THE KINGS OF ATLANTIS BECOME THE GODS OF THE GREEKS

LORD BACON said:

“The mythology of the Greeks, which their oldest writers do not pretend to have invented, was no more than a light air, which had passed from a more ancient people into the flutes of the Greeks, which they modulated to such descants as best suited their fancies.”

This profoundly wise and great man, who has illuminated every subject which he has touched, guessed very close to the truth in this utterance.

The Hon. W. E. Gladstone has had quite a debate of late with Mr. Cox as to whether the Greek mythology was underlaid by a nature worship, or a planetary or solar worship.

Peru, worshipping the sun and moon and planets, probably represents very closely the simple and primitive religion of Atlantis, with its sacrifices of fruits and flowers. This passed directly to their colony in Egypt. We find the Egyptians in their early ages sun and planet worshippers. Ptah was the object of their highest adoration. He is the father of the god of the sun, the ruler of the region of light. Ra was the sun-god. He was the supreme divinity at On, or Heliopolis, near Memphis. His symbol was the solar disk, supported by two rings. He created all that exists below the heavens.

The Babylonian trinity was composed of Idea, Anu, and Bel. Bel represented the sun, and was the favorite god. Sin was the goddess of the moon.

The Phœnicians were also sun-worshippers. The sun was

represented by Baal-Samin, the great god, the god of light and the heavens, the creator and rejuvenator.

“The attributes of both Baal and Moloch (the good and bad powers of the sun) were united in the Phœnician god Melkart, “king of the city,” whom the inhabitants of Tyre considered their special patron. The Greeks called him “Melicertes,” and identified him with Hercules. By his great strength and power he turned evil into good, brought life out of destruction, pulled back the sun to the earth at the time of the solstices, lessened excessive beat and cold, and rectified the evil signs of the zodiac. In Phœnician legends he conquers the savage races of distant coasts, founds the ancient settlements on the Mediterranean, and plants the rocks in the Straits of Gibraltar. (“American Cyclopædia,” art. Mythology.)

The Egyptians worshipped the sun under the name of Ra; the Hindoos worshipped the sun under the name of Rama; while the great festival of the sun, of the Peruvians, was called Ray-mi.

Sun-worship, as the ancient religion of Atlantis, underlies all the superstitions of the colonies of that country. The Samoyed woman says to the sun, “When thou, god, risest, I too rise from my bed.” Every morning even now the Brahmans stand on one foot, with their hands held out before them and their faces turned to the east, adoring the sun. “In Germany or France one may still see the peasant take off his hat to the rising sun.” (“Anthropology,” p. 361.) The Romans, even, in later times, worshipped the sun at Emesa, under the name of Elagabalus, “typified in the form of a black conical stone, which it was believed had fallen from heaven.” The conical stone was the emblem of Bel. Did it have relation to the mounds and pyramids?

Sun-worship was the primitive religion of the red men of America. It was found among all the tribes. (Dorman, “Origin of Primitive Superstitions, p. 338.) The Chichimecs called the sun their father. The Comanches have a similar belief.

But, compared with such ancient nations as the Egyptians

and Babylonians, the Greeks were children. A priest of Sais said to Solon,

“You Greeks are novices in knowledge of antiquity. You are ignorant of what passed either here or among yourselves in days of old. The history of eight thousand years is deposited in our sacred books; but I can ascend to a much higher antiquity, and tell you what our fathers have done for nine thousand years; I mean their institutions, their laws, and their most brilliant achievements.”

The Greeks, too young to have shared in the religion of Atlantis, but preserving some memory of that great country and its history, proceeded to convert its kings into gods, and to depict Atlantis itself as the heaven of the human race. Thus we find a great solar or nature worship in the elder nations, while Greece has nothing but an incongruous jumble of gods and goddesses, who are born and eat and drink and make love and ravish and steal and die; and who are worshipped as immortal in presence of the very monuments that testify to their death.

“These deities, to whom the affairs of the world were in trusted, were, it is believed, immortal, though not eternal in their existence. In Crete there was even a story of the death of Zeus, his tomb being pointed out.” (Murray’s “Mythology,” p. 2.)

The history of Atlantis is the key of the Greek mythology. There can be no question that these gods of Greece were human beings. The tendency to attach divine attributes to great earthly rulers is one deeply implanted in human nature. The savages who killed Captain Cook firmly believed that he was immortal, that he was yet alive, and would return to punish them. The highly civilized Romans made gods out of their dead emperors. Dr. Livingstone mentions that on one occasion, after talking to a Bushman for some time about the Deity, he found that the savage thought he was speaking of Sekomi, the principal chief of the district.

