Atlantis Beneath the Ice (14 page)

He turns to the skies and the stars. From his astrological calculations and recollections of ancient myths, Montezuma calculates that the Plumed Serpent will return during the next one reed year, 1519.
¹⁷

Montezuma waits, checking and rechecking his calculations. He now believes that he has narrowed the date of the Plumed Serpent’s return to the very day. Surely, he reasons, the god will come back to
his homeland on his name day, Nine Wind Day. On the European calendar that would be April 21, 1519. Montezuma sends spies to the eastern shores to watch for the coming of the god on this sacred day.

AZTLAN

On April 21, 1519, the silence of Mexico’s Caribbean coast was broken by the clang of swords and the shuffle of marching boots across the white beach. From his ship stepped a bearded conquistador named Hernando Cortes, his helmet adorned with “a plume of feathers.”
¹⁸
The Spaniard pounded a great cross into the soft sand to honor his faith, little realizing that the cross was also the symbol of the Plumed Serpent.
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The Aztec spies watched in amazement and horror before hurrying back to Montezuma to confirm his prediction. Never in the course of human history has there been a greater case of mistaken identity. On that day, Cortes, with blind luck on his side, began a bloody march that would ultimately end in the annihilation of the Aztec Empire.

The Spanish conquerors believed that Mexico was once an Egyptian colony. It is little wonder, since the Aztecs shared several common mythological themes with the Egyptians. The Egyptians believed that the world was surrounded on all sides, including the heavens, with water. In Aztec mythology, “The sea was thought to extend outward and upward until—like the walls of a cosmic house—it merged with the sky. . . . The sky, therefore, was known to contain waters which might in perilous times descend in deluges, annihilating man.”
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This empire, like that of the Egyptians, had built great pyramids that symbolized the land that saved their ancestors from the Flood.
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And like those of Egypt, the solar megaliths were aligned with the rising sun. It was atop the Temple of the Sun that Montezuma met Cortez. He recounted their conversation in a letter to the king of Spain. Montezuma told Cortes about the island homeland of the Aztecs’ ancestors, saying, “Our fathers dwelt in that happy and prosperous place which they called Aztlan, which means whiteness.”
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Aztlan is described
as “a bright land of shining light and whiteness, which contained seven cities surrounding a sacred mountain.”
²³
Perhaps the blazing lights of Aztlan were actually the southern lights of Antarctica before that land was thrust into the confines of the Antarctic Circle.

Aztlan was said to be “located beyond the waters, or as surrounded by waters; and the first stage of the migration is said to have been made by boat.”
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Once again we have the familiar story. “They believed that two persons survived the deluge, a man, named Coxcox, and his wife. Their heads are represented in ancient paintings, together with a boat floating on the waters, at the foot of a mountain.”
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Throughout North and South America the myth of a lost island paradise haunts the memories of the native people. But they were not alone in their grief for the lost land. Across the ocean the tale was told in India, Iran, Iraq, and Japan, too.

POLAR PARADISE

In 1922, Mahatma Gandhi, about to be sentenced to six years in prison, said to the judge, “Since you have done me the honor of recalling the trial of the late Lokamaya Gangadhar Tilak, I just want to say that I consider it the proudest privilege and honor to be associated with his name.”
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Bal Gangadhar Tilak forged the tactic of passive resistance as a means of overthrowing British rule in India. He was held in such esteem that Gandhi used the title Lokamaya (meaning “beloved leader of the people”) when referring to him. Tilak earned his title while imprisoned in 1897 for seditious writings. The British hoped to curb his role in the rising tide of Indian nationalism by locking him up. The harsh conditions of his Bombay cell took their toll. Tilak’s health waned. Fearing that his death in custody might spark a general uprising, the British moved the “beloved leader of the people” to a safer prison in Poona. Helped by donations of fruit and vegetables, Tilak partially recovered his health. But soon a new hunger overtook him—the need for
intellectual stimulation. Relief came from an unlikely quarter: England.

Tilak had published a respected work on India’s oldest texts, the Vedas, and Sanskrit scholars at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge were outraged by his imprisonment and treatment. Professor F. Max Muller, the world’s leading authority on the Vedas, was successful in having Tilak’s case reviewed by Queen Victoria. She shortened his sentence and granted him a reading light in his cell. Denied access to newspapers or any other current material, Tilak used this “privilege” to continue his studies of the Vedas.

Upon his release, Tilak retired to the mountains to rest at a favorite family retreat. In 1903, his great work,
The Arctic Home in the Vedas,
was published. In it he argued that the remains of an island paradise could be found beneath the Arctic Ocean. “It was the advent of the Ice Age that destroyed the mild climate of the original home and covered it into an ice-bound land unfit for the habitation of man.”
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Tilak summarized a key passage in the oldest saga of Iran, the
Zend-Avesta.
“Ahura Mazda warns Yima, the first king of men, of the approach of a dire winter, which is to destroy every living creature by covering the land with a thick sheet of ice, and advises Yima to build a Vara, or an enclosure, to preserve the seeds of every kind of animal and plant. The meeting is said to have taken place in the Airyana Vaêjo, or Paradise of the Iranians.”
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Tilak chose the Arctic Circle as the location of the lost continent of Airyana Vaêjo after reading
Paradise Found: The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole,
written in 1885 by the founder of Boston University, Dr. William Fairfield Warren. Warren had been impressed by how often the story of a falling sky and Great Flood was to be found intertwined with accounts of a lost island paradise. He also realized that the lost land had many polar features. In Warren’s view, the worldwide nature of these descriptions suggested a common physical explanation. An exciting idea of the ice ages provided part of his answer.

