Читать книгу Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds - Jerome Clark - Страница 21

From 1923 onward, Cayce’s readings often incorporated references to sitters’ past lives, though reincarnation plays no role in Christianity. In fact, at first the comments — of which, as always, he had no conscious awareness and which, also as always, were pronounced in the first-person plural pronoun—startled and disturbed him. In due course he came to accept them and to believe that family members and close associates had all experienced numerous incarnations together. Many of these could be traced back to the lost continent of Atlantis.

The Atlantis stories amount to a creation myth, a marriage of Genesis to a fantastic tale presumably manufactured in Cayce’s unconscious imagination, inspired in part by occult materials to which Cayce had been exposed. The telling of the epic took place over a period of years and involved some 600 life readings. Allusions to the subject go back to some of the first readings after 1923—with Atlantis referred to also as Alta or Poseidia—but early 1927 readings for Edgar Evans Cayce, Edgar’s 14-year-old son, brought the subject into focus and made it clear, at least to those who took The Source at its word, that Atlantis was to be considered a “real” place, evidence for which still could be uncovered if one were willing to engage in the effort, however difficult, to seek it out.

On February 27, 1927, a life reading informed him that his already evident engineering and mechanical skills had come to him in a past life in Poseidia and that they had served him well through all subsequent incarnations. Three days later, in a followup reading in which the young Cayce asked questions about the nature of Atlantis, The Source began to provide details which eventually—especially through concentrated readings over a period in 1932—would lay out a rich, complex history of a magnificent kingdom from which all of humanity had sprung. Only Cayce’s most devoted followers, some of them still endeavoring to prove the real-world truth of the readings, believe it to represent consensus-level reality. Still, it is quite a story.

It begins with God and, as in Genesis, his command “Let there be light.” In this case, however, “light” meant a being named Amilius, the first soul entity God created around 10,000,000 years ago. Other souls, all of light, followed, but Amilius remained the principal one and uniquely close to the Creator. Together the two fashioned spirits in their image; these spirits headed earthward so that they could incarnate in self-generated physical forms. They sought experiences of taste, touch, smell, and sex unavailable to them as immaterial shapes. Unfortunately, contrary to plans, they found themselves trapped in inferior biological bodies, modeled on animals but with embellishments that generated satyrs, mermaids, unicorns, and other creatures preserved in mythological memory. Amilius transformed himself into Adam and, accompanied by “twin soul” Eve, manifested on Earth—in five different places at once with five different skin colors representing the varying races—in “superior” (present-day Homo sapiens) physical form, intending to lead the other Earth entities back to God. White people appeared first in the Carpathian Mountains, black people in northern Africa, yellow people in the Gobi Desert, and brown people in the Andes and Lemuria. The people of Atlantis had red-hued skin.

A 1933 map depicts the location of Atlantis during the time of the Ice Age, when the water levels of the oceans were much lower (Mary Evans Picture Library).

The earliest civilized order to develop among the new humans—100,000 years ago—was Atlantis, where Amilius/Adam and other followers of God built a temple to celebrate the “law of one,” what we would call Christ Consciousness. As large as Europe, Atlantis was a huge land mass stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Mediterranean—in other words all across the North Atlantic—with islands scattered around it. Its capital city was Poseidia, open and unwalled, situated on a hill overlooking the ocean.

The Atlanteans were giants whose diets consisted of fruits, nuts, vegetables, and goat’s milk. A typical lifespan stretched a thousand years. Atlantis’ technology was in many ways advanced even beyond our own. Their principal achievement was something called the Crystal, which provided heat and energy from the sun and the earth’s interior. The Atlanteans possessed airplanes and submarines and had cracked the secret of antigravity. Even more spectacularly, they were skilled telepaths.

Conflict broke out between those who followed the law of one and the sons of Belial (a.k.a. those of Belial), the latter a movement centered on religious skepticism, materialism, hedonism, and selfish pursuits. Cayce’s readings were usually rendered in a garbled, sometimes nearly incomprehensible prose which at times confounded even his sons, who tried in subsequent writings to explain what their father—or The Source — actually meant. Here is how Hugh Lynn Cayce, writing in 1935, deciphered the account of the dispute:

Very early in Atlantean history, two factions arose that were deeply split over the issue of how to treat these souls that had become so entangled in matter. … The sons of the law of one were those who believed the soul was a gift from God and strove to keep the race pure, free from animal characteristics and appendages. They wanted to aid those deeply entangled in the physical world and help them regain their positions as creatures of God. The sons of Belial were those without standard or morality and believed in gratification of the senses without respect to others. They looked down on these entangled souls as “things” to be treated as slaves or machines.

