©1999 Jay Weidner and Vincent Bridges
Republished with permission of Jay Weidner.
It is hard to determine exactly when the Old World discovered the New. Columbus’ voyages marks a watershed only of publicity and royal exploitation. Given that he seemed to know exactly where he was going and had fairly accurate sailing directions on how to get there, discovery is hardly the correct term. In fact, the farther back we go, the less of a distinction we find between the Old World and the New. One of the prime mysteries of the Bronze Age, roughly 3000 BCE to around 800 BCE, is where did the enormous amounts of copper needed to plate whole buildings in bronze, such as we find in Minoan Crete, come from? The tin came from England and the coast of Cornwall, but there is no significant copper deposits in Europe or the Mediterranean Basin. So where did all this copper come from?
In the five hundred years before Columbus, we find evidence of Vikings, Scottish and Welsh princes and Irish monks all traveling to the New World. Indeed, the Vikings created a colony in North America. A 12th century Pope even appointed a bishop to Vinland, and the remains of his church can still be seen today in Newport, Rhode Island’s Stone Tower. The Viking sagas show that they penetrated into the upper mid-west and the Great Lakes. The sagas also refer to the inhabitants of what is now New England as being Irish, labeling the region White Man’s Land.
This is curious, since New England has many Celtic and even megalithic type stone structures whose closest analogs are found in Ireland and the west coast of Britain. Such structures are found in odd places up and down the east coast, and differ greatly from the clearly indigenous Hopewell and Adena cultures in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. In the Grave Creek burial mound in West Virginia, a clay tablet was found with an inscription in ancient Celto-Iberian exchanging greetings from the Queen of a Celtic culture to the east and the king of the local Hopewell nation. This has been dated to around 1000 BCE. One must assume that the copper trade was still viable at that point, since the Hopewell federation contained many sources of easily accessible copper.
A megalithic or Celtic presence in North America seems indisputable given the evidence of the structures and inscriptions on the ground. But they were not the only visitors to the New World. The Egyptians may have traveled as far as Australia in the middle of the 3rd millennium BCE, where the cartouche of Rajedef, the son of Khufu of Great Pyramid fame, has been found carved in stone in the desert outback. By the time of Hatshepsut, a millennium later, regular trade voyages were under way to places that remain unknown to this day. One of these was the “land of the copper mountain,” as the inscription reads on the porch of her mortuary tomb on the west bank at Luxor. The fact that cocaine and nicotine residue has been found in New Kingdom mummies suggests that this trade was in fact with South America.
Soon after Hatshepsut’s reign, New Kingdom Egypt lost its overseas trade to the up and coming Sea Peoples, the Phoenicians and the Minoans. By the time the Queen of the Celtic east in America was conducting her negotiations with the Hopewell magnate, a Phoenician was sure to be the middle man in the exchange. Their trading culture began to fade with the arrival of iron equipped Aryans, such as the Doric Greeks, a century or so after the turn of the 1st millennium BCE. These of course are the Greeks of our history books, brash barbarians eager to acquire the knowledge of the ancient world.
Which brings us to Plato and his story of Atlantis. In his dialogues, teaching stories told as if they were sessions with the philosopher Socrates, Plato introduces the idea of an ancient civilization that died out in a great catastrophe roughly 9000 years before the Golden Age of ancient Greece. In most of these dialogues it is hard tell which are Socrates’ ideas and which are Plato’s, but the Atlantis story is solidly attributed. In the Critias, it is Plato’s friend of the same name who relates his tale. He claims to have heard it from his grandfather who learned it from the great Solon, one of Greece’s Seven Sages, who heard it from an Egyptian priest of Sais named Sonchis. Thus the story has a clear and undeniably prominent lineage.
Plato insisted four times that the story was true. He was quite definite about it. “The fact that it is not invented fable but a genuine history is all important,” he tells us in the Timaeus. The most reasonable explanation is that Solon gave an accurate account of what his Egyptian source told him. From this, we would be wise to consider Atlantis as a genuine Egyptian tradition, rather than a philosophical fable. Chances are, Atlantis really existed and it wasn’t Minoan Crete, although they may have had “Atlantean” connections.
But where was it? Plato tells us that “in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Hercules.” This seems clear enough, but modern knowledge of sea-floor spreading and continental drift suggest that no extra island of any size is possible in the mid Atlantic. The sunken continent idea seems improbable, even though Plato insists that Atlantis disappeared in a single day and night of catastrophe.
