published his own scientific study of Atlantis in The Subterranean World thirty-six years later. Although a work of fiction.

The New Atlantis came about through excited discussions in contemporary scholarly circles of reports from travelers to America. They said that the indigenous peoples had oral accounts of a land comprising numerous points in common with Plato's sunken civilization; they even called it Aztlan. which paralleled a native version of the Greek Atlantis.

The New Atlantis actually incorporates some Atlanto-American myths Bacon heard repeated in London.

A German polymath of the seventeenth century, the Jesuit priest, Athanasius Kircher was a pioneering mathematician, physicist, chemist, linguist, and archeologist. He was the first to study phosphorescence and he was the inventor of numerous futuristic innovations including the slide projector and a prototype of the microscope. The founding father of scientific Egyptology, he led the first serious investigation of temple hieroglyphs.

Kircher was also the first scholar to seriously investigate the Atlantis legend. Initially skeptical. he cautiously began reconsidering its credibility while assembling mythic traditions about a great flood from numerous cultures in various parts of the world.

"I confess for a long time I had regarded all this," he said of various European traditions of Atlantis, "as pure fables, to the day when, better instructed in Oriental languages. I judged that all these legends must be, after all, only the development of a great truth."

His research led him to the immense collection of source materials at the Vatican Library, where, as Europe's foremost scholar, he had at his disposal all its formidable resources.

It was here that he discovered a single piece of evidence that proved to him that the legend was actually fact.

Among the relatively few surviving documents from Imperial Rome, Kircher found a well-preserved, treated-leather map purporting to show the configuration and location of Atlantis. The map was not Roman, but had been brought in the first century C.E. to Italy from Egypt, where it had been executed. It survived the demise of Classical times and found its way into the Vatican Library. Kircher copied it precisely (adding only a visual reference to the New World) and published it in The Subterranean World.

His caption describes it as a map of the island of Atlantis, originally made in Egypt after Plato's description, which suggests it was created sometime following the fourth century C.E., perhaps by a Greek mapmaker attached to the Ptolemys.

More probably, the map's first home was the Great Library of Alexandria, from which numerous books and references to Atlantis were lost, along with another million-plus volumes, when the institution was burned by religious fanatics.

By relocating to Rome, the map escaped that destruction.

Similar to modern conclusions forced by current understanding of geology in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, Kircher's map depicts Atlantis not as a continent but as a large island about the size of Spain and France combined. It shows a tall, centrally located volcano, most likely meant to represent Mount Atlas, together with six major rivers, something Plato does not mention (the Critias speaks of large rivers on the island of Atlantis, but we are not told how many).

Although the map vanished after Kircher's death in 1680, it was the only known representation of Atlantis to have survived the Ancient World. Thanks to his research and book, it survives today in what is considered to be a close copy of the original.

Kircher was the first to publish such a map, probably the most accurate of its kind to date.

Curiously, it is depicted upside down, contrary to maps in both his day and ours. Yet this apparent anomaly is proof of the map's authenticity, because Egyptian mapmakers, even as late as Ptolemaic times, designed their maps with the Upper Nile Valley (located in the south; "Upper" refers to its higher elevation) at the top, because the river's headwaters are located in the Sudan.

Olof Rudbeck (1630-1702) was Sweden's premiere scientific genius: professor of medicine (Uppsala), discoverer of the lymph glands, inventor of the anatomical theater dome, leading pioneer of modern botany, designer of the first university gardens; initiator of Latin as the lingua franca of the scientific world community; historian of early Sweden.

A brilliant scholar fluent in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, Rudbeck possessed a grasp of Classical literature that was nothing less than encyclopedic.

Combining his vast knowledge of the ancient world with personal archeological research in his own country, he concluded during a long, intense period of investigation (1651 to 1698) that Atlantis was fact, not fiction, and the greatest civilization in prehistory.

He believed that Norse myths and some physical evidence among his country's megalithic ruins showed how a relatively few Atlantean survivors may have had an impact on Sweden, contributing to its cultural development, and laid the foundation (particularly in ship construction) for what would much later be remembered as the Viking Age (the ninth to twelfth centuries C.E.).

Critics have since misrepresented Rudbeck's work by claiming he identified Sweden with Atlantis itself, but he never made such an assertion. In their sloppy research they have confused him with another eighteenth-century scholar, the French astronomer Jean Bailey, who concluded (before being executed during the French Revolution) that Spitzbergen, in the Arctic Ocean, was all that remained of Atlantis.

Born in Kraljevic, Austria, on February 27, 1861, Rudolf Steiner was a university-trained scientist, artist, and editor who founded a Gnostic movement based on comprehension of the spiritual world through pure thought and the highest faculties of mental knowledge.

This was the guiding principle of anthroposophy, knowledge produced by the higher self in man, as he defined it, a spiritual perception independent of the senses. Such instinctual awareness of the divine energies that interpenetrate the entire universe is not new; on the contrary, it was exercised by our ancestors during the deep past, when they more freely and fully participated in the spiritual processes of life.

A gradual attraction to vulgar materialism through development of the high cultures in the ancient world increasingly diminished their innate sensitivities, which eventually atrophied but did not die out.

To awaken these faculties dormant in all men and women required, Steiner believed, training their consciousness to look beyond mere matter. These concepts were developed in his 1904 book, Cosmic Memory: Prehistory of Earth and Man.

He maintained that before Atlantis gradually sank, in 7227 B.C.E., its earliest inhabitants formed one of mankind's root races, a people who did not require speech but instead communicated telepathically in images, not words, as part of their immediate experience with God.
 

According to Steiner, the story of Atlantis was dramatically revealed in Germanic myth, wherein fiery Musplheim corresponded to the southern, volcanic area of the Atlantic land, while frosty Niflheim was located in the north.

Steiner wrote that the Atlanteans developed the first concept of good versus evil and laid the groundwork for all ethical and legal systems. Their leaders were spiritual initiates able to manipulate the forces of nature through control of the life force and development of etheric technology.

Seven epochs comprise the "post-Atlantis period," of which ours, the Euro-American epoch, will end in C.E. 3573.

Cosmic Memory goes on to describe the earlier and contemporary Pacific civilization of Lemuria, with stress on the highly evolved clairvoyant powers of its people. Steiner defined Atlantis as the turning point in an ongoing struggle between the human search for community and our experience of individuality.

The former, with its growing emphasis on materialism, dragged down the spiritual needs of the latter, culminating eventually in the Atlantean cataclysm. In this interpretation of the past, Steiner opposed Marxism.

To him, spirit, not economics, drives history. Steiner's views of Atlantis and Lemuria are important if only because of the educational Waldorf movement he founded, which still operates about one hundred schools attended by tens of thousands of students in Europe and the United States.

He died on March 30, 1925, in Dornach, Switzerland, where he had founded his school of spiritual science twelve years earlier.

James Lewis Thomas Chalmers Spence, born on November 25. 1874. in Forfarshire. Scotland. was a prominent mythologist who inherited Ignatius Donnelly's position as the world's leading Atlantologist of the early twentieth century.

An alumnus of Edinburgh University. Spence was made a fellow of the Royal Anthropology Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. and elected vice president of the Scottish Anthropology and Folklore Society.

Awarded a Royal Pension for services to culture, he published more than forty books.

Many of them, such as the Dictionary of Non-Classical Mythology coauthored with Marian Edwards, are still in print and widely regarded as the best source materials of their kind.
 

His interpretation of the Maya's Popol Vuh (Book of Consul) won international acclaim, but he is best remembered for,

• The Problem of Atlantis (1924)

• Atlantis in America (1925)

• The History of Atlantis (1926)

• Will Europe Follow Atlantis? (1942)

• The Occult Sciences in Atlantis (1943)

During the early 1930s, he edited a prestigious journal, The Atlantis Quarterly.

The Problem of Lemuria (1932) is still probably the best book on its subject.

Lewis Spence died on March 3. 1955. and was succeeded by the British scholar Edgerton Sykes. Trained as an engineer. Sykes was a foreign correspondent for the British press. invaluable because of his quadrilingual fluency.