We find the barbarians of the coast of the Mediterranean regarding

the civilized people of Atlantis with awe and wonder: “Their physical strength was extraordinary, the earth shaking sometimes under their tread. Whatever they did was done speedily. They moved through space almost without the loss of a moment of time.” This probably alluded to the rapid motion of their sailing-vessels. “They were wise, and communicated their wisdom to men.” That is to say, they civilized the people they came in contact with. ‘They had a strict sense of justice, and punished crime rigorously, and rewarded noble actions, though it is true they were less conspicuous for the latter.” (Murray’s “Mythology,” p. 4.) We should understand this to mean that where they colonized they established a government of law, as contradistinguished from the anarchy of barbarism.

“There were tales of personal visits and adventures of the gods among men, taking part in battles and appearing in dreams. They were conceived to possess the form of human beings, and to be, like men, subject to love and pain, but always characterized by the highest qualities and grandest forms that could be imagined.” (Ibid.)

Another proof that the gods of the Greeks were but the deified kings of Atlantis is found in the fact that “the gods were not looked upon as having created the world.” They succeeded to the management of a world already in existence.

The gods dwelt on Olympus. They lived together like human beings; they possessed palaces, storehouses, stables, horses, etc.; “they dwelt in a social state which was but a magnified reflection of the social system on earth. Quarrels, love passages, mutual assistance, and such instances as characterize human life, were ascribed to them.” (Ibid., p. 10.)

Where was Olympus? It was in Atlantis. “The ocean encircled the earth with a great stream, and was a region of wonders of all kinds.” (Ibid., p. 23.) It was a great island, the then civilized world. The encircling ocean “was spoken of in all the ancient legends. Okeanos lived there with his wife

[paragraph continues]Tethys: these were the Islands of the Blessed, the garden of the gods, the sources of the nectar and ambrosia on which the gods lived.” (Murray’s “Mythology,” p. 23.) Nectar was probably a fermented intoxicating liquor, and ambrosia bread made from wheat. Soma was a kind of whiskey, and the Hindoos deified it. “The gods lived on nectar and ambrosia” simply meant that the inhabitants of these blessed islands were civilized, and possessed a liquor of some kind and a species of food superior to anything in use among the barbarous tribes with whom they came in contact.

This blessed land answers to the description of Atlantis. It was an island full of wonders. It lay spread out in the ocean “like a disk, with the mountains rising from it.” (Ibid.) On the highest point of this mountain dwelt Zeus (the king), “while the mansions of the other deities were arranged upon plateaus, or in ravines lower down the mountain. These deities, including Zeus, were twelve in number: Zeus (or Jupiter), Hera (or Juno), Poseidon (or Neptune), Demeter (or Ceres), Apollo, Artemis (or Diana), Hephæstos (or Vulcan), Pallas Athena (or Minerva), Ares (or Mars), Aphrodite (or Venus), Hermes (or Mercury), and Hestia (or Vesta).” These were doubtless the twelve gods from whom the Egyptians derived their kings. Where two names are given to a deity in the above list, the first name is that bestowed by the Greeks, the last that given by the Romans.

It is not impossible that our division of the year into twelve parts is a reminiscence of the twelve gods of Atlantis. Diodorus Siculus tells us that among the Babylonians there were twelve gods of the heavens, each personified by one of the signs of the zodiac, and worshipped in a certain month of the year. The Hindoos had twelve primal gods, “the Aditya.” Moses erected twelve pillars at Sinai. The Mandan Indians celebrated the Flood with twelve typical characters, who danced around the ark. The Scandinavians believed in the twelve gods, the Aesir, who dwelt on Asgard, the Norse Olympus.

[paragraph continues]Diligent investigation may yet reveal that the number of a modern jury, twelve, is a survival of the ancient council of Asgard.

“According to the traditions of the Phœnicians, the Gardens of the Hesperides were in the remote west.” (Murray’s “Manual of Mythology,” p. 258.) Atlas lived in these gardens. (Ibid., p. 259.) Atlas, we have seen, was king of Atlantis. “The Elysian Fields (the happy islands) were commonly placed in the remote west. They were ruled over by Chronos.” (Ibid., p. 60.) Tartarus, the region of Hades, the gloomy home of the dead, was also located “under the mountains of an island in the midst of the ocean in the remote west.” (Ibid., p. 58.) Atlas was described in Greek mythology as “an enormous giant, who stood upon the western confines of the earth, and supported the heavens on his shoulders, in a region of the west where the sun continued to shine after he had set upon Greece.” (Ibid., p. 156.)