Modern consensus among archeologists and scholars is that if there is any truth to Plato’s tale, then it must be referring to the explosion of Thera, an island in the Aegean Sea, around 1500 BCE. Along with ignoring Plato’s precise location and dating, this theory has massive problem on its own terms. Dramatic as the destruction of Thera was, its loss hardly effected life in the Mediterranean. The Minoans did not fade out over night; their main cities were not abandoned or destroyed for another hundred years. The Phoenicians were untouched, and their expansion of trade routes increased in the centuries after Thera’s explosion. Thera was a disaster, and its destruction was sudden, but it was hardly the fall of Atlantis.
Other theorists have located Atlantis in places as fanciful as Ceylon and Heligoland in the Baltic Sea. Ignatius Donnelly, a 19th century American political figure, wrote two massive books on Atlantis and the various catastrophes of prehistory. Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, while believing in a mid-Atlantic island and other outdated ideas, comes closest to being the text book on Atlantis. Donnelly’s suggestions are very close to the truth, as when he speculates that the end of the last Ice Age coincides nicely with Plato’s dates for the destruction of Atlantis.
However, Donnelly and the other mid-Atlantic theorists are right to take Plato literally in front of the pillars of Hercules is clear and simple enough but they are misled by their maps. If we look at a standard wall map of the world, we see only open ocean in front of the Pillars of Hercules. There is certainly room in the mid-Atlantic for a very large island or continent. But if we look at polar projection map or a globe, we notice something right away. There already is a large island continent in front of the Pillars. It’s called South America.
Plato tells us that “in a single day of misfortune, the island of Atlantis disappeared in the depths of the sea.” Given the evidence of modern geology, it is hard to conceive of how an entire continent, or even a very large island, could become completely submerged beneath the ocean. Even extreme theories, such as crustal displacement, can’t account for a complete disappearance. We would do better to interpret Plato’s statement as being a description of a vast tidal wave that brought the depths of the sea to Atlantis, than to insist on a literal sunken continent.
With that in mind, we turned to South America with new interest. Did it fit, in any significant way, Plato’s description? Plato says that Atlantis was larger than Libya and Asia Minor combined, suggesting an accessible coast line of over a thousand miles. South America is the only candidate, including mythical mid-Atlantic islands, that fits this criteria. He goes on to say that Atlantis “was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent, which surrounds the true Ocean.” However you read this, it is quite startling and reveals that whoever told Solon originally knew much more of the true geography of the planet than he should have. Let us merely note that this description clearly could apply to South America. Evidence has been found of ancient visits to the Andean coast from Japan and China.
And, there is evidence in South America of both advanced civilizations and catastrophic destruction. On the shore of Lake Titicaca, high in the Peruvian Andes, stands the mysterious ancient city of Tiahuanaco, built according to tradition by the Andean culture hero Viracoca. Viracoca first appeared in Tiahuanaco after a great disaster had destroyed everything. This is from Father Molina in his chronicle Relacion de las fabulas ritos de los Yngas:
“They say that in it (the catastrophe) perished all races of men and created things insomuch that the waters rose above the highest mountain peaks in the world. No living thing survived except a man and a woman who remained in a box, and, when the weather subsided, the wind carried them to Tiahuanaco (where) the creator began to raise up the people and the nations that are in that region.”
Even today, the ruins of Tiahuanaco are impressive. To the early Spanish visitors after the conquest they were truly awe inspiring. Garcilasco de la Vega, who visited in the mid 16th century, described it this way: “We must now say something about the large and almost incredible buildings of Tiahuanaco. There is an artificial hill, of great height, built on stone foundations so that the earth will not slide. There are gigantic figures carved in stone these are much worn which shows great antiquity. There are walls, the stones of which are so enormous it is difficult to imagine what human force could have put them into place. And there are the remains of strange buildings, the most remarkable being stone portals, hewn out of solid rock; these stand on bases up to 30 feet long, 15 feet wide and 6 feet thick. How, and with the use of what tools or implements, massive works of such size could be achieved are questions which we are unable to answer.”
One of the stone portals de la Vega describes stands at the north-west corner of a vast enclosure known as the Place of Upright Stones. This portal, while an amazing work of art, is also a complex and accurate calendar in stone. The whole complex has been found to be an intricate astronomical observatory, perhaps designed to calculate alignments of solstices and equinoxes with the galactic core and edge. Whatever it was designed to do, its astronomical nature allows us to date its construction with precision.