During his long life in the diplomatic service and as a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, he published an estimated three million words in numerous books and magazine articles, many of them devoted to a rational understanding of the Atlantis controversy.

Sykes's erudite journals and encyclopedias of comparative myth went a long way in sustaining and expanding interest in Atlantis throughout the mid-twentieth century.

He died in 1983. just before his ninetieth birthday. but a legacy in the form of his large library of Atlantis-related material is preserved in its own room at Edgar Cayce's Association for Research and Enlightenment in Virginia Beach. Virginia.

Contrary to mean-spirited characterizations by conservative archeologists, it says something for the credibility of Atlantis that many of the greatest thinkers in the history of Western civilization have been among its most prominent advocates.
 

21 - Atlantis in Antarctica

Forget about the North Atlantic and the Aegean, Says Author Rand Flem-Ath

J. Douglas Kenyon

In the not-too-distant future, Atlantis-seeking archeologists may have to trade in their sun hats and scuba gear for snow goggles and parkas.

If a rapidly growing body of opinion proves correct, instead of the bottom of the ocean, the next great arena of exploration for the fabled lost continent could be the frozen wastelands at the bottom of the earth. And before scoffing too vigorously, proponents of probable locations for Atlantis - such as the North Atlantic Ocean and the Aegean Sea, as well as other candidates  - would be well advised to give the new arguments for Atlantis in Antarctica a fair hearing.

Already enlisted in the ranks of those who take the notion very seriously are such luminaries as John Anthony West and Graham Hancock.

Founded on a scientific theory developed by the late Dr. Charles Hapgood in close interaction with no less a personage than Albert Einstein, the idea appears robust enough to withstand the most virulent attacks expected from the guardians of scientific orthodoxy.

At any rate, it will not take a wholesale melting of the ice cap to settle the question. A few properly directed satellite pictures and the appropriate seismic surveys could quickly determine whether or not an advanced civilization has ever flourished on the lands beneath the ice.

Leading the charge of those betting that such evidence will soon be forthcoming are Canadian researchers Rand and Rose Flem-Ath, the authors of When the Sky Fell: In Search of Atlantis, a book that contains the couple's painstaking synthesis of Hapgood's theory of Earth's crust displacement and their own groundbreaking discoveries. The result has already won many converts.

Graham Hancock believes the Flem-Aths have provided the first truly satisfactory answer to the question of precisely what happened to Plato's giant lost continent. Since devoting a chapter in his best-selling Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization to the work of the Flem-Aths, Hancock continues to discuss in media appearances the importance of their Antarctic theories.

Flem-Ath himself talked about his ideas on the February 1996 NBC Special "The Mysterious Origins of Man."

To get to the bottom of all the excitement, if not the planet, Atlantis Rising interviewed Rand Flem-Ath at his home on Vancouver Island in British Columbia.

The author has not forgotten how his own interest in Atlantis began. In the summer of 1966, while waiting for an interview for a librarian's position in Victoria, British Columbia, he was working on a screenplay involving marooned aliens hibernating in ice on Earth for 10,000 years.

Suddenly, on the radio, came pop singer Donovan's hit "Hail Atlantis."

"Hey, that's a good idea," Flem-Ath thought.

"I wanted ice, so I thought, 'Now where can I have ice and an island continent?' and I thought of Antarctica."

Later, researching the idea, he read everything he could find on Atlantis, including Plato's famous account in the Timaeus and the Critias, where Egyptian priests described Atlantis - its features, location, history and demise - to the Greek lawgiver Solon. At first the story didn't work for Flem-Ath, but that

changed when he made a startling discovery - unmistakable similarities between two obscure but remarkable maps.

A 1665 map by the Jesuit scholar Athenasius Kircher, copied from much older sources. seemed to have placed Atlantis in the North Atlantic but. strangely. had put north at the bottom of the page. apparently forcing study upside down.

The 1513 Piri Ri'is map, also copied from much more ancient sources. demonstrated that an ice age civilization had sufficient geographic knowledge to accurately map Antarctica's coast as it existed beneath an ice cap many millennia old (as pointed out by Charles Hapgood in Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age).

What seemed obvious to Flem-Ath was that both maps depicted the same landmass.
 

Suddenly Antarctic Atlantis "stopped being a science-fiction story," Flem-Ath says.

The revelation had dawned that it might be "something that could have been real." Further study of Plato yielded even more clues.

"I noticed that the description is from Atlantis." he recalls.

Soon, armed with a U.S. Navy map of the world as seen from the South Pole, he discovered a new way of understanding Plato's story and a new way of looking at Kircher's map.

Viewed from this southern perspective. all of the world's oceans appear as parts of one great ocean. or as what is described in Plato as "the real ocean." and the lands beyond as a "whole opposite continent." Sitting in the middle of that great ocean. at the very navel of the world. is Antarctica.

Suddenly, it was possible to understand Kircher's map as drawn, with north at the top, Africa and Madagascar to the left, and the tip of South America on the right.
 

The term "Atlantic Ocean," Flem-Ath soon realized, had meant something quite different in Plato's time. To the ancients, it included all of the world's oceans.

The idea becomes clearer when one remembers from Greek mythology that Atlas (a name closely related to Atlantis and Atlantic) held the entire world on his shoulders.
 

The "whole opposite continent," which surrounded the "real ocean" in Plato's account, consisted of South America, North America, Africa, Europe, and Asia, all fused together in the Atlantean worldview as though they were one continuous landmass.

And, in fact, these five continents were at that time (9600 B.C.E.) one landmass in the geographic sense.

Flem-Ath would render Plato's account to read:

"Long ago the World Ocean was navigated beyond the Straits of Gibraltar by sailors from an island larger than North Africa and the Middle East combined.

 

After leaving Antarctica you would encounter the Antarctic archipelago (islands currently under ice) and from them you would reach the World Continent which encircles the World Ocean.

 

The Mediterranean Sea is very small compared to the World Ocean and could even be called a bay. But beyond the Mediterranean Sea is a World Ocean which is encircled by one continuous landmass."

A common mistake in most readings of Plato, Flem-Ath believes, is the inappropriate attempt to interpret the ancient account in the light of modern concepts.

Another example is the familiar reference to the Pillars of Hercules. beyond which Atlantis was said to reside. Though it is true that the term sometimes referred to the Straits of Gibralter, an equally valid interpretation is that it meant "the limits of the known world."

For Flem-Ath. the world as seen from Antarctica matched perfectly the ancient Egyptians' account of the world as seen from Atlantis. The ancient geography was, in fact, far more advanced than our own. which made sense if Atlantis was, as Plato argued, an advanced civilization.

Platonic theories notwithstanding. the most difficult challenge - explaining how Atlantis might have become Antarctica - remained. How could land currently covered with thousands of feet of ice have once supported any kind of human habitation. much less a great civilization on the scale described by Plato? For the Flem-Aths. the answer, it turned out, had already been worked out - thoroughly, convincingly, and published in the Yale Scientific Journal in the mid-1950s.

In his theory of Earth crust displacement. Professor Charles Hapgood had - citing vast climatalogical. paleontological. and anthropological evidence - argued that the entire outer shell of the earth periodically shifts over its inner layers. bringing about major climatic changes. The climatic zones (polar. temperate. and tropical) remain the same because the Sun still shines from the same angle in the sky. but as the outer shell shifts. it moves through those zones.

From the perspective of earth's population. it seems as though the sky is falling. In reality. the Earth's crust is shifting to another location.

Some lands move toward the tropics. Others shift. with the same movement. toward the poles; yet others escape great changes in latitude. The consequences of such movements are. of course. catastrophes. as throughout the world massive earthquakes shake the land and enormous tidal waves batter the continental shelves. As old ice caps forsake the polar zones. they melt. raising sea levels higher and higher.

Everywhere. and by whatever means possible. people seek higher ground to avoid an ocean in upheaval.

 

The Flem-Aths corresponded with Hapgood from 1977 until his death in the early eighties, and though he differed with them about the location of Atlantis (his candidate was the Rocks of Saint Peter and Saint Paul), he praised their scientific efforts to buttress his theory.

