The Chimerical Atlantises
Interestingly enough, the Hindus associate this sort of stuff – this vitreous “seafroth” (really pumice stone, rather than ambergris) – with Krishna and Balarama, the real archetypes of Hercules and Atlas. Balarama is himself the alias of the Serpent Shesha, whose name means (in Sanskrit) “residue, scum” and, even more exactly, the kind of foam such as ambergris or pumice stone thrown over the beaches by the seas.
This etymon also coincides with that of the “mud” – or “scum, spume, froth, slime” (pelos) – reported by Plato as covering the seas of Atlantis after the cataclysm.
This whole story is in fact a clever allegory of the explosion of Mt. Atlas. This explosion formed the World’s Pillar (or “Pillar of Heaven”) which allegedly holds up the skies, ejecting the huge amounts of pumice stone and fly ash that covered the whole soil and the seas of Atlantis.
And this thick layer of fiery tephra choked out all the forms of life which existed in this previously paradisial place, the site of Atlantis-Eden. We will return to this subject in more detail in Part III of the present book, and will not repeat this discussion here.
The Titans – and Atlas in particular – were often likened to Serpents (or Dragons), and to “weak-legged”, anguipedal, civilizing heroes such as Erychthonius, Erechtheus, Cadmus, Hercules, Quetzalcoatl, Kukulkan, Hephaistos, Atlas, etc.. All such Titans indeed derive their myth from the Nagas or Minas (“Serpent-people”, “Dragons”, “Fish-people”) of India and Indonesia, the archetypes of the Titans of Greece.
As we said above, the Cretan “Atlantis” of certain authorities is actually an illusion. And so are all other sites outside the East Indies of the Far East, the poetic name of Indonesia in antiquity.
Nevertheless, the explosion of the Thera volcano closely parallels the one of the Krakatoa of 1883, as some researchers have noted. But this eruption of the Thera volcano was far too small and far too late and too wrongly sited in relation to the Pillars of Hercules for it to be the right time and the right place.
Moreover, Crete lacked the size and the importance that Plato attributes to Atlantis. Thera and Crete were puny in comparison to, say, its contemporary civilizations in Egypt, Babylon, the Indus Valley and even Mycenian Greece. And the Theran cataclysm never pushed Crete underseas, or even hampered its existence in any notable way, as is now well known.
In fact, the very name of Crete (Kriti) means “swept, cut off, razed”, rather than “sunken one”, as does the name of Atlantis in the holy tongues of India. So, although Crete was recognizedly “swept” by the Theran cataclysm, it was not really “sunken” by it, as Atlantis actually was.
The story of Crete being the true site of Atlantis is nowadays only pushed by tourism agents bent on attracting visitors to the charming site in the Greek islands. The prehistoric explosion of the Krakatoa volcano which sundered open the Strait of Sunda was, by comparison with the one of the Thera volcano, fully a million times stronger, in terms of the energy actually released and the amount of crust lofted.
If the Theran explosion could sweep away a considerable extent of Minoan Crete, we are led to conjecture that the one of the Indonesian volcano could well have wiped out an entire continental-sized civilization, as it in fact did. And it could also very likely have triggered the chain reaction of positive feedback events that culminated in the catastrophic end of the Pleistocene Ice Age.
The Mid-Atlantic Ridge and Donnelly’s Atlantis
Equally illusory are the supposed Atlantises of the Bosphorus (Moreau de Jonnés); of Spain (R. Hennig); of Libya (Borchardt); of Benin in Africa (Leo Frobenius), and the even less likely one of the North Sea (Olaus Rudbeck). The same holds for the Americas (several researchers including Col. Fawcett) and Antarctica (several proponents, among them the British journalist Graham Hancock).
Even more impossible are the purely phantasmal Atlantises located in sunken islands or continents of the Mediterranean Sea (Robert Sarmast) or of the Atlantic Ocean (several proponents) and, particularly, the ones of the Sargasso Sea, as they are not even real geological possibilities.
There are no sunken continents at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, period. An extensive and detailed study of this region has unequivocally shown this fact, which cannot and should not therefore be doubted anymore. What this detailed research demonstrated instead is the existence of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a vast submarine cordillera that divides the Atlantic Ocean more or less at the middle.
This submarine feature corresponds to the rift from whence the Tectonic Plates issue, causing the continents to drift away from the ridge, at the rate of a few centimeter per year. As is now clear, this is land which is rising, rather than sinking, as Ignatius Donnelly, Mme. Blavatsky and other nineteenth century researchers originally supposed.
Hence, despite the brilliant plea of the two researchers just named, this ridge corresponds not to a sunken continent, but instead to land which is slowly rising out of the seafloor. Such rifts and ridges in fact exist in all oceans, and are not unique features of the mid-Atlantic Ocean. And their volcanic peaks sometimes rise above the sea level in certain spots, forming islands and island arcs.
This is actually what happens in Indonesia and at the Indus Valley, as well as in the Azores, the Madeiras and other such volcanic islands of the ocean. When they do, they normally cause the kind of terrible supervolcanoes and earthquakes that we have been discussing.
It is no coincidence that the two Atlantises we mentioned above are both located precisely at such volcanic spots where the Mid-Oceanic Ridges, or their branches, rise above the surface of the sea. When we inspect the map of the above figure, we also note that a sizable chunk of India actually disappeared in the Indus Delta region at the end of the Ice Age.
This region of India is nowadays known as the Rann of Kutch (“Marshes of Death”) and is in fact still sinking underseas, even today. This region is deemed some sort of a Hell by the natives of the region and has been clearly flooded by some sort of terrible cataclysm that also took place at the end of the Pleistocene, just as did the one of Lemurian Atlantis.
This region is merely a replica of Dvaraka, the legendary capital city of Krishna’s worldwide empire, as we already discussed above. It is not the site of true Atlantis, which really lies in the region of Indonesia, as we have already agued above. Dwarka, in the Indus Delta region is merely a ghostly Atlantis, a replica imitating the original archetype in Malaysia.
The legends of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata have, already in antiquity, been transferred to this region of India, as well as to Sri Lanka, which both function as reasonable replicas of Atlantis. And they have also been transferred to the Celtic Shelf, where the tradition of sunken cities also survives.
As such, these close replicas have fooled myriad researchers the world over. These legends all speak of sunken cities whose golden spires can often be seen glittering under the waters by the local fishermen.
The Indian legends on Dvaraka and Golden Lanka strikingly evoke the similar tales of the Celts on legendary places such as Ys and Avalon, which occur in the region of Britain and Brittany, and as the Nordic Vineta in the North Sea. But these legends and alleged sightings are all chimaeras, much as are the ones of Sri Lanka, Eldorado, Septe Cidades, Golden Cipango, Cibola, Tartessos, and so forth.
As we just showed, the luciferine civilization of the Indus Valley may be counted as the third avatar of Atlantis. The Indus Valley is one of the greatest and earliest archaeological sites of the present era of mankind.
Civilization was again reborn there and, at its demise, radiated to all other places on earth, as we just said: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Minoan Crete, Mycenian Greece, Etruria, Hatti, Phoenicia, the Americas, and so forth.
This serves to show, once again, that the legend of Atlantis really originated in the Far East, in the region of India and Indonesia, whence it later diffused to the whole world, in one way or the other. As the distance from the real location of Atlantis increases in eith
er time or space, the parallels dim, and the replicas get worse and worse, until they finally fade away and disappear altogether, like some mirage.
Chapter 4 - Indonesian Atlantis and the Four Rivers of Paradise
There are three fountains Under the Mountain of Gifts.
And a city that is buried,
Under the waves of the sea.
Taliesin
The Four Rivers of Paradise
History often repeats itself. On the occasion of the end of the Ice Age, the greater part of the Himalayan glaciers melted away, pouring their meltwaters down the Indus Valley, in floods that were hundreds of times larger than the ones of today, even when the terrible monsoon storms castigate the entire region.
Such is clearly the record left by the tempests and floods that swept away the third Atlantis, if we also count the first one (Lemurian Atlantis) and its successor (Atlantis proper). This happened during what is really the third of the biblical Floods, the two previous ones being triggered by the Toba and the Krakatoa volcanoes, at the dates and events already mentioned.
This Himalayan meltwater formed the great rivers of the Indus Valley region: the Indus, the Ganges, the Sutlej and the Brahmaputra. These rivers are locally identified to the Four Rivers of Paradise, particularly in Tibetan Buddhism. These four rivers all spring in the neighborhood of Manasarovar Lake, in the region of Mt. Kailasa.
In Hindu-Buddhic traditions, Mt. Kailasa is usually identified with Mt. Meru, the Holy Mountain of Paradise, the actual source of their Four Rivers of Paradise. The replica is so perfect that I was for a long time misled into believing that this was the true source of the myth of the Four Rivers of Paradise which figure so centrally in Hindu-Tibetan traditions.
I then noted that the same thing also happened at the other side of the mighty Himalayas, whence issue the great rivers that irrigate South Asia, China and Southeast Asia, such as the Huang-ho, the Yangtze, the Mekong, and the Irrawaddy.
However, these four rivers are again mere replicas of the Four Rivers of Eden (Atlantis proper), whose sunken remains we recently discovered in Indonesia, as I will be arguing next.
There can be very little doubt that the Indonesian Atlantis – as well as its two main successors, the Indian Atlantis and the Chinese Atlantis just mentioned – are far more than just sacred traditions based on thin air.
They are real, and their destructions are based on actual geological facts such as the Universal Flood, which were in no way exaggerated by our ancestors, in contrast to the false premises of Darwin and Lyell which have fooled so many people for such a long time.
As we just said, we have at long last been able to locate the real, original Four Rivers of Paradise of which the ancient traditions so insistently speak. Through the process of diffusion, these sacred traditions became universal, a fact which explicates why we now find the traditions on these four sacred rivers just about everywhere in the world.
And this includes the Americas, as attested, for instance, in the sacred lore of the “River of Milk” of the Tucano Indians of the Brazilian Amazonia. This mythical river is clearly the same as the Pishon of the Bible, a name which also means the same thing in Dravida, the sacred Atlantean tongue in which this holy book, like so many others, was originally written.
But these paradisial rivers – in Tibet, in China, in the Americas, etc. – are all mere replicas, sheer phantasmagoria having no reality whatsoever. The actual Four Rivers of Paradise are of course now sunken, with Atlantis-Eden itself.
Fortunately, their beds still remain as clearly visible under the waters as one might possibly wish. These river beds were carved when the region was still subaerial, a fact that attests their reality during the Ice Ages, since rivers of course do not flow under the sea.
And their beds are, as just affirmed, attested in the seafloor of the region, as we have managed to discover in the maps originally due to early researchers of the region such as G. A. F. Molengraaff and other naturalists. But the best source on this is by far the detailed maps of Dr. Harold K. Voris already referenced above and reproduced in the figure below. A clearer, original color version is linked here. ↑023
This uncanny discovery we made is a very cogent proof of the reality of Atlantis-Eden and of Paradise, its mythical counterpart. One tradition reinforces and supports the other, and they all add up to establish the reality of Atlantis as the Terrestrial Paradise of which the traditions of virtually all peoples on earth invariably speak.
Unfortunately, the more detailed discussion of this fascinating subject does not fit here, and was left for an already planned sequel of the present book, one which centers on the theme of Paradise itself. So, we here limit ourselves to giving only the barest essentials of our seminal discovery. First of all, we note that the seafloor of the region is crisscrossed by riverbeds. This geological fact attests that the region was subaerial and well-watered during the Ice Age, the time of Atlantis.
Consider, in the map of the seafloor of the region of Indonesia just linked, the region around the islands of Java and Sumatra. This is the region at the center of the figure, the one near Australia, shown at the bottom right. Above all, note the rectangular region above Java, which presently corresponds to the Java Sea and the Sunda Strait, seen as the small dent between the islands of Java and Sumatra.
The Java Sea and Sunda Shelf formed an extensive plain during the
Ice Age, when it was subaerial. Such huge plains are as rare as the gold of
Ophir. Moreover, the rectangular shelf of the Java Sea measures about 600 x 400 km, which is exactly the size given by Plato for Atlantis’ Great Plain. So, it seems reasonable to conclude that the present Java Sea corresponded to the former Great Plain of Atlantis.
But the most telltale connection of this region with Paradise are the four rivers springing from the mountain at the left of Sunda Strait (Mt. Dempo, a huge volcanic peak). The largest of these rivers flows towards the west, across the whole Great Plain. A smaller river springs next to its source and flows south, into the Sunda Strait (best seen in the color version just linked)
A third river also springs in the same region and flows north, into the South China Sea. And a fourth river, born more or less at the same spot flows west, into what is presently Malacca Strait, separating Sumatra from the Malay Peninsula.
These four rivers are all born on or near Mt. Dempo, a famous volcano and huge crater lake of the region. This volcano is, as we comment in more detail further below, one of the two Pillars of Hercules, the other one being the Krakatoa volcano, actually located beneath the waters of Sunda Strait.
The Flood and the Destruction of Paradise
Now, rivers like these four, flowing along the Four Cardinal Directions are also as rare as the gold of Ophir. So, this region is visibly that of Eden and hence of Atlantis itself, its alias. What else? Why posit alternative locations, if Ockham’s Razor dictates that we tend to identify these two legendary paradises and most others as well?
The super-eruption of the Krakatoa volcano – probably accompanied by those of the other neighboring volcanoes such as the Dempo due to some sort of paroxysmal chain reaction – was what really caused the destruction of Paradise. When this volcano erupted, it opened up Sunda Strait and triggered the maritime invasion known to geologists as Meltwater Pulse 1B.
The Ocean, freed of its bonds, invaded the region of the Great Plain of Atlantis and the coterminous one of the Sunda Shelf, next to it. This maritime invasion was sudden and brutal, exactly as described by Plato in his Critias. And it probably corresponded to the geological event known as Meltwater Pulse 1B.
This event was also the same as the one called the Flood in the universal traditions. The cataclysm in question here submerged the food sources of Atlantis (the Great Plain) and actually caused the mass exodus of entire nations which were later to form the great civilizations of the remote past: those of the American Indians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Minoans, the Mesopotamians, the Mycenians, the Indus Valley Culture, et
c..
These early mass migrants also include the Jews, the Phoenicians, the Aryans and even the Amerinds, all driven out from their ancestral homelands in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. At first these migrants attempted to settle in India and in Southeast Asia. But they were eventually driven out by the local populations, being forced to move out to China and Mongolia and, finally, to the places they presently occupy.
Such mass migrations are the same as the ones told in the Bible (Exodus) and in similar holy books of nations everywhere. They are the legends concerning mythical heroes such Moses leading the Israelites; Aeneas leading the Roman people; Hercules leading his Greek “cattle” (hordes); the Incas leading their people, and so on.
These legends also concern the traditions on Cain’s expulsion from Eden; of Quetzalcoatl’s arrival in Mexico; of Viracocha and the coming of the Incas to Peru; of the Fomorians and the Tuatha Dé Danaan invading Britain, and so on. These legends generally disguise historical facts under the thin veil of allegories intended to confound the more ignorant, unwelcome profanes. Why would these peoples all invent lies which so closely correspond to inescapable realities?
The aforementioned myths personify – or rather, deify – the peoples in question under the figures of purely mythical heroes such as Manu, Noah, Moses, Hercules, Kukulkan, Quetzalcoatl, Bochica, and a myriad others. And these legends often include heroines or goddesses such as Venus, Demeter, Dana, Danu, Cybele, Vesta, Hathor, Isis, Ishtar, Shri, Astarte, Hecate, Myriam, and so on.
Atlantis the Lost Continent Finally Found Page 11