In the 1920’s, Professor Arthur Posnansky, a German-Bolivian scholar who had been investigating Tiahuanaco for almost fifty years, published his monumental, four volume Tiahuanaco: the Cradle of American Man. By using the small differences in the earth’s tilt against the ecliptic and its effect on the sunrise azimuth from century to century, Posnansky calculated a date for the construction of Tiahuanaco.
The earth’s tilt changes slightly over time, with a length of one and a half precessional cycles between maximum and minimum. As we saw above, Reich postulated that the tilt ‘s angle is caused by the earth’s spin in the midst of an Orgone flow from the center of the galaxy. On the basis of this bobbing or rolling motion, like a ship on an ocean, Reich predicted the reason for the narrow, three degree band of the tilt. LaViolette also speculates that the periodic eruptions from the galactic core could create the tilt, and therefore its relationship to precessional motion, Fulcanelli’s “heliocoidal track of the sun.”
Posnansky found that by establishing the solar alignments of key structures that now looked out of true, he could determine the angle of the ecliptic tilt at the time when the structure was built. He found a tilt of 23 degrees, eight minutes and 48 seconds. Comparing this angle to the graph developed in 1911 by the International Conference of Ephemerids, we find a date of around 15,000 BCE. Naturally, most orthodox archeologists found this hard to take.
But his work was checked by a high-powered group of specialists and at the end of a three year study concluded that Posnansky’s observations were correct. The sites at Tiahuanaco were indeed laid out to match a tilt angle derived date of circa 15,000 BCE. This did little to changing the prevailing archeological paradigm, even today glossy picture books of the Andes tell us that Tiahuanaco was built by the pre-Inca civilization around 500 BCE. No one has an answer for why anyone would build an observatory with its instruments 14 and a half millennia out of alignment.
Tiahuanaco was originally built as a port on the shores of Lake Titicaca when the lake was at least 100 feet deeper and far wider. In that case, Tiahuanaco would have been an island, and we can see the changes in the lake level and shoreline for over 5,000 years of inhabitance. Until some time in the eleventh millennium BCE, when a sudden natural disaster struck the city. The evidence of this disaster is still visible in the vast chunks of rocks littering the site like so many discarded match sticks.
Posnansky argued that “this catastrophe was caused by seismic movements which resulted in an overflow of the waters of Lake Titicaca” in a vast flood. He cites the evidence of jumbles of human, animal and fish bones covered by an alluvial deposit, suggesting that the water descended on Lake Titicaca and Tiahuanaco “in onrushing and unrestrainable torrents.”
This certainly sounds like Plato’s description of the destruction of Atlantis. Curiously enough, it also matches LaViolette’s predictions of the effects of the double catastrophe of a galactic core explosion. And while the initial destruction was sudden, the disasters continued for almost two millennium before the people of Tiahuanaco gave up and departed. This also fits LaViolette’ galactic core explosion scenario and prediction.
Does that mean that Tiahuanaco is the lost city of Atlantis? Possibly, for there is one curious connection with Plato’s tale that is hard to account for any other way. Plato tells us that Atlantis contained a great number of elephants, a fact that argues against Crete or Thera. Present day South America of course has no elephants, but during the last Ice Age it apparently did. Remains have been found of a species called Cuvieronius which was an elephant-like proboscid complete with trunk and tusks. We find these animals carved on the great stone portal of the Gateway of the Sun, suggesting they were common in the Tiahuanaco area. These “elephants” however became extinct around 10,000 BCE.
Suggestive as this is, Tiahuanaco, even as an island, fails to match Plato’s description of the city of Atlantis. His account of the city may in fact be purely symbolic or allegorical. Dr. LaViolette points out that the description of Atlantis matches a subquantum kinetic model of the primordial atom. At the very least, this would suggest that the Atlanteans had an understanding of continuous creation ether physics.
While we can’t definitely say that the ancient cultures of South America are the lost Atlanteans, we can say that the likelihood is strong. No other alternative matches Plato so closely, and an advanced civilization in 15,000 BCE, whatever its resemblance to Plato, must be considered a candidate for Atlantis.
