The Antediluvian World

I >> Ignatius Donnelly >> The Antediluvian World

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"But what happened at Pointe Mulatre enables us to spot the locale of
the eruption. Pointe Mulatre lies at the foot of the range of mountains
on the top of which the Boiling Lake frets and seethes. The only outlet
of the lake is a cascade which falls into one of the branches of the
Pointe Mulatre River, the color and temperature of which, at one time
and another, shows the existence or otherwise of volcanic activity in
the lake-country. We may observe, en passant, that the fall of the water
from the lake is similar in appearance to the falls on the sides of
Roairama, in the interior of British Guiana; there, is no continuous
stream, but the water overleaps its basin like a kettle boiling over,
and comes down in detached cascades from the top. May there not be a
boiling lake on the unapproachable summit of Roairama? The phenomena
noted at Pointe Mulatre on Sunday were similar to what we witnessed in
Roseau, but with every feature more strongly marked. The fall of mud was
heavier, covering all the fields; the atmospheric disturbance was
greater, and the change in the appearance of the running water about the
place more surprising. The Pointe Mulatre River suddenly began to run
volcanic mud and water; then the mud predominated, and almost buried the
stream under its weight, and the odor of sulphur in the air became
positively oppressive. Soon the fish in the water--brochet, camoo, meye,
crocro, mullet, down to the eel, the crawfish, the loche, the tetar, and
the dormer--died, and were thrown on the banks. The mud carried down by
the river has formed a bank at the month which nearly dams up the
stream, and threatens to throw it back over the low-lying lands of the
Pointe Mulatre estate. The reports from the Laudat section of the
Boiling Lake district are curious. The Bachelor and Admiral rivers, and
the numerous mineral springs which arise in that part of the island, are
all running a thick white flood, like cream milk. The face of the entire
country, from the Admiral River to the Solfatera Plain, has undergone
some portentous change, which the frightened peasants who bring the news
to Roseau seem unable clearly and connectedly to describe, and the
volcanic activity still continues."

From this account it appears that the rain of water and mud came from a
boiling lake on the mountains; it must have risen to a great height,
"like a water-spout," and then fallen in showers over the face of the
country. We are reminded, in this Boiling Lake of Dominica, of the Welsh
legend of the eruption of the Llyn-llion, "the Lake of Waves," which
"inundated the whole country." On the top of a mountain in the county of
Kerry, Ireland, called Mangerton, there is a deep lake known as
Poulle-i-feron, which signifies Hell-hole; it frequently overflows, and
rolls down the mountain in frightful torrents. On Slieve-donart, in the
territory of Mourne, in the county of Down, Ireland, a lake occupies the
mountain-top, and its overflowings help to form rivers.

If we suppose the destruction of Atlantis to have been, in like manner,
accompanied by a tremendous outpour of water from one or more of its
volcanoes, thrown to a great height, and deluging the land, we can
understand the description in the Chaldean legend of "the terrible
water-spout," which even "the gods grew afraid of," and which "rose to
the sky," and which seems to have been one of the chief causes, together
with the earthquake, of the destruction of the country. And in this view
we are confirmed by the Aramaean legend of the Deluge, probably derived
at an earlier age from the Chaldean tradition. In it we are told, "All
on a sudden enormous volumes of water issued from the earth, and rains
of extraordinary abundance began to fall; the rivers left their beds,
and the ocean overflowed its banks." The disturbance in Dominica
duplicates this description exactly: "In a moment" the water and mud
burst from the mountains, "the floodgates of heaven were opened," and
"the river overflowed its banks."

And here, again, we are reminded of the expression in Genesis, "the same
day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up" (chap. vii.,
11). That this does not refer to the rain is clear from the manner in
which it is stated: "The same day were all the fountains of the great
deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. And the rain was
upon the earth," etc. And when the work of destruction is finished, we
are told "the fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were
stopped." This is a reminiscence by an inland people, living where such
tremendous volcanic disturbances were nearly unknown, of "the terrible
water-spout which "rose to the sky," of the Chaldean legend, and of "the
enormous volumes of water issuing from the earth" of the Aramaean
tradition. The Hindoo legend of the Flood speaks of "the marine god
Hayagriva, who dwelt in the abyss," who produced the cataclysm. This is
doubtless "the archangel of the abyss" spoken of in the Chaldean
tradition.

The Mountains of the North.--We have in Plato the following reference to
the mountains of Atlantis:

"The whole country was described as being very lofty and precipitous on
the side of the sea. . . . The whole region of the island lies toward
the south, and is sheltered from the north. . . . The surrounding
mountains exceeded all that are to be seen now anywhere."

