The Problem of Atlantis (1925)

I read Lewis Spence’s The Problem of Atlantis for the claims a later writer can set beside Plato, Donnelly, Le Plongeon, Churchward, and Spence’s own later book. The copy in front of me is a library scan of the revised edition. The title page reads London, William Rider & Son, Limited, 8 Paternoster Row, E.C. 4, 1925, revised edition, with sixteen full-page plates. The next leaf says first published May 1924, second edition February 1925, printed in Great Britain by Neill & Co., Ltd., Edinburgh. The book is out of copyright. The quotes below are his sentences. Page numbers are the printed numbers in the running head.

He spells Plato’s dialogue Timeus, and he prints Crô-Magnon with the circumflex. I keep both. His summary of Plato writes twelve kings in one sentence and ten kings in the next. I leave both numbers as they stand on the page.

A year later he published The History of Atlantis. I keep that book’s site, area, and population in the 1926 review. This 1925 text puts the main mass on Dolphin’s Ridge, dates a final disaster about 10,000 B.C. in the geology chapter, and in the geography chapter dates the city itself not later than 7000 B.C.

For Plato’s own text, see Timaeus & Critias. For Donnelly’s Atlantic site, see Atlantis: The Antediluvian World.

The book at a glance

• Title: The Problem of Atlantis.
• Edition I read: revised edition, London, William Rider & Son, 1925. First published May 1924. Second edition February 1925. Neill & Co., Edinburgh. Sixteen full-page plates. The frontispiece is a conjectural map of Atlantis after Bory de St. Vincent.
• Length: eighteen chapters. Chapter I starts on page 1. The conclusion starts on page 227. The colophon stands on page 232.
• What he claims: a real Atlantic land, broken into two large masses, Atlantis near Europe and Africa and Antilia in the West Indies, joined by an island chain. Crô-Magnon and Azilian-Tardenoisian people are its migrants. The city of Plato’s account is a later memory of a metropolis on the same site. Maya, Egyptian, and old Peruvian customs are, for him, the surviving shape of that culture.

Findings worth setting beside other writers

These are the claims I would take to the 1926 History, to Donnelly, to Le Plongeon, and to the archaeologists he names. The chapter notes give the pages.

• Site. The main continental mass occupies the position J. Starke Gardner gave an Eocene continent, the bank still marked on charts as Dolphin’s Ridge, after the U.S. ship Dolphin. The Azores stand on its extreme eastern coast. A submarine spit runs from the southern side toward South America, and another ridge branches toward St Paul’s. An island chain joins this mass to Antilia, of similar size, whose remains are the Antilles (pp. 204 to 206).
• Two lands, two endings. In the Pleistocene the continent broke into Atlantis, close to Europe and Africa, and Antilia, joined by a chain of which the Azores and the Bermudas are vestiges. Atlantis suffered further disintegration about 25,000 years ago. Final disaster overtook Atlantis about 10,000 B.C. Antilia lasted much longer and still shows in the West Indian islands (pp. 43, 92, 205).
• Plato’s date, and the date of the city. The invasion in his reading of Plato falls roughly at 9600 B.C. He treats that as one migratory impulse, and he says a port full of the world’s shipping at 9600 B.C. is more than the evidence will bear. In the geography chapter he dates the founding of the city of Atlantis at not later than 7000 B.C., with an older Azilian-Tardenoisian settlement on the same site for another two thousand years or more (pp. 14, 209 to 210).
• What he refuses as one catastrophe. An Atlantis of about 9000 B.C. stretching from Europe to America, destroyed in a single cataclysm, and civilising America at that date, is, he says, opposed to Mexican and Central American history. He calls Le Plongeon’s colonisation of Central America by Atlanteans 11,500 years ago an absurd contention (p. 87). Phelon’s opening chapter pastes a clipping that prints about 11,500 years and sixty-four millions for the land of Mu. Spence is answering that kind of date.
• Peoples. First wave, Aurignacian or Crô-Magnon, by land, at the close of the Ice Age, which he puts at about 25,000 years ago. Male average height on the early page is 6 feet (1.83 meters) 1 1/2 inches. In the conclusion the male range is 6 ft. 1 in. to 6 ft. 7 in., the women small. Fair or brunette, probably blue or brown eyes, like the Guanches. Second wave, Azilian-Tardenoisian, about 10,000 years ago, shorter and darker, parents of the Mediterranean or Iberian race, and the people he matches to Plato’s invaders. He also reads a Magdalenian reinforcement from the same stock (pp. 58, 73, 227).
• America on American soil. To the best of his belief no American civilisation greatly antedated 100 B.C., so far as its appearance on American soil is concerned. The old Maya district, about the Usumacinta and in Chiapas, was colonised about a century before the Christian era, and disaster overtook it some time in the sixth century. The culture arrives already full-blown. He puts its earlier life on Antilia (pp. 93, 121).
• Egypt. Dynastic Egypt is in large measure Azilian-Tardenoisian, the same stock that entered Spain about 10,000 B.C. Osiris is western, probably Libyan. A chapter of the Book of the Dead was “discovered” about 4266 B.C., in the reign of Hesep-ti. He dates the First Dynasty, in the revised chronology of this edition, at 3500 B.C. on the Greek comparison (pp. 14, 149 to 152).
• Crete. He argues that Crete is a colony modelled on Atlantis, and that the fall of Knossos about 1200 B.C. cannot be Plato’s nine thousand years. Early Minoan civilisation dates roughly from about 3400 B.C. He asks whether a last spur of the continent survived until about 3500 B.C. (pp. 206 to 209).
• Bull, pyramid, mummy. The bull rite of the kings is the germ he finds in Apis, in Beltane, and in the Spanish bullfight. The pyramid is a memory of the sacred hill of Poseidon, built in earth faced with stone, and only later in stone. Mummification begins with red ochre on Crô-Magnon bodies and is still practised by the Guanches.

Preface to the second edition

Few facts are altered. The outstanding change is the chronology of early Greek and Egyptian cultures, which is the revision behind the 3500 B.C. he gives the First Dynasty when he sets it beside Early Helladic Greece. He repairs an omission: Poseidon was a god of earthquake as well as a marine deity. He says Mr Ralph Shirley brought that to his notice.

He answers Professor Perry, writing in The Nation, on an Egyptian penetration of Central America by a Pacific route. Spence allows a late, feeble, and fragmentary Egyptian influence by the Pacific. He rejects it as the main explanation, and he says Perry’s “Children of the Sun” formula breaks down for Mexico and Central America, where terrace-irrigation, pearl-fishing, and metalworking are not the standing features the formula requires. He dates his own change of view on Egyptian influence in America as far back as 1916. He says his critics did not traverse the part of the case he most wants kept: an Aurignacian, non-Egyptian origin of European civilisation, moving from west to east. The preface is signed Lewis Spence.

Preface to the first edition

The purpose is to put the study on a more accurate basis, and to demonstrate the continent as well. He says he is not absolutely convinced of every consideration, and that the wreck of Atlantis sleeps beneath the sea.

He calls Brasseur de Bourbourg and Dr Augustus le Plongeon precipitate. From Brasseur he takes a city named Atlan, standing when Columbus discovered the continent, at the entrance to the Gulf of Uraba, in Darien, with a good harbour, and now an unimportant pueblo named Acla. The earliest civilisation he will defend is in the Biscayan and Pyrenean area, centuries before Egypt. Crô-Magnon culture, he says, contained the germs of early Nilotic culture and continued in the Canary Islands until the Spanish discovery.

He rejects a Bronze Age Atlantis. The Maya, the Mexicans, and the Peruvians had no metal tools or weapons, and they were civilised in architecture and polity. He leaves the Sargasso Sea alone. Recent research, he says, convinced him that former conclusions about it were mistaken. He argues against the idea that Atlantis is a memory of Crete.

Chapter I. The Atlantis of Plato

He prints a summary and says no salient fact is omitted. In the dialogue he calls The Timeus, Critias tells Timaeus and Socrates that Dropidas, his great-grandfather, had writings and traditions from Solon. Solon heard them at Sais from a priest of Neith, whom the priests identified with Pallas Athene. Athens was founded nine thousand years before that conversation. He puts the conversation about 600 B.C., so the Athenian origin falls 9600 years before the Christian era, and Sais a thousand years later.

The island lay in front of the Pillars of Hercules, greater than Libya and Asia together. Libya here is northern Africa, and Asia is Asia Minor. It was the way to other islands and to the opposite continent. The kings ruled the island, parts of that continent, Libya as far as Egypt, and Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. The Athenians expelled the invaders. In a single day and night the warlike men of Athens sank into the earth and Atlantis disappeared under the sea, leaving shallow mud.

The names had been Egyptianised by the priests and later Hellenised by Solon. Poseidon, or Neptune, received the island. On the seaward side, in the centre, was a fertile plain. Fifty stadia off stood a low mountain, home of Evenor, his wife Leucippe, and their daughter Cleito.

The Greek stadium was equal to 602 3/4 English feet.

Lewis Spence, The Problem of Atlantis (1925), p. 5

Poseidon ringed the hill so that no man might reach what Spence calls this Eden, and begat five pairs of male twins. The eldest, Atlas, received his mother’s dwelling, the largest allotment, and the kingship. The metal next to gold is orichalcum, which Spence glosses as copper. The island had the elephant, vegetables, chestnuts, and a fruit with a hard rind affording drinks, and meats, and ointments.

The canal through the zones was three hundred feet wide, about a hundred deep, and fifty stadia, or about six miles, long. The largest zone was three stadia, the next two stadia, and the zone about the central island one stadium. The palace island was five stadia across. The bridge was a sixth of a stadium in breadth. The stone was white, black, and red. The walls were faced with brass, tin, and orichalcum, which gave a red light. One temple was the enclosure of Cleito and Poseidon. Another was of what he calls barbaric splendour: Poseidon in a chariot with six winged steeds, and golden statues of his ten sons and their wives. A racecourse encircled the island. The city stood on an oblong plain, open toward the south and sheltered on the north, inside a fosse. The island was divided into sixty thousand lots, each ten stadia square. The owner of a lot furnished the sixth part of a war-chariot, so as to make up ten thousand chariots, and the complement of ships is twelve hundred.

Each of the twelve kings was absolute in his own island.

Lewis Spence, The Problem of Atlantis (1925), p. 7

The laws stood on a pillar of orichalcum in the temple of Poseidon. The people held festival every fifth and every sixth year. On the same page the sacred bulls are offered by the ten kings of the islands. They shed the blood over the inscription and vow not to transgress the laws. When night falls they put on azure robes. Zeus’s speech, in Plato, breaks off. Spence does not supply an ending.

He then sets three other classical notices beside Plato.

Theopompus of Chios, through Aelian’s Varia Historia, in the English of Abraham Fleming, London, 1576, has Silenus tell Midas of islands called Europa, Asia, and Libia, and of a continent beyond whose men exceed our stature twice. The warlike city is Machimus and the peaceful city is Euseues. Ten millions of the warlike people once attacked Europe, came first to the Hyperboreans, and withdrew. Later writers call the country Meropian, from the Meropes.

Plutarch, in “On the Face appearing in the Orb of the Moon,” puts an isle, Ogygia, about five days’ sail west from Britain, with three other islands at about equal distance to the north-west. Saturn is imprisoned there by Zeus. Beyond lies the Saturnian sea, and a continent about five thousand stadia from Ogygia. A bay in the latitude of the Caspian Sea is inhabited by Greeks, who every thirty years send ministers to Saturn.

Proclus reports Marcellus, in an Ethiopic history, on ten islands in the Atlantic close to Europe, and a memory of a larger Atlantic island, Atlantis. Spence also cites Strabo’s notice of Poseidonius. The footnote points to the Didot edition of Muller’s Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, volume iii, page 281.

