Atlantis Beneath the Ice

by Rand Flem-Ath

  In fact, A’a’tam means “people.” Part of the A’a’tam history was carried across the centuries in an age-old myth of a Great Flood that had once overwhelmed the earth. Their tale of the Flood included an event absent from the frontiersmen’s Bible. Using the symbolism of a magical baby created by an evil deity, the myth told how the screaming child “shook the earth,” catapulting the world into the horrors of the Great Flood.16

  The A’a’tam now feared that the sky was insecure. Corrective measures were called for, and the Earth Doctor created a gray spider that spun a huge web around the edges of the sky and the earth to hold them secure. Even with these protective measures the fear remained that the fragile web might break, releasing the sky and causing the earth to tremble.17

  In 1849, the California gold rush brought fortune seekers streaming across the Rocky Mountains to the West Coast, home of the Cahto. Ten years later, the pioneers of Mendocino County in northwestern California killed thirty-two Cahto because they took some livestock belonging to the whites. These thirty-two men represented more than 6 percent of the Cahto’s population. To put this tragedy in perspective, we can imagine the havoc wreaked today if the populations of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles were suddenly murdered by some alien force. The Cahto never recovered. By 1910, 90 percent of the population was dead.

  The mythology of the Cahto stretched back nearly twelve thousand years to the time of the last earth crust displacement. Through this legacy we learn of the catapulting events in California at the time of the Great Flood. “The sky fell. The land was not. For a very great distance there was no land. The waters of the ocean came together. Animals of all kinds drowned.”18 The original title of this book paid tribute to the Cahto, who poetically recalled the Flood as a time when the sky fell.

  American native mythology identifies four westerly mountains tied to the aftermath of a Great Flood (see figure 3.1 on page 44). All four mountains are 1,800 meters or higher above sea level. At the time of the Great Flood these mountains at the western extremity of North America would have been the first hope for those survivors of the lost island paradise who had traveled so far across an endless ocean.

  Figure 3.1. First Nations myths honor four mountains as sites of ancestral survival after the Great Flood. These sites suggest the ancestors arrived from the Pacific.

  The native people of Washington and Oregon claim that their ancestors arrived in great canoes and disembarked on Mount Baker19 and Mount Jefferson.20 They believed that Mount Rainier21 was the refuge of those who were saved after the wicked of the earth were destroyed in a Great Flood. The Shasta of northern California tell of a time when the sun fell from its normal course.22 A separate myth relates how Mount Shasta saved their ancestors from the Deluge.23 On the opposite side of North America lies another great mountain chain, the Appalachians. There, also, tales were told of terrifying solar changes, massive floods, and the survivors of these catastrophes.

  The lush green forests of the southern tip of the Appalachian Mountains were once the home of the Cherokee. In the early nineteenth century, a Cherokee named Sequoya created an alphabet for his language. He left a rich legacy of myths transcribed from his people’s oral tradition. In one myth the Flood is attributed to the uncontrollable tears of the sun goddess. It was said that she hated people and cursed them with a great drought. In desperation the Cherokee elders consulted the “Little Men,” whom they regarded as gods. The Little Men decreed that the Cherokees’ only hope of survival was to kill the sun. Magical snakes were prepared to deal a deathblow to the sun goddess. But a tragic mistake was made, and her daughter, the moon, was struck instead.

  When the Sun found her daughter dead, she went into the house and grieved, and the people did not die any more, but now the world was dark all the time, because the Sun would not come out.