These mountains were the present Azores. One has but to contemplate
their present elevation, and remember the depth to which they descend in
the ocean, to realize their tremendous altitude and the correctness of
the description given by Plato.

In the Hindoo legend we find the fish-god, who represents Poseidon,
father of Atlantis, helping Mann over "the Mountain of the North." In
the Chaldean legend Khasisatra's vessel is stopped by "the Mountain of
Nizir" until the sea goes down.

The Mud which Stopped Navigation.--We are told by Plato, "Atlantis
disappeared beneath the sea, and then that sea became inaccessible, so
that navigation on it ceased, on account of the quantity of mud which
the ingulfed island left in its place." This is one of the points of
Plato's story which provoked the incredulity and ridicule of the
ancient, and even of the modern, world. We find in the Chaldean legend
something of the same kind: Khasisatra says, "I looked at the sea
attentively, observing, and the whole of humanity had returned to mud."
In the "Popol Vuh" we are told that a "resinous thickness descended from
heaven," even as in Dominica the rain was full of "thick gray mud,"
accompanied by an "overpowering smell of sulphur."

The explorations of the ship Challenger show that the whole of the
submerged ridge of which Atlantis is a part is to this day thickly
covered with volcanic debris.

We have but to remember the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, which
were covered with such a mass of volcanic ashes from the eruption of
A.D. 79 that for seventeen centuries they remained buried at a depth of
from fifteen to thirty feet; a new population lived and labored above
them; an aqueduct was constructed over their heads; and it was only when
a farmer, in digging for a well, penetrated the roof of a house, that
they were once more brought to the light of day and the knowledge of
mankind.

We have seen that, in 1783, the volcanic eruption in Iceland covered the
sea with pumice for a distance of one hundred and fifty miles, "and
ships were considerably impeded in their course."

The eruption in the island of Sumbawa, in April, 1815, threw out such
masses of ashes as to darken the air. "The floating cinders to the west
of Sumatra formed, on the 12th of April, a mass two feet thick and
several miles in extent, through which ships with difficulty forced
their way."

It thus appears that the very statement of Plato which has provoked the
ridicule of scholars is in itself one of the corroborating features of
his story. It is probable that the ships of the Atlanteans, when they
returned after the tempest to look for their country, found the sea
impassable from the masses of volcanic ashes and pumice. They returned
terrified to the shores of Europe; and the shock inflicted by the
destruction of Atlantis upon the civilization of the world probably led
to one of those retrograde periods in the history of our race in which
they lost all intercourse with the Western continent.

The Preservation of a Record.--There is a singular coincidence in the
stories of the Deluge in another particular.

The legends of the Phoenicians, preserved by Sanchoniathon, tell us that
Taautos, or Taut, was the inventor of the alphabet and of the art of
writing.

Now, we find in the Egyptian legends a passage of Manetho, in which
Thoth (or Hermes Trismegistus), before the Deluge, inscribed on stelae,
or tablets, in hieroglyphics, or sacred characters, the principles of
all knowledge. After the Deluge the second Thoth translated the contents
of these stelae into the vulgar tongue.

Josephus tells us that "The patriarch Seth, in order that wisdom and
astronomical knowledge should not perish, erected, in prevision of the
double destruction by fire and water predicted by Adam, two columns, one
of brick, the other of stone, on which this knowledge was engraved, and
which existed in the Siriadic country."

In the Chaldean legends the god Ea ordered Khasisatra to inscribe the
divine learning, and the principles of all sciences, on tables of
terra-cotta, and bury them, before the Deluge, "in the City of the Sun
at Sippara."

Berosus, in his version of the Chaldean flood, says:

"The deity, Chronos, appeared to him (Xisuthros) in a vision, and warned
him that, upon the 15th day of the month Doesius, there would be a flood
by which mankind would be destroyed. He therefore enjoined him to write
a history of the beginning, procedure, and conclusion of all things, and
to bury it in the City of the Sun at Sippara, and to build a vessel,"
etc.

The Hindoo Bhagavata-Purana tells us that the fish-god, who warned
Satyravata of the coming of the Flood, directed him to place the sacred
Scriptures in a safe place, "in order to preserve them from Hayagriva, a
marine horse dwelling in the abyss."

Are we to find the original of these legends in the following passage
from Plato's history of Atlantis?

