Hi, All, and particularly, Dick Fojut and Hazel!
First, thank you both for your kindly responses to my last message. This time, after reading some of your comments upon Atlantis and James Churchward, I would like to stick in my own two bits (or maybe ten bucks) worth about Atlantis and its location, if I may! I have endeavoured to read up just about everything I can find about the original whereabouts of Atlantis, and have finally come to the conclusion that it was exactly where Plato claimed it to be - just outside the Straits of Gibraltar (or the Pillars or Hercules).
Many learned scholars have attempted to make Plato out to be some kind of a liar and that his famous "Dialogues" of Critias and Timaeus, and those of Solon, his maternal ancestor, who heard it all directly from the Egyptian priests of Sais, were nothing more than fictitious inventions of his fertile imagination.
But why would he want to lie about such a thing? What could possibly be in it for him? It sounds to me suspiciously like that same sort of disbelief with which Herodotus was also treated when he reported all that interesting "inside info" about ancient Egypt. I just cannot buy it, as these men were reputable philosophers of their day, as well as historians. The same thing is still rife in our modern philosophical and intellectual society - anyone who reports anything which flies in the face of orthodox scientific "belief" - which is ALL it is - is regarded either as a liar, a crank, a gullible fool, or a loony!
Even we Hollow Planeteers are lumped into the same generic category as the Flat Earthers, along with the Mars Cydonian Anomaly crowd, by people who haven't even bothered to seriously read up anything about such possibilities! They just brand us all as purveyors of wild and unprovable hypotheses - as if the Scientific Establishment themselves have actually been down and checked out the Earth's nickel iron core, by way of their 3000-mile mantle of molten magma. Or that they have now unearthed all the sequential and intact skeletons of the thousands of evolving Missing Links purported to have existed between us and the ancestor of ourselves and the apes. Or that they have clear and conclusive evidence that there is nothing to be discovered upon Mars but rust and dust! This patronizing and patently dishonest attitude on the part of the Science Establishment really makes me choke with frustrated anger!
After all, when we speak of our own particular subject as a being "purely a theory", we mean what we say. But not so the august Science Establishment. Yet, when you get right down to it, most of their alleged "Scientific Knowledge" is itself founded largely upon pure theory, hypothesis and speculation, which has somehow miraculously evolved into "Factual Truth" through time-honoured tradition over the past decades, and docile acceptance as such by the lay-public of the world. No one *actually* knows how the Universe got started or how our own solar System came into being, but every new science-book we pick up - particularly those for young children - is crammed with totally unproven "Facts", all beautifully illustrated and printed in glorious four-color offset litho, accompanied by glibly worded text that would convince even Einstein, if he were to return tomorrow!
However, having got all that off my chest, let me come back to my point - which, I hasten to add, is all based on speculation and educated guesswork.
I personally believe that Plato meant just what he said, when he posited Atlantis as lying "beyond the Pillars of Hercules". I don't think he made it up at all, but he may have apdopted the custom of Greek writers and historians to choose his words and present them in the form of a "discourse", because that was the Greek scholarly way of stating such beliefs. Herodotos, as I've already pointed out, tended to use the same style of hyperbolic presentation in his discourses on history - especially that which he had learned from the Egyptians. I think it was presented in this circumlocative manner to save a lot of endless argument and heckling, and maybe modern scholars could learn much from this approach.
Well, now! As to why I believe Plato's story.
I believe that the site is as good as any other, and I also think that Charles Hapgood's theory about the disappearance of Mu in a series of cataclysmic sinkings, due to the collapsing of subterranean and suboceanic gas-caverns or "chambers" is a tenable one. Geologists cannot disprove their existence, any more than they can disprove that the Earth is hollow! However, I suspect that Plato might have been given just a touch of exaggeration as to the actual size of Atlantis, and that it was probably a lot smaller than the area he mentioned. After all, he hadn't seen it for himself, and it's my experience with such accounts that they tend to become embellished and added to as they are retold.