In the summer of 1995, Flem-Ath was allowed to read Hapgood's voluminous, 170-page correspondence with Albert Einstein, wherein he discovered a much more direct collaboration between the two men than had been previously supposed.

Upon first hearing of the research (in correspondence from Hapgood).

Einstein responded:

"very impressive... have the impression that your hypothesis is correct."

Subsequently, Einstein raised numerous questions that Hapgood answered with such thoroughness that Einstein was eventually persuaded to write a glowing foreword for Hapgood's book Earth's Shifting Crust: A Key to Some Basic Problems of Earth Science.

Earth crust displacement is not mutually exclusive with the now widely accepted theory of continental drift.

According to Flem-Ath,

"they share one assumption. that the outer crust is mobile in relation to the interior. but in plate tectonics the movement is extremely slow."

Earth crust displacement suggests that over long periods of time, approximately 41.000 years. certain forces build toward a breaking point.

Among the factors at work: a massive buildup of ice at the poles. which distorts the weight of the crust; the tilt of the earth's axis. which changes by more than three degrees every 41.000 years (not to be confused with the wobble that causes the precession of the equinoxes); and the proximity of the earth to the Sun. which also varies over thousands of years.

"One of the common mistakes," says Flem-Ath, "is to think of the continents and the oceans as being separate, but really the fact that there's water on certain parts of the plates is irrelevant.

 

What we have in plate tectonics are a series of plates that are moving very gradually in relationship to each other.

 

But what we have in Earth crust displacement is that all of the plates are considered as one single unit, as part of the outer shell of the earth, which changes place relative to the interior of the earth."

The theory. says Flem-Ath. offers elegant explanations for such phenomena as the rapid extinction of the mammoths in Siberia. the near universal presence of cataclysmic myths among primitive peoples. and many geographic and geological anomalies left unexplained by any other theory.

Most of the evidence usually cited to support the idea of an ice age serves the theory of Earth crust displacement even better. Under the latter. some parts of the planet are always in an ice age; others are not. As lands change latitude. they move either into or out of an ice age.

The same change that put western Antarctica in the ice box also quick-froze Siberia but thawed out much of North America.
 

Although many establishment geologists insist that the Antarctic ice cap is much older that the 11,600 years indicated by Plato, Flem-Ath points out that the core sampling on which most of the dating is based is taken from Greater Antarctica, which was indeed under ice, even during the time of Atlantis.

The suggestion here is that a movement of about 30 degrees or about two thousand miles occurred within a relatively short span of time.

Before such a movement, the Palmer peninsula of Lesser Antarctica (the part closest to South America and whose sovereignty is presently disputed by Chile, Argentina, and Great Britain) would have projected an area the size of western Europe beyond the Antarctic circle into temperate latitudes reaching as far as Mediterranean-like climes.

In the meantime, Greater Antarctica would have remained under ice in the Antarctic circle.

"An area such as that described by Plato," says Flem-Ath, "would be the size of Pennsylvania, with a city comparable to modern-day London" - not a bad target for satellite photography.

Concentric circles or other large geometric features should be easily discernible through the ice.

Flem-Ath believes that in most areas, Plato should be taken at his word, though he does suspect that there may have been some fabrications in the story.

The war between the Atlanteans and the Greeks, for example, he believes may have been cooked up to please the local audience. In regard to the scale of Atlantean achievement, however, he takes Plato quite seriously and is very impressed.

"The engineering feats described," says Flem-Ath, "would have required incredible skill, more so than even what we have today."

As for the notion that Plato's numbers should be scaled down by a factor of ten - a frequent argument used to support claims that Atlantis was really the Minoan civilization in the Aegean - he doesn't buy it.

"A factor of ten error might be understandable when you are using Arabic numbers, with a difference between one hundred and one thousand of one decimal place, but in Egyptian numbering the difference between the two numbers is unmistakable."

For him the argument is similar to the one for a North Atlantic location, in which a modern concept has been inappropriately superimposed upon an ancient one.

So far Flem-Ath's ideas have been largely ignored by the scientific establishment, but he believes that at least Hapgood's arguments may be getting close to some kind of acceptance.

"Quite often new ideas take about fifty years to be absorbed," he says, "and we're getting close to the time."

If, in fact, satellite photography and seismic surveys produce the indications that Flem-Ath expects, what next?

"The ice in the region that we are talking about is relatively shallow," he says, "less than half a kilometer, and once we've pinpointed the area, it should be relatively easy to sink a shaft and find something."

That "something" could be among the finest and most dramatic artifacts ever discovered - quick-frozen and stored undisturbed for almost 12,000 years. Is this a prospect hot enough to melt the hearts of even the most hardened skeptics?

We shall see.

22 - Blueprint from Atlantis

Doments of Ancient Monuments Have Something to Tell Us about the History of Earth's Shifting Crust?
Rand Flem-Ath
 

In November 1993 I received a fax from John Anthony West that started me on a four-year quest.

The article that slipped through the fax machine that day had been written by an Egyptian-born construction engineer by the name of Robert Bauval. Little did I suspect that Bauval would soon become known for his revolutionary theory that the pyramids of Egypt were a mirror image of the constellation of Orion. Bauval discusses this in his book. coauthored by Adrian Gilbert, The Orion Mystery: Unlocking the Secrets of the Pyramids.

However. in the article I read that day. Robert Bauval had taken his idea even further. He revealed that not only the pyramids but also that most famous of all sculptures. the Sphinx. were oriented to the constellation of Orion as it appeared in 10.500 B.C.E.

This he discusses in another book. cowritten with Graham Hancock, entitled The Message of the Sphinx: A Quest for the Hidden Legacy of Mankind.

John followed up his fax with a telephone call; this was to be one of our earliest conversations. He had read the original manuscript of our book When the Sky Fell: In Search of Atlantis and had volunteered to write an afterword.

Our theory that Antarctica could hold the remains of Atlantis was framed by the concept of a geological phenomenon known as Earth crust displacement. about which I had spent years corresponding with Charles Hapgood.

I had concluded. based on extensive research into the origins of agriculture and the late Pleistocene extinctions. that 9600 B.C.E. was the most probable date of the last displacement.

After discussing details about the afterword for When the Sky Fell, John. in his usual direct manner. asked me:

"If Bauval is right that the Sphinx points to a date of 10.500 B.C.E.. how do you reconcile that date with your time period of 9600 B.C.E.. for the last displacement of the earth's crust?"

John had put his finger on a very important point.

If the Sphinx had been built before the crustal displacement. as Bauval's data indicated. then the monument's orientation would have been changed as the earth's crust shifted. resulting in a misalignment.

But the fact remains that the Sphinx and. indeed. the whole Giza complex are precisely aligned with the earth's cardinal points.

"Either Bauval's calculations of the astroarcheology are incorrect or your date of 9600 B.C.E. is wrong." John said. "How sure are you of that date? Could you be wrong by nine hundred years?"

"John." I replied. "a host of archeological and geological radiocarbon dates indicate unequivocally that the last catastrophe occurred in 9600 B.C.E. I'm sticking with that. Perhaps the ancient Egyptians were memorializing an earlier date that was tremendously significant to them. not necessarily the date that the Sphinx was carved."

In October 1996. Robert Bauval and I continued the friendly debate at a conference in Boulder, Colorado.

I was convinced that the Sphinx was constructed immediately after 9600 B.C.E. and I explained why. Imagine. I began. that an asteroid or giant comet hit the United States today. utterly destroying the continent and throwing the whole culture back to the most primitive of living conditions.

Then imagine that a team of scientists, perhaps safely under the ocean in a submarine, survived the cataclysm and decided to commemorate their nation and leave a message for the future by constructing a monument aligned to the heavens.

What date would they choose to mark the memory of the United States of America? Would it be 1996, the year that their world ended? I don't think so. I believe that they would orient their monument to 1776: the date that the nation was born. And in the same way, I think that although the Sphinx was created around 9600 B.C.E., it is oriented to 10,500 B.C.E. because that date was significant to their culture.

