Atlantis: The Antedeluvian WorldDonnelly, Ignatius
History
Atlantis: The Antedeluvian World
Donnelly, Ignatius
Atlantis (Legendary place); Deluge; Ethnology
"Many of the oldest myths," says Baldwin ("Prehistoric Nations," p.
376), "relate to Spain, North-western Africa, and other regions on the
Atlantic, such as those concerning Hercules, the Cronidæ, the
Hyperboreans, the Hesperides, and the Islands of the Blessed. Homer
described the Atlantic region of Europe in his account of the wanderings
of Ulysses.... In the ages previous to the decline of Phoenician
influence in Greece and around the Ægean Sea, the people of those
regions must have had a much better knowledge of Western Europe than
prevailed there during the Ionian or Hellenic period."
The mythology of Greece is really a history of the kings of Atlantis.
The Greek heaven was Atlantis. Hence the references to statues, swords,
etc., that fell from heaven, and were preserved in the temples of the
different states along the shores of the Mediterranean from a vast
antiquity, and which were regarded as the most precious possessions of
the people. They were relics of the lost race received in the early
ages. Thus we read of the brazen or bronze anvil that was preserved in
one city, which fell from heaven, and was nine days and nine nights in
falling; in other words, it took nine days and nights of a
sailing-voyage to bring it from Atlantis.
The modern theory that the gods of Greece never had any personal
existence, but represented atmospheric and meteorological myths, the
movements of clouds, planets, and the sun, is absurd. Rude nations
repeat, they do not invent; to suppose a barbarous people creating their
deities out of clouds and sunsets is to reverse nature. Men first
worship stones, then other men, then spirits. Resemblances of names
prove nothing; it is as if one would show that the name of the great
Napoleon meant "the lion of the desert" (Napo-leon), and should thence
argue that Napoleon never existed, that he was a myth, that he
represented power in solitude, or some such stuff. When we read that
Jove whipped his wife, and threw her son out of the window, the
inference is that Jove was a man, and actually did something like the
thing described; certainly gods, sublimated spirits, aerial sprites, do
not act after this fashion; and it would puzzle the mythmakers to prove
that the sun, moon, or stars whipped their wives or flung recalcitrant
young men out of windows. The history of Atlantis could be in part
reconstructed out of the mythology of Greece; it is a history of kings,
queens, and princes; of love-making, adulteries, rebellions, wars,
murders, sea-voyages, and colonizations; of palaces, temples, workshops,
and forges; of sword-making, engraving and metallurgy; of wine, barley,
wheat, cattle, sheep, horses, and agriculture generally. Who can doubt
that it represents the history of a real people?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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