  They went again to the Little Men, and told them if they wanted the Sun to come out again they must bring back her daughter. . . . [Seven men went to the ghost country and retrieved the moon but on the return journey she died again. The sun-goddess cried and wept . . .] until her tears made a flood upon the earth, and the people were afraid the world would be drowned.24 (italics added)

  The Cherokee, like the Ute and Okanagan tribes, held a dark prophecy of how the world would end. “The earth is a great island floating in a sea of water, and suspended at each of the four cardinal points by a cord hanging down from the sky vault, which is of solid rock. When the world grows old and worn out, the people will die and the cords will break and let the earth sink into the ocean, and all will be water again.25

  Despite the fact that they both lived in mountain ranges that lay far from the ocean, the Cherokee and Okanagan both associated the mythological Flood with an island. For the Okanagan this island lay “far off in the middle of the ocean.” For the Cherokee the myth of the “great island floating in a sea” contains clues to the lost land. “There is another world under this, and it is like ours in everything—animals, plants, and people—save that the seasons are different.”26

  There is, in fact, just such an island in the middle of the ocean with a climate opposite to that of the northern hemisphere (see figure 3.2). The island continent of Antarctica was partially ice free before the last earth crust displacement. Was it the doomed island of Okanagan and Cherokee mythology?

  The people of Central and South America also hold rich mythologies about the lost island paradise and its destruction in a Great Flood.

  Figure 3.2. Antarctica is an island in the middle of the ocean, just like the lost land of Okanagan mythology. And like the floating disc of Cherokee mythology, Antarctica would have experienced seasons opposite to those of North America. The formerly temperate parts of Antarctica may have been, before the last earth crust displacement, the lost island paradise of Okanagan and Cherokee mythology.

  The Ipurina of northwestern Brazil retain one of the most elegant depictions of the disaster. Their myth states, “Long ago the Earth was overwhelmed by a hot flood. This took place when the sun, a cauldron of boiling water, tipped over.”27

  Further south, the Spanish conquistadors assumed after their sweeping victories in Mexico and Peru that Chile would be another easy target. Santiago, the Spanish capital, was founded in February 1541 by Pedro de Valdiva, the first Spanish governor. Six months later the city was destroyed by the native people of Chile, the Araucanians, who launched a war that continued for four centuries. Here was a tribe so valiant that they would fight for generations rather than submit to slavery. But even these brave people trembled before a traumatic memory. “The Flood was the result of a volcanic eruption accompanied by a violent earthquake, and whenever there is an earthquake the natives rush to the high mountains. They are afraid that after the earthquake the sea may again drown the world.”28

  Like the Araucanians, the Inca were paralyzed by the fear that any change in the sun foretold doom. A 1555 Spanish chronicler recorded their terror, stating when “there is an eclipse of the sun or the moon the Indians cry and groan in great perturbation, thinking that the time has come in which the earth will perish.”29

  The Peruvian historian, Carcilasso de la Vega, the son of a Spanish conquistador and an Incan princess, asked his Incan uncle to relate the story of his people’s origins. How had Lake Titicaca become the source of their civilization? The uncle explained, “In ancient times all this region which you see was covered with forests and thickets, and the people lived like brute beasts without religion nor government, nor towns, nor houses, without cultivating the land nor covering their bodies. . . . [The sun god sent a son and daughter to] give them precepts and laws by which to live as reasonable and civilized men, and to teach them to dwell in houses and towns, to cultivate maize and other crops, to breed flocks, and to use the fruits of the earth as rational beings.”30

  The supposed gods who brought agriculture to the vicinity of Lake Titicaca were said to have come “out of the regions of the south”31 immediately “after the deluge.”32 Those whom t
he Inca called gods may have been people who possessed precious skills and were forced to leave their southern home after it was destroyed by a flood.

  The word inca means “son of the sun” and was a title originally granted only to the emperor. To preserve his culture from the ravages of the conquistadors, Inca Manco II left the great capital of Cuzco in 1536 and retreated into the daunting heights of the Andes. He took with him three sons, each of whom would, in turn, become inca and suffer a succession of bloody encounters with the Spanish. Manco II chose a mountain peak overlooking the Urubamba Valley to build his palace. Francisco Pizarro, leader of the Spanish invaders, was never able to find this secret base, and its existence intrigued those who followed him. But all who tried to discover the lost city failed.