Now, it happens that inconsistencies and puzzles in science are like oxygen to my blood! My entire philosophy of science is predicated on the motto that anomalies are gateways to discovery. I usually conduct my research in a methodical and painstaking (some might say obsessive) manner.

However, over the past twenty years of investigating the problem of Atlantis and the earth's shifting crust, I have discovered again and again that chance plays a critical role in discovery.

Between writing novels, my wife, Rose, works part time at the local university library, and her serendipitous approach to research ideally balances my own meticulous methods. I can't begin to count the number of times that she has brought home a book that turned out to be exactly what I needed. So when she presented me with Archaeoastronomy in Pre-Columbian America, I eagerly flipped it open.

Written in 1975 by Dr. Anthony F. Aveni, one of the leading astroarcheologists in the world, the book dropped right into my lap a critical piece of the puzzle that I was trying to solve. It appears that almost all of the major megalithic monuments of Mesoamerica are oriented east of true north. Aveni wrote that the people of Mesoamerica did tend to lay out many of their cities oriented slightly east of true north. Fifty of the fifty-six sites examined east of north.

However, I found Aveni's explanation for this alignment wanting. He believes that the Street of the Dead, the famous avenue at Teotihuacan (near Mexico City), is the key to the whole mystery of why the monuments are strangely misaligned. This street, which runs directly toward the Pyramid of the Moon, is misaligned fifteen and a half degrees east of north.

Because it points within one degree to the Pleiades constellation (a set of stars important to Mesoamerican mythology), Aveni views this skewed alignment as a kind of template, a master plan, for the rest of the megaliths throughout Mesoamerica. While this is true for Teotihuacan's Street of the Dead, it is not true for the other sites that Aveni lists in his book.

His argument that the other forty-nine sites are merely inadequate copies of the holy alignment of Teotihuacan rang hollow.

I had a different idea, a theory based on the science of geodesy, which is the study of the measurement of the shape and the size of the earth. In addition to astronomical observatories, what if these Mesoamerican sites were part of a vast geographical survey? My study of ancient maps had convinced me that the Atlanteans had mapped the world.

What if the orientations of the most ancient cities of Mexico were remnants of a lost science, the science of geography? What if the alignment of the ancient cities was a stone stencil, a precise blueprint of a prediluvian Earth?

Teotihuacan lies upon the longitude of 98:53 west. If we subtract the 15:28 degrees that it is misaligned, we get a location of 83:25 west, less than half a degree off Charles Hapgood's location of the North Pole prior to 9600 B.C.E.

In other words, the Street of the Dead was fifteen and a half degrees west of the longitude that Hapgood had calibrated for the old pole.

When I made this discovery. I was naturally very excited. Could it be that the ancient monuments of Mexico were orientated to the pole before the last Earth crust displacement? The implications were profound. Such an orientation would point to the existence of a civilization that must have held scientific knowledge of the earth's geography. They also must have possessed sophisticated surveying methods that they put to use in America before the earth's crust shifted.

I soon discovered that several important Mesoamerican sites (Tula. Tenayucan. Copan. and Xochicalco. for instance) matched my geodetic theory. Each of their misalignments. when subtracted from their current longitude. yielded the longitude of the North Pole before the last Earth crust displacement (83 degree west). What if. I wondered. there were other sites in the Old World that were orientated to the old pole?

I began to research sites in Iraq. cradle of the most ancient civilizations. Unlike in Mesoamerica. these sites had not been studied in relation to their misalignment to the earth's cardinal points. I had to piece together the evidence from site to site. from author to author. But the tedious task was worth the startling result obtained. I soon discovered that many of the oldest sites in the Middle East are west of today's North Pole. Like the ancient sites of Mesoamerica. they were oriented to the old pole.

In the ancient city of Ur. its ziggurat (a stepped pyramid symbolizing a sacred mountain) and its shrine to the Moon god. Nanna. are oriented west of north (toward the old pole in the Hudson Bay).

Without control of the holy city of Nippur. no ruler could rightfully claim to be the king of Sumeria. The remains of the city lie south of Baghdad. where some of the most famous tablets in archeology were unearthed at the turn of the twentieth century.

The tablets disclosed the Sumerian belief in the existence of a long-lost island paradise called Dilmun. The myth of Dilmun. which we show in When the Sky Fell, is remarkably similar to the mythology of the Haida people of British Columbia. and relates how the island paradise was destroyed by the god Enlil in a Great Flood.

Enlil's incredible power is honored at Nippur with a temple and a ziggurat that is skewed west of north. The ziggurat and White Temple of the Sumerian city of Uruk also point to Hudson Bay rather than true north.

The more I looked. the more ancient sites I found in the Middle East that pointed to the North Pole before the last Earth crust displacement. Perhaps the most poignant is Jerusalem's Wailing Wall. the only remains of Herod's Temple. built upon the site of Solomon's Temple.

I now knew that I was looking at a unique geodesic phenomenon that demanded exploration. My next step was to calculate the former latitudes of the key megalithic and sacred sites of the world. If the latitudes were located at significant numbers. I could be sure that I was really on to something.

The first site I measured was. of course. the eternally compelling Great Pyramid at Giza. I calculated its coordinates against 60 degrees N 83 degrees W (Hudson Bay pole). Giza had been 4.524 nautical miles from the Hudson Bay pole, which meant its latitude was at 15 degrees north prior to 9600 B.C.E.

I found it odd that Giza, which today lies at 30 degrees north (one third of the distance from the equator to the pole), should have been so neatly at 15 degrees north (one sixth the distance) before the last Earth crust displacement.

So I decided to study Lhasa. the religious center of Tibet, because I knew that this city, like Giza, lies at 30 degrees north today.

Lhasa's coordinates are 29:41N 91:10E, which calculated at 5,427 nautical miles from the Hudson Bay pole.

The distance from the equator to the pole is 5,400 nautical miles (90 degrees times 60 seconds = 5,400), so Lhasa had rested just twenty-seven nautical miles (less than half a degree) off the equator during the reign of Atlantis.

This was getting spooky. The Earth crust displacement had shoved Giza from 15 degrees to 30 degrees while moving Lhasa from 0 degree to 30 degrees. Was this coincidence?

The coincidence started to become extreme when I compared the location of Giza and Lhasa (and a host of other ancient sites) with the position of the crust over three Earth crust displacements. I was amazed to discover that latitudes like 0 degree, 12 degrees, 15 degrees, 30 degrees, and 45 degrees came up again and again. Each of these numbers divides the earth's geography by whole numbers.

This seemed way beyond chance, so I christened them "sacred latitudes." Most of these sites will be familiar to anyone who takes an interest in archeology or the sacred sites of the world's major religions. All of these places are within thirty nautical miles (a day's walk) from sacred latitudes, and are thus more accurately aligned geodesically than Aveni's astronomical calculations.

The careful reader will note that several of these sites show up in more than one table. They are actually situated at the crossing points of two (even three) sacred latitudes. For example, Giza lies at the intersection of 15 degrees (Hudson Bay pole) and 45 degrees north (Greenland Sea pole) and today is at 30 degrees north.

Lhasa, which today is near 30 degrees north, was at the equator during the Hudson Bay pole and only thirty-two nautical miles from 30 degrees north during the Greenland Sea pole.

So what was going here?

I believe that sometime before the devastating Earth crust displacement, scientists in Atlantis recognized that the increasing earthquakes and rising ocean level that they were experiencing were a warning of a coming geological catastrophe. Trying to preserve their civilization from this unavoidable disaster, they became obsessed with discovering exactly what had overtaken the globe in the remote past.

Teams of geologists fanned across the planet with a mission to gauge the former positions of the earth's crust. If they could determine exactly how far the crust had shifted in the past, they might have some idea of what they could expect to face in the future. In the process of their investigations, they left geodesic markers at the points they considered critical to their calculations.

After the earth crust displacement that destroyed Atlantis, the old calibrations were rediscovered by survivors who knew nothing of that forgotten and desperate geographic survey.