"Now, the relations of their governments to one another were regulated
by the injunctions of Poseidon, as the law had handed them down. These
were inscribed by the first then on a column of orichalcum, which was
situated in the middle of the island, at the Temple of Poseidon, whither
the people were gathered together. . . . They received and gave
judgments, and at daybreak they wrote down their sentences on a golden
tablet, and deposited them as memorials with their robes. There were
many special laws which the several kings had inscribed about the
temples." (Critias, p. 120.)

A Succession of Disasters.--The Central American books, translated by De
Bourbourg, state that originally a part of the American continent
extended far into the Atlantic Ocean. This tradition is strikingly
confirmed by the explorations of the ship Challenger, which show that
the "Dolphin's Ridge" was connected with the shore of South America
north of the mouth of the Amazon. The Central American books tell us
that this region of the continent was destroyed by a succession of
frightful convulsions, probably at long intervals apart; three of these
catastrophes are constantly mentioned, and sometimes there is reference
to one or two more.

"The land," in these convulsions, "was shaken by frightful earthquakes,
and the waves of the sea combined with volcanic fires to overwhelm and
ingulf it. . . . Each convulsion swept away portions of the land until
the whole disappeared, leaving the line of coast as it now is. Most of
the inhabitants, overtaken amid their regular employments, were
destroyed; but some escaped in ships, and some fled for safety to the
summits of high mountains, or to portions of the land which for a time
escaped immediate destruction." (Baldwin's "Ancient America," p. 176.)

This accords precisely with the teachings of geology. We know that the
land from which America and Europe were formed once covered nearly or
quite the whole space now occupied by the Atlantic between the
continents; and it is reasonable to believe that it went down piecemeal,
and that Atlantis was but the stump of the ancient continent, which at
last perished from the same causes and in the same way.

The fact that this tradition existed among the inhabitants of America is
proven by the existence of festivals, "especially one in the month
Izcalli, which were instituted to commemorate this frightful destruction
of land and people, and in which, say the sacred books, 'princes and
people humbled themselves before the divinity, and besought him to
withhold a return of such terrible calamities.'"

Can we doubt the reality of events which we thus find confirmed by
religious ceremonies at Athens, in Syria, and on the shores of Central
America?

And we find this succession of great destructions of the Atlantic
continent in the triads of Wales, where traditions are preserved of
"three terrible catastrophes." We are told by the explorations of the
ship Challenger that the higher lands reach in the direction of the
British Islands; and the Celts had traditions that a part of their
country once extended far out into the Atlantic, and was subsequently
destroyed.

And the same succession of destructions is referred to in the Greek
legends, where a deluge of Ogyges--"the most ancient of the kings of
Boeotia or Attica, a quite mythical person, lost in the night of
ages"--preceded that of Deucalion.

We will find hereafter the most ancient hymns of the Aryans praying God
to hold the land firm. The people of Atlantis, having seen their country
thus destroyed, section by section, and judging that their own time must
inevitably come, must have lived under a great and perpetual terror,
which will go far to explain the origin of primeval religion, and the
hold which it took upon the minds of men; and this condition of things
may furnish us a solution of the legends which have come down to us of
their efforts to perpetuate their learning on pillars, and also an
explanation of that other legend of the Tower of Babel, which, as I will
show hereafter, was common to both continents, and in which they sought
to build a tower high enough to escape the Deluge.

All the legends of the preservation of a record prove that the united
voice of antiquity taught that the antediluvians had advanced so far in
civilization as to possess an alphabet and a system of writing; a
conclusion which, as we will see hereafter, finds confirmation in the
original identity of the alphabetical signs used in the old world and
the new.

PART III

THE CIVILIZATION OF THE OLD WORLD AND NEW COMPARED.

CHAPTER I.

CIVILIZATION AN INHERITANCE.

Material civilization might be defined to be the result of a series of
inventions and discoveries, whereby man improves his condition, and
controls the forces of nature for his own advantage.