Chapter II. Plato’s account examined

Troy and Arthur were once treated as myth and are now treated as history. He puts Chedorlaomer in the same class of recovered names. Plato, for him, stands with Geoffrey of Monmouth and with Homer. Geoffrey’s “British book” is no longer to be dismissed as a fraud. Jowett’s “noble lie,” which he cites from the Dialogues, volume iii, page 684, belongs to a Victorian reading. The tale is not an allegory of the kind in More’s Utopia or in Wells’s Men Like Gods. Socrates says it is suitable to the festival of the goddess, and fact rather than fiction. Critias says the Egyptian record was branded into his mind.

Neith of Sais, Het-byati, “the House of the Bee-man,” the king of Lower Egypt, is Pallas Athene. Both are virgin goddesses of war. Neith’s arrow is Athene’s spear. Neith is Libyan. Worship of her was introduced into the Nile by Iberians from the west, who also carried it to Greece. A Greek of Plato’s day, Spence argues, could not have known the resemblance without an Egyptian source.

Proclus, whom he dates about A.D. 412 to 485, reports Crantor, about 300 B.C., the first commentator, that the priests told Solon the story was written on pillars still preserved. He cites Taylor, Commentaries of Proclus on the Timeus, London, 1820. Martin, hostile in the Études on the Timeus, Paris, 1841, still believes Solon had the story from the priests at first hand.

Egyptian chronology, he says, was inflated, as Chinese chronology was. Fifty years before this book, British historians still used Archbishop Usher, at about 4004 B.C. He spells the name Usher. He says he will later show Plato’s invasion date substantially correct. The Athenian victory has to go. National pride, or ignorance of who the “Greeks” were, put it in. Solon had an account of an Atlantean reverse in the Aegean and concluded that Greeks inflicted it.

Poseidon is god of the sea and maker of earthquakes. That is the point added in this edition. Atlas is the founder of Mauretania. Orichalcum is Greek oreichalkos, mountain copper. Spenser used the word for a gold-coloured alloy resembling brass, a kind of pinchbeck.

The Carthage comparison comes from M. Paul Aucler’s restoration. Byrsa is the citadel, with a temple of Aesculapius, three ramparts with towers, a waterway 1,066 feet (324 meters) wide, a circular island, the admiral’s headquarters, docks under a circular Ionic colonnade, the cothon or drinking-cup, a mercantile harbour 1,396 feet (425 meters) long, and a sea entrance of 76 feet (23.16 meters), closable by chains and masked by a sea-wall. Marshes lay landward. Cisterns on the hills were also used as baths. Shared with Plato’s city: a citadel hill, zones of land and water, a canal to the sea, bridged zones, towers on the bridges, roofed docks, three walls, cisterns, baths, and a sea-wall. Carthage cannot be Atlantis, because Critias’s narrative is dated before the city Aucler restores. Spence concludes that Carthage was built to an older Atlantic town-plan already used in north-western and western Africa. Aristotle and Strabo say the Phoenicians knew a secret Atlantic island to which they meant to fly if driven out.

The island-within-an-island plan also appears in British prehistoric island-forts of Mediterranean origin. He does not separate those from the Sardinian nuraghe at this point. He returns to them in the geography chapter.

Termier, of the Geological Survey of France, in an address of 30 November 1912, describes the ocean floor as ancient rocks, fragments of whitish calcareous terranes, extinct volcanic mountains, and lava-flows, black and red, long since grown cold. Spence uses that for Plato’s white, black, and red stone. Temple roofs of gold, silver, and bronze match Nineveh and Persepolis, and they do not match Greek architecture. Twenty golden statues of kings and their wives are paralleled, for him, by the Inca mummies in the Temple of the Sun at Cuzco and the queens in the Temple of the Moon.

On pages 20 and 21 he gives eight points. Legend has a substratum of truth. Plato’s account is of the same class as Geoffrey on Arthur and Homer on Troy. The hypothesis does not rest on Plato alone, and there is no good reason to doubt the substantial accuracy of the account. Plato could not have known the likeness of Neith and Athene except through Egypt. The prehistoric Athens is patriotic, and it may preserve a foreign defeat in the Aegean. The Hellenic names are a translation from Atlantean into Egyptian and from Egyptian into Greek. The city resembles Aucler’s Carthage, so Carthage followed an older Atlantic plan. The stone is what a geologist of eminence would expect in an oceanic volcanic area.

He says Plato furnishes the clue only. The reader is not to justify every assertion, any more than with Troy or Arthur. Folk-memory of a catastrophe can last thousands of years.

Chapter III. The evidence from geology

Late Tertiary time, for him, is the Miocene and the Pliocene, and true man belongs in the Pliocene. The Quaternary is the Pleistocene, the Ice Age, and the Holocene. He cites Sollas, Evolutional Geology, 1900, for a Pleistocene of 400,000 years, Penck for 520,000 to 840,000, and James Geikie for a minimum of 620,000. The practical beginning he uses is about 500,000 years ago: four glacial epochs, one postglacial, and three interglacial. Modern-form man in Europe, by the consensus he accepts, appears only in the post-glacial stage, about 25,000 years ago. The search for a semi-civilised Atlantis is therefore narrowed to the last 25,000 years.

The older biological bridges are Edward Forbes in 1846, a bridge of islands in the North Atlantic, Heer in 1856, and Unger in 1860 on the fossil flora of Europe set against the living flora of Asia. Kuntze is cited for the seedless banana in Asia and America before the discovery. Lyell, Elements of Geology, London, 1841, is on the other side of the argument, from supposed great depths.

The long précis is Termier’s paper “Atlantis,” read before the Institut Océanographique in Paris on 30 November 1912. Spence says the English text is in the Smithsonian report. Emptied of water, the Atlantic shows two valleys, north and south, parallel with the shores, and a middle zone raised above them. The western valley, along the American coast, is the larger and deeper, more than 6,000 metres, from Greenland to the 70th parallel of south latitude. The Azores are nine islands stretched over about 500 miles (804 kilometers), prolonged under the waves. An eastern zone about 1,875 miles (3017 kilometers) broad is still in movement: Iceland, the Azores, Madeira, the Canaries, and the Cape Verde Islands.

In the summer of 1898 a cable ship working the Brest to Cape Cod line tried to recover a broken strand about 500 miles (804 kilometers) north of the Azores, at about 1,700 fathoms. The grapples brought soil and rock from a mountainous bottom. The lava is vitreous. Compared with Lacroix on Mont Pelée, that means it cooled in the air. Formed under 3,000 metres of water, it would have crystallised. The surface 562 miles (904 kilometers) north of the Azores was therefore covered with lava while it stood above water, and the sinking to 3,000 metres followed suddenly on the eruption.

He also prints Dr Frederick Finch Strong, in The Messenger for 1919. Strong’s inference, as Spence gives it, is that lava exposed to sea-water disintegrates to a known extent in about 15,000 years, and that an undecomposed sample means an eruption less than 15,000 years ago, and therefore a land then above sea-level. I keep that as Strong’s inference in Spence’s pages.

Termier’s two ancient continents are a North Atlantic mass, Russia, Scandinavia, Great Britain, Greenland, and Canada, with a southern band of central and western Europe and a large part of the United States, and a South Atlantic or African-Brazilian continent from the southern border of the Atlas to the Persian Gulf and the Mozambique Channel, west to the eastern border of the Andes and the sierras of Colombia. The facing coasts, 1,875 miles (3017 kilometers) apart, Brittany, Cornwall, and the south of Ireland against Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, are estuary shores set face to face. The northern mass submerged in the Tertiary, before the collapse of the volcanic lands of which the Azores are the last vestiges. Tertiary folds run from the Atlas toward the Canaries and from the Alps toward the southern islands of the Azores. Termier will not yet extend them very far. The sediments of Santa Maria show that in the Miocene, when the great Alpine movements had ended in Europe, a Mediterranean shore, continent or large island, lay not far from that part of the Azores, and another shore of the same Miocene sea passed near the Canaries.

Professor J. W. Gregory, Geography: Structural, Physical, and Comparative (1908), does not reject a former Atlantean continent. Scharff’s paper “Some Remarks on the Atlantis Problem,” Royal Irish Academy, November 1902, is reserved in part for the biology chapter. From it Spence takes Haug’s Tertiary chains from Venezuela to Morocco and from the Lesser Antilles to Portugal, and Scharff’s conclusion that Madeira and the Azores were connected with Portugal up to Miocene times, and that a vast land stretched from Morocco to the Canaries and on to South America, as far as St Helena. Professor Hull treats the Azores as the peaks of a submerged Pleistocene land, with a mid-Atlantic island of equable climate while Britain was semi-polar, and with land-bridges north and south during and before the glacial epoch. Hull also holds that an Antillean ridge then shut the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico off from the Gulf Stream.

On the ridge itself, Spence reports a level some 9,000 feet (2743 meters) above the Atlantic bed, the islands as mountain peaks, and, between the 26th and 45th parallels, a base of about 1,000 nautical miles from east to west. Those parallels describe the bank, and they are not the latitude box he draws for the island in the 1926 book. The Challenger found the ridge covered with volcanic detritus. The commander of the Gettysburg, about 150 miles (241 kilometers) from the Azores, is cited for inequalities that must have been cut above water.

His own four geological conclusions stand on pages 42 and 43. A great continent once occupied the whole or the major part of the North Atlantic, and a considerable portion of the southern basin, and it rose and sank more than once. In the Miocene it still had a continental character, and toward the end of that period it began to break up. The result was greater and lesser islands. Two of the greater masses lay at a short distance from the entrance to the Mediterranean, and in the region of the West Indies. He names them Atlantis and Antilia, with an island chain between them. Those two masses and the chain lasted until late Pleistocene times. About 25,000 years ago, the beginning of the post-glacial epoch, Atlantis broke up further.

Final disaster seems to have overtaken Atlantis about 10,000 B.C. Antilia, on the other hand, seems to have survived until a much more recent period, and still persists fragmentally in the Antillean group, or West Indian Islands.

Lewis Spence, The Problem of Atlantis (1925), p. 43

He notices the theory that the Old and New Worlds have drifted apart. The earth, he says, is 8,000 miles (12874 kilometers) thick. The heavy nucleus is nickel and iron, the Nife. Above it a liquid stratum of silica and magnesia is the Sima, and the outer crust is silica and alumina. He names Professor W. de Sitter of Leyden on the suggestion that parts of the surface move relative to other parts. He says the Atlantean hypothesis has nothing to gain from the admission that the island once lay closer to Europe and America than the present ocean gap.

Chapter IV. The biological evidence

He uses only the biological evidence that seems to him to show a former land connection, and he warns that most of the floral and faunal case is Tertiary. It does not do much for a late Quaternary continent. It also tells against the presumption that the islands were always islands.

Scharff answers Wallace on Madeiran beetles. If Madeira had been joined to Europe, the join would have been to southern Spain or Portugal, and the beetles Wallace misses are negligible in Spain and Portugal. Wallace said the Atlantic islands have no indigenous land mammals, and that those found there were introduced. Scharff finds no record of artificial introduction, and he thinks at least some arrived by land.

The rabbit is one of his cases, and so are the large hawks or buzzards. The Azores were known before the usual date of discovery. A Spanish friar’s book of 1345 names them. An atlas dated 1385, published at Venice, has Capraria or the Isle of Goats, now San Miguel, Columbia or the Isle of Doves, now Pico, Li Congi or Rabbit Island, now Flores, and Corvi Marini or the Isle of Sea Crows, now Corvo. Drouet notes the goat of San Miguel, with antelope-like horns. The rabbit may have reached the Azores and Europe from America by the old land connection. Osborn suggests an American origin for the rabbit and the hare.

Scharff’s own limit is explicit. He is not advocating a direct land connection between southern Europe and America by way of the Atlantic islands. One land-bridge, in southern latitudes, joined Africa and South America, farther south than the islands. From North Africa there was frequent intercourse with southern Europe, and with that he joins the Atlantic islands, so that South American species could reach Madeira and the Azores indirectly. Forsyth Major and Lydekker are cited on the rabbit-forms of Africa. Sclater, The Geography of Mammals, London, 1899, and Morelet, Éléments de la faune açoréenne, Paris, 1861, are in the same shelf.