They naturally believed that these marvelous geodesic markers, from those who had gone before, were messages from the gods. The sites became sacred and cities were built around them (it's no accident that Teotihuacan is an Aztec term meaning "Place of the Gods"), and their very practical purpose was lost.

Further generations continued to worship at these huge shrines, but eventually the winds of time began to erode the original structures. New altars were built on top of the remnants of the artifacts left by the surveyors from Atlantis. But during each reconstruction, whispers from the past compelled the new architects to preserve the original orientations that pointed to the Hudson Bay pole at the time when Atlantis thrived.

The secrets buried beneath the slowly crumbling cities remained hidden for thousands of years. Eventually, some intrepid souls in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, and America had the courage to begin excavations.

The story of the remarkable discoveries uncovered by those who dared to dig under holy sites is only now emerging. The secret mission of the Knights Templar in Jerusalem and the sophisticated devices that Moses took from Egypt are but two of these fascinating accounts.

I believe we can explain the enigmatic location of the ancient megaliths in a way that finally makes sense of their puzzling misalignments. These sacred sites, which we sense contain clues to our true history, continue to draw visitors who marvel over their awesome construction feats and wonder at the intelligence and vision of our anonymous ancestors.

But my explanation covers only the tip of a very deep iceberg. There are many more sites that can be discovered using simple calculations derived from latitude changes after crustal displacements, not the least of which are sites on Atlantis itself, the island continent of Antarctica.

I never thought to find another adventure to compare with my eighteen-year search for Atlantis. But the unique placement of the earth's most sacred sites has emerged as a mystery that compels me with the same kind of fascination as that journey did.
 

23 - Japan's Underwater Ruins

Have Remains of Ancient Lemuria Been Found?

Frank Joseph

In March 1995, a sport diver unintentionally strayed beyond the standard safety perimeter near the south shore of Okinawa.

A battleground for the last land campaign of World War II, the island was about to become the scene of another kind of drama. As the diver glided through unvisited depths some forty feet beneath the clear blue Pacific, he was suddenly confronted by what appeared to be a great stone building heavily encrusted with coral.

Approaching it, he could see that the colossal structure was black and gaunt, a sunken arrangement of monolithic blocks, their original configuration obscured by the organic accretion of time. After encircling the anonymous monument several times and taking several photographs of it, he rose to the surface, reoriented himself, and kicked for shore.

The next day, photographs of his find appeared in Japan's largest newspapers.
 

The structure sparked instant controversy and attracted crowds of diving archeologists, newsmedia people, and curious nonprofessionals, none of whom was able to ascertain its identity.

They could not even agree on whether or not it was man-made, let alone ancient or modern. Was it the remnant of some forgotten military coastal defense from the war? Or could it possibly date back to something entirely different and profoundly older?

Already there were whispers of the lost culture of Mu, preserved in legend as "the Motherland of Civilization," which perished in the sea long before the beginning of recorded time.

But Okinawa's drowned enigma was hermetically locked within too thick an encrustation. The structure looked anciently man-made.

Nature, however, sometimes made her own forms appear artificial. The popular and scientific debate concerning its origins went back and forth. Then. in late summer of the following year. another diver in Okinawan. waters was shocked to see a massive arch. or gateway. of huge stone blocks. beautifully fitted together in the manner of prehistoric masonry found among the Incan cities on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. in the Andes Mountains of South America.

This time there was no doubt. Thanks to swift currents in the area. coral had been unable to gain any foothold on the structure. leaving it unobscured in the hundred-foot visibility of the crystal-clear waters. It was certainly man-made and very old.

It seemed nothing short of miraculous, an unbelievable vision standing in apparently unruined condition on the ocean floor.

But its discovery was only the first of that summer's undersea revelations. Fired by the possibility of more sunken structures in the area. teams of expert divers fanned out from the south coast of Okinawa using standard grid-search patterns. Their professional efforts were soon rewarded. Before the onset of autumn. they found five subsurface archeological sites near three offshore islands.

The locations varied from depths of one hundred to twenty feet. but are all stylistically linked. despite the great variety of their architectural details. They comprise paved streets and crossroads, huge altarlike formations, grand staircases leading to broad plazas, and processional ways surmounted by pairs of towering features resembling pylons.

The sunken buildings apparently cover the ocean bottom (although not continuously) from the small island of Yonaguni in the southwest to Okinawa and its neighboring islands - Kerama and Aguni - 311 miles away.

If ongoing exploration reveals more structures linking Yonaguni with Okinawa. the individual sites may be separate components of a huge city lying at the bottom of the Pacific.

The single largest structure so far discovered lies near the eastern shore of Yonaguni at one hundred feet down. It is approximately 240 feet long. 90 feet across. and 45 feet high. All the monuments appear to have been built from granitic sandstone. although no internal passages or chambers have been found. To a degree. the underwater structures resemble ancient buildings on Okinawa itself. such as Nakagusuku Castle.

More of a ceremonial edifice than a military installation, Nakagusuku dates back to the early centuries of the first millennium B.C.E., although its identity as a religious habitation site is older still. Its builders and the culture it originally expressed are unknown. although the precinct is still regarded with superstitious awe by local Okinawans.

Other parallels with Okinawa's oldest sacred buildings are found near Noro. where burial vaults designed in the same rectilinear style are still venerated as repositories for the islanders' ancestral dead.

Very remarkably. the Okinawan term for these vaults is moai. the same word Polynesians of Easter Island. more than six thousand miles away. used to describe the famous large-headed. long-eared statues dedicated to their ancestors!

Possible connections far across the Pacific may be more than philological. Some of the sunken features bear even closer comparison to the heiau found in the distant Hawaiian Islands. Heiau are linear temples of long stone ramparts leading to great staircases surmounted by broad plazas. where wooden shrines and carved idols were placed. Many heiau still exist and continue to be venerated by native Hawaiians.

In terms of construction, the Okinawan examples comprise enormous single blocks; the heiau are made up many more. smaller stones.

They were first built. according to Hawaiian tradition. by the Menehune. a red-haired race of master masons who occupied the islands long before the arrival of the Polynesians. The original inhabitants left. unwilling to intermarry with the newcomers.

Okinawa's drowned structures find possible counterparts at the eastern limits of the Pacific Ocean. along Peruvian coasts. The most striking similarities occur at ancient Pachacamac, a sprawling religious city a few miles south of the modern capital of Lima.

Although functioning into Incan times (as late as the sixteenth century). it predated the Incas by at least 1.500 years and was the seat of South America's foremost oracle. Pilgrims visited Pachacamac from all over the Tiawantisuyu (the Incan empire) until it was sacked and desecrated by the Spaniards under Francisco Pizarro's high-spirited brother. Hernando. with twenty-two heavily armed conquistadors.

Enough of the sun-dried. mud-brick city remains. with its sweeping staircases and broad plazas. to suggest parallels with the sunken buildings around Okinawa.

Two other pre-Incan sites in the north. just outside Trujillo. likewise have some leading elements in common with the overseas. undersea structures. The so-called Temple of the Sun is a terraced pyramid built two thousand years ago by a people known as the Moche. More than 100 feet high and 684 feet long. the irregularly stepped platform of unfired adobe bricks was formerly the colossal centerpiece of a city sheltering 30.000 inhabitants. Its resemblance to the structure found at Yonaguni is remarkable.

On the other side of the Pacific, the first emperor of Japan was remembered as Jimmu. whose immediate descendant was Kamu. among the "legendary" founders of Japanese society. Another ancestral emperor was Temmu. who was said to have committed to memory the Kojiki ("Records of Ancient Matters") and the Nihongi ("Chronicles of Japan").

In northern Japan runs a river deemed sacred because it carried the first semi-divine beings into the country; it is called the Mu River. In Japanese. the word mu means "that which does not exist or no longer exists." just as it does in Korean. Does it harken back to a land that "no longer exists"?

In ancient Rome, the Lemuria was a ritual conducted by the head of each household to appease the spirits of the deceased who returned annually. Lemuria was also the Roman name for a huge island kingdom that the Romans believed once lay in "the Far Eastern Sea." sometimes imagined to have been the Indian Ocean. It vanished to become "the abode of troubled souls."