In my humble opinion, I believe the Canary Islands, plus Madiera and Funchal, the Azores ridge, and possibly the Azores Islands plateau, are all high peaks and elevated remnants of a sunken Atlantean land mass (or masses), which has long since been covered by the tidal sediment of the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea. I also believe that at the time of Atlantis' peak of civilization and commerce as one of the world's greatest seafaring nations, what today is the Mediterranean Sea, was then a huge fertile valley, upon the floor of which there were a good many cities and towns. Ancient legends and historic references claim that there are at least 250 such sites beneath the Mediterranean Sea, and this is now being revealed to be the case as more and more cities are being located by undersea archaeoloogists.
According to ancient accounts I have come across, and also those related by the oracular David Hatcher Childress, the Mediterranean Valley was once partially occupied by a breakaway group of Atlanteans known as the Osirians, who managed to build up a fairly sizeable Empire of their own. As far as I can gather, they still continued to follow the traditions of the Atlanteans in both their religion and their lifestyle, even after their original homeland had vanished, in two or three separate, devastating catastrophes beneath the Atlantic waves. However, their own situation, upon the extremely fertile valley floor, was far from secure, as eventually the Atlantic, most likely aided by the melting of polar ices, rose to a higher level, along with the world ocean in general, and rapidly began to break down the lowest portion of the Atlas Mountain chain.
There must have been a particular weak section between what are now Spain and Morocco - possibly a geological after-effect of the submergence of Atlantis, or the collapse of the subterranean gas-tubes or chambers in that area. For soon, the barrier of rock gave way, and the Atlantic was able to begin flowing into the great valley. I don't believe that the Mediterranean valley was as deep then as it is now, and has probably been scoured much deeper in some parts by the inflow of various rivers, as well as by the trenching action of the irrupting waters of the Atlantic. I also suspect that the Nile - which was then known as the Styx, and flowed out of a very deep canyon which ran back as far as the position of the present Aswan High Dam - emptied out into a deep lake between what is now Egypt and the rocky shelf of Crete, and that from there, some of its overflow water may have found its way around Sicily into another deep basin off the high cliffs of the modern French Cote D' Azure, to form a further deep lake. The Rhone would have been a major contributor to this lake. Much of this water would have been lost due to evaporation, thus maintaining a more or less steady balance in the two major lakes.
As the Atlantic waters relentlessly began to fill up the lush Mediterranean valley, one can imagine that the Osirians, along with other inhabitants of the valley, had to seek higher ground, which, according to all the Mediterannean bathymetric charts I've consulted, would most probably have been more easily accessible to the south, via Malta and up onto the Libyan plain of North Africa. And there the Osirians, the last repositors of Atlantean wisdom and technology, could have established a new dominion for some lengthy period of time - if they had not already done so, long beforehand!
In the meantime, the inflowing, deepening waters of the Atlantic had now reached the farther end of the Mediterranean valley and had begun to silt up the long ravine that had been carved out by the Styx-Nile, raising its floor steadily higher and higher as the sea-level rose in the great valley, sluicing stirred-up silt and soil into the once deep chasm. So that in the fullness of time, the Nile, instead of crashing over a giant waterfall into a deep canyon at Aswan, now flowed much more slowly at a far higher level, and was thus able to deposit its rich sediment along the length of what was to become the richly fertile river valley of Egypt.Thus the 1000-mile Styx canyon was rapidly filled up, and the valley of the Nile became even more fertile and green than the adjoining Libyan savannah grass and swamp lands.
I also believe that it was this wonderful change which attracted the Libyan descendants of the Osirians into this new land of Egypt, where they set about establishing yet another great empire, which was to become almost as powerful as the one from whence they had originally hailed - beyond the now famed Pillars of Hercules! Needless to say, they brought with them all the ancient wisdom of Atlantis, and part of it was their vast fund of technological knowledge and skill in the art of handling enormous works of stone construction by hi-tech means of which, today, we know nothing.