The Geckotidae give him a North African and a Chilean species. A land connection across the Atlantic explains them better, for him, than accidental carriage. Very few range into North America, and none has been found in Asia. On the molluscs he uses a monograph of the Atlantic islands, Testacea Atlantica, London, 1878: land-shells shared by Europe, the West Indies, and Central America imply an ancient connection ruptured toward the close of the Miocene. Von Ihering, in Engler’s Botanische Jahrbücher for 1893, holds that continental molluscs reached the islands only by a former connection.

Certain ants occur both in the Azores and in America. A species of the African family Dorylidae is also found in South America. Sixty per cent of the butterflies and moths of the Canaries are of Mediterranean origin, and 20 per cent of these are found in America. The crustacean genus Platyarthus has three species in western Europe and North Africa, one in the Canaries, and one in Venezuela. Porcellio is in all three regions. He says accidental waifs do not become established.

Sir William Dawson, Salient Points in the Science of the Earth, page 86, is cited for shallow-water molluscs of New England and Canada that are also European, and for deep-sea forms of which 30 out of 35 are shared. In America they kept the large size they had in Europe in the Miocene. That implies, in the argument Spence adopts, an extension of the Atlantic continent to the West Indies at the beginning of Miocene times, and a separation during the Miocene or toward its close.

R. M. Gattefossé of Lyons, whom Spence calls mystic, chemist, botanist, and archaeologist, says the Canaries, the Azores, and Madeira have a living flora comparable with that of western Europe in Tertiary times, and that after the rupture this flora evolved locally. One writer in the chapter concludes that the last great fragment engulfed, leaving only the four archipelagoes, would be the Atlantis of Plato. Spence prints that as the biological case, and he does not let it override the late date he wants from archaeology.

Chapter V. The evidence from pre-history

If the mass broke up slowly through the Ice Age, Europe received repeated immigrations. Plato’s 9,000 years before Solon, about 9600 B.C., is one impulse, and it is not the first. The first migration reached Europe by dry land, while Europe was still joined in places to the sunken continent. That race is the Crô-Magnon, or Aurignacian. An early discovery was in 1852, in the grotto of Aurignac.

The average height of the men of this race was 6 feet (1.83 meters) 1 1/2 inches.

Lewis Spence, The Problem of Atlantis (1925), p. 58

The shoulders are exceedingly broad, and the arms are short compared with the legs. The nose is thin and prominent, the cheek-bones high, the chin massive. He cites Sir Arthur Keith, Ancient Types of Man, New York, 1911, page 71, for one of the finest types, mentally and physically, the world has ever seen. Broca found that the brain-content of the skull of a Crô-Magnon woman surpassed that of the average male of the present day. A later passage in the chapter gives a minimum stature of 5 feet (1.52 meters) 7 inches, a maximum of 6 feet (1.83 meters) 7 inches, and one locality where the average male stature is over 6 feet (1.83 meters). I keep that range separate from the average on page 58, and separate again from the conclusion on page 227.

When the Crô-Magnon race arrived in the Biscay region of Europe at the close of the Ice Age (which came to an end about 25,000 years ago)...

Lewis Spence, The Problem of Atlantis (1925), p. 58

The Neanderthal people, low and plantigrade, with a small brain, became extinct. A footnote says the two names are used interchangeably, Crô-Magnon usually for the race and Aurignacian for the culture.

He will not credit Plato’s port, full of the world’s shipping, at 9600 B.C., and still less at 25,000 B.C. A third wave, by sea, about 10,000 years ago, is reserved for the next chapter. Crô-Magnon man did not come by water. Spence also refuses a sea passage to the Canaries. Like the animals and plants of those islands, the people were cut off and marooned. No boat, and no drawing of a boat, of the Aurignacian period has been found.

The art is part of the identification. Shells were made into mantles or gorgets. Finger-mutilation, “to cut off deaths,” matches a practice among some Bushmen, Australian Blackfellows, and some American Indian tribes. Red ochre, or ruddle, was put on the bones to give the colour of blood, that is of life. Osborn, Men of the Old Stone Age, 1915, sees a unity of heredity from the early Aurignacian to the close of the Magdalenian in the art impulse. Industry shows vicissitudes. Art shows a continuous evolution from one motive, beauty of form and realistic representation. The people are many colonies, not one local tribe. Smaller figures in the round are almost certainly idols of goddesses. Osborn says they resemble the work of modern Cubists. The art runs about 15,000 years, the period from 25,000 to 10,000 years ago.

The Abbé Breuil sees a similarity to North African art. Osborn thinks a southerly origin more probable, because Aurignacian colonies surround the Mediterranean, in northern Africa, Sicily, Italy, and Iberia, and spread over southern France. A primitive Aurignacian in Tunis resembles the Abri Audit of the Dordogne. The cave of Antelias in Syria, and stations in Phoenicia, are characteristically Aurignacian, but the pure early industry is in the Dordogne and the Pyrenees. Spence’s own step is that the people did not come from the east. The eastern finds are later, and the art does not approach the Biscayan or Pyrenean type. The Spanish and southern French stations so far found lie in the Biscayan district, and they do not lie on the southern coasts. The African examples, in Tunis, are primitive or debased, and he derives them from Spain.

The stronger proof, for him, is that Guanche culture in the Canaries was of the Aurignacian type. The Guanche theory is favoured by von Behr, von Luschan, Mehlis, and especially Verneau. Keith discusses it in Ancient Types of Man, pages 454 and 455.

He reads a further immigration at the Magdalenian period, from the same disintegrating land, bringing a higher culture than the older settlers of the race had carried. Osborn reports Breuil as saying that the whole Upper Palaeolithic art of Europe was the work of one race, and that race can be none other than the Crô-Magnon. A plate reproduces horses from Les Espélungues and Le Mas d’Azil.

On language he cites Dr Farrar, Families of Speech, page 132. The affinities of the Basque root are, in that sentence, indisputable and eminently noteworthy. Spence uses Basque as a possible remnant sitting in the western refuge, and he does not print a vocabulary.

Chapter VI. The third Atlantean invasion

The Azilian-Tardenoisian industry, named from a Pyrenean locality and dated by the archaeologists he follows at about 10,000 years ago, challenged the Crô-Magnons. Osborn treats the Azilian bone-harpoon industry and the Tardenoisian microlithic flint industry as largely the work of fisher-folk. Breuil gives them a Mediterranean origin and a gradual mingling with the Aurignacian. The earliest known stages are in North Africa and south-western Europe.

These people, Spence says, were the parents of the Mediterranean or Iberian race. They spread over southern Europe, reached Britain and Norway in the north, and Egypt in the east, and they introduced the Neolithic. Elliot Smith is quoted on the family likeness between the early Neolithic peoples of the British Isles and the Mediterranean and the bulk of the population, ancient and modern, of Egypt and East Africa. A description of the bones of an early Briton of that epoch might apply, in all essential details, to an inhabitant of Somaliland.

This invasion is the one he collocates with Plato’s date. Egyptian records may bridge several centuries. He asks where they learned the sea. He has no data that the Egyptians braved the ocean before 5000 B.C. Flint fish-hooks of the early Azilians belong to about 10,000 years ago, or about 8000 B.C. Later voyages to Britain fall inside the Egyptian maritime period. He also allows that they may have reached Africa, and then Europe, by a land-bridge or a closely knit island chain, so that proof of ocean seamanship is not essential to the hypothesis.

The Iberians, or the later Azilian-Tardenoisians, settled first in the Atlas region and were known to the Romans as Atlanteans. Azilian burials turn the face to the west, and the body is smothered in ochre. The note he points forward is that Egypt was not the mother of European culture. The early impetus came from the west. Hall, in the Cambridge Ancient History, page 264, has Egypt originally inhabited by a stone-using Hamitic race, the Iberians, related to the surrounding Semites, Libyans, and Mediterraneans.

D’Arbois de Jubainville, Les premiers habitants de l’Europe, pages 24 and 25, is cited on the Iberians. Spence’s own limit is the same one he uses for the Maya: a Stone Age culture can be high. The Maya, the Nahua, and the Incas were Neolithic, and he will not rank them below Egypt, Babylon, Greece, or Rome except in the matter of metal implements.

Chapter VII. The evidence from European tradition

Some of the island legends, he allows, may have arisen from a hazy knowledge of the Canaries or the Cape Verde Islands. Theopompus and Ogygia have already been set out. Mexican paintings retell Deucalion and Pyrrha. Chalchihuitlicue, in particular, precipitates a flood, and a man and a woman survive.

St Brendan, Abbot of Clonfert, is visited by Barontus, who tells him of the promised land of the Saints, far in the ocean. Honorius Philoponus, Navigationes, 1621, maps the saint’s island north-west of Spain and north-east of the Canaries. After the discovery of the Azores, expeditions searched for it until as late as 1721. The island was reported seen in 1759.

Huemac, the Great Hand, is the first king of the Toltecs. Among the Maya, Hunab Ku is a god behind the gods, the only Maya god who can boast of a beard, and a figure who may be identified with the moon, childbirth, and the healing art. Human sacrifice was rendered to him. At a certain season criminals were sacrificed by grinding between the stones. In a myth in the Codex Tellerio-Remensis this god, or his Mexican equivalent, breathed and divided the waters of the heavens and the earth. Spence thinks the memory of this god, or of an Antilian equivalent, survives in the name Hand of Satan, given to one island of the group Formaleoni discussed. Formaleoni saw in Antilia a European foreknowledge of the Antilles, which were named after the continent the maps still treated as mythical.

Antilia, or the Isle of Seven Cities, is the largest island of the medieval geographers, rectangular, extending from north to south, in mid-Atlantic at about latitude 35 degrees north. It appears on maps of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and later centuries, and it was thought of as a half-way house to the Indies. One legend settles it with refugees from Spain in 714, after the defeat of King Roderick by the Moors. Another has a Portuguese rediscovery.

Spence’s own division is that the original land kept its name in the east, while the western portion came to be known as Antilia. The traditions are distinct. Antilia conserved the remains of Atlantean culture and stayed above the ocean for many thousands of years after Atlantis sank, joined to the eastern mass by an island chain until the final destruction. Brasseur de Bourbourg, Bancroft, and Le Plongeon had already identified the Antilles with Atlantis. Spence differs from them. The Antilles are the remains of a distinct western portion.

On page 87 he states the limit in his own terms. An Atlantis of later times, say 9000 B.C., stretching from Europe to America, destroyed by one cataclysm, and colonising and civilising the American continent at that period, is opposed to all that is known of Mexican and Central American history. That view, he says, has done more to discredit the hypothesis than anything else could have done. With it he places the contention of Le Plongeon that Central America was colonised by Atlanteans 11,500 years ago, and what he calls the rhetorical rubbish Brasseur published.

The map evidence is Andreas Bianca, 1436. Brazil is drawn as an island north of Madeira. Satanaxio stands on a parallel with the north of Spain. Antilia is a large oblong mass opposite the opening of the Mediterranean, and a considerable distance from it. Benincasa, 1476, is almost the same. On the Laon globe Antilia keeps the latitude, and the others are not represented. Later charts keep Brazil and Satanaxio, the latter called the Isle of Demons, at their latitudes, and Antilia drops out. He takes the repeated latitudes as evidence that the islands were real.

He also gathers the Irish Brazil. One notice gives O’Brasile under longitude 3 degrees and latitude 50 degrees 20 minutes. A pretended visit was published in London in 1675, reprinted by Hardiman, and the position is nearly that of Dudley’s Arcano del Mare (1646). O’Flaherty’s Ogygia (London, 1685) and Jeremy Taylor’s Dissuasive from Popery (1667) mention it as a familiar name. Bory de St. Vincent, Essais sur les Îles Fortunées (1803), supplies the frontispiece: the Azores, Madeira, the Canaries, and the Cape Verde Islands as the remains of one island-continent, known as the Hesperides, the country of Atlantis, the land of the Amazons, and the home of the Gorgons.