The Lemurian ceremony was instituted by Romulus in expiation for the murder of Remus. Here, too, we encounter Mu in relation to the founding of a civilization. as the brothers were accepted as the progenitors of Rome.

In Latin, their names are pronounced with the accent on the second syllable:

RoMUlus and ReMUS.

In the early nineteenth century, when English biologists were in the process of mammal classification. they applied the ancient term lemur to describe primitive tree primates first found in

Madagascar, because the creatures possessed large, glaring eyes, just like the ghostly lemures described in Roman myth. When lemurs were discovered outside Africa, in such widely separated locations as southern India and Malaya, scientists theorized that a continent in the Indian Ocean may have connected all these lands before it sank beneath the waves.

Oceanographers have since established that no such continent ever existed.

But collectors of oral traditions throughout the island peoples of the Pacific were perplexed by recurring themes of a vanished motherland from which ancestral culture bearers arrived to replant society's seeds. On Kaua'i, the Hawaiians told of the Mu (also known as the Menehune mentioned earlier) who arrived in the dim past from a "floating island."

The most important ancestral chant known to the Hawaiians was the "Kumulipo," which recounts a terrific flood that destroyed the world long ago.

Its concluding lines evoke some natural catastrophe in the deep past:

"Born the roaring, advancing and receding of waves, the rumbling sound, the earthquake. The sea rages, rises over the beach, rises to the inhabited places, rises gradually up over the land. Ended is the line of the first chief of the dim past dwelling in cold uplands. Dead is the current sweeping in from the navel of the Earth. That was a warrior wave. Many who came vanished, lost in the passing night."

The survivor who escaped the "warrior wave" was Kuamu.

Despite an abundance of folk traditions spanning the Pacific, all describing a sunken homeland, the first accurate, sonar-generated maps of the ocean bottom revealed nothing resembling a lost continent. But archeological enigmas supporting the myths still exist at such remote locations as tiny Malden Island, where a road of paved stones leads directly into and under the sea. The uninhabited island is also home to forty platform pyramids.

A provocative architectural theme, linking South America to Japan through Polynesia and suggesting a lost intermediary culture, is the sacred gate. The aesthetic focus of Tiahuanaco, a great ceremonial city high in Bolivia's Andes near Lake Titicaca, is two ritual gates.

One is above the sunken court at the entrance and dramatically frames the twelve-foot-tall statue of a god or man; the other, at the far end of the complex, is the famous Gateway of the Sun, oriented to various solar phenomena.

Out across the Pacific in the Polynesian island of Tonga stands the Haamonga-a-Maui, "the Burden of Maui," a fifteen-foot-high stone gate weighing 109 tons and aligned with sunrise of the summer solstice. Japan is covered by many thousands of such gates, most of them wooden but all used to define a sacred space.

Known as torii, the same word appears in ancient Indo-European languages and survives in the German word for gate: "Tor." An outstanding feature of the sunken structures in the vicinity of Okinawa is an unconnected gate of massive stonework.

The Romans, who celebrated a Lemuria festival every May, ornamented their empire with free-standing ceremonial gates.

These intriguing parallels, combined with a wealth of archeological evidence and descriptive native traditions, convinced investigators that some powerful, centrally located "X-culture" indeed existed in the Pacific, from which civilizing influences spread in both directions.

Their conclusion seemed borne out with recent discoveries among the Ryukyu Islands, where architectural features of the sunken structures bear tell-tale affinities to pre-Incan structures in Peru and ancestral burial vaults on Okinawa. But the sunken buildings provoke more questions than they answer.

How old are they? Why are they under water? Who built them? For what purposes?

The evidence that has been collected thus far suggests that the site did not succumb to a sudden geologic catastrophe. Aside from one or two monuments leaning at irregular angles. none of them displays any structural damage. no cracks or fallen stones. Instead they appear in unruined. virtually pristine condition. They were either overwhelmed by rising sea levels or sank with a slowly collapsing landmass. or some combination of both.

Most researchers opt for the last scenario. as oceanographers tell us that sea levels rose from one hundred feet 1.7 million years ago. Even so. the Japanese sites must be very old. They are constantly being swept clean by strong currents. so radiocarbon-dating material is not available.

The purposes for which they were made appear less difficult to understand. because their strongest resemblance to Hawaiian heiau implies that they were mostly ceremonial in nature. Their expansive staircases lead up to presently barren platforms. where wooden shrines and carved idols were probably set up for religious dramas.

Just who their worshippers and builders were suggests a word most professional American archeologists are unable to pronounce.

But in view of the numerous accounts from hundreds of cultures around the Pacific of a flood that destroyed some former civilization, if Okinawa's sunken city is not the lost Lemuria, then what is it?
 

24 - West, Schoch, and Hancock Dive into Lemurian Waters

J. Douglas Kenyon
The issue of underwater ruins in the Pacific remains controversial, even within the alternative science community.

 

Atlantis Rising has not taken a stance one way or the other on the issue, desiring instead to present both sides of the argument in a fair and even-handed manner.

 

I will say, however, that those individuals who believe that these underwater ruins are man-made are supported by the argument presented by Frank Joseph in the foregoing chapter, while those who question this supposition may find themselves agreeing with the positions of Robert M. Schoch, Ph.D., et al., in the following essay.
 - EDITOR
 

In September 1997, the maverick Egyptologist John Anthony West, accompanied by the geologist Robert M. Schoch, Ph.D., and the writer Graham Hancock, visited the island of Yonaguni in Japan, where a mysterious 160-foot pyramidal platform had been found under the waters of the ocean at a depth of eighty feet. In several dives, the three investigated part of what could be one of the most significant discoveries of the century.

Subsequent to the trip, West shared with Atlantis Rising his opinion regarding the site's archeological authenticity.
 

He and Schoch, it was pointed out, had made the trip predisposed to believe that here could be the great breakthrough most of us have been waiting for - the discovery of undeniable proof of the existence of prediluvian civilization (the area has been under water for at least 11,500 years).

The photos they had been shown certainly appeared unambiguous.

And, after all, it was their research that had, a few years earlier, shaken the academic establishment by demonstrating that it was water and not windblown sand that had weathered the Great Sphinx of Egypt, thus establishing that it was thousands of years older than previously supposed.

After examining the Yonaguni site, however, both West and Schoch are of the opinion that it is probably natural in origin, though perhaps worked over by human hands in some way - maybe to create a terra-form. Nevertheless, the two continue to believe that even if the Yunaguni site is of strictly natural origin, the spot remains one of the most - if not the most - unusual to be found anywhere.

The one thing that West, Schoch, and Hancock agree on unanimously is the need for much more research and a complete examination of the site, as they all feel it is far too early to draw any final conclusions.
 

In response to West's comments, Atlantis Rising contributor Frank Joseph pointed out that West, Schoch, and Hancock visited only one of eight locations that are spread over a 311-mile area. and added that the onus is now on Schoch to demonstrate just how geomorphologic forces could have created the formations, which, if indeed natural, are unique in the world.

After attending a conference of avant-garde researchers held in England by Quest Magazine (also attended by West). Joseph reports that while there is still much controversy and complexity surrounding the issue. the consensus at the conference. he felt. was that the formations were of man-made origin.

Joseph also added that laboratory analysis by Japanese researchers of some of the stone from the site is consistent with artificial tooling.
 

25 - India 30,000 B.C.E.

Do the Roots of Indian Culture Lie Drowned beneath the Indian Ocean?

David Lewis

The world is full of mysteries. And given its mystical traditions. no place in the world remains more mysterious than India. a country and culture said to be rooted in primordial timelessness.

Westerners have frequently tried to fathom the mysteries of Mother India.

Western scholars, relative newcomers on the world stage, have consistently tried to date Indian civilization according to Western time lines, assuming an intellectual superiority that routinely dismisses the accumulated wisdom of millennia. including cultural traditions that speak of humanity's origin, lost continents, and advanced prehistoric civilizations.
 