The savage man is a pitiable creature; as Menabosbu says, in the
Chippeway legends, he is pursued by a "perpetual hunger;" he is exposed
unprotected to the blasts of winter and the heats of summer. A great
terror sits upon his soul; for every manifestation of nature--the storm,
the wind, the thunder, the lightning, the cold, the heat--all are
threatening and dangerous demons. The seasons bring him neither
seed-time nor harvest; pinched with hunger, appeasing in part the
everlasting craving of his stomach with seeds, berries, and creeping
things, he sees the animals of the forest dash by him, and he has no
means to arrest their flight. He is powerless and miserable in the midst
of plenty. Every step toward civilization is a step of conquest over
nature. The invention of the bow and arrow was, in its time, a far
greater stride forward for the human race than the steam-engine or the
telegraph. The savage could now reach his game--his insatiable hunger
could be satisfied; the very eagle, "towering in its pride of place,"
was not beyond the reach of this new and wonderful weapon. The discovery
of fire and the art of cooking was another immense step forward. The
savage, having nothing but wooden vessels in which to cook, covered the
wood with clay; the day hardened in the fire. The savage gradually
learned that he could dispense with the wood, and thus pottery was
invented. Then some one (if we are to believe the Chippeway legends, on
the shores of Lake Superior) found fragments of the pure copper of that
region, beat them into shape, and the art of metallurgy was begun; iron
was first worked in the same way by shaping meteoric iron into
spear-heads.

But it must not be supposed that these inventions followed one another
in rapid succession. Thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands, of years
intervened between each step; many savage races have not to this day
achieved some of these steps. Prof. Richard Owen says, "Unprepossessed
and sober experience teaches that arts, language, literature are of slow
growth, the results of gradual development."

I shall undertake to show hereafter that nearly all the arts essential
to civilization which we possess date back to the time of
Atlantis--certainly to that ancient Egyptian civilization which was
coeval with, and an outgrowth from, Atlantis.

In six thousand years the world made no advance on the civilization
which it received from Atlantis.

Phoenicia, Egypt, Chaldea, India, Greece, and Rome passed the torch of
civilization from one to the other; but in all that lapse of time they
added nothing to the arts which existed at the earliest period of
Egyptian history. In architecture, sculpture, painting, engraving,
mining, metallurgy, navigation, pottery, glass-ware, the construction of
canals, roads, and aqueducts, the arts of Phoenicia and Egypt extended,
without material change or improvement, to a period but two or three
hundred years ago. The present age has entered upon a new era; it has
added a series of wonderful inventions to the Atlantean list; it has
subjugated steam and electricity to the uses of man. And its work has
but commenced: it will continue until it lifts man to a plane as much
higher than the present as the present is above the barbaric condition;
and in the future it will be said that between the birth of civilization
in Atlantis and the new civilization there stretches a period of many
thousands of years, during which mankind did not invent, but simply
perpetuated.

Herodotus tells us ("Euterpe," cxlii.) that, according to the
information he received from the Egyptian priests, their written history
dated back 11,340 years before his era, or nearly 14,000 years prior to
this time. They introduced him into a spacious temple, and showed him
the statues of 341 high-priests who had in turn succeeded each other;
and yet the age of Columbus possessed no arts, except that of printing
(which was ancient in China), which was not known to the Egyptians; and
the civilization of Egypt at its first appearance was of a higher order
than at any subsequent period of its history, thus testifying that it
drew its greatness from a fountain higher than itself. It was in its
early days that Egypt worshipped one only God; in the later ages this
simple and sublime belief was buried under the corruptions of
polytheism. The greatest pyramids were built by the Fourth Dynasty, and
so universal was education at that time among the people that the stones
with which they were built retain to this day the writing of the
workmen. The first king was Menes.

"At the epoch of Menes," says Winchell, "the Egyptians were already a
civilized and numerous people. Manetho tells us that Athotis, the son of
this first king, Menes, built the palace at Memphis; that he was a
physician, and left anatomical books. All these statements imply that
even at this early period the Egyptians were in a high state of
civilization." (Winchell's "Preadamites," p. 120.) "In the time of Menes
the Egyptians had long been architects, sculptors, painters,
mythologists, and theologians." Professor Richard Owen says, "Egypt is
recorded to have been a civilized and governed community before the time
of Menes. The pastoral community of a group of nomad families, as
portrayed in the Pentateuch, may be admitted as an early step in
civilization. But how far in advance of this stage is a nation
administered by a kingly government, consisting of grades of society,
with divisions of labor, of which one kind, assigned to the priesthood,
was to record or chronicle the names and dynasties of the kings, the
duration and chief events of their reigns!" Ernest Renan points out that
"Egypt at the beginning appears mature, old, and entirely without
mythical and heroic ages, as if the country had never known youth. Its
civilization has no infancy, and its art no archaic period. The
civilization of the Old Monarchy did not begin with infancy. It was
already mature."