Greek tradition located the island in which Olympus was situated “in the far west,” “in the ocean beyond Africa,” “on the western boundary of the known world,” “where the sun shone when it had ceased to shine on Greece,” and where the mighty Atlas “held up the heavens.” And Plato tells us that the land where Poseidon and Atlas ruled was Atlantis.

“The Garden of the Hesperides” (another name for the dwelling-place of the gods) “was situated at the extreme limit of Africa. Atlas was said to have surrounded it on every side with high mountains.” (Smith’s “Sacred Annals, Patriarchal Age,” p. 131.) Here were found the golden apples.

This is very much like the description which Plato gives of the great plain of Atlantis, covered with fruit of every kind, and surrounded by precipitous mountains descending to the sea.

The Greek mythology, in speaking of the Garden of the Hesperides, tells us that “the outer edge of the garden was slightly raised, so that the water might not run in and overflow the land.” Another reminiscence of the surrounding mountains of Atlantis as described by Plato, and as revealed by the deep-sea soundings of modern times.

Chronos, or Saturn, Dionysos, Hyperion, Atlas, Hercules, were all connected with “a great Saturnian continent;” they were kings that ruled over countries on the western shores of the Mediterranean, Africa and Spain. One account says:

“Hyperion, Atlas, and Saturn, or Chronos, were sons of Uranos, who reigned over a great kingdom composed of countries around the western part of the Mediterranean, with certain islands in the Atlantic. Hyperion succeeded his father, and was then killed by the Titans. The kingdom was then divided between Atlas and Saturn–Atlas taking Northern Africa, with the Atlantic islands, and Saturn the countries on the opposite shore of the Mediterranean to Italy and Sicily.” (Baldwin’s Prehistoric Nations,” p. 357.)

Plato says, speaking of the traditions of the Greeks (“Dialogues, Laws,” c. iv., p. 713), “There is a tradition of the happy life of mankind in the days when all things were spontaneous and abundant. . . . In like manner God in his love of mankind placed over us the demons, who are a superior race, and they, with great care and pleasure to themselves and no less to us, taking care of us and giving us place and reverence and order and justice never failing, made the tribes of men happy and peaceful . . . for Cronos knew that no human nature, invested with supreme power, is able to order human affairs and not overflow with insolence and wrong.”

In other words, this tradition refers to an ancient time when the forefathers of the Greeks were governed by Chronos, of the Cronian Sea (the Atlantic), king of Atlantis, through civilized Atlantean governors, who by their wisdom preserved peace and created a golden age for all the populations under their control–they were the demons, that is, “the knowing ones,” the civilized.

Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates these words (“Dialogues, Cratylus,” p. 397): “My notion would be that the sun, moon, and stars, earth, and heaven, which are still the gods of many barbarians, were the only gods known to the aboriginal Hellenes. . . . What shall follow the gods? Must not demons

and heroes and men come next? . . . Consider the real meaning of the word demons. You know Hesiod uses the word. He speaks of ‘a golden race of men’ who came first. He says of them,

But now that fate has closed over this race,
They are holy demons upon earth,
Beneficent averters of ills, guardians of mortal men.’

He means by the golden men not men literally made of gold, but good and noble men; he says we are of the ‘age of iron.’ He called them demons because they were δαήμονες (knowing or wise).”

This is made the more evident when we read that this region of the gods, of Chronos and Uranos and Zeus, passed through, first, a Golden Age, then a Silver Age–these constituting a great period of peace and happiness; then it reached a Bronze Age; then an Iron Age, and finally perished by a great flood, sent upon these people by Zeus as a punishment for their sins. We read:

“Men were rich then (in the Silver Age), as in the Golden Age of Chronos, and lived in plenty; but still they wanted the innocence and contentment which were the true sources of bu man happiness in the former age; and accordingly, while living in luxury and delicacy, they became overbearing in their manners to the highest degree, were never satisfied, and forgot the gods, to whom, in their confidence of prosperity and com fort, they denied the reverence they owed. . . . Then followed the Bronze Age, a period of constant quarrelling and deeds of violence. Instead of cultivated lands, and a life of peaceful occupations and orderly habits, there came a day when every where might was right, and men, big and powerful as they were, became physically worn out. . . . Finally came the Iron Age, in which enfeebled mankind had to toil for bread with their hands, and, bent on gain, did their best to overreach each other. Dike, or Astræa, the goddess of justice and good faith, modesty and truth, turned her back on such scenes, and retired to Olympus, while Zeus determined to destroy the human race by a great flood. The whole of Greece lay under water, and none but Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha were saved.” (Murray’s “Mythology” p. 44.)