Now if, during the prevalence of the Deluge, or later, in consequence of the on-coming of the Ice Age, the survivors of the Flood were translocated from their antediluvian home at the Pole to the great Central Asia “plateau of Pamir,” the probable starting-point of historic postdiluvian humanity, the new aspect presented by the heavens in this new latitude would have been precisely as if in the grand world-convulsion the sky itself had become displaced, its polar dome tilted over about one third of the distance from the zenith to the horizon. The astronomical knowledge of those survivors very likely enabled them to understand the true reason of the changed appearance, but their rude descendants, unfavored with the treasures of antediluvian science, and born only to a savage or nomadic life in their new and inhospitable home, might easily have forgotten the explanation. In time such children’s children might easily have come to embody the strange story handed down from their fathers in strange myths, in which nothing of the original facts remained beyond an obscure account of some mysterious displacement of the sky, supposed to have occurred in a far-off age in connection with some appalling natural catastrophe or world-disaster.
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Warren conjectured that the island paradise myths and their dramatic accounts of a falling sky and worldwide flood were part of the actual history of traumatized populations who had lost their homeland in a geological upheaval. Again and again in the most ancient records, Warren found evidence that the lost land was near the pole.

For example, in 681 CE the Japanese Emperor Temnu ordered the man with greatest memory in the country, Hieda no Are, to recite the most ancient of myths to a scribe. Hieda no Are was the most respected voice of the “guild of narrators” (
katari-be
) and he took his task seriously. O no Yasumaro, the scribe, faithfully transcribed Hieda no Are’s words. Their compilation became known as the
Ko-ji-ki
(“Records of Ancient Matters”) and appeared in 712. Warren believed that the earliest part of the book contained the notion of an original
island homeland near the earth’s axis.
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The
Ko-ji-ki
begins with the “Seven Generations of the Age of the Gods.” Each “generation” consisted of a brother and sister. After the seven generations had been created, two more gods, Izanagi and his sister/wife Izanami, were brought into being. They were charged with the task of creating the world out of the porridge-like chaos that was the primordial earth. Warren summarizes the moment when the two celestial deities create the first world. He says the deities,

standing on the bridge of heaven, pushed down a spear into the green plain of the sea, and stirred it round and round. When they drew it up the drops, which fell from its end, consolidated onto an island. The sun-born pair descended onto the island, and planting a spear in the ground, point downwards, built a palace round it, taking that for the central roof-pillar. The spear became the axis of the earth, which had been caused to revolve by stirring round.
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Warren concluded that Onogorojima (Island of the Congealed Drop) was an island somewhere near the pole. The central “roof-pillar” represented, in his view, the earth’s axis. A great palace was built on the island, a theme that reappears in the legend of Atlantis. (Later, Izanagi created other islands, including the eight main islands of Japan.)

But why would these people have made their home at the inhospitable pole? Warren answered that at the time the earth was much warmer, its temperature having only recently cooled. Heat was generated from within the planet and combined with surface temperatures to render lands that are now tropical and even temperate far too hot to support life. Only the polar regions were cool enough to invite human habitation.

Warren believed that the polar paradise was destroyed when a critical temperature drop resulted in a worldwide geological upheaval. A huge mass of the earth’s interior collapsed inward, pulling sections of the planet’s crust with it. The ocean rushed to drown the sunken areas.
The globe then cooled, suffocating the original island paradise in snow and ice.

Because he believed that the entire island had disappeared beneath a polar ocean, Warren dismissed the South Pole as a possible location since the Antarctic continent still existed as land. Instead, he focused his attention on the Arctic Ocean, which to him represented the true “Navel of the Earth.”

Students of antiquity must often have marveled that in nearly every ancient literature they should encounter the strange expression, the Navel of the Earth. Still more unaccountable would it have seemed to them had they noticed how many ancient mythologies
connect the cradle of the human race with this earth-navel.
The advocates of the different sites which have been assigned to Eden have seldom, if ever, recognized the fact that no hypothesis on this subject can be considered acceptable which cannot account for this peculiar association of man’s first home with some sort of natural centre of the earth.
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Warren believed that the term
Navel of the Earth
referred to the earth’s axis. His map of the location of the lost paradise depicts the earth as it appears from the North Pole (see figures
6.1
and
6.2
on page 96).

If Warren hadn’t been so fixed on the northern view and had instead looked to the south, he would have seen that Antarctica represents a far more natural Navel of the Earth.

Antarctica sits, like the mythological homeland of the Okanagan, in the “middle of the ocean.” Consider these points:

Like the lost island of the Cherokee it lies in the southern hemisphere.

Like the Aztec’s Aztlan, Antarctica is “white.”

Like Iran’s lost paradise, Antarctica is covered “with a thick sheet of ice.”