We shall attempt to show that it matured in Atlantis, and that the
Egyptian people were unable to maintain it at the high standard at which
they had received it, as depicted in the pages of Plato. What king of
Assyria, or Greece, or Rome, or even of these modern nations, has ever
devoted himself to the study of medicine and the writing of medical
books for the benefit of mankind? Their mission has been to kill, not to
heal the people; yet here, at the very dawn of Mediterranean history, we
find the son of the first king of Egypt recorded "as a physician, and as
having left anatomical books."

I hold it to be incontestable that, in some region of the earth,
primitive mankind must have existed during vast spaces of time, and
under most favorable circumstances, to create, invent, and discover
those arts and things which constitute civilization. When we have it
before our eyes that for six thousand years mankind in Europe, Asia, and
Africa, even when led by great nations, and illuminated by marvellous
minds, did not advance one inch beyond the arts of Egypt, we may
conceive what lapses, what aeons, of time it must have required to bring
savage man to that condition of refinement and civilization possessed by
Egypt when it first comes within the purview of history.

That illustrious Frenchman, H. A. Taine (" History of English
Literature," p. 23), sees the unity of the Indo-European races manifest
in their languages, literature, and philosophies, and argues that these
pre-eminent traits are "the great marks of an original model," and that
when we meet with them "fifteen, twenty, thirty centuries before our
era, in an Aryan, an Egyptian, a Chinese, they represent the work of a
great many ages, perhaps of several myriads of centuries. . . . Such is
the first and richest source of these master faculties from which
historical events take their rise; and one sees that if it be powerful
it is because this is no simple spring, but a kind of lake, a deep
reservoir, wherein other springs have, for a multitude of centuries,
discharged their several streams." In other words, the capacity of the
Egyptian, Aryan, Chaldean, Chinese, Saxon, and Celt to maintain
civilization is simply the result of civilized training during "myriads
of centuries" in some original home of the race.

I cannot believe that the great inventions were duplicated
spontaneously, as some would have us believe, in different countries;
there is no truth in the theory that men pressed by necessity will
always hit upon the same invention to relieve their wants. If this were
so, all savages would have invented the boomerang; all savages would
possess pottery, bows and arrows, slings, tents, and canoes; in short,
all races would have risen to civilization, for certainly the comforts
of life are as agreeable to one people as another.

Civilization is not communicable to all; many savage tribes are
incapable of it. There are two great divisions of mankind, the civilized
and the savage; and, as we shall show, every civilized race in the world
has had something of civilization from the earliest ages; and as "all
roads lead to Rome," so all the converging lines of civilization lead to
Atlantis. The abyss between the civilized man and the savage is simply
incalculable; it represents not alone a difference in arts and methods
of life, but in the mental constitution, the instincts, and the
predispositions of the soul. The child of the civilized races in his
sports manufactures water-wheels, wagons, and houses of cobs; the savage
boy amuses himself with bows and arrows: the one belongs to a building
and creating race; the other to a wild, hunting stock. This abyss
between savagery and civilization has never been passed by any nation
through its own original force, and without external influences, during
the Historic Period; those who were savages at the dawn of history are
savages still; barbarian slaves may have been taught something of the
arts of their masters, and conquered races have shared some of the
advantages possessed by their conquerors; but we will seek in vain for
any example of a savage people developing civilization of and among
themselves. I may be reminded of the Gauls, Goths, and Britons; but
these were not savages, they possessed written languages, poetry,
oratory, and history; they were controlled by religious ideas; they
believed in God and the immortality of the soul, and in a state of
rewards and punishments after death. Wherever the Romans came in contact
with Gauls, or Britons, or German tribes, they found them armed with
weapons of iron. The Scots, according to Tacitus, used chariots and iron
swords in the battle of the Grampians--"enormes gladii sine mucrone."
The Celts of Gaul are stated by Diodorus Siculus to have used
iron-headed spears and coats-of-mail, and the Gauls who encountered the
Roman arms in B.C. 222 were armed with soft iron swords, as well as at
the time when Caesar conquered their country. Among the Gauls men would
lend money to be repaid in the next world, and, we need not add, that no
Christian people has yet reached that sublime height of faith; they
cultivated the ground, built houses and walled towns, wove cloth, and
employed wheeled vehicles; they possessed nearly all the cereals and
domestic animals we have, and they wrought in iron, bronze, and steel.
The Gauls had even invented a machine on wheels to cut their grain, thus
anticipating our reapers and mowers by two thousand years. The
difference between the civilization of the Romans under Julius Caesar
and the Gauls under Vercingetorix was a difference in degree and not in
kind. The Roman civilization was simply a development and perfection of
the civilization possessed by all the European populations; it was drawn
from the common fountain of Atlantis.

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