Chapter VIII. The evidence from American tradition

During the Pleistocene the continent broke into the two masses already named. Atlantis shows its last peaks in the Canaries, Madeira, and the Cape Verde Islands. Antilia is the Antilles. The chain between them leaves the Azores and the Bermudas. Antilia did not finally disappear until long after Atlantis. Maya chronology, the one generally accepted for Central America, is the clock he trusts. Megalithic pre-Incan Peru is more doubtful and would seem earlier.

I will content myself by saying that to the best of my belief no American civilisation greatly antedated 100 B.C., that is so far as its appearance on American soil is concerned.

Lewis Spence, The Problem of Atlantis (1925), p. 93

He begins with North American creation myths. Among the Muskogee stock, the Creeks, Choctaws, and Seminoles, a primeval waste of waters holds two pigeons, or doves, and a single blade of grass. A great hill, Nunne Chaha, rose in the midst, and in the centre was the house of the deity Esaugetuh Emissee, Master of Breath, who made men from clay. The Huron Tawiscara guided the torrents into smooth seas and lakes.

South American floods follow. The Tupuya, or Ges, of eastern Brazil and Bolivia have the god Anatiwa, and a water-hen fetching earth to the hills. The Antis of the Bolivian Alps, in north-western Brazil, and the Ipurina, tell of a destruction by Maire, who sent an inundation from which a few were saved by climbing trees.

Mexican sculpture of four epochs is the longest American sequence in the chapter. Four Jaguar: Tezcatlipoca as the sun, and men and giants devoured by jaguars. Four Wind: Quetzalcoatl, and an ending in hurricanes. The gods created giants, very great men and of much strength. Quetzalcoatl became the sun. Tlaloc held it for 364 years, during which Quetzalcoatl rained fire on the sun, and then created as the sun his wife Chalchihuitlicue. Another flood has a deity seize fishes, mould their hinder parts, change their heads, and turn them into dogs. Xelhua is a giant of the first age. The Mixtec deer-gods of south-western Mexico have more sons and daughters, and then a flood in which many perished. Spence finds that myth a very Atlantean complexion.

He points to illustrations of Quetzalcoatl in what he calls his Atlantean form, and he treats the likeness to the Greek Atlas as enough to identify them. A plate sets Quetzalcoatl as Atlas, from the National Museum at Naples. The working-out is in his Gods of Mexico, 1923, in the chapter on cosmogony. The interpreter of the Codex Telleriano-Remensis says they celebrated a festival on the sign of four earthquakes to the destroyer, with reference to the fate which again waited the world. The world had undergone four destructions, and would be destroyed again. The Historia de los Mexicanos tries to date these events on the Mexican time-cycle. Spence will not vouch for the exactitude. He takes the attempt as folk-memory with a mythical colouring.

Quetzalcoatl is, for him, a real culture-hero from a region in the east, the western Atlantic, in a word from Antilia. The Mexicans also regarded him as the Trade Wind. Spence says he was among the first to indicate that connection, and he treats the wind as a secondary and legendary sense, of the kind that ties William Wallace to one of the Eildon Hills. Toltec culture remains, tied to Quetzalcoatl, with a speedy rise and a comparatively sudden downfall. He left a memory as civiliser, architect, craftsman in jewellery and dyestuffs, and agriculturist. A line of priest-kings followed him. One myth has him behold the building of a tower like that of Babel, and its fall. He must periodically return to Tlapallan for his magic draught and speak with another old man, or he cannot return refreshed. Spence reads an old ritual of rejuvenation when the crops fail, and he places that ritual in Atlantis-Antilia as well as in the allegory of the Trade Wind.

Aztlan is the pictured homeland. A native record says this is the beginning of the record of the coming of the Mexicans from the place called Aztlan, and that they came by water, four tribes, rowing in boats. The picture, facing page 202, resembles Plato’s description: a place in a lake, surrounded by walls. When the Mexicans built Mexico they built it on the plan of Aztlan.

His summary of the American traditions is that they point to a later date for the Antilian catastrophe than for the Atlantean one, that flood and upheaval myths are widespread, that a great hill like the hill of Poseidon’s temple is prominent, and that culture-heroes arrive from the east, from an oceanic land.

Chapter IX. American tradition continued

The interpreter of Codex Vaticanus A says of Tlaloc that on the 21st of December they celebrated the festival of this god, through whose instrumentality the earth became again visible after it had been covered with the waters of the deluge. In the Aubin tonalamatl, Chalchihuitlicue stands in water, and down the water float a jewel-box, an armed man, and a woman. The myth is also in the Codex Telleriano. If Quetzalcoatl is Atlas, Tlaloc and Chalchihuitlicue can, he says, almost as readily be paired with other Atlantean figures.

Xiuhtecutli holds sway over fire, whether from the heavens or from the earth beneath. A notice from Chiapas says the writer discovered, among Quiche manuscripts he had burned, a book purporting to have been written by Votan. Spence uses Votan as another eastern arrival, and he does not build a separate colonisation date on that report.

At the place where Plato’s narrative breaks off, Spence says, Zeus was about to warn the Atlanteans and then to punish them. He reads the American destroyer-gods, Tezcatlipoca and Hurakan among them, as the same warning turned into a standing terror after the catastrophe.

Chapter X. The Popol Vuh as an Atlantean record

At the instance of the late Alfred Nutt, about seventeen years before this book, he studied the Popol Vuh and doubted its American provenance. He thought Biblical matter had been laid over American tradition, and other intensive students agreed. A residuum would not treat as anything but American. Collation showed that the tales which looked borrowed had only a superficial likeness to scripture. He became convinced they were not European missionary imports, and he asks where legends that seem neither European nor American originated.

The book, in the form we have, was composed by a native of Guatemala in the seventeenth century. The Quiche, a dialect of Maya, was turned into Spanish by Francisco Ximenes. Original and translation were lost between the beginning of the nineteenth century and 1854, and were rediscovered by Dr C. Scherzer, an Austrian, in the library of the University of San Carlos, Guatemala. The name means the Collection of Written Leaves, which Spence takes as proof of traditional matter written very early. It is the mythology and history of the Quiche from the origin to the Spanish conquest. He confines himself to what he thinks is Atlantean-Antillean tradition, and more especially Antillean, because America owed more to the western and later portion than to the eastern.

Creation begins with the Former, the Mother and Father, the Cause of Existence. There is nothing, a silent sea, the spaces of heaven, the Old Ones, and serpents covered with green feathers and blue feathers, gods of sky and sea. They take counsel with Hurakan, Heart of Heaven, the wind-god, the hurricane. Solid land, trees, plants, and animals follow. Mannikins of wood are irreverent. Hurakan swells the waters. A mighty flood and a thick resinous rain fall. Birds tear out eyes and bite off heads. Domestic animals and household utensils jeer. Roofs crumble, trees hurl the mannikins down, and caves close. The remnant become monkeys. Spence reads a cataclysm or a volcanic catastrophe: a tidal wave, fiery rain, crashing houses, falling trees, the collapse of caverns, and survivors reduced to the wild life of the forest.

Xpiyacoc and Xmucane are Father Earth and Mother Sky. Gucumatz, the green-feathered and blue-feathered serpents in the deep, gods of subterranean disturbance, is the same being as Quetzalcoatl, and the name has the same meaning. Quetzalcoatl came from Tlapallan, situated in the Atlantic Ocean, to civilise Mexico. The word hurricane comes from Hurakan.

After the catastrophe lives the Titan Vukub-Cakix, Seven Times the Colour of Fire, the Great Macaw, with the brilliance of sun and moon and with emerald teeth. His sons are Zipacna, the Earth-heaper, and Cabrakan, Earthquake, who cast mountains about like toys. The heroes are Hun-Apu, Hunter with a Blowpipe, and Xbalanque, Little Tiger. Hun-Apu wounds Vukub-Cakix with a dart. The Father and Mother, disguised as physicians, remove the teeth and the eyes. Then come the sons, the maker of volcanoes and the destroyer of mountains. The lords of Xibalba, Hun-Came and Vukub-Came, challenge the brothers to a ball game. The adventures of the brothers and of their nephews and sons are, for Spence, the tests of a secret society. He returns to that reading in the Egypt chapter.

The third book has four men made from a paste of yellow and white maize, and four women given to them while they sleep, the ancestors of the Quiche. There is no sun. They journey to Tulan-Zuiva, the Seven Caves, where gods are given to them. Speech is confounded as at Babel. One band follows Tohil over lofty mountains and once crosses the ocean bed, the waters divided. At the mountain Hacavitz the sun appears. The first men, overcome by age, expire or are translated.

The atmosphere is American only in a secondary sense. The pantheon is one of tempest and earthquake. The leaders of the secret society have a ritual that resembles the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The migration in a world where there was no sun, and the passage over a sea whose waters were divided, he reads as a volcanic ridge, temporary or otherwise, by which they passed from Antilia to America. The ancestors of the Quiches and of the Maya came from Antilia.

Chapter XI. Central American archaeology

The strange culture of the Maya gives him a picture of civilisation in ancient Antilia, the last sub-continental fragment. Central American culture resembles Egypt in a general way. Elliot Smith’s school accounts for the resemblance by a slow spread of Pyramid-age Egypt across the Pacific. Spence says the associated factors called the signs of the Children of the Sun, terrace-irrigation, pearl-fishing, metalworking, and the rest, break down in Mexico, where practically none of them obtained. The best authenticated myths say the culture arrived from the east.

The civilised peoples occupied the tract from the Tropic of Cancer to Nicaragua. The beginnings on this tract lie about the head-waters of the Usumacinta and the Rio Grande in Guatemala, and in the part of Chiapas that slopes down from the Cordilleras. That oldest district was probably colonised about a century before the Christian era. Ruined cities, chief among them Palenque, Piedras Negras, and Ocosingo, stretch east into Belize and south to Honduras. The temples already have the stamp of a metropolitan art. Some time in the sixth century disaster overtook these communities. Pestilence or a religious cause is his guess. Invasion is unlikely, because the buildings are almost perfect and have not been fired. The Maya of Guatemala and Chiapas journeyed south into the almost waterless peninsula of Yucatan and raised settlements again. In Yucatan the art is less free and more conventional, and the city-states are more tumultuous.

When the civilisation first appears on Central American soil it is full-blown: art, architecture, religion, and hieroglyphic writing, with no trace of evolution on American ground. The Tuxtla statuette and the Leiden Plate, a century before and a century after the opening of the Christian era, show the same script as objects of the century before the Spaniards. Nothing earlier has been found on Maya soil.

The architecture has links with Egypt and a character of its own, which he reads as an art long segregated in an oceanic environment. It owes nothing, in his view, to an alien system in the way Greek architecture owed debts to Egypt and Babylonia. He derives it from the oblong bamboo house. Temple walls are sculptured as bamboo rods, as the earliest Egyptian temples were carved as wooden logs. The box has no windows. Air and light enter by the doorways. A second storey is another box set on the first. That applies to temples and palaces. The dwellings of the people were huts of leaves and adobe, a sign, for him, that the populace had been habituated to earthquakes or volcanic disturbance.

The principal sites in Guatemala and Chiapas stand on plains surrounded by mountains, the site Plato gives Atlantis. Palenque is an amphitheatre on the slopes of the Cordilleras. From the central pyramid the eye meets a ring of palaces and temples on artificial terraces. He asks why they are raised. Persepolis is raised because of seasonal floods, and Palenque had no such risk. The elevation may remember buildings that stood on a sacred hill, the hill of American legend and of Atlantis. The Maya and the Mexicans also believed they were building on the back of a great sea-monster, a cayman or alligator, or, as the Book of the Kakchiquels has it, a whale with four feet, which occasionally writhed and cast them into the ocean. Prudence founded the buildings on something more stable than the monster’s back. He takes that as a haunting by cataclysm.

