Ceylon, today Sri Lanka, turns up in my sources as the island of the first man in several traditions, and as one end of the sunken southern land of the Theosophists. These are the pages where it appears.
The island of Ad-ima
Ignatius Donnelly finds a memory of Atlantis in a Hindu tradition. On Traditions of Atlantis he writes:
Among the Hindoos the first man was Ad-ima, his wife was Heva. They dwelt upon an island, said to be Ceylon; they left the island and reached the main-land, when, by a great convulsion of nature, their communication with the parent land was forever cut off.
Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World
Ad-ima and Heva follows the same couple, who in some interpretations lived on an island often identified with Ceylon.
Where Adam fell
The Islamic and Persian legends put Adam there too. On The peacock the legend I quote has Adam fall onto the island of Serendib (Ceylon), Eve at Jedda and the serpent into the Sahara. On Who Are the Pre-Adamites? the Huschenk-Nameh tradition, as cited in 19th-century legend collections, says the flat-headed men submitted after Adam settled in Ceylon. On The death of Adam Ceylon is one of the places traditions name for his burial.
Languages and lost lands
On The Oldest Son of Noah Donnelly points to the continuous belt of Indo-European languages from Iceland to Ceylon. On The Lemurian Era Rudolf Steiner places Lemuria in a land that, in Theosophical literature, stretched from Ceylon to Madagascar, and on What Are Blavatsky’s Root Races? the Secret Doctrine geography runs through India and Ceylon.
Related pages
- Traditions of Atlantis
- Ad-ima and Heva
- The peacock
- Who Are the Pre-Adamites?
- The death of Adam
- The Oldest Son of Noah
- The Lemurian Era
- What Are Blavatsky’s Root Races?
For every page I tagged with Ceylon, see the Ceylon tag archive.
