Atlantis: The Antedeluvian WorldDonnelly, Ignatius
History
Atlantis: The Antedeluvian World
Donnelly, Ignatius
Atlantis (Legendary place); Deluge; Ethnology
"The second tradition is the Thessalian legend of Deucalion. Zeus having
worked to destroy the men of the age of bronze, with whose crimes he was
wroth, Deucalion, by the advice of Prometheus, his father, constructed a
coffer, in which he took refuge with his wife, Pyrrha. The Deluge came;
the chest, or coffer, floated at the mercy of the waves for nine days
and nine nights, and was finally stranded on Mount Parnassus. Deucalion
and Pyrrha leave it, offer sacrifice, and, according to the command of
Zeus, repeople the world by throwing behind them 'the bones of the
earth'--namely, stones, which change into men. This Deluge of Deucalion
is, in Grecian tradition, what most resembles a universal deluge. Many
authors affirm that it extended to the whole earth, and that the whole
human race perished. At Athens, in memory of the event, and to appease
the manes of its victims, a ceremony called Hydrophoria was observed,
having so close a resemblance to that in use at Hierapolis, in Syria,
that we can hardly fail to look upon it as a Syro-Phoenician importation,
and the result of an assimilation established in remote antiquity
between the Deluge of Deucalion and that of Khasisatra, as described by
the author of the treatise 'On the Syrian Goddess.' Close to the temple
of the Olympian Zeus a fissure in the soil was shown, in length but one
cubit, through which it was said the waters of the Deluge had been
swallowed up. Thus, every year, on the third day of the festival of the
Anthestéria, a day of mourning consecrated to the dead--that is, on the
thirteenth of the month of Anthestérion, toward the beginning of
March--it was customary, as at Bambyce, to pour water into the fissure,
together with flour mixed with honey, poured also into the trench dug to
the west of the tomb, in the funeral sacrifices of the Athenians."
In this legend, also, there are passages which point to Atlantis. We
will see hereafter that the Greek god Zeus was one of the kings of
Atlantis. "The men of the age of bronze" indicates the civilization of
the doomed people; they were the great metallurgists of their day, who,
as we will see, were probably the source of the great number of
implements and weapons of bronze found all over Europe. Here, also,
while no length of time is assigned to the duration of the storm, we
find that the ark floated but nine days and nights. Noah was one year
and ten days in the ark, Khasisatra was not half that time, while
Deucalion was afloat only nine days.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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