Читать книгу Edgar Cayce's Origin and Destiny of Man - Lytle Webb Robinson - Страница 11

Ever since Plato wrote his startling account of a sunken continent, men have debated the reality of its existence. Indeed, no historical subject has produced more controversy and been of such persistent duration. Long since lost in antiquity, here is a land and a people about which history officially knows nothing. In spite of Plato’s story and some 25,000 volumes subsequently written on the subject, only the bravest of modern scholars give any credence to the Atlantean theory.

The first recorded mention of such a land is in Plato’s Timaeus, written in the fifth century before Christ. Here the great philosopher describes a conversation between certain Egyptian priests and Solon, an Athenian statesman of the seventh century B.C. The priests represented Atlantis as a great island larger than Asia Minor and Libya combined, lying just beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. It had been a powerful kingdom 9,000 years before the birth of Solon, in 638 B.C., and its invading hordes had overrun the lands that bordered the Mediterranean.

Only Athens itself had successfully withstood the Atlantean invasions. Finally, because of the wickedness of its inhabitants, earthquakes and the sea overwhelmed Atlantis, and it disappeared into the ocean. In the unfinished Critias, Plato adds a history of the ideal commonwealth of Atlantis—the political Utopia of another age.

Pliny, the Roman naturalist, also discusses it in his Natural History, a sort of encyclopedia written in the first century A.D. Early Arabian geographers place Atlantis on their maps. Medieval writers accepted it as true history, and their beliefs were substantiated by numerous traditions of ancient islands in the eastern seas, which offered various points of resemblance to Atlantis. Some of these sunken islands were marked on maps as late as the sixteenth century A.D.

There are traditions of a great flood among almost all races of ancient peoples, indicating a common origin and a widespread acceptance of the legend. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the subject of Atlantis was still seriously debated and its credibility admitted by such men as Voltaire, Montaigne, and Buffon. Francis Bacon, in his allegory, The New Atlantis, published in 1627, presents it as a symbolic Utopia established on scientific principles: a high cultivation of natural science and the arts.

Many attempts have since been made to rationalize the story of Atlantis, the best perhaps being Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, by Ignatius Donnelly. The land has variously been identified with America, the Scandinavian countries, the Canary Islands, and Palestine—but usually with the main body of it lying in the North Atlantic.

Perhaps its most prominent defender of modern times was Edward H. Thompson, archaeologist and American Consul for twenty-four years to Yucatan, Mexico. He died in 1935, still convinced that the mysterious tribe of Mayan Indians of Central America was originally from Atlantis. A few others have held to this view despite the ridicule of the conservative element of science.

Scholars have long tended to regard the whole story as invention, since no contemporary written records have been found. Little credence is given to the early accounts, the legends or the theory, although the latter does answer many otherwise unanswered questions. Plato, Pliny, and Bacon are not known as writers of pointless fiction, and the story as a myth would appear to be grossly out of place in serious philosophic and historic works. Why they should now be accused of fabricating their accounts, except partially in the case of Bacon, is as regrettable as it is unrealistic and unlikely.

Geologists have discovered that the coastline of western Europe at one time extended farther in the direction of America than it does now and that its submergence must have taken place long before history was recorded. There are known mountain ranges, ravines, and ridges in the bottom of the Atlantic. Because of a broken cable running between Brest and Cape Cod, geologists found lava that proved to have hardened under atmospheric conditions—and therefore above water—less than 15,000 years ago. In Colorado an ancient dog’s skull of European origin was identified as that of a species 12 to 15 million years old, suggesting a land bridge to that continent.

Archaeological findings reveal striking similarities between ancient Egyptian and Central American architecture, art, and inscriptions, although the two lands are separated by thousands of miles of ocean. Atlantean migration to both areas is a plausible answer, especially since no other satisfactory solution to the problem has been put forth.

Atlantis is first mentioned in the Cayce records in a reading given in 1923. After that, many facets of its history appear hundreds of times in readings for different persons over a period of twenty-three years. The readings not only corroborate its existence and the best that has been written on the subject, but they supply much that is new and give a detailed and comprehensive picture of the land and its peoples. More than that, and perhaps most important of all, they relate its amazing civilization to our present age in a way that is stirring, convincing, and alarming.

Interwoven in the last era of the Atlantean culture are factors that have direct and significant influences on the problems of current events at home and abroad. These are not by accident; and the numerous parallels between the two civilizations drive home the crucial importance of the decisions America now faces.