It is remarkable that we find here the same succession of the Iron Age after the Bronze Age that has been revealed to scientific men by the patient examination of the relies of antiquity in Europe. And this identification of the land that was destroyed by a flood–the land of Chronos and Poseidon and Zeus–with the Bronze Age, confirms the view expressed in Chapter VIII. (page 237, ante), that the bronze implements and weapons of Europe were mainly imported from Atlantis.

And here we find that the Flood that destroyed this land of the gods was the Flood of Deucalion, and the Flood of Deucalion was the Flood of the Bible, and this, as we have shown, was “the last great Deluge of all,” according to the Egyptians, which destroyed Atlantis.

The foregoing description of the Golden Age of Chronos, when “men were rich and lived in plenty,” reminds us of Plato’s description of the happy age of Atlantis, when “men despised everything but virtue, not caring for their present state of life, and thinking lightly of the possession of gold and other property;” a time when, as the chants of the Delaware Indians stated it (page 109, ante), “all were willingly pleased, all were well-happified.” While the description given by Murray in the above extract of the degeneracy of mankind in the land of the gods, “a period of constant quarrelling and deeds of violence, when might was right,” agrees with Plato’s account of the Atlanteans, when they became “aggressive,” “unable to bear their fortune,” “unseemly,” “base,” “filled with unrighteous avarice and power,”–and “in a most wretched state.” And here again I might quote from the chant of the Delaware Indians–“they became troubled, hating each other; both were fighting, both were spoiling, both were never peaceful.” And in all three instances the gods punished the depravity of mankind by a great deluge. Can all these precise coincidences be the result of accident?

May we not even suppose that the very word “Olympus” is a transformation from “Atlantis” in accordance with the laws

that regulate the changes of letters of the same class into each other? Olympus was written by the Greeks “Olumpos.” The letter a in Atlantis was sounded by the ancient world broad and full, like the a in our words all or altar; in these words it approximates very closely to the sound of o. It is not far to go to convert Otlontis into Oluntos, and this into Olumpos. We may, therefore, suppose that when the Greeks said that their gods dwelt in “Olympus,” it was the same as if they said that they dwelt in “Atlantis.”

Nearly all the gods of Greece are connected with Atlantis. We have seen the twelve principal gods all dwelling on the mountain of Olympus, in the midst of an island in the ocean in the far west, which was subsequently destroyed by a deluge on account of the wickedness of its people. And when we turn to Plato’s description of Atlantis (p. 13, ante) we find that Poseidon and Atlas dwelt upon a mountain in the midst of the island; and on this mountain were their magnificent temples and palaces, where they lived, separated by great walls from their subjects.

It may be urged that Mount Olympus could not have referred to any mountain in Atlantis, because the Greeks gave that name to a group of mountains partly in Macedonia and partly in Thessaly. But in Mysia, Lycia, Cyprus, and elsewhere there were mountains called Olympus; and on the plain of Olympia, in Elis, there was an eminence bearing the same designation. There is a natural tendency among uncivilized peoples to give a “local habitation” to every general tradition.

“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 Phœnician 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?

Uranos was the first god; that is to say, the first king of the great race. As he was at the commencement of all things, his symbol was the sky. He probably represented the race previous even to the settlement of Atlantis. He was a son of Gæa (the earth). He seems to have been the parent of three races–the Titans, the Hekatoncheires, and the Kyklopes or Cyclops.

I incline to the belief that these were civilized races, and that the peculiarities ascribed to the last two refer to the vessels in which they visited the shores of the barbarians.

The empire of the Titans was clearly the empire of Atlantis. “The most judicious among our mythologists” (says Dr. Rees, “New British Cyclopædia,” art. Titans)–“such as Gerard Vossius, Marsham, Bochart, and Father Thomassin–are of opinion that the partition of the world among the sons of Noah-Shem, Ham, and Japheth–was the original of the tradition of the same partition among Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto,” upon the breaking up of the great empire of the Titans. “The learned Pezron contends that the division which was made of this vast empire came, in after-times, to be taken for the partition of the whole world; that Asia remaining in the hands of Jupiter (Zeus), the most potent of the three brothers, made him looked upon as the god of Olympus; that the sea and islands which fell to Neptune occasioned their giving him the title of ‘god of the sea;’ and that Spain, the extremity of the then known world, thought to be a very low country in respect of Asia, and famous for its excellent mines of gold and silver, failing to Pluto, occasioned him to be taken for the ‘god of the infernal regions.'” We should suppose that Pluto possibly ruled over the transatlantic possessions of Atlantis in America, over those “portions of the opposite continent” which Plato tells us were dominated by Atlas and his posterity, and which, being far beyond or below sunset, were the “under-world” of

Source: Atlantis, the Antediluvian World, by Ignatius Donnelly

THE KINGS OF ATLANTIS BECOME THE GODS OF THE GREEKS

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