The Cross at Hendaye’s inscription encodes a place of refuge, a place where the survivors of the last catastrophe gathered. It clearly says Inca Cave, Cusco, Peru, directing us to the ancestors of the mysterious builders of Tiahuanaco, the Inca. Whether or not Atlantis can be found in the Andes, Fulcanelli and the Cross are telling us that the place of refuge can be found there.
During the final draft of this volume, long after the above section was written, cartographer J. M. Allen published his Atlantis: The Andes Solution which not only supported our ideas on Atlantis in the Andes, but disclosed the actual location of the city itself. It is not often, while navigating such obscure waters, that one finds independent confirmation of one’s more sensational theories. But it is truly gratifying when it happens.
Starting with the same common sense deductions that we arrived at, Allen focuses on South America as the most logical choice for Atlantis. He notes that the Indian name before Columbus had been reported as “Atlanta,” a name Allen feels is related to the Quechua word for copper, “antis,” and the Nahuatl word for water, “atl.” Since “antis” is the origin of the word Andes, then we might suspect that the phrase on Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple is the Egyptian name for Atlantis.
Allen turned to Plato and taking his description of a rectangular plain criss-crossed by a grid of canals in the middle of the island literally, settled on the Altiplano of southern Peru and northern Bolivia as the best match. He built a three dimensional model of the region and discovered Plato’s “rectangular plain surrounded by mountains.”
This, Allen believed, was the key to the mystery. Plato describes a plain in the center of the long side of the continent, next to a body of water. The plain was very smooth and level, surrounded by mountains on all sides, high above ocean level with the form of “a quadrangle, rectilinear for the most part and elongated.” This is in fact a close description of the Altiplano, the largest level plain in the world which also contains the two inland seas of Lake Titicaca and Lake Poopo.
With this in mind, Allen went looking for Plato’s regular grid pattern. It was described as a 600 foot wide canal running around the perimeter of the plain with regular intersections and transverse canals forming a vast grid-work. “It only remains then to discover on site evidence of a channel 600 ft wide to say without any more doubts that here indeed is the proof that the city and the civilization of Atlantis existed in these parts,” Allen informs us. Satellite and aerial photos suggest that such canals do exist, and in the summer of 1995, Allen traveled to Bolivia in search of them.
“I found,” he tells us, “the remains of a channel of enormous dimensions, the base of the canal was around 120 ft wide and the gently sloping sides were each of some 230 ft making it just under 600 ft from crest to crest of the parallel embankments.” Atlantis, it seemed, had been located.
Allen buttresses his argument with examples of mineral wealth and early mining that match Plato’s description. Atlantean use of gold to plate their sacred precincts has echoes in the Inca temples discovered by the Spanish, and a natural alloy of gold and copper mentioned by Plato can be found as a mineral only in the region of the Altiplano. As the matches mount up, we are convinced that Allen has discovered the source of Plato’s tale.
For most interpreters and Atlantis seekers, the description of the city itself is the most problematic. Why concentric circles of water and land? It seems odd and un-necessary. But the Altiplano hypothesis addresses this very issue. Being an ancient volcanic region, there are many eroded volcanic cones near the Altiplano, including one on the north-east side of Lake Poopo, which match in size Plato’s dimensions. These cones form natural concentric circles out from the central flue of the volcano and can be easily shaped and filled with water to produce the specific Atlantis configuration, which Allen calls the Cross of Atlantis. It is just possible that this ancient civilization built its greatest city as a model of the primordial atom of continuous creation and the Great Cross of the galactic alignment.
Allen’s work does have a few flaws. He seems hesitant to let go of the Sea Peoples and the Bronze Age date of Thera, even though he tells us that Lake Poopo flooded the region around 12,000 BCE. It is hard to account for this reluctance to go with the older dates. He is apparently unaware of Professor Posnansky’s work, and barely mentions archeo-astronomy in any meaningful way. Even with these gaps, it is clear that Allen is presenting significant evidence for the location and date of Atlantis.
Here we have proof that Fulcanelli’s place of refuge was the ancient home of the advanced global civilization of pre-history. The Atlantean culture survived a thousand years or more of intermittent catastrophe before finally emigrating to their colonies around the planet. Viracoca of the Incas was the god-like survivor from the Atlantean civilization who brought back to cataclysm ravaged regions the skills and graces of civilization, including perhaps the knowledge of how to calculate the time of the next cosmic disaster.