As to the great Pyramids of Giza. For all we know, they might already have built them many centuries before, high upon a great plateau of solid rock that formed the towering corner of the deep canyon of the Styx. It would have been an obvious and excellent site for the two great monoliths which represented their mighty god, Osiris, and his Queen, Isis. (The third, smaller one came much later.) It isn't hard to envisage the first brilliant rays of the rising sun gleaming upon those beautiful man-made, polished white and gold pyramids, at the break of the dawn, whilst the floor of the huge Mediterranean valley was still shrouded in darkness! This would have been a truly awe-inspiring sight for the faithful down below! And the massive, lion-headed Sphinx - that had been built by the real Ancients long before the Osirian Empire ever came into being, and was already a marvel and a mystery even then - would have gazed solemnly forth across the great Styx canyon to greet the rising of the sun.
From this purely hypothetical chain of deductions one can piece together something of the history of both ancient Egypt and what became of the Atlanteans and their famed culture. There is good reason to believe that, if they were, as legend claims, a nation of mighty builders and seafarers, they may well have carried much of their culture across to the Americas. This would account for the many otherwise inexplicable parallels between the building styles of the Egyptians and the precursors of the Mexican Olmecs, to whose original civilization no truly definitive date can be accurately ascribed. The brilliant building techniques of the Atlanteans must have been passed on, via their Osirian kin, to most of those fledgling nations which surrounded the Mediterranean valley, since we see echoes of it in the ziggaruts of ancient Sumer and in the balustraded and colonnaded temples and palaces of Crete and Greece, as well as the massive structures of Baalbek in ancient Lebanon, and even Persia.
As to the other sites ascribed to Atlantis. I have read Rand and Rose Flem-Ath's well thought-out book positing its Antarctic pre-poleshift origin. But there are too many objections to overcome for it to sound completely convincing. However, this is not to say that there couldn't very well have been another, even older, civilization there, so closely adjacent to one of the fabled polar portals to the inner world. So I feel that they might well have led us toward another as yet unheard-of culture, but one that may have been well known to the seafaring Atlanteans!
The Bimini and Bahamas region, north east of Cuba, is quite a good site for a *province* of Atlantis, and there *are* those intriguing submerged ruins which lend much substance to this idea, but the area is simply not large enough to meet the criteria of a continent-sized island such as Plato described (unless he meant America!), nor is it anywhere even close to the Pillars of Hercules. But again, since this site *is* close to what I believe is another major inner-earth "portal" centred on the Devil's Triangle,* I don't doubt that there was once a very ancient emergent civilization around that area, which vanished beneath the waves due to seabed subsidence in the same manner as Atlantis and Mu.
But regarding the rather far-fetched idea of an *eastern* Atlantis. I would suggest that this would have been much more likely to have been a major part of Churchward's famous and entirely credible Muvian Empire, and part of as different culture. so I won't waste any more time here on that proposal. I would suggest to those who have any doublts, that they cshould peruse a few bathymetric charts of the world's oceans! The major last remaining portion of the several linked continents of Mu is that of of Australasia. All that remains of the other elongated landmasses of Mu are the Pacific island chains, which are the tips of their volcanic peaks. I don't believe that Mu was ever one single massive continent.
I guess that just about covers the main thrust of my argument in favour of Plato's site being the right one for Atlantis, so I'll quietly roll up my swag and try to catch up with David Hatcher Childress! I only hope that this long-winded airing of my views hasn't bored the pants off you patient people! But I do hope it might stir up some further debate as we delve ever deeper in search of our inner-Earth origins!
*Oh,yes! And before I close, let me once again mention Matt and Kev Taylor's "The Land of No Horizon" as being an invaluable read for those seeking a new angle on the Hollow Earh theory. It has caused me to think a lot harder about several interesting avenues we've not yet explored in terms of intra-crustal "portals" and planetary gravitation!
Thanks for listening, folks, and my best regards to all.
Marsflash (aka Gerry)