Ignatius Donnelly - Antediluvian world

I incline to the belief that these were civilized races, and that the peculiarities ascribed to the last two refer to the vessels in which they visited the shores of the barbarians.

THE

EMPIRE

OF

ATLANTIS

.

The empire of the Titans was clearly the empire of Atlantis. “The most judicious among our mythologists” (says Dr. Rees, “New British Cyclopaedia,” art. Titans)—”such as Gerard Vossius, Marsham, Bochart, and Father Thomassin—are of opinion that the partition of the world among the sons of Noah-Shem, Ham, and Japheth—was the original of the tradition of the same partition among Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto,” upon the breaking up of the great empire of the Titans. “The learned Pezron contends that the division which was made of this vast empire came, in after-times, to be taken for the partition of the whole world; that Asia remaining in the hands of Jupiter (Zeus), the most potent of the three brothers, made him looked upon as the god of Olympus; that the sea and islands which fell to Neptune occasioned their giving him the title of ‘god of the sea;’ and that Spain, the extremity of the then known world, thought to be a very low country in respect of Asia, and famous for its excellent mines of gold and silver, failing to Pluto, occasioned him to be taken for the ‘god of the infernal regions.’” We should suppose that Pluto possibly ruled over the transatlantic possessions of Atlantis in America, over those “portions of the opposite continent” which Plato tells us were dominated by Atlas and his posterity, and which, being far beyond or below sunset, were the “under-world” of the ancients; while Atlantis, the Canaries, etc., constituted the island division with Western Africa and Spain. Murray tells us (“Mythology,” p. 58) that Pluto’s share of the kingdom was supposed to lie “in the remote west.”

The under-world of the dead was simply the world below the western horizon; “the home of the dead has to do with that far west region where the sun dies at night.” (“Anthropology,” p. 350.) “On the coast of Brittany, where Cape Raz stands out westward into the ocean, there is ‘the Bay of Souls,’ the launching-place where the departed spirits sail off across the sea.” (Ibid.) In like manner, Odysseus found the land of the dead in the ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules. There, indeed, was the land of the mighty dead, the grave of the drowned Atlanteans.

“However this be,” continues F. Pezron, “the empire of the Titans, according to the ancients, was very extensive; they possessed Phrygia, Thrace, a part of Greece, the island of Crete, and several other provinces to the inmost recesses of Spain. To these Sanchoniathon seems to join Syria; and Diodorus adds a part of Africa, and the kingdoms of Mauritania.” The kingdoms of Mauritania embraced all that north-western region of Africa nearest to Atlantis in which are the Atlas Mountains, and in which, in the days of Herodotus, dwelt the Atlantes.

Neptune, or Poseidon, says, in answer to a message from Jupiter, No vassal god, nor of his train am I.

Three brothers, deities, from Saturn came, And ancient Rhea, earth’s immortal dame; Assigned by lot our triple rule we know; Infernal Pluto sways the shades below: O’er the wide clouds, and o’er the starry plain Ethereal Jove extends his high domain; My court beneath the hoary waves I keep, And hush the roaring of the sacred deep. Iliad, book xviii.

Homer alludes to Poseidon as

“The god whose liquid arms are hurled Around the globs, whose earthquakes rock the world.”

Mythology tells us that when the Titans were defeated by Saturn they retreated into the interior of Spain; Jupiter followed them up, and beat them for the last time near Tartessus, and thus terminated a ten-years’

war. Here we have a real battle on an actual battle-field.

If we needed any further proof that the empire of the Titans was the empire of Atlantis, we would find it in the names of the Titans: among these were Oceanus, Saturn or Chronos, and Atlas; they were all the sons of Uranos. Oceanus was at the base of the Greek mythology. Plato says (“Dialogues,” Timaeus, vol. ii., p. 533): “Oceanus and Tethys were the children of Earth and Heaven, and from these sprung Phorcys, and Chronos, and Rhea, and many more with them; and from Chronos and Rhea sprung Zeus and Hera, and all those whom we know as their brethren, and others who were their children.” In other words, all their gods came out of the ocean; they were rulers over some ocean realm; Chronos was the son of Oceanus, and Chronos was an Atlantean god, and from him the Atlantic Ocean was called by the ancients “the Chronian Sea.” The elder Minos was called “the Son of the Ocean:” he first gave civilization to the Cretans; he engraved his laws on brass, precisely as Plato tells us the laws of Atlantis were engraved on pillars of brass.

The wanderings of Ulysses, as detailed in the “Odyssey” of Homer, are strangely connected with the Atlantic Ocean. The islands of the Phoenicians were apparently in mid-ocean: We dwell apart, afar

Within the unmeasured deep, amid its waves The most remote of men; no other race Hath commerce with us.—Odyssey, book vi.

The description of the Phaeacian walls, harbors, cities, palaces, ships, etc., seems like a recollection of Atlantis. The island of Calypso appears also to have been in the Atlantic Ocean, twenty days’ sail from the Phaeacian isles; and when Ulysses goes to the land of Pluto, “the under-world,” the home of the dead, he “Reached the far confines of Oceanus,”

beyond the Pillars of Hercules. It would be curious to inquire how far the poems of Homer are Atlantean in their relations and inspiration.

Ulysses’s wanderings were a prolonged struggle with Poseidon, the founder and god of Atlantis.

“The Hekatoncheires, or Cetimaeni, beings each with a hundred hands, were three in number—Kottos, Gyges or Gyes, and Briareus—and represented the frightful crashing of waves, and its resemblance to the convulsions of earthquakes.” (Murray’s “Mythology,” p. 26.) Are not these hundred arms the oars of the galleys, and the frightful crashing of the waves their movements in the water?

“The Kyklopes also were three in number—Brontes, with his thunder; Steropes, with his lightning; and Arges, with his stream of light. They were represented as having only one eye, which was placed at the juncture between the nose and brow. It was, however, a large, flashing eye, as became beings who were personifications of the storm-cloud, with its flashes of destructive lightning and peals of thunder.”

We shall show hereafter that the invention of gunpowder dates back to the days of the Phoenicians, and may have been derived by them from Atlantis. It is not impossible that in this picture of the Kyklopes we see a tradition of sea-going ships, with a light burning at the prow, and armed with some explosive preparation, which, with a roar like thunder, and a flash like lightning, destroyed those against whom it was employed? It at least requires less strain upon our credulity to suppose these monsters were a barbarian’s memory of great ships than to believe that human beings ever existed with a hundred arms, and with one eye in the middle of the forehead, and giving out thunder and lightning.

The natives of the West India Islands regarded the ships of Columbus as living creatures, and that their sails were wings.

Berosus tells us, speaking of the ancient days of Chaldea, “In the first year there appeared, from that part of the Erythraean Sea which borders upon Babylonia, an animal endowed with reason, by name Oannes, whose whole body (according to the account of Apollodorus) was that of a fish; that under the fish’s head he had another head, with feet also below, similar to those of a man, subjoined to the fish’s tail. His voice too and language was articulate and human, and a representation of him is preserved even unto this day. This being was accustomed to pass the day among men, but took no food at that season, and he gave them an insight into letters and arts of all kinds. He taught them to construct cities, to found temples, to compile laws, and explained to them the principles of geometrical knowledge. He made them distinguish the seeds of the earth, and showed them how to collect the fruits; in short, he instructed them in everything which could tend to soften manners and humanize their laws. From that time nothing material has been added by way of improvement to his instructions. And when the sun set, this being, Oannes, retired again into the sea, and passed the night in the deep, for he was amphibious. After this there appeared other animals like Oannes.”