On the writing he sets Le Plongeon aside. The wild and unscientific theories, and the alleged discoveries, of Le Plongeon and his school are to be cast behind. The glyphs have not had the popular fame of Egyptian or cuneiform script. Stephens’s explorations excited an earlier generation. The United States, France, and Germany encouraged the work. Britain, he says, still languishes in it. The monuments stand in Yucatan, the uplands of Guatemala, Tabasco, Chiapas, and a portion of Honduras. The greater number of inscriptions are in the south, where the older branch flourished: Copan in Honduras, Quirigua and Tikal in Guatemala, Piedras Negras and Palenque in Chiapas, with inscriptions of moment also at Uxmal and Chichen Itza. The script is painted on paper or skin, carved on stone, incised on wood, bone, shell, and metal, and modelled on pottery. Stone and paper are the media that matter. The carved texts stand on stelae, which recall the menhirs of Brittany in shape, and on altars, staircases, and walls. The writing proper is confined to the Dresden, Paris, and Madrid manuscripts, rescued from the Spanish clergy.

The glyphs are calculiform, pebble-shaped, each in a contour like an Egyptian cartouche. They are read in parallel columns, two at a time, left to right and top to bottom. A horizontal band is read in pairs from left to right. In 1565 Landa, Bishop of Chiapas, who had destroyed manuscripts as the devil’s picture-books, collected characters for twenty-seven sounds. Brasseur de Bourbourg published the essay at Paris in 1864. Landa’s alphabet was hailed as the Rosetta Stone of America, and decipherment by it was only partly successful. Spence repeats the conjecture that the scribes misled the bishop. The names and symbols of the days and months are correct, as the Books of Chilan Balam show, where the glyphs stand with European letters. Leon de Rosny in 1876 published an alphabet of twenty-nine letters. De Charency’s attempt, and Le Plongeon’s “Ancient Mayan Hieratic Alphabet” of ten years later, are set aside. Le Plongeon identified the signs with Egyptian hieroglyphs and, in Spence’s words, did incalculable mischief.

Ernst Förstemann of Dresden, about 1880, showed that the records fix calendric festivals and date monuments, and he elucidated the numeration. J. T. Goodman of Alameda, working independently, reached similar conclusions. The work was carried on by D. G. Brinton, Eduard Seler, S. G. Morley, and C. P. Bowditch of Boston. F. W. Hodges, of the Bureau of American Ethnology, is quoted to the effect that the earliest inscriptions now extant probably date from about the beginning of the Christian era, and that the complexity even then requires many centuries of earlier development.

Each glyph has one essential element, seldom altered, and accessory elements that vary with space, style, and material. A head-variant transfers the signs onto a human head. Two groups are distinguished: astronomical, calendric, and numerical signs, which are most of what has been read, and a smaller explanatory group, which probably relates history. The system is not a pure alphabet. It shows phonetic traces, and every attempt to reduce it to an alphabet has failed. Brinton called the phonetic use ikonomatic, or rebus-writing. The Aztec writing was entirely of that character, and Spence believes the Aztecs drew it from Maya sources. The idea of a glyph overshadows its phonetic value.

Förstemann found the sign for zero, a shell, from the symbol for completeness, zero being the only complete number. The moon sign, a cursive head of the moon god, is the month of twenty days and therefore the number twenty. A dot is one, a bar is five. The higher dating system he declines to set out here.

The day-sign akbal means night, and also the beginning of the month, because the Maya month begins after midnight. With footsteps beneath it, Förstemann read beginning, or forward movement. A glyph for seven, which also means great or ultimate, means the end. Union is the sting of a rattlesnake. The dog is drawn as an ear, the whole by the part. Division, or cutting, is an obsidian knife. A half-closed hand means to eat. Added to kin, the sun, it denotes chikin, the west, from the principal meal at sunset. Likin, the east, joins the sun-sign to ahau, king, from a root meaning to rise up or to awake, so that the sun awakes. Xaman, the north, is the face of the devouring earth-monster. The spring equinox is a cloud with three streams of water, a square of sky above, and the obsidian knife as a period cut off. Water is a serpent. The sacrificial victim joins the vulture, the death-bird, to a crouching captive. The day of the new year, in the month Ceh, joins sun, year, division, and the month sign. Wind accompanies a deity of the four cardinal points. Other glyphs cover red, yellow, white, and black, certain deities, and the planets Venus and Mercury. A residuum, with dates, relates historical events. The signs are few, and the script is highly concentrated.

The writing was not developed on American soil. From the oldest temples in Guatemala and Chiapas to the arrival of the Spaniards, some twelve centuries later, the form is much the same. It was supposed to be the joint invention of Quetzalcoatl, the first Atlantean coloniser of Central America, and the old gods Cipactonal and Oxomoco, whom he equates with the old ones of the Popol Vuh, the serpents covered with green and blue feathers. Mendieta, in the Historia Ecclesiastica, tells a Mexican myth that the gods wished the people to have a means of writing. Oxomoco and Cipactonal, who dwelt in a cave in Cuernavaca, considered it. Cipactonal thought her descendant Quetzalcoatl should be consulted. Among them they arranged the calendar and its signs. Some authorities translate Tlapallan, which he also spells Tiapallan in this passage, as Land of Writing. He has himself taken it as the land of the black and red stones, and he allows the secondary meaning. The inks of the Maya scribes were black and red.

Chapter XII. Central American archaeology continued

The glyphs, read as pictures of an environment, remember the sea. The human ear is xicin, which also means shell. Brinton says shells had a peculiar sacredness in Maya symbolism. Oyster shells recur with fish, the harvest of the sea, and sometimes with the cormorant. The conch is frequent. The sign Ben-ik is, for Spence, cataclysmic. Brinton calls it a worm-like figure. Seler calls it mother-earth. It is sometimes fish-like, with cloud-balls as a superfix. Spence takes it as the earth-dragon lying in the waters, with cities on its back, and another version as a tower surrounded by the sea. In Maya cosmology the earth was the turreted castle. Some authorities read the sign as rain or flood.

A further glyph depicts deluge from above, with lightning, and it is associated with dates or a time-count, which he refers to a catastrophe of the Popol Vuh kind. A plate from Brinton’s Maya Hieroglyphics shows the heavenly shield, the sign for deluge, Ben-ik, the sign for the east, and humanity re-arising out of deluge. A design from the Paris Codex is, in his reading, humanity arising out of a sunken land. He says M. A. Blackwell, in “The Swastika and Atlantis,” published in The Word, had already pointed out that the symbols at the base and sides stand for Atlantis, and that the curving lines are engulfing waters. The headless figure rising from the waves is mankind, branching east and west. The design is usually associated with Quetzalcoatl, the god of Tlapallan. The heavenly shield is a city on the Atlantean plan, zones of land and water, four roads to a central citadel, set between mummy-bundles, the majesty enveloped of the first four men in the Popol Vuh. Above are the signs of storm and deluge. The symbol for east repeats the surrounded island, the way to the sea, the port gate, and flanking towers. That it means east is, for him, a reminiscence of an eastern locality.

He will not follow Blackwell into signs taken from Brasseur and Le Plongeon that he cannot find in the more authoritative writers or on the monuments.

The plant-and-fish motif is common at Copan, Palenque, and Chichen Itza. Maudslay and Spinden describe the plant as a water-plant, like a water-lily, with a fish feeding on the petals. Spinden says the whole apparently carries the idea of water. It is attached to animals and to divinities associated with water, including the long-nosed god, probably Quetzalcoatl, who in the Dresden manuscript walks into the water and pulls up a water-plant. Fish and shells are shown. The lower depths are coloured green, the shade of the tropical sea. Bearded figures of the class other writers call Atlantean are common at Chichen Itza. Costume, robes embroidered with silver and gold, plumes, necklaces, belts, inlaid arm and leg pieces, and earrings, is the outcome of centuries, and he will not allow that magnificence to have evolved on the soil where the stelae now stand. A Maya stele is the result of countless ages. The comparison he draws is with the art of peoples now in a condition of barbarism, and the gap, for him, is profound.

The mythological figures continue the ocean and the cataclysm. Maudslay’s Two-headed Dragon at Copan is the earth as a devouring monster. One face wears a mask like a beautiful woman held in the jaws, which Spence reads as the earth at its most attractive when about to destroy. The other face is the true nature. Spinden says the lower jaw is represented as a bleached bone, and sometimes the nose has a cavity that indicates death. On Stela M at Copan the face bears the symbols of water and flood. At Quirigua the dragon merges with a great turtle, the earth resting on a carapace, as among the Hindus and the Chinese, and the figure also occurs as an Atlantean or caryatid motif, so that the architect associated it with Atlas.

The manuscripts, as apart from the carvings, are three: the Dresden, the Paris, and the Tro-Cortesianus, all copies of older books, and for the most part time-counts. Aguilar learned from the native books that they recorded three cataclysms. The first was maya cimil, universal death. The second was oc na kuchil, the ravens enter the houses. The third was hun yecil, universal deluge, which a Maya-Spanish dictionary explains by a tradition that the water was so high that its surface was within the distance of one stalk of maguey from the sky. Another term, bulcahal, haycahol, or haycahil, is a universal earthquake and flood which destroyed the world. Spence reads “the world” as the old world, the Antilia from which the Maya emigrated.

In the Codex Tro-Cortesianus he sees a male and a female figure, possibly Poseidon and Cleito, surrounded by lines which may be the zones. In that codex and in the Dresden, Kukulkan or Quetzalcoatl is seated in a boat coming from Tlapallan, and he is shown with the long proboscis of the tapir. Spence recalls that Tlapizanes was the title of the priests who guarded the Atlantean treasure and manuscripts found and destroyed by the Spanish priesthood.

The serpent or water-goddess appears in all three manuscripts: an old woman with a brown-stained body and claws for feet, a knotted serpent on her head, pouring a flood from a great inverted vase. Förstemann calls her a personification of water as destroyer. In the Dresden Codex, page 74, where something resembling a flood is represented, she wears the cross-bones of the death-god. Brinton calls her the personification of the thunderstorm: the vase is the torrent, the rattles are the thunder-claps. A hieroglyph that accompanies her is read as evil days, or disaster, and her place is the east. Spence identifies her with the Atlantean mother-goddess. Tezcatlipoca, Hurakan in his Maya equivalent, has his sport and his amusement with the people, terrifying them as he pleased. A prayer of the inland Mexicans says, we are all the children of water, and asks Tlaloc not to slay them. He reads an era of recurrent doom.

The Maya god of death, Ah-puch or Kun-hau, is associated with the east. He wears the sea-snail, the ruff of the vulture, and the skull and cross-bones, and he is accompanied by the moan-bird, a falcon which Seler says typifies the thundercloud. The bird is the demon Coslahuntox, the thirteen layers of clouds. The sun-god is frequently bearded, and at Copan, and on the pottery pipes of the Strebel collection, he has filed teeth. Filing or serration of the teeth was practised by the Toltecs, the followers of Quetzalcoatl from Tlapallan. It is not, Spence says, an American practice. It is found in Africa. He derives it from a common centre.

To the objection that the Maya had lost the art of seamanship, he answers that they were skilful sailors. Columbus, on his third voyage, sighted a good-sized vessel with masts and sails and a crew of forty men, who gave him sailing directions by signs. Cabins fore and aft housed women and children, so the voyages were of considerable extent. When Cortes invaded Central America from Mexico he found a regular maritime commerce from the Laguna del Terminos, and the Maya supplied charts of the coast. One god is called the old fish-god of our flesh. A goddess is shown suckling a fish. Opochtli invented the fishermen’s net. Shells adorn practically every god of the Mexican pantheon and many Maya gods. Quetzalcoatl wore on his breast the sliced shell of the sea-snail. The shell girdle was worn by most of the goddesses, and shells hung from their skirts.