But that wasn't always the case. In the mid- to late nineteenth century, when scientific ideas about human origins had only begun to take shape in Europe. many early geologists and archeologists accepted the idea of the biblical flood and lost continents for which they found much hard evidence, even a landmass in the Indian Ocean - the great Southern Continent of the British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace.

Today, mainstream science still theorizes that landmasses such as Gondwanaland and Pangaea must have existed, although they are relegated to extremely ancient epochs: 180 to 200 million years ago.
 

MOTHER OF ALL MOTHERLANDS
Lemuria, the term for a lost continent in the Pacific or Indian Ocean. came to life in the 1860s when geologists found a striking similarity between fossils and sedimentary strata in India, South Africa, Australia, and South America.

These geologists surmised that a great continent or at least a land bridge or series of islands must have existed in the Indian Ocean. and this landmass was named Lemuria by the English biologist Philip L. Scalter after the lemurs of Madagascar.
 

Madame Helene Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, wrote extensively in the late nineteenth century of Lemuria and, in the 1920s, Colonel James Churchward claimed to have discovered certain ancient tablets in India describing long-lost Mu (Lemuria), a golden civilization said to have existed in the Pacific.

Churchward devoted his life and study to bringing the lost Lemurian culture to life in a series of books.

Continental drift theory, which proposes the extremely slow drifting of continents, and then the concept of plate tectonics, did away with Lemuria in the minds of many, while satisfying one of the essential tenets of modern scientific thinking about origins.

This essential tenet is called uniformitarianism, which holds that all natural developments on Earth come about extremely slowly, incrementally, and in a more or less uniform fashion.

Great floods, global cataclysms, and the submergence of continents in recent prehistory smack of the biblical, and so the anti-biblical Darwinists of bygone days imposed the doctrine of uniformitarianism upon the early geologists and archeologists. The idea that grand-scale cataclysms had anything to do with prehistory, once considered heretical, only recently came into fashion on the heels of evidence that a large-impact asteroid struck the Yucatan area, causing the extinction of the dinosaurs many millions of years ago.

But consider the ancient south Asian traditions that mimic the findings of early geologists, those that say an inhabited continent once existed in what is now the Indian Ocean. This is a belief that thrives, to this day, among peoples of southern India, in Sri Lanka, and in the islands of the Andaman Sea off Malaysia.

One tradition emerges from the writings of ancient Ceylon that refers to a lost civilization in the area now occupied by the Indian Ocean and a landmass that connected the Indian subcontinent with the island of Sri Lanka - the kind of tradition dismissed as fable by the modern-day intelligentsia.

"In a former age," an ancient Ceylonese text states, "the citadel of Rawana (Lord of Lanka), 25 palaces and 400,000 streets were swallowed by the sea."

The submerged landmass, according to one ancient account, rested between Tuticorin on the southwest Indian coast and Manaar in Ceylon, not a landmass of the size once envisioned by the early geologists. but - if it actually existed - a submerged portion of the Indian subcontinent just the same.

Another cultural tradition. cited in Allan and Delair's Cataclysm! Compelling Evidence of a Cosmic Catastrophe in 9500 B.C.E., that of the Selungs of the Mergui archipelago off southern Burma. also speaks of a sunken landmass:

"Formerly [the] country was of continental dimensions. but the daughter of an evil spirit threw many rocks into the sea... the waters rose and swallowed up the land . . . . Everything alive perished. except what was able to save itself on one island that remained above the waters."

One of the Tamil epics of southern India. the Silappadhikaram, frequently mentions a vast tract of land called Kumari Nadu. otherwise known as Kumari Kandam (and later identified as Lemuria by European scholars). stretching far beyond India's present-day coasts into the Indian Ocean.

Ancient south Indian commentators wrote in detail of a prehistoric Tamil Sangham. a spiritual academy. situated in that ancient land. They also wrote of the submersion of two rivers. the Kumari and the Pahroli. in the middle of the continent. and of a country dotted with mountains. animals. and vegetation.

The Silappadhikaram tells of a country with forty-nine provinces. and mountain ranges that yielded precious gems (Sri Lanka and other parts of India are sources of precious gems to this day).

This Pandyan kingdom. according to tradition. reigned from 30.000 B.C.E. to 16.500 B.C.E. At least one lineage of modern-day south Indian mystics claims direct descent from those extraordinarily ancient times. when their spiritual progenitors achieved extremely long lives through yogic mastery. walking as virtual gods. This was a phenomenon said to have been duplicated successively to the present. carried on in remote regions of the Himalayas.

In addition. India's epic poem the Mahabarata, dated by some nonanglicized Indian scholars to the fifth millennium before Christ. contains references that place its hero. Rama. gazing from India's present-day west coast into a vast landmass now occupied by the Indian Ocean.

These Indian epics also allude to advanced technology in the form of vimana, aircraft that were used to transport the society's elite and to wage war.

Less celebrated ancient Indian writings describe these aircraft in detail and at great length. puzzling both scholars and historians. What's more. the great Indian epics vividly describe militaristic devastation that can be equated only to nuclear war.

The Sanskrit scholar and the renowned physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. father of the hydrogen bomb. apparently interpreted the ancient epic as having described a prehistoric nuclear conflagration.

After the first atomic test in Alamagordo, New Mexico, Oppenheimer chillingly quoted the Mahabharata, saying.

"I have become death, the destroyer of worlds."

In a later interview. when asked if the Alamagordo test was the first time an atomic bomb had been detonated. Oppenheimer replied that it was the first time in modern history.

Oppenheimer notwithstanding, are tales of flying machines. lost continents. and prehistoric nuclear war merely mythical or do these ancient references provide us with a historical record. long forgotten and then dismissed by modern science. with its modern prejudices. as fantasy?
 

THE KNOWLEDGE FILTER
To begin to answer that question. we must first look at the history of scholarship as it pertains to India.

Since the nineteenth century. Western scholars have routinely dismissed the historical significance of the cultural traditions of ancient peoples. those of southern Asia included. With a decidedly ethnocentric bias - the intellectual stepchild of Western colonialism - the experts reinterpreted Eastern history. casting whole systems of ancient philosophy and science. in the experts' minds. into the historical dustbin.

This historical dustbin is the repository of all things conflicting with European models. such as biblical Christianity and scientific materialism. Here we find the very inception of the "knowledge filter." now well known to students of alternative archeology. geology. and other disciplines involved with the search for lost origins.

India. with her treatment by the West and her acquiescence to that treatment. typifies the way in which Western intellectualism conquered the world.

Call it the "West is best" model: a strict adherence to European doctrines that deny traditions and attempt to offer decidedly more ancient theories regarding the origins of civilization than those of the Western scholars.

On top of this, add a scientific materialism that denies all nonmaterial theories regarding the origins of man, life, and reality.
 

Having found. for example, that root words of India's ancient Sanskrit turned up almost universally in the world's major languages.

Western scholars devised an ethnocentric scheme to explain the phenomenon - one that India's first prime minister. Jawaharlal Nehru. and many other modern Indian intellectuals came to accept. A previous European people must have once existed. the scholars told us. an Indo-European race upon which the world. and India. drew for its linguistic roots and genetic stock.

The scholars also expropriated the now mythic Aryans of ancient India to flesh out this scenario. This mythic race. we were told. derived from Europe and then invaded the Indus Valley. in the north of India - making Sanskrit and Vedic culture a product. rather than a progenitor. of Western civilization -  and rather young at that.

But the Aryan invasion theory has since fallen into disrepute. after being downgraded to a migration theory. James Schaffer. of Case Western University. a noted archeologist specializing in ancient India. had this to say on the matter:

"The archeological record and ancient oral and literate traditions of south Asia are now converging."

Schaffer recently wrote.

"A few scholars have proposed that there is nothing in the 'literature' firmly placing the Indo-Aryans outside of south Asia. and now the archeological record is confirming this... We reject most strongly the simplistic historical interpretations, which date back to the eighteenth century [the time of the British invasion of India]... These still-prevailing interpretations are significantly diminished by European ethnocentrism, colonialism, racism, and anti-Semitism."

None of this, of course, speaks well of Western scholarship.

Southern India, a land whose cultural roots are said by some to stretch into an even more profound antiquity than that of the north, suffered a similar fate. Speakers of a proto-Dravidian language, the forerunner of a family of languages spoken in the souths - and some say of Sanskrit itself - entered India from the northwest, we were told.

Both theories were necessitated by Western beliefs, at first about the supremacy of the Garden of Eden theory of origins and then, with the arrival of the Darwinists, the widely held "out-of-Africa" theory - the doctrine that man evolved from a more primitive form in southern Africa and slowly made his way across Asia, then to the New World, just 12,000 years ago.

But the Aryan invasion theory has been debunked. No skeletal evidence shows any difference between the supposed invaders and the indigenous peoples of India. And satellite imagery now shows that the ancient Harappan civilization of the Indus Valley and Mohenjo-Daro probably declined and disappeared due to climatic changes - that is, the drying up of the mythical Saraswati River - rather than the descent of imaginary Aryan hordes.

Burying the Aryan invasion theory, however, opens a Pandora's box for orthodox scholars regarding the prehistory not just of India, but of the world. If Sanskrit predates the world's other languages, along with India's genetic stock, how to explain prehistory in conventional terms?

David Hatcher Childress attributes the demise of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro to something far more controversial than climate change: a prehistoric nuclear conflagration involving aircraft and missiles (Rama's highly destructive "flaming arrows").

This is a picture that may seem bizarre on the face of it, but it is represented convincingly in the ancient writings - as Oppenheimer observed - and with some geological evidence, according to Childress.

Meanwhile, even orthodox thinking dates Indian village culture, thought to be the forerunner of Mohenjo-Daro and the Harappan civilization, to an extremely ancient age.

Excavations at Mehgarh, in modern-day Pakistan, have pushed back that date in India to 6000 B.C.E., before the so-called advent of civilization in the Middle East. Some orthodox scholars credit India not only with the first alphabet, but also as the cradle of civilization whence sprang Mesopotamia, Sumeria, and Egypt.

Linguistic evidence, moreover, offers intriguing clues: The indigenous languages of places as distant as Kamchatka and New Zealand bear a similarity to Tamil, the language of southern India.

Tamil words turn up, furthermore, in the world's great Classical languages: Sanskrit, Hebrew, and Greek.
 

But how far does the knowledge filter go? How much of the actual history of India still lies in the dustbin created by Western ethnocentrism, colonialism, and scientific materialism?

The demise of the Aryan invasion theory may represent only the tip of the iceberg of misconceptions about the age and nature of the ancient Indian subcontinent, its culture, its people, and its accomplishments. It has long been claimed that Mother India holds a history that stretches into the dim and forgotten mists of the past, to a time before all myth began, when great rishis, men of profound wisdom and phenomenal spiritual attainment, walked the earth.

This ancient India, said to be a product of the gods, dates to the times out of which grew the epic poems the Ramayana and the Mahabarata and the ancient traditions of Tamil Nadu in southern India. This ancient India was a land whose culture was said by some to predate that of the north, having once existed as part of Kumari Kandam, a great southern continent thought to have stretched from present-day Madagascar to Australia and dating to a staggering 30,000 B.C.E.

Obscure texts of the Siddhanta tradition of Tamil Nadu reportedly say that a great deluge inundated Kumari Kandam.

This is a notion that is echoed in the writings of Colonel James Churchward and of W.S. Cerve, both of whom claim knowledge of texts, Indian and Tibetan, respectively, that speak of a long-lost continent situated in the East.
 

WHERE HAVE ALL THE MAMMALS GONE?
While continental drift theory presupposes extremely slow and regular movement of landsmasses over many hundreds of millions of years, a great deal of evidence exists that Earth's surface did indeed change with extreme rapidity and violence in recent prehistory.

A great, sudden extinction took place on the planet, perhaps as recently as 11,500 years ago (usually attributed to the end of that last ice age), in which hundreds of mammal and plant species disappeared from the face of the earth, driven into deep caverns and charred muck piles the world over. Modern science, with all its powers and prejudices, has been unable to adequately explain this event.

Instead, one might reasonably say, it has tried to explain away the evidence with ever more cumbersome ice age theories meant to account for everything and anything of a cataclysmic nature that happened in recent prehistory.

Gradual glacial movements caused all the death and destruction. we are told. though such assertions do not account for much of the worldwide evidence indicating that. on review. a global cataclysm must have taken place. Indeed. scientists can't explain why massive glaciers would slide in the first place.

Allan and Delair. in Cataclysm! - a stunning and exhaustive work of scholarship - amass a formidable quantity of known evidence corroborating the flood/conflagration legends stored in the world's mythological record. If we suspend belief in the textbook accounts of recent prehistory. Allan and Delair fill the void in a most convincing way. And much evidence centers on southern Asia that would explain how a continent would have been lost to the sea in recent prehistory.

Records gathered in 1947 by the Swedish survey ship Albatross reveal a vast plateau of hardened lava for at least several hundred miles southeast of Sri Lanka.

The lava. evidence of a severe rupture in the earth's crust. fills most of the now submerged valleys that once existed there. The immense eruption that gave off the lava may have coincided with the downfall of Wallace's Southern Continent (aka Kumari Kandam) for which much zoological and botanical evidence exists that would give such a landmass a recent date. according to Allan and Delair.

Amid the troves of evidence compiled by early geologists and resurrected by Allan and Delair are Asian caves filled with the bones of numerous and diverse species of recent prehistoric animals from around the world that could have been driven to their final resting place only by vast amounts of water. propelled by some spectacular. cataclysmic force of nature.

In light of Allan and Delair's work. other geographic anomalies. such as India's Deccan trap. a vast triangular plain of lava several thousand feet thick covering 250.000 square miles. and the Indo-Gangetic trough. a gigantic crack in the earth's surface stretching from Sumatra through India to the Persian Gulf. can be interpreted as evidence of a fantastic cataclysm that sank Kumari Kandam at the time of the great extinction. And this Deccan area is geologically distinct from the Indo-Gangetic plain and the Himalayas of the north.

The rocks of the Deccan are among the oldest in the world. with no trace of ever having been under water. and frequently overlaid with sheets of trap rock or basalt that once flowed over them as molten lava.
 

DISTANT LEGACIES?
Other titillating fragments of anomalous evidence suggest a pervasive if not advanced seafaring or even airborne culture having once existed in Kumari Kandam: for example. the identical nature of the Indus Valley script to that found at Easter Island on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.

According to certain south Indian researchers. the thought-to-be-indecipherable scripts are written in a proto-Tamil language. one that would link the culture of distant Easter Island and its famous megalithic statues with ancient southern India, or Kumari Kandam - an idea echoed in the lore of Easter Islanders about a great Pacific continent from which their people originated.

And continuing eastward to North America. new dating methods have placed the Spirit Cave mummy  - the remains of a forty-year-old man discovered in 1940 in a cave east of Carson City. Nevada - in the seventh millennium B.C.E.

Although the remains have been claimed by modern American Indians, the mummy's facial features appear to be that of a Southeast Asian man. With a dispute raging over the dating of the mummified man's lifetime and the uncertainties and biases regarding the dating of artifacts and fossils in general, the Spirit Cave mummy may be the remains of an ancient inhabitant of Kumari Kandam, or perhaps at least an ancestor.

Whether or not the Spirit Cave mummy hails from Kumari Kandam. actually or genetically, a new look at old research in the field of human origins and the probability of ancient advanced civilization having once existed has begun to seriously upset the applecart of the Western scientific paradigm.

The trouble for "West-is-besters." and with them dyed-in-the-wool scientific materialists. is that most cultures of the world offer traditions and a mythological record that contradict the aggressive assumptions of Western science. its assertions about prehistory and about the nature of man.

More and more frequently. incremental revelations in a variety of fields. from archeology, to the new physics, to near-death studies, support the ancient traditions.

And even as "West-is-best" assumptions continue to proliferate in textbooks and universities around the globe, records written in the earth and in ancient texts quietly reappear like ghosts from the forgotten past.

The records of Mother India, where those ghosts are gods, are no exception.

Back to Contents