  Later, in the same century, two monks, Friar Marcos and Friar Diego, did come tantalizingly close to lifting the veil of the hidden city. Friar Marcos was fired with a “desire to seek souls where not a single preacher had entered, and where the gospel message had not been heard.”33 Traveling with him was a medical missionary, Friar Diego, who became popular with the local people and a favorite of the royal inca. The two monks had established a convent at Puquiura, near Vitcos, and were fascinated by Incan stories of the “Virgins of the Sun,” who dwelled in a fabulous city known as “Vilcabamba the Old.” This mountain city was said to house “wizards and masters of abomination.”34

  The two monks repeatedly tried to coax an Inca who sometimes emerged from the hidden city into revealing its location. Finally, he agreed to take them. Higher and higher they traveled, the air becoming thinner with every step. The Inca was carried in a litter and enjoyed the view, while the monks stumbled through the thick jungle, tripping over their long robes. After three days they arrived at the foot of yet another barrier of mountains that jutted even farther into the sky.

  For three weeks the monks preached to and taught the natives who lived in a settlement just beyond sight and sound of the mystery city. They were forbidden to enter its enclaves for fear they would learn something of its rites, ceremonies, and purpose. During the night the Incan priests high in the forbidden city conspired to corrupt the monks by sending beautiful women to tempt them from their vows of celibacy. Friars Marcos and Diego resisted to the end and finally concluded that they would never reach the sacred city. It was never found by the Spanish.

  In 1911, four centuries later, the American historian and explorer Hiram Bingham (1875–1956) discovered the marvelous, haunting ruins of a lost Incan city cradled in the summit of a mountain called Machu Picchu.

  Bingham believed that he had discovered the lost city of “Vilcabamba the Old,” where the “Virgins of the Sun” catered to the wishes of their Incan master.35 He recovered a number of skeletons from Machu Picchu, which he sent to Dr. George Eaton of Yale University. The professor concluded that among the skeletons, “there was not a single one of a robust male of the warrior type. There are a few effeminate males who might very well have been priests, but the large majority of the skeletons are female.”36

  Why did the Inca maintain a settlement of young women in their sanctuary, Machu Picchu? A clue might come from the U.S. Air Force and its bunker buried deep beneath Colorado Springs. It was built as a retreat in the event of nuclear war and a base from which civilization might be reestablished. For the Inca, the threat was not nuclear, but rather a Great Flood. To meet this danger, they created bases on mountains far from the ocean. If another deluge was unleashed, a base like Machu Picchu could repopulate a drowned world.

  In his book The Lost City of the Incas,37 Bingham described a ritual performed on the winter solstice by the priests of Machu Picchu. A mystical cord was secured by a great stone pillar to “guide” the sun across the sky, preventing it from losing course. This intihuatana, or hitching post of the sun, may have represented a symbolic attempt to prevent another earth crust displacement. If so, then the mysterious solar megaliths (known as sun stones) that are found around the globe may have represented ancient attempts to secure the sun in its new path across the sky after the Flood. A reined sun could not release another Great Flood. The earth would be safe for another year.

  This obsession with the stability of the sun’s path is also found in the American southwest among the ruins of the Anasazi (a Navajo word meaning “the ancient ones”). They are famed for their cliff dwellings, their circular architecture, and other artistic achievements. Chaco Mesa in New Mexico is the site of one of the most remarkable solar megaliths in the world. Three slabs of stone, each weighing two tons, have been arranged so that the light of the sun falls on a spiral petroglyph, marking the summer and winter solstices and the spring and fall equinoxes.

  It was discovered in 1977 by artist and amateur archaeo-astronomer Anna Sofaer,38 who called it a “sun dagger” because of the pattern the sunlight makes on the rock carvings during the summer solstice. Since its true purpose may have been the Anasazi’s equivalent of the Inca’s hitching post of the sun, it could be called a solar cord, designed to prevent a wayward sun or at least to monitor the sun’s path to ensure that all was in order.