The earlier stages, and the linguistic affinities, he looks for in the Antilles. Columbus remarked on the peaceable and civilised character of the inhabitants. Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, and Porto Rico were held by Arawaks. The lesser islands were held by Caribs. The Tainos, or Arawaks, of Cuba had founded a colony in Florida to search for the Fountain of Perpetual Youth, which is what Quetzalcoatl was advised to seek in Tlapallan if he would return to Mexico as a youth. The islanders were hardy sailors. Those of the Bahamas had a regular commerce with Havana. They attacked the flotilla of Ponce de León. The Caribs of the Lesser Antilles penetrated to the heart of Brazil. Spence suspects them as the builders of large ruined cities there, and he says the data are not yet sufficient for certainty. They were cannibals, as the Mexicans were, and he calls them carriers of culture.

The Caribs had two languages, one for men and one for women. He reads an invasion that brought no women, slaughtered the men, and took Arawak wives. The army did not return to a base, and the inference he draws is that the base had disappeared. Von den Steinen, who found remnants in the far interior of Brazil, says they spoke island Carib, the speech of the islands, and not the Carib of the Guianas. An earlier people than either Carib or Arawak, the Guacanabibes, still survived in western Cuba when the Spaniards arrived. J. W. Fewkes found their remains in Porto Rico. They lived in caves. From the name and the customs Spence takes them as the same people as the Guanches of the Canaries. Many of these tribes, especially the Caribs, flattened the head, as the Maya of Guatemala, Chiapas, and Yucatan did, and they built large wooden houses.

Beuchat says the zemies, the gods of the Tainos of Cuba, strongly resemble the naguals, the spiritual beast-guardians of the Maya. Their storm-goddess Guabancex is, Spence thinks, the Sycorax of Shakespeare’s Tempest, and Caliban is an older word for Carib, or cannibal. A footnote says Caliban’s “My dam’s god, Setebos” was in reality a god of the Patagonian Indians mentioned by Magellan. Guabancex’s ministers, Guatauva and Coatrischie, gathered the waters in the valleys before the floods that devastated the islands. The people of Haiti believed the souls of the dead joined their ancestors in a mythical island called Coaibai, in the east. Like the Maya and the Mexicans, they embalmed the dead.

He distinguishes two arrivals. The Maya were direct immigrants from sunken Antilia into Guatemala and Chiapas, and they pushed past the Antilles, which had received only a measure of Antilian civilisation by commerce. The Caribs were bands of the lower orders, sailors, leaderless, who seized shipping and settled the Lesser Antilles. Quetzalcoatl’s myth says more than one party arrived. Carib and Maya resemble each other, and the divergences are what a prolonged isolation would produce.

Chapter XIII. The evidence from Egypt

He will not enter the controversy over an Atlantean origin of Egypt as a welter of argument. The anthropological chapters have already claimed that the dynastic population was in large measure Azilian-Tardenoisian, the Iberians of later times, the same elements that first entered Spain about 10,000 B.C. He does not deny later, and perhaps equally powerful, colonies from Asia. Egyptian dynastic culture was no more wholly Atlantean than Maya culture. The civilising influences from Atlantis coloured it more deeply, in his maintenance, than those from elsewhere.

The best early evidence is Osiris, who is not indigenous. The first dynastic centres are Abydos and Mendes. He may be represented on a mace-head of Nar-mer at Hieraconpolis, and on a wooden plaque of Udy-mu, or Den, also called Hesepti, the fifth king of the First Dynasty, who dances before him. A centre of Osirian worship therefore existed at Abydos in the First Dynasty. Allusions in the Pyramid Texts show earlier shrines. He is usually depicted in mummy bandages and the white cone-shaped crown of the South. Budge says his home and origin were possibly Libyan.

The Book of the Dead is the Pert-em-hru, the Chapter of Coming Forth by Day. A subsidiary title is the Chapter of Making Perfect the Khu, the spirit, which he also renders the Book of the Perfect Way. Certain parts were in use at least four thousand years before our era. Crude prototypes stand in the Pyramid Texts. With mummification a more intricate ritual ensured that the corpse would not corrupt, and that a beautified astral body would be the future home of the spirit. Just before the dynastic era the cult received a great stimulus, and Osiris became primarily the god of the dead. Most of the texts are older than Mena, the first historical king. Even at as early a date as 3300 B.C. the professional copyists were so puzzled that they scarcely understood the purport. Budge estimates the earliest form as contemporaneous with the foundation of the civilisation called Egyptian in the Nile valley. Spence’s step is that it was certainly not Egyptian.

A hieratic inscription on the sarcophagus of Queen Khnemnefert, wife of Mentu-hetep, a king of the Eleventh Dynasty, about 2500 B.C., states that a certain chapter was discovered in the reign of Hesep-ti, the fifth king of the First Dynasty, about 4266 B.C. The sarcophagus gives two copies of that chapter. If it was discovered at that date, it was not Egyptian in origin. He thinks the ritual, if it was not itself the ritual of a mystical society, coloured all later ones. Halls and passages are stages of initiation. The book influenced the Cabiri and Eleusis. Either it is an early type of initiatory ceremonial, or it is an older mystery later turned to other uses.

The cult is probably an importation from Libya, and he traces it further west. Amulets on Aurignacian remains in Spain are practically the prototypes of the amulets on the Egyptian mummy. The shell as the symbol of life in early Spain is paralleled in Egypt. Prehistoric cave-paintings of the Pyrenees in some places portray a ritual that resembles the Pyramid Texts. Osiris, Libyan or western, entered Egypt early, reached a high popularity, and later merged with Ra and Amen, religions of Asiatic provenance, until Osiris was recognised at home and abroad as the deity of Egypt. In simpler form the same myth is everywhere in western Europe. The Scottish and old English ballads of John Barleycorn are the myth of Osiris, the life and death of the barley plant. Druidism is the cult of Osiris in another form, and the menhirs and dolmens are the rude parallels of the pyramid.

W. T. Perry of Manchester, and the school with him, seek to show that all ancient culture arose in Egypt and spread in the Pyramid era. That, Spence says, does not account for the entrance into Egypt, at a much earlier date, of a highly developed Osirian cult with relationships in Spain and northern Africa, where at a date at least 12,000 years B.C. the beginnings of mummification are already present. The Crô-Magnons of the Biscay region smeared the dead with red oxide of iron, to give the colours of life. The blood was the life-principle. Sympathetic magic expected the soul to wake in a body restored, including the fluidity of the blood. The same coloration is found on the earliest Egyptian mummies, and it later becomes the painting of the mummy-case. The Egyptians painted the statues of their gods to make them healthy. The earliest examples are in Crô-Magnon graves in Spain and France. A burial in Wales, the Red Lady of Paviland, though the remains seem to be those of a man, was found by Dr Buckland in 1823. The bones are stained with a dark brick-red, enveloped in ruddle of red micaceous oxide of iron, which stained the earth to about half an inch around. Spence places that burial several thousand years before any interment of the kind in Egypt. Shell necklaces, animals’ teeth, and ivory ornaments in the graves held the life-substance of deities. Elliot Smith connects the shells of Upper Palaeolithic burial, at the Grimaldi caves at Mentone and elsewhere, with later Egyptian amulets. The whole tendency, Spence says, runs from western Europe eastward, among peoples of an Atlantean connection, and the American form is reserved for the next chapter.

Druidism has been called eastern because it resembles oriental religions. He reverses the direction. The simple form is the beginning, and the complex Egyptian form is the mixture with Asiatic thought. Modern writers have tried to prove that Druidism never existed except in later folk-belief, against Caesar, Pliny, and Tacitus. He says the attempt failed, and that the controversy enlightened the study. Druidism is a religion of Iberian origin, with European beginnings in Spain, and a later Celtic mass superimposed. The Messrs Siret, Belgian archaeologists, think it was brought to Iberia by Easterners from Egypt or Syria, who introduced the sacred palm and a goddess resembling Hathor, a form of Nut, the sky-goddess, and who, expelled from Spain, settled in Gaul, Italy, and North Africa. Hathor or Nut is the cow of the heavenly regions, associated with milk and with the milk-exuding fig of the sycamore. In north-western Europe the lacteal fig is replaced by the hazel-nut and by similar plants, and the mistletoe berry is another bearer of the magical milk. The Sirets tie the cult to the megalithic monuments. Spence accepts the correspondence, and he will not take Egypt as the source.

Metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls, is Iberian, not Celtic. Diodorus Siculus, in the latter half of the first century A.D., reports it in Gaul. The Welsh bard Taliessin inhabited the bodies of men and animals, and even a plant. Mongan, king of Ulster, underwent a similar experience. The ancient Britons refused the flesh of certain animals and birds, as the shrines of their ancestors. The idea is in the Book of the Dead, where the soul takes animal and floral forms, and Spence says it appears in connection with Osiris, the western cult, and not with the Asiatic gods of Egypt. Its appearance in India is later. Osiris is the son of Nut, the divine cow whose distorted worship the Sirets find in Spain, Gaul, and Britain.

Arthur, he believes, is Asar, or Osiris. He will not elaborate the case beyond the illustration. Princes of Strathclyde, the Brythonic kingdom from Lothian through Clydesdale to Wales, were called Arthur, and British tradition associates him with that region. Romance also mingled a god who had ceased to be worshipped with a man of history. Slain in his last battle with his nephew Mordred, Arthur is carried by his sisters in a barque to Avallon, the Place of Apples, in the western sea, neither dead nor alive, awaiting the day Britain requires him. Osiris, slain by his brother Set, is ferried in the sacred barque, with Isis and Nephthys, to Aalu in the west, a place of fruits and grain, and rules the not-dead while awaiting resurrection. Avallon is the Anwynn of Welsh myth and the Tir-nan-ogue of Celtic tradition, an island in some tales and a submarine locality in others, and it was confounded with Brazil, which he calls a Celtic name, and with St Brendan’s Isle. In more than one Irish myth it lies at the bottom of the sea.

The Grail legend is connected with the Osirian myth. The Fisher King, wounded in the Grail Castle, has been identified with Arthur and with Osiris, and by German scholarship with Orpheus. Miss Margaret Murray, lecturer on Egyptian language at University College, London, has identified many Grail place-names with localities in Egypt. Horus, the resurrected form of Osiris, resembles Arthur. Both gather companions against evil monsters. The symbol of both is the sun. Arthur’s Round Table typifies the luminary. He and his knights wax stronger as the sun rises and weaker as it sets, and the final discomfiture comes as the sun sinks. Most of the knights are old British gods. King Loth of Lothian is Llud, or Nud, or Lug of the Long Arm, after whom Ludgate is named, and he resembles Aten, whose worship Akhenaten introduced, both described with very long arms, the rays of the sun ending in human hands. Sir Kay is the British god Kai, who could walk under water with a torch in either hand, like the Maya god Itzamna. Lancelot was brought up by Morgan le Fay in a submarine paradise. Morgan is the Irish Morrigan, the raven. Merlin, says Rhys, is the god of Stonehenge. The legendary name of Britain in the Welsh triads is Plas Myrddin, the enclosure of Merlin.

Both cults look to an island paradise in the west. Both fight a monster in the ocean: Apep in Egypt, the addanc in Wales, the etin in Scotland. That monster is the earth-devouring dragon of the waters, which caused them to overflow and drown the world in the cataclysm of Llyn Llion. The heroes wait in the island paradise and are conveyed there in the same manner. Both cults are connected with the sky-cow, with milk, and with milk-giving trees. The serpent figures in both. The founders on both sides are Iberians, and the ancestors of those Iberians are the Azilian-Tardenoisians who arrived in Spain about 10,000 years ago. The chain, for him, is complete. Druidic and Osirian cults had a common origin in Atlantean religion.