Evidently, though, it was not this conflict that led to the first destruction of Atlantis around 50,700 B.C.E. The precipitating event was an attempt to protect the civilized world—which had now spread beyond that continent and into regions such as Egypt and India—against marauding giant land animals, sea serpents, and flying creatures. These monsters destroyed land and crops and menaced human beings, making life unbearable to those who were trying to conduct business. It is not wholly clear what these animals were supposed to be. Some readings make them sound like dinosaurs, others monstrous thought creations. In any event, a gathering of nations was held in Egypt—one country where the bestial hordes had yet to penetrate—where those attending discussed ways to slaughter the beasts into extinction via some sort of “death ray.”

In a fashion less than clear, the ultimate consequence—apparently triggered in part by the misuse of the advanced Atlantean weapons technology in the anti-monster war—the earth’s axis shifted. Much—albeit by no means all—of Atlantis was broken up, and the climates of the world’s various regions changed so radically that the monsters died out. Many human beings fell victim to the cataclysm, too, and many Atlanteans fled to other islands and nations. A number survived on the continent, now reduced to a series of five islands, to rebuild and resume social and technological development over the next 22,000 years. Through Atlantis’ history, the entity Amilius continued to reincarnate and, under different names, push his (or her; some incarnations were as a woman) countrymen in positive, productive directions while seeking to frustrate the nefarious schemes of those of Belial.

In 28,000 B.C.E. the second and final destruction of Atlantis took place, this time as a direct result of technology disastrously misapplied. The Atlanteans had developed some sort of enormous crystalline “power station” fueled by a “firestone.” After it was “unintentionally turned too high,” according to The Source, it ignited a shattering explosion, sparking massive volcanic activity and generating a tidal wave that swept across much of the world, to be remembered in legends of the Great Flood. The climate was altered again, possibly because of a polar shift.

Was the once-great Mayan civilization actually built by Atlanteans? (iStock)

Two of Atlantis’ remaining five islands vanished beneath the water, leaving only Poseidia, Aryan, and Og. Many Atlanteans fled or migrated elsewhere, to serve the Law of One as religious leaders. Some went to Egypt, others to the Yucatan and Peru and to what would be the states of Nevada and Colorado. The Atlanteans had long since taken on more or less the appearance and height of human beings as we know them today. The Source described the average lost continental as “five feet ten inches [about two meters], weighing a hundred and sixty pounds; color as of gold that is burnished; yet keen of eye, gray in color. Hair as golden as the body. In activity alert, keen, piercing in vision, and of influence on those that approached.”

Meanwhile, on the surviving Atlantis islands the dispute between the two factions went on, with one dominating for a period, then another. Laborers and the poor also battled for recognition and a rightful place, further roiling the already unstable social and political situation. Then, by around 11,000 B.C.E., authorities concluded that the remaining islands were also destined eventually to fall apart. Over the next thousand years, until the final disaster occurred, migrations sent Atlanteans around the globe, including into the interior of North America, where they would be remembered as the Mound Builders. In a November 12, 1933, reading, The Source reported:

Then, with the leavings of the civilization in Atlantis (in Poseidia, more specific), Iltar—with a group of followers that had been of the household of Atlan, the followers of the worship of the One—with some 10 individuals —left this land Poseidia, and came westward, entering what would now be a portion of Yucatan. And there began, with the activities of the peoples there, the development into a civilization that rose much in the same manner as that which had been in the Atlantean land. [The reference is to the Mayans.] Others left the land later. Others had left the land earlier. There had been upheavals earlier from the land of Mu, or Lemuria, and these had their part in the changing … when much of the contour of the land in Central America and Mexico was changed to that similar to [what] may be seen in the present.

Cayce, who made many predictions about coming events in the twentieth century, declared that Atlantis would rise from the depths in 1968 or 1969. He said that this extraordinary event would take place in a part of the Bahamas, the three-island chain of Bimini (North Bimini, South Bimini, East Bimini) 50 miles (80 kilometers) from the coast of Florida and a part of the Bahamas.