  The fear of a wayward sun or falling sky became a global nightmare for the survivors of the last earth crust displacement. For example, from 400 to 1200 CE, the Celts occupied much of central and western Europe. They were known as fearless warriors who “did not dread earthquakes or high tides, which, indeed, they attacked with weapons; but they feared the fall of the sky and the day when fire and water must prevail.”39 And in 1643, a bishop in Ireland discovered an ancient manuscript containing the most detailed Germanic mythology ever found. These myths open with the haunting prophecy of an inspired seeress: “The sun turns black, earth sinks into the sea. The hot stars down from the heavens are whirled.”40

  The overwhelming anxiety that earthquakes might foreshadow a worldwide flood was suffered not just by those who dwelled on the lip of the ocean. The Mari, who still occupy the land west of the Volga River in Russia, believed that the earth was supported on the remaining horn (the other had broken before the Great Flood) of a massive bull. The bull, in turn, balanced precariously on the back of a giant crab, which crouched on the ocean floor. Any movement of the bull’s head was thought to cause earthquakes. The Mari lived in terror that the bull’s remaining horn would snap, sending the earth tumbling once more into the ocean. As the beast’s head tipped, throwing the earth forward, violent earthquakes would erupt. And then, as the earth was pitched from the bull’s horn and hurtled through the air, the sky would seem to fall. Finally, the earth would tumble into the ocean, releasing a cataclysm of water that would drown the world.41

  Throughout ancient Europe giant stones were erected to honor the sun. Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England, is one of the most famous of these sites. Like the structures in North and South America, Stonehenge may have been built as a magical device designed to prevent another earth crust displacement. People clung to the belief that by controlling the sun’s movements, these massive stones might ensure the safety of the world.

  The horseshoe mouth of the stones is open to receive the sun’s rays on the summer solstice. The body of the horseshoe corresponds to the path of the sun from sunrise to sunset. Each day, as spring moves toward summer, the sun rises slightly farther north on the morning horizon. On the summer solstice this “migration” north seems to stall. On the day after the solstice the sun reverses its journey and begins to rise farther south each morning. To a people ever vigilant to the dangers of a wayward sun, any irregularity threatens catastrophe. To prevent this, the priests may have, like their counterparts on Machu Picchu, attempted to symbolically harness the sun by tying its rays to successive stones within the horseshoe. The world would be safe for another year.

  The Greek’s fear of a wayward sun involves their god, Helios, who was responsible for the passage of the sun across the sky. Helios drove a chariot drawn by winged horses that flew a regular route across the sky. The burning sun was dragged behind Helios’s chariot. Helios had
a son, Phaethon, by a mortal woman. The boy traveled to the ends of the earth to find his father. After many adventures he arrived at the edge of the earth, where he saw Helios preparing to harness the winged horses. The son begged for his father’s approval. Helios granted Phaethon one wish.

  Phaethon asked to drive the winged chariot to impress on his doubting friends that he was truly born to a god. Helios was horrified and tried to dissuade his son. The boy would not relent and forced the issue. Locked into his promise, Helios reluctantly relinquished the reins.

  Under Phaethon’s inexperienced hand, the horses veered from their normal path, swinging the raging sun closer and closer to the earth. Fire erupted across the globe. Phaethon was powerless to bring the winged steeds under control. The world was ablaze. Desperately, the gods appealed to Zeus, who reluctantly cast a thunderbolt at Phaeton, killing him. A Great Flood was unleashed to drown the fire.

  The story of the misguided son playing with powers beyond his control traces the sequence of events that would erupt during an earth crust displacement: a shocking change in the path of the sun, followed by a violent worldwide flood.

  In Egypt, the pyramids were also precisely aligned with the rising sun on the summer solstice. In an ancient Egyptian writing, the sun god decrees, “I am the one who hath made the water which becomes the Great Flood.”42 The sun “is usually said to have been born on or by ‘the great flood.’”43

  In Egyptian mythology, the world was seen as a bubble within an endless “Primordial Abyss of Waters.” “This was unlike any sea which has a surface, for here there was neither up nor down, no distinction of side, only a limitless deep—endless, dark, and infinite. . . . It was thought that the seas, the rivers, the rain from heaven, and the waters in the wells, and the torrents of the floods were parts of the Primeval Waters which enveloped the world on every side.”44