That religion, from Plato, was connected with the bull. In Egypt the bull is Apis, a form of Osiris, the calf of Nut, and other cattle were sacrificed to the bull that represented him. The cult of Serapis, Osiris-Apis, was brought by the Romans to Britain and flourished chiefly at York. The bull was sacred to the Druids and was sacrificed at Beltane, Bile’s Fire, when cattle were driven into the flames. The rite, distorted, is still celebrated in Scotland on May Day. From 1649 to 1678, according to the records of the Presbytery of Dingwall, bulls were sacrificed in the parish of Gairloch, in Ross-shire, and oblations of milk were poured on the hills. The sacred bull is depicted on Scottish standing-stones. Kelly, in his Folklore, records a calf burned at Beltane in Northamptonshire. Bull-fighting in Spain, which he calls the purest Iberian race, is a survival of bull-sacrifice. Floods and submerged islands in Druidical legend, and one myth in which Osiris was drowned, close the circle.

Chapter XIV. Egyptian and American comparisons

Recent research, he says, has made it clear that the civilisations of Egypt and America sprang from one common source. Elliot Smith’s school sends Egyptian influence of the Pyramid era round the world by the Pacific. Spence thinks that if Egyptian civilisation reached America it did so by a shorter route than Asia, and that ideas which still look purely Egyptian could not have passed an Asiatic filter without greater alteration than they show. Chinese, Cambodian, and Polynesian influences did impinge on America. The Egyptian culture in Central America was as untouched by Asia, in its passage, as later European culture was.

Brasseur de Bourbourg notes a river Nil, or Nile, in Guatemala, harbouring many crocodiles, with pyramids on its banks. Spence cannot believe that association arrived after thousands of years through Asia and across the Pacific. The Mexican pantheon is the shadow of the Egyptian one. Quetzalcoatl is Thoth, or Osiris. Ciuacoatl is Isis. Piltzintecutli is Horus. Xochipilli is Bes. The list, he says, might be extended without end. Such resemblances, if they occur in India, are not encountered in China, and the Japanese surrogates are later. Actual mummification is found in Mexico and Peru, and only its memory in China. Egyptian records speak of prolonged voyages. A people who rounded the Cape of Good Hope in the reign of Necho were capable of almost any sea passage. Direct contact, he feels convinced, took place by way of Atlantis, or, more probably, Atlantis civilised both.

The outstanding similarity is the disposal of the dead. American mummification was introduced, as in Egypt. The native custom in Mexico and among the Maya was fire or burial. A compromise consumed the embalmed bodies of chiefs and kings on a funerary pyre. In Michoacan the mummy, swathed in numerous wrappings, resembles the Egyptian mummy. On the plateau and in the south the corpse was bound in a squatting posture in a mummy-bundle of stout cloth, secured by a network of rope, with a false head and religious symbols. Knowledge of it comes from native and colonial descriptions and from the codices. In the Popol Vuh the bodies of the first men were miraculously placed in a bundle called the majesty enveloped, in a region of Maya culture older than the Mexican proper. Maya tombs of important persons have yielded large vessels resembling Egyptian canopic jars, with lids as the heads of the gods of the four points.

The Egyptian colours and organs are north red for the lungs, south white for the liver, east yellow for the stomach, and west black for the intestines. The Maya allotment is nearly identical and not the same: north white for the lungs, south yellow for the belly, east red for the larger intestines, and west black for the intestines. West agrees in colour and organ. North agrees in the organ. Canopic jars, which went out of fashion in Egypt, continued among the Maya under the Bacabs, the gods of the four coloured points. He quotes D. A. Mackenzie, in Folklore for June 1923, on that continuation, and on the argument that the likeness is too striking for chance. The receptacles held the eviscerated organs.

Sheet 60 of the Codex Magliabecchiano, in the Biblioteca Nazionale at Florence, shows the mummy-bundle of a dead warrior, upright, in a manner reminiscent of the embalmed Osiris, with a turquoise-mosaic headband, blue ear and nose plugs, a paper shoulder-band, a drooping panache, and the banner of Uitzilopochtli. Cotton-balls, the emblem of the Underworld, decorate the hair. A blue hairless dog, sacrificed at the master’s death, precedes him. Gifts for Mictlantecutli, Lord of the Dead, include a symbol resembling the tat sign buried with Egyptian mummies, which was to provide a new backbone. A severed hand, from a wizard or a woman who died in childbed, gives light in the Underworld. Spence identifies it with the hand of glory, still used, he says, not so very long ago among Irish burglars. The face-painting is that of Uitzilopochtli and represents the starry sky. Another painting in the same codex shows a young warrior, a telpochtli, not yet a knight, packed in white cotton and secured with ropes.

A myth of the creation of the sun and moon says the gods who killed themselves at the sight of the first sun left their raiment to their servants, and each retainer wrapped the clothing round a stick, placed a chalchihuitl, a jadeite stone, inside as a heart, and named the bundle after the god. The Franciscan Olmos found such a relic at Tlalmanco, of considerable age. These bundles are in the same category as the medicine-bundle of the North American tribes. The deity of Venus is represented as a mummy and wears the insignia of warriors who died by sacrifice. The periods of Venus were connected with the return of souls. The people danced, taking hands, round a sham mummy-bundle on a pole, a feast resembling All Souls. Codex Borbonicus, sheet 28, pictures it. A Sahagun manuscript in the Biblioteca del Palacio at Madrid shows the priests manufacturing the mock mummy.

In Peru the process resembled the Egyptian more closely than the Mexican did. An anatomist who had examined both told Spence the process was very nearly the same. The house of the deceased was set apart, a staff of servants appointed, and lands endowed for offerings. Friends and dependents once immolated themselves. Later a llama, called by the name of the supposed human victim, was accepted. The Temple of the Sun at Cuzco held the mummies of thirteen Incas, seated round the altar, and the Temple of the Moon held their consorts. Polo de Ondegardo hunted out the royal mummies the Peruvians had hidden, with one exception, and the conquistadors stripped them. The heights over the Yucay are honeycombed with double-chambered caves, one chamber for the mummy and his ghost and one for his property. Peruvian mummies are wrapped in bundles, like the Mexican. The intestines were not removed, as they were in Mexico and among the Maya. Canopic jars appear in the border regions where Maya and Mexican cultures mingle, which he takes as a sign that the Maya, the older race, began the practice in America.

North American customs extend the map. Canoe burial and tree burial persist. In Kentucky the body was dried, filled with sand, wrapped in skins or matting, and placed in a cave or a hut. In the Darien peninsula the viscera were removed, the trunk filled with resin, and the corpse smoked and kept in the house. The Aleutians embalmed their chiefs by similar methods. The Virginian Indians removed the skin and fitted it to the skeleton again.

His view is that Egypt, Mexico, and Peru resemble each other because all three sprang from one common source, Atlantis. The germ left the sinking continent with the Crô-Magnons and the Azilian-Tardenoisians, at a stage still embryonic, though amulets had already been placed on the corpse for ages. The Guanches, the last remnant of the Atlantean population, embalmed their dead. The sandals on the statue called Chac-mool at Chichen Itza are exact representations of those found on the feet of the Guanches, whose mummies are occasionally discovered in the caves of Tenerife. Guanche mummies from the Barranco de Fataga in Grand Canary often have a profusion of red hair, lie or are placed on the left side, and are wrapped in goatskin, with the hands crossed over the breast, as in some Peruvian mummies. They are found in caverns, crouching or sitting, like the mummies of Mexico and Peru and the earlier Egyptian interments, rather than stretched out in the late Egyptian manner.

The mysteries are the second comparison. The Book of the Dead is, for him, the fount of mystical practice, ancient and modern. Edward James Payne called Codex Vaticanus A the Mexican Book of the Dead. The corpse is dressed for burial. The soul escapes from the mouth, like the Egyptian ba. A priest in an ocelot skin, where the Egyptian high priest wears a leopard skin, ushers the spirit before Tezcatlipoca, as the Egyptian ghost is brought before Osiris. The spirit stands naked with a wooden yoke on the neck to receive sentence, and then faces the tests.

Hunhun-Apu and Vukub-Hunapu, descending to Xibalba, find two seated figures of wood and a seat of honour that is a red-hot stone. Their sons and nephews outwit the Xibalbans, after the House of Lances, the House of Cold, the House of Pumas, the House of Fire, and the House of Bats. Spence sets these houses beside the halls of the Egyptian spirit. The deities have an agricultural connection, like Osiris and Isis, and like Demeter and Kore. Xquiq, daughter of one of the lords, gathers a basket of maize where no maize grew, and he identifies her with Kore or Persephone. North American Indians and Australian Blackfellows celebrate the same type of mystery. The likeness, he says, has been perpetuated to a certain extent in modern Freemasonry.

Sanchoniathon the Carthaginian says the Cabiri, of Carthaginian origin, were connected with Osiris. They set down records of the past by command of Thoth, and delivered them to their successors and to foreigners, of whom one was Isiris, the inventor of the three letters, the brother of Chua, called the first Phoenician. Phoenician myth made the Titans, the Rephaim, that is Atlas and his kin, their ancestors. The worship was brought from the Phoenician settlements in north-western Africa to Greece. The nations of antiquity regarded the Cabiri as the most ancient gods of whose worship there was any record. Eleusis and Bacchus were things of yesterday beside them. To the profane they appeared as deities armed with darts, lances, or hammers, sometimes as pygmies, and they wore the apron of the smith or mason. They were connected with fire and water, and with Vulcan. They were two, and were later reflected in the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, who resemble the Atlantean offspring of Poseidon. Poseidon was worshipped with the Cabiri at Berytus.

In Mexico the twins Uitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipoca resemble them, and they seem the same as the hero-twins of the Popol Vuh. They are armed with the spear and connected with the stars of the two hemispheres. Plato’s ten golden statues in front of the temple of Poseidon resemble the ten images of the Tzitzimine, the elemental deities, placed round the idol of Uitzilopochtli in his temple at Mexico. Uitzilopochtli was the chief oracle of Mexico. Strange rites belonged to Tezcatlipoca, patron of witchcraft and sorcery.

Quetzalcoatl resembles Thoth. Both can have the heads of birds with long beaks. Both invented writing. Both are connected with the moon. Thoth in one form is the dog-headed ape, Cynocephalus. Quetzalcoatl takes the guise of a dog supposed to bring lightning. Both are deities of rain and wind, masters of magic and medicine. Anubis has his counterpart in Xolotl, dog-headed in Codex Borbonicus sheet 16 and in Codex Vaticanus B. In both countries the dog accompanies his master to the place of the dead.

Bes is reflected in Xochipilli. Bes is a huge dwarf, enormous stomach, bow legs, thick lips, protruding tongue, flat nose, shaggy eyebrows, a tiara of feathers, and a panther skin with the tail hanging behind. He is provider of amusements, grotesque dancer, harp-player, and god of dance, music, and joviality. Xochipilli, or Macuil Xochitl, wears a panache and a dress with a similar appendage. Sahagun calls him the god of those who served for the amusement of the great.

Set and Tezcatlipoca share night and darkness, an animal head that belongs neither to the camel nor to the okapi and that is unknown in Mexico as well, storms, earthquakes, eclipses, the Great Bear, enmity to a brother who is a sun-god, and a stone. Set’s hieroglyph is a stone of the desert on either side of the Nile. Tezcatlipoca’s stone is the tepochtli, the wizard stone, from which tempests arise. His names Yaotl and Yaomitl signify Enemy and Dreaded Enemy. Both are painted black. A plate compares Quetzalcoatl with Thoth.

Isis, carrying the child Horus and moaning as she seeks Osiris, is set beside a pottery figure of Ciuacoatl in the Uhde Collection in Berlin. She wears a head-dress reminiscent of Hathor and carries an infant, and she wanders crying. The bird and the serpent close the mythological list. Herodotus says the Egyptians believed the sacred ibis destroyed the serpent. In the myth of the founding of Mexico the eagle performs that office. The serpent was venerated by Egyptians, Druids, and Mexicans. In a Mexican manuscript the gods drag the serpent of darkness through the universe as the genii of light towed the serpent Ankh-neteru.

The architecture follows. The teocalli has often been compared with the pyramid. Many were the last resting-places of kings, and they were not only high places. In the Totonac country, north of Vera Cruz, a pyramidal building is frequently crowned by a covered temple with a massive roof. The striking Mexican examples are Teotihuacan and Xochicalco. Teotihuacan was the religious centre of the Nahua. The pyramids of the Sun and the Moon are surrounded by burying-grounds, where the devout hoped, if interred there, to enter the paradise of the Sun. The pyramid of the Moon has a base of 426 feet (129 meters) and a height of 137 feet (41 meters). The Sun has a base of 735 feet (224 meters) and a height of 203 feet (61 meters). The base of the pyramid of Cholula, 45 acres, is greater than that of any Egyptian pyramid.

Both series have an inaccurate orientation toward the compass, a line through the centres roughly on the astronomical meridian, and both were built in steps. In Egypt the steps were filled in and the sides smoothed, and the same was frequently done in Mexico and Central America. Both were used for burial. Waldeck found near Palenque two pyramids, square at the base and pointed, the sides forming equilateral triangles. The pyramid of Teotihuacan has an opening 69 feet (21.03 meters) from its base, a gallery entered by crawling, running inward on an incline for 25 feet (7.62 meters) to two sepulchral chambers, each 5 feet (1.52 meters) square. Lowenstein describes the gallery as 157 feet (47 meters) long, with a well over 6 feet (1.83 meters) square. Spence says the arrangement is almost that of the interior of the pyramid of Cheops. Near Tezcuco is Xochicalco, the Hill of Flowers, which one writer at least believes to be a facsimile of the temple hill of Atlantis. The porphyry quarries lie many miles off, and the blocks are some 12 feet (3.66 meters) long. The sculpture is now a ruin.

He will not derive these structures from direct Egyptian influence. They have a character of their own. Pyramid building in Egypt was not originally Egyptian. Until Zoser, in the Third Dynasty, the royal tombs were sun-dried brick lining pits in the ground or the sand. The stone pyramid was introduced by a stone-using people from the west, the people who built cairns, tumuli, menhirs, and dolmens in Spain, France, and Britain. Elliot Smith treats the dolmen, a large stone on three others under an earthen mound, as a degenerate pyramid. Spence reverses that. If evolution is worth anything, the dolmen is the earliest form. The early Egyptians used brick. Stone-building rose when the Iberians, descendants of the Atlanteans, entered Egypt. The related civilisations entered their spheres one from the east and one from the west, so the parent centre lay in north-western Africa, in western Europe, or in an Atlantic land now submerged and once joined by a land-bridge. The first hypotheses do not bring this type of culture to America. The remaining alternative is the Atlantean one. He does not know whether the Atlanteans built pyramids. By analogy, their architecture and art are the prototypes of Mexico and Egypt.

Chapter XV. The evidence from old Peru

On the western slope of the Peruvian Andes stand remains of a civilisation far older, he says, than the Inca dynasty the Spaniards met in 1534. Gigantic blocks, often called Cyclopean, belong to a megalithic or Andean period of which there is not even legendary knowledge. A legend says that when the founders left the island of Titicaca the sun-god gave them a golden branch, which would take root where they were to found a centre of enlightenment. It rooted at Cuzco. The city stands at an altitude of over eleven thousand feet, on artificial terraces of immense masses of earth held by Cyclopean walls. The stone came by main force from the quarries of Anduhaylillas, twenty-two miles off. The Peruvians had no draught animal except the llama. The blocks were squared and joined by a mortise about a foot deep, into which a tenon from the upper block fitted. Weight took the place of mortar. Above the city towered Sacsahuaman, on a rock between the Huatenay and the Rodadero. The walls run one thousand eight hundred feet, in three great circles. Three entrances could be closed with blocks held ready. A round tower in the centre held the Inca treasure. From it the last of the line hurled himself when the last native insurrection failed, the rising in which Juan Pizarro lost his life. The early Spaniards believed the Father of Evil had assisted the builders.

The Temple of the Sun, now a Dominican convent, stood on a hill 80 feet (24.38 meters) above the Huatenay, reached by garden terraces worked in solid silver and gold. Hoes, spades, and mattocks were of solid silver. Pedro Pizarro is among the eye-witnesses. Models of animals and insects in gold and silver filled the grounds. The quarter was Coricancha, the City of Gold. The temple occupies one side of a court called Intipampa, the Field of the Sun. Squier saw, in houses in Cuzco, sheets of gold of the thickness of paper stripped from the walls. A plaque of the sun-god stood so that the rising sun struck it. The altarpiece fell as booty to Mancio Serra de Leguicano, who lost it on a single throw of the dice. The roof was choice wood under a thatch of maize straw. Twelve large silver vases held the sacred grain, and the water-pipes were of silver. The walls of the Aclahuasi, the House of the Virgins of the Sun, still stand for 750 feet (228 meters).

The Stone of Twelve Angles, in the palace terrace of Rocca, is met on each of its dozen sides by another stone. A penknife blade, and on some walls a needle, cannot be introduced between the stones. One hall, by a native historian, could hold 60 horsemen exercising with lances. The Huacapata, the great square, was surrounded on three sides by public buildings each capable of holding several thousand people. Niches, narrower at the top than at the base, relieve the masonry and resemble the Egyptian pylon in shape.

The Acllahuasi, or convent, now Santa Catalina, housed the maidens set apart for the sun, from whom the Incas took their brides. A love affair meant death for the woman and for the man, and the village he came from was levelled, as a nest of similar vipers. The building is now 750 feet (228 meters) long and from 20 to 25 feet (7.62 meters) high, and the existing walls show no entrance. The Yachahuasi, the schools founded by the Inca Rocca, were plain seminaries where the amautas taught the quipus, the tales of gods and heroes, music, native engineering, and astrology.

On Rodadero Hill, more than half a mile round and at least 80 feet (24.38 meters) high, stands the Piedra Causada, the Tired Stone. Garcilaso says it required 20,000 men and, rolling, killed 300. Spence calls the chronicler’s history mendacious on this point. The stone weighs probably over 1,000 tons and was never moved by mere physical effort. Its upper surface is cut into seats, reservoirs, niches, and staircases. The Seat of the Inca, benches cut in the rock like a Roman amphitheatre, is where tradition says the three Incas who built Sacsahuaman watched the work.

Ollantay-Tampu, about forty-five miles north of Cuzco, defended the Yucay valley against the Chinchos, who lived in the forests of the Amazon. The walls, mostly red porphyry, average 25 feet (7.62 meters). Squier compared it to the castles of the Rhine. An inclined plane over half a mile long brought the stones up, guarded by block-houses and supported by an embankment more than 60 feet (18.29 meters) high. The first wall climbs to a precipice of 1,000 feet (304 meters). The stone was quarried some seven miles away, upwards of 3,000 feet (914 meters) above the valley. Some blocks approach 20 feet (6.1 meters) by 5 feet (1.52 meters) by 4 feet (1.22 meters). Six support a terrace whose facing was never finished. One Tired Stone on the plane is 21 feet (6.4 meters) 5 inches long by 15 feet (4.57 meters) broad.

He describes these remains at length because, in his estimation, they preserve the atmosphere of Atlantis better than any other remains, American, European, or Asiatic. The plateau of Lake Titicaca holds Tiahuanaco, on the southern side of the lake, at 13,000 feet (3962 meters), occupying nearly half an acre, built of enormous blocks of trachytic rock. The doorway is cut from a single block. He gives the height as 7 feet (2.13 meters). The width and the thickness are broken in this scan, so I leave them off the page. A central figure in high relief has a head surrounded by solar rays and a sceptre in each hand ending in a condor’s head, flanked by three tiers of kneeling winged suppliants with similar sceptres. Other blocks are some 36 feet (10.97 meters) long. When the Spaniards arrived, no tradition of the founders remained. Brinton, Squier, and Markham thought the builders indigenous. Spence says modern archaeology will not countenance that. Some traditions bring them from the south, from Bolivia. Others bring them from the north by sea. He thinks both are correct. Argentina was at a remote period covered by a vast, partially land-locked sea, and the ancestors of the Quichua-Aymara dwelt on its shores as fishers or fowlers. The earlier Andean stock arrived, after the fall of Antilia, on the shores of Brazil, worked up the Amazon, and reached Peru.

The Peruvian flood has a man whose llama will not eat, and who is told that in five days the sea will engulf the earth. He climbs a high mountain with food for five days. After another five days the water falls, and only he is alive. On a mountain-top appear five eggs, and from one emerges the demi-god Paricaca. The egg is the fertility pot, and the pot is the ark. Spence reads the eggs as the great ships of the Atlanteans, washed up on a mountain in Peru.

A theory he has already noticed derives the Peruvians from Iberians who crossed a land-bridge from North Africa. He thinks it more probable that the resemblance comes from a common Atlantean origin. The people as a whole were no more Atlantean than the races of Central America. The ruling class was. Tradition says the Quichuas were fair, with blue eyes and sometimes auburn hair, and their descendants are still lighter than the surrounding stocks. Pylon doorways and polygonal masonry approximate, for him, to Libya, Egypt, Crete, and Carthage.

Stones become men, as with Deucalion and Pyrrha. When the Chancas attacked Cuzco, a defender set up stones with shields and weapons, and Pachacutic cried to them until they became men. A sunken island belongs to the water-goddess of Lake Titicaca. Huaina Ccapac, the eleventh Inca, determined to build a shrine to Yatiri, or Pachacamac, on an island. He raised a temple on Titicaca itself, then transferred it to Apiuguela, then inaugurated one on Paopiti. The goddess lashed the waters until the island and the shrine disappeared. Pariacaca formed the lake called after him in three days and nights by hurling rain and hail at a local god. Twin gods, Apocatequil and Pigueréo, brought the race out of darkness into the light. Apocatequil is a thunder deity, and his statue stood on a mountain with those of his mother and brother. The inland tribes feared the sea. The coastal people called it Mama-cocha, Mother-sea, and worshipped the whale and the lesser fish. The prototype of each species dwelt in the upper world and sent his servants into the deep.

Viracocha, a culture-hero and rain-god like Quetzalcoatl, sent storms and cataclysms for men’s sins, then forgave them, taught the arts, and disappeared into the ocean, coming from the region of the dawn. The Canaris Indians of Canaribamba, in Quito, tell of twin brothers who fled to a mountain called Huacaquan, which rose as the flood rose. They married bird-women, women dressed in the plumage of birds. Thonapa, badly treated at Yamquisapa in the province of Alla-suyu, caused a lake to appear where the town stood, burned an idol of a woman on the hill Cachapucara, destroyed the hill, and turned a concourse of Indians into stones. The people of Tuja-manacu, bent on pleasure, were treated in the same way. Like Quetzalcoatl, he disappeared into the sea.

Pariacaca, the demi-god from the egg, came like Poseidon to a hill-country where he was insulted, and he destroyed the village with a flood. He met Choque Suso, whom Spence calls the Cleito of Plato in a parenthesis, weeping because the maize was dying for lack of water. She consented to his suit, and he irrigated the whole land, as Poseidon did in Atlantis. He eventually turned his wife into a statue. Spence lists the shared details: the hill, the beautiful girl, the irrigation, and the loved one as a stone image. The cataclysms in these myths are brought on by wickedness or by a careless love of pleasure.

A fish-god, Pachacamac, had a temple on the right bank of the River Lurin, on the coast of the Chincha country. A mound of stone and adobe rises 200 feet (60 meters), on three wide terraces with a platform. Miguel Astete, one of the conquerors, says that in 1533 an idol of wood was found in a large, well-painted building and was destroyed. Spence says the building was of the Atlantean type, and he takes that up in the next chapter.

Chapter XVI. The geography and topography of Atlantis

The plan of the capital was copied far and wide, as colonial cities copied the mother city. Cities of southern Yucatan were modelled on older Guatemala. Cities of southern Egypt resemble those of the Delta. