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Edgar Cayce's Atlantis. John Van Auken
Читать онлайн.Название Edgar Cayce's Atlantis
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780876048917
Автор произведения John Van Auken
Жанр Эзотерика
Издательство Ingram
Plato’s story of Atlantis suddenly seemed to provide the solution. For example in the 1570s, the famous London-born astrologer and mathematician, Dr. John Dee, informed Queen Elizabeth I that the Americas had been Atlantis.
After Columbus’ discovery, rumors began spreading that he had taken several ancient maps with him. The maps showed large islands far into the Atlantic. The Bennicasa Map of 1482, for example, is one that many researchers believe Columbus used. This map depicts an island called Antilia to the far southwest of Gibraltar. Antilia was named by early Carthaginian explorers who claimed that it was a large island in the western Atlantic, but it has gone by several names and spelling variations. According to Andrew Collins, a 1367 chart depicted Antilia near the Azores, in the mid-Atlantic. But the island on the map is far too large to be the Azores and later maps placed Antilia much further to the southwest. Early Spanish explorers identified the West Indies as Antilia, and the similarity of the name to Atlantis has long been obvious to many people. The islands of the Caribbean, consisting of over 7,000 small and large islands including Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, and Hispaniola, comprise the West Indies. But the most convincing link between that region and Atlantis was made during the exploration and excavations of the Maya and Aztec civilizations.
Excited by tales of travel in the Yucatan that were being widely published, in the 1860s a French monk, Charles Étinne Brasseur de Bourbourg, went to Guatemala. Brasseur soon discovered the Popol Vuh, a sacred history of the Mayan people, and subsequently published the first translation of it. Brasseur also came into possession of a native document called the Troano Codex, which had been removed from Central America by Cortez. As he translated the Troano Codex, Brasseur was stunned to learn that a cataclysm had taken place in Central America in 9937 B.C. Later in Mexico City, Brasseur found another native document, the Chimalpopoca Codex, which described a series of four natural disasters that took place in the region around 10,500 B.C. From his translation of the text, Brasseur surmised that the disasters were related to a shift in the earth’s axis. Because of the similarity of these events to Plato’s story of Atlantis, Brasseur reasoned that the people of the New World were descendants of survivors of Atlantis, and the advanced cultures of the Americas were remnants of Plato’s lost Atlantis. Brasseur’s Atlantis speculations were aided by a partnership with Augustus LePlongeon, who also traveled throughout the Yucatan.
Another Frenchman, Desiré Charnay, became obsessed with excavating Mexican and Yucatan ruins after arriving there in the late 1860s. Charnay found massive basalt statues at Tula that looked almost otherworldly. Reasoning they were from Atlantis, he called the huge figures “Atlantean,” a term that is used to describe them even today. Charnay then visited Palenque where he became intrigued by the story of Votan, allegedly a bearded white man who came to the area after a disaster destroyed his island homeland to the east. Votan, it was said, began the Maya civilization. Today, most scholars believe that the legends of the Maya god Votan (also called Kukulcan), the Aztec and Toltec god Quetzalcóatal, and the Incas’ Viracocha (also called Thunupa) are all variations of the same story. These legends parallel some Native American tribal lore of their ancestors coming from the east after fleeing a disastrous flood that hit their island.
“Atlantean” figures at Tula, Mexico. Photo—Greg Little, 1979.
In Gateway to Atlantis, Collins traced the story of Votan back to Cuba, which he asserts was the main island of Atlantis. Collins also noted that Votan traveled up the Yucatan coastline and when he reached the first large river, turned inland. He then established a major city, which has long been thought to be Palenque. In a 2004 interview on the video documentary The Yucatan Hall of Records, Collins said he now believes that the river Votan traveled was the Usumacinta and that the present day Mayan ruins at Piedras Negras, Guatemala, may well mark the place where his city was established. As stated in Chapter 1, Piedras Negras is believed to be the site where one of the Atlantean Halls of Records was hidden.
Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis
In his two books, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882) and Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883), Ignatius Donnelly forever linked the Mid-Atlantic and the Americas to Atlantis. Donnelly was educated as a lawyer and, from 1863-1869 served in the U.S. House of Representatives for Minnesota. When he lost the 1870 reelection, he became a newspaper editor and was later elected to the state legislature. Between 1878 and 1880, Donnelly completed the Atlantis manuscript, working from notes and information he gathered from the Library of Congress. It was an immediate best-seller and became the definitive book on the subject.
Donnelly’s book was widely praised and even skeptical archaeologists admit that his research was scholarly despite containing what they consider to be fundamental errors. The highly skeptical archaeologist Stephen Williams wrote in his 1991 textbook, Fantastic Archaeology, that he “cannot help but feel a special kinship with this remarkable man.” Explaining the popularity of Donnelly’s book, Williams wrote, “First, it is a well-written and convincing tale explaining the past in forthright manner and with just enough specific evidence to make it very plausible. Second, the author quickly, and without boring the reader, establishes that he has done his homework … It is all pretty convincing.”
Donnelly carefully presented myths and legends from Native American tribes, pottery and artifacts found in the Americas, the advanced civilizations in Central and South America, the sudden rise of the Egyptian civilization—all as evidence of the destruction of an advanced civilization lying between the Americas and the “Old World.” Donnelly came to believe that the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a long, massive underwater mountain range running nearly the entire length of the Atlantic, had once been Atlantis and that the Azores were the highest mountain peaks of the massive island. His second book, Ragnarok, was less popular, but it detailed what Donnelly felt was substantial geological evidence showing that the Mid-Atlantic Ridge had been above the sea level in ancient times.
Theosophical Speculations on Atlantis
As Edgar Evans Cayce (Edgar Cayce’s youngest son) and his coauthors related in Mysteries of Atlantis Revisited (1988), the Atlantis speculations of Donnelly and the early explorers of the New World were based on first-hand observations, scholarship, and science. Beginning in the 1800s, however, a completely unique set of Atlantis ideas emerged from a tradition of obtaining occult—or hidden—knowledge through clairvoyance. The most influential of these came from a system of philosophy and teachings known as theosophy.
The word theosophy is derived from a combination of two Greek words, theos (god) and sophia (wisdom). The roots of the organization stretch back to a secret society begun in the 1400s and later formally established in London in 1510. The American Theosophical Society officially began in 1875 after Helena Petrovna Blavatsky met Henry Steele Olcott in America. The spiritualist movement was then at its height, and attempts to contact the dead and higher powers through séances were commonplace. The tenets of theosophy are beyond the scope of this book, but they contain some parallels to—and substantial differences from—the ideas expressed in the Cayce readings.
Theosophy and Blavatsky’s Atlantis
Madame Blavatsky, as she is typically called, was born in Russia in 1831. Her family was related to Russian royalty and at age 17 she married a government official who was