Atlantis: The Antedeluvian WorldDonnelly, Ignatius
History
Atlantis: The Antedeluvian World
Donnelly, Ignatius
Atlantis (Legendary place); Deluge; Ethnology
13. The Barbarians who are alluded to by Homer and Thucydides were a
race of ancient navigators and pirates called Cares, or Carians, who
occupied the isles of Greece before the Pelasgi, and antedated the
Phoenicians in the control of the sea. The Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg
claims that these Carians were identical with the Caribs of the West
Indies, the Caras of Honduras, and the Gurani of South America. (Landa's
"Relacion," pp. 52-65.)
14. When we consider it closely, one of the most extraordinary customs
ever known to mankind is that to which I have already alluded in a
preceding chapter, to wit, the embalming of the body of the dead man,
with a purpose that the body itself may live again in a future state. To
arrive at this practice several things must coexist:
a. The people must be highly religious, and possessed of an organized
and influential priesthood, to perpetuate so troublesome a custom from
age to age.
b. They must believe implicitly in the immortality of the soul; and this
implies a belief in rewards and punishments after death; in a heaven and
a hell.
c. They must believe in the immortality of the body, and its
resurrection from the grave on some day of judgment in the distant
future.
d. But a belief in the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of
the body is not enough, for all Christian nations hold to these beliefs;
they must supplement these with a determination that the body shall not
perish; that the very flesh and blood in which the man died shall rise
with him on the last day, and not a merely spiritual body.
Now all these four things must coexist before a people proceed to embalm
their dead for religious purposes. The probability that all these four
things should coexist by accident in several widely separated races is
slight indeed. The doctrine of chances is all against it. There is here
no common necessity driving men to the same expedient, with which so
many resemblances have been explained; the practice is a religious
ceremony, growing out of religious beliefs by no means common or
universal, to wit, that the man who is dead shall live again, and live
again in the very body in which he died. Not even all the Jews believed
in these things.
If, then, it should appear that among the races which we claim were
descended from Atlantis this practice of embalming the dead is found,
and nowhere else, we have certainly furnished evidence which can only be
explained by admitting the existence of Atlantis, and of some great
religious race dwelling on Atlantis, who believed in the immortality of
soul and body, and who embalmed their dead. We find, as I have shown:
First. That the Guanches of the Canary Islands, supposed to be a remnant
of the Atlantean population, preserved their dead as mummies.
Second. That the Egyptians, the oldest colony of Atlantis, embalmed
their dead in such vast multitudes that they are now exported by the ton
to England, and ground up into manures to grow English turnips.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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