Rediscovered a speculation on the
Ignatius Donelly on Atlantis
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- Atlantis, The Antediluvian World
- Atlantis”
- Darwin’s
- Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. Part 1. Chapter 1. THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK.
- A Quick Run Through Donnelly’s Book
- Inundated or just Plain Sunk
- Churchward versus Donnelly
- Central American Evidences of Atlantean Influence
- Quetzalcoatl
Ignatius Donelly on AtlantisLet us begin then with perhaps the greatest champion of Atlantis – Ignatius Donnelly, whose great book: “Altlantis, The Antediluvian World” was first pubished in 1882 – and is STILL in print in 2001! Donnelly’s book contains a huge collection of data, legendary, geological and archaeological, which he had amassed over a long period of time to back up his beliefs. He fully supported Plato’s story with an extremely well-argued case, as would befit a long-standing, erudite senator for Minnesota, who had full access to explore all the resources of the vast Library of Congress. Which he did, and very exhaustively, too! Since Ignatius Donnelly produced a voluminous work on this topic I will try to only mention the major proposals that Donnelly has advanced in his magnificent opus: “Atlantis, The Antediluvian World”. The Reception of Donnelly’s Book As one might expect, Donnelly’s highly–controversial Atlantis work attracted both enthusiastic support and deep skepticism on both sides of the Atlantic. His skeptics strove immediately to challenge and ridicule his theory, both in its sources and its logic, and such skeptics still abound, even a full century later. However, Britain’s then Prime Minister, William Gladstone, was so completely convinced by Donnelly’s carefully-reasoned and highly-persuasive work, that he sought to gain funds from the British Government to finance an expedition to scour the depths of the Atlantic Ocean for traces of the lost continent. Sadly the skeptics also won the day in the British Parliament, and no funds were forthcoming for such a “madcap adventure”! It was Donnelly’s primary intent to prove conclusively to the full extent of his undoubted ability that Atlantis had once existed in factual reality as a large island-continent in the central Atlantic Ocean. His utter faith in the truth of Plato’s allegedly fabulous story was unshakable. To Donnelly, Atlantis was, beyond all doubt, the very birthplace of western civilization. He believed that its rulers and heroes were directly identifiable with the great deities of the Greeks, Scandinavians, Phoenicians and Hindus. The great mythical activities of these various pantheons of gods were simply jumbled records of actual historical events and deeds of the Atlanteans! Donnelly viewed Atlantis as the essential aggregation in human memory of a real place which was the foundation of all the great legends, such as the Gardens of Eden, and of the Hesperides, Mount Olympus, and all other such mythical places that were fabled dwelling-places of peace, harmony and happiness. Its people were sun-worshipers and they spread their religious beliefs wherever their vast merchant fleet conducted its trade. From such far-flung places as Peru in the west, including all of the Americas, South, Central and North, across to Northern Europe and Scandinavia. From Britain, Spain, and coastal lands around the continent of Africa, including Ethiopia and Arabia via the Red Sea and perhaps as far east as western India. His powerful imagination led him to deduce that the Atlanteans were the first to produce bronze and iron, and that their alphabet was the precursor of both the Phoenician alphabet and the Mayan glyphs. In fact, in Donnelly’s view, Atlantis was very likely the original homeland of both the Aryan Indo-Europeans and the Semitic peoples, including the Egyptians, Assyrians and Arabs! It was also his opinion that after the ultimate destruction of Atlantis, the survivors of its submergence fled both to the east and the west, bearing tales of the cataclysm, and that these accounts became legends of universal deluges and massive inundations among many different nations. Because Plato was held, in the ninteenth century, to be a trusted scholar and philosopher, Donnelly had the greatest faith in his integrity, and believed completely that his account of Atlantis was founded upon fact. Plato had described Atlantean history as that of a pragmatic race who built great temples, huge earthworks and ships, as well as many other marvellous machines. They were a race of human beings that traded with their friends and warred with their enemies. Plato spoke very little of gods and heroes in his account, so it was no doubt this realistic attitude which convinced Donnelly that Plato was far above inventing fiction On taking my first cursory glance through Ignatius Donnelly’s “Atlantis” book, I was forcibly reminded of the rather later series of books on “The Lost continent of Mu”, published by Colonel James Churchward in the Mid-1920s to late 1930s. I noted the same unswerving scholarly dedication to what must then have been a greatly scorned and ridiculed area of research. What the Scientific Establishment of that day would have mockingly dismissed as “Fictitious Nonsense” or “Heathen Gibberish”. Even though they themselves were the ones who had gladly welcomed Darwin’s “Origin of Species and Descent of Man” with open arms and minds as if it were a miraculously truthful Godsend! (Sadly, many otherwise seemingly learned and wise scientists still do!) However, to return to Donnelly’s excellently-researched opus. It has more than just a ring of truth about it – although some sections are possibly a little outdated now – and I, for one, am convinced that he was on the right track. In Chapter One, Donnelly sets out the purpose of his book, and the reader will doubtlessly bear with me if I quote verbatim some of his propositions and comments inscribed in this opening chapter from Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. Part 1. Chapter 1. THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK. This book is an attempt to demonstrate several distinct and novel propsitions. These are: 1. That there once existed in the Atlantic Ocean, opposite the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea, a large island which was the remnant of an Atlantic continent, and known to the ancient world as Atlantis. 2. That the description of this island given by Plato is not, as has long been supposed, fable, but veritable history. 3. That Atlantis was the region where man first rose from a state of barbarism to civilization. 4. That it became, in the course of ages, a populous and mighty nation, from whose overflowings the shores of the gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River, the Amazon, the Pacific coast of South America, the Mediterranean, the west coast of Europe and Africa, the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Caspian were populated by civilized nations. 5. That it was the true Antediluvian world; the Garden of Eden: the Gardens of the Heperides; the Elysian Fields; the Gardens of Alcinous; the Mesomphalos: the Olympos: the Asgard of the traditions of the ancient nations; representing a universal memory of a great land, where mankind dwelt for ages in peace and happiness. 6. That the gods and goddesses of the ancient Greeks, the Hindoos, and the Scandinavians were simply the kings, queens, and heroes of Atlantis; and that the acts attributed to them in mythology are a confused recollection of real historic events. 7. That the mythology of Egypt and Peru represented the original religion of Atlantis, which was sun-worship. 8. That the oldest colony formed by the Atlanteans was probably in Egypt, whose civilization was a reproduction of that of the Atlantic island.
There was a time when the expedition sent out by Pharaoh Necho to circumnavigate Africa was doubted, because the explorers stated that after they had progressed a certain distance the sun was north of them; this circumstance, which aroused suspicion, now proves to us that the Egyptian navigators had really passed the equator, and anticipated by 2100 years Vasquez de Gama in his discovery of the Cape of Good Hope. If I succeed in demonstrating the truth of the somewhat startling propositions with which I commenced this chapter, it will only be by bringing to bear upon the question of Atlantis a thousand converging lines of light from a multitude of researches made by scholars in different fields of modern thought. Further invest-igations and discoveries will, I trust, confirm the correctness of the conclusions at which I have arrived.” Let us now proceed to follow Donnelly’s thinking, even if only in basic outline form for the sake of brevity, as he develops his propositions and theories further…. A Quick Run Through Donnelly’s Book In the interests of time and space within this document, and with the expectation that the reader will take the time to read through “Atlantis:The Antediluvian World”, I have decided to first hurry through the first part of the book with some speed, selecting any key elements which I feel need to be updated, in order to relate better with current 21st century knowledge and thought on Atlantis and its catastrophe. Then I shall return to consider the ancient MesoAmerican ramifications of Donnelly’s conclusions regarding the influence of Atlantis upon its neighbouring lands. After a reiteration of Plato’s history of Atlantis, via an imagined dialogue between Critias and Socrates, Donnelly discusses the probability of Plato’s story being true. Like myself, he concludes that it must have been a historically correct account, for the same reasons. He next goes on to ask if such a catastrophe was possible, and if so how did it happen? He then goes into various disatrous volcanic explosions which all destroyed islands around the world. Unfortunately Donnelly’s book was already published just one year before one of the greatest such disasters in history. This was the explosion of the volcanic island of Krakatoa, in Indonesia, between Java and Sumatra, which took an enormous toll in human life and produced spectacular atmospheric lighting effects by its pulverised dustcloud in the upper atmosphere for many months afterwards! Donnelly then delves into the testimony of the sea – or rather the seabed - as revealed by the rough-and-ready deep-sea “weighted-line” soundings of his day. By and large, these indicated much of what has been confirmed since by more hi-tech methods, regarding a large uneven submarine plateau in the cenral region of the Atlantic, the volcanic peaks of which still protrude from the ocean to form the Azores group. However, Donnelly was born too early to know that there is a long volcanic ridge with a central rift that continually oozes magma, running the entire length of the Atlantic, from the North Pole right down toward the south polar region! From what uncertain traces of this ridge the sounding vessels were able to detect, he concludes that a long arm of Atlantis connected it to South America and on down the Atlantic, almost touching Africa at one point. He concluded that this central ridge must be the sunken backbone of the elongated Atlantean landmass. However, we now know, thanks to the newly emerged science of crustal expansion between continents, that this extended ridge is really quite unrelated to Atlantis, and that this same expansional mechanism may be steadily removing all geological traces of the continent’s subsidence Still, one has to admire Donnelly’s amazing conclusions drawn from so little real data! I will skip over his chapter on flora and fauna here, since it is not so immediately relevant to the main issue of the actual existence of Altantis. Interested readers can check this biological evidence out for themselves from his book. But his following chapters on the Deluge Legends and the Biblical Deluge are of more immediate interest, since there are many who tend to attribute the submergence of Atlantis to this cause, rather than its subsidence and sinking by tectonic action.
True, I believe it possible that there may well have been a rapid rise in world sea-level due to a sudden melting of the polar ice packs – possibly associated with a polar topple or tilt – which caused the Atlantic to overflow the Atlas mountain-chain and fill up the Mediterranean basin – and subsequently the Black Sea, via the Bosporus. Thanks to modern marine technology and bathymetric advances, this has been conclusively proven to be true. But I remain convinced that the sinking of Atlantis was due solely to a tectonic upheaval, and that the so-called “Deluge” occurred much later on in time. As I have already hinted, the filling of the Mediterranean might have been a long-term follow-up event from the same tectonic collapse that sank Atlantis, as the lower strata of the local crustal area shifted and settled even further. This flooding itself might easily have been the origin of the Old World “Deluge” legend. But it still doesn’t account for the legend of a very similar “Deluge” in the Asia-Pacific region. There is, nevertheless, traditional evidence for a “Deluge” in the Americas. Donnelly mentions such an American “Deluge” in his chapter on “The Deluges of America”: “Atlantis and the western continent had from an immemorial age held intercourse with each other: the great nations of America were simply colonies of Atlantis, sharing in its civilization, language, religion, and blood. From Mexico to the peninsula of Yucatan, from the shores of Brazil to the heights of Bolivia and Peru, from the gulf of Mexico to the headwaters of the Mississippi River, the colonies of Atlantis extended; and therefore it is not strange to find, as Alfred Maury says, American traditions of the Deluge coming nearer to that of the Bible and the Chaldean record than those of any peoples of the Old World.” Churchward versus Donnelly? As I may have already pointed out, Donnelly wrote his book some 38 years before Churchward produced his own masterly work on “The Lost Continent of Mu”, in which he demonstrated (at least to my satisfaction) how that mid-Pacific continent (or group of continents) sank after the explosion of highly-pressured natural gas-chambers deep in the underlying crust. An explosion that was due, I understand, to them being ignited by the intrusion of molten lava from surrounding magma layers. The gas could have been a mephitic by-product of local volcanic formations. Alternatively, it might have been plain methane gas, produced in the formation of hydrocarbon oil from decayed and compressed biological matter, which is obtained from such chambers via deep-drilled oil wells. These chambers, once emptied of the highly-pressurized gas, would inevitably collapse under the enormous weight of overlying rock and ocean. Thus they could cause a great and sudden subsidence of the upper crustal layers, to depths of anywhere between hundreds or even thousands of feet, depending on their original volume and height. This is my first major difference with Donnelly’s view, in which he appears to simply credit a vast volcanic explosion as the sole and complete cause of its demise. Is Civilization Inherent? Donnelly next discusses civilization and whether or not it is an inherent feature of our species. He points to the past and our supposed advances in this area then makes the profound statement that: “In six thousand years the world made no advance on the civilization which it received from Atlantis”. That’s quite a statement! He says that whilst Phoenicia, Egypt, Chaldea, India, Greece and Rome passed on the torch from one to the other, they added nothing to such arts as architecture, sculpture, painting, mining, metallurgy, navigation, ceramics and glassware, or to road, bridge or canal construction! And whilst this modern age of ours has entered an alleged “new era”, by subjugating steam, electricity, and now even atomic energy, we have still only really begun to catch up with the backlog from the Atlantean technologies list. In actual truth, we are still living in an age of barbarism, and it will still take many thousands of years for us to attain again to that once “Golden Age” of long-forgotten technology and truly civilized culture. To all evident intents and purposes, we are still only just managing to hold the status quo. Human civilization in the 21st century is merely “Marking Time”! He then goes on to point out that civilization isn’t communicable to all – many savages are incapable of it. We humans, he claims, are divided into two groups. Civilized and savage. However, I personally wonder if it’s really that clear-cut, and if even those of the races which are supposedly cultured in the arts and crafts, really only wear civilization in the form of a smooth outer “veil” over a rough hide of natural savagery. One which can be discarded at a second’s notice if the wearer is goaded sufficiently! One has only to think of the horrendous events that took place in ancient Rome, once hailed as being the heart of world civilization, and then compare that to the horrors of savagery to which the civilized nations have descended since Donnelly’s time! Two major world Wars in which unspeakable acts of debased savagery and butchery were perpetrated, not just by the Germans and Japanese and their allies, but by all the parties involved, in one manner or another. As well as the dramatic decline in Western morality and civility since then. Can we seriously delude ourselves into believing that any of our own modern nations are not suffering from the same downhill slide of morality, honour, trust, chivalry, religion, and true appreciation of real art and music that once were the hallmarks of civilization? We need only look at the soaring crime-rate, and the ever-deepening decline in moral values – Lack of religious values, pornography, blatant homosexuality, child-prostitution, paedophilia and drug-addiction. Not to mention all the evils that follow in their wake: AIDS, rape, home-invasions, cowardly attacks upon the aged and frail for drug-money, and rampant depression and suicide. No. It is all too clear that civilization isn’t an inheritance, nor is it a true reality in today’s world, either! What Does “Modern Civilization” Mean? All we mean today by “modern civilization” is simply the preparedness of a group of totally dissimilar people from many different cultures to share living-space and public amenities in common; to live cheek by jowl with people they dislike; to allow their children to be forcibly brainwashed into accepting a corrupt “ethical and legal” code and to be taught a pack of outrageous theories disguised as “fact” and “history”. And, as if this weren’t enough, to allow themselves to be governed, taxed, administered and directed by an over-large body of egocentric, power-hungry, “get-rich-quick”, ineffectual political opportunists and a veritable army of so-called “public-servants” (who mostly serve only themselves), whom the populace totally distrust, and wouldn’t allow into their homes! Moving On Donnelly then goes into a rambling diatribe about the identity of civilizations in both old and New World. However, it is essentially a sort of catalogue of the different customs, relgions and mythologies of various ancient “civilizations”, the origins of which which Donnelly attempts to relate back to Atlantis. So I will skim over this chapter, and leave the reader to delve into it at his or her leisure from Donnelly’s original text. Central American Evidences of Atlantean Influence? In Chapter III of Part III, he discusses “American Evidences of Intercourse with Europe or Atlantis”. This is getting closer to what we are seeking, as he goes into the clear evidences in Central American legends and religious beliefs, which can only be related to visits by people from the Old World. He begins by describing those MesoAmerican cultural influences which could only have come from the East - such as are today found in Europe, Africa, or the Middle East region of Asia, But what Donnelly is really saying is that the true origin of all such cultures was Atlantis - since many of the Old World nations themselves appear to have derived many aspects of their own seemingly “native”cultures from a single common source. I will not attempt to go into any detail about the many examples which Donnelly points out, but will again leave readers to discover them for themselves from his book. Most of these, however, are basically a recital from such works as the “Popol Vu” and other Olmec, Mayan or Aztec legends, regarding strangers arriving in ships from the direction of the Rising Sun. Often gray-bearded men who taught them many skills, arts and crafts, including the recording of the days, years and seasons by means of the calendar. Also it would seem that much of the MesoAmerican etymology has been strongly influenced by the common tongue of the Atlanteans. That great leader and god of the ancient Aztecs, Quetzalcoatl, (better known as the “Feathered Serpent”) is inferred by Donnelly to have been an Atlantean sage. Directory: forster forster -> Kant and skepticism forster -> Is our earth forster -> From Mu To Thule And the Inner Earth Download 297.91 Kb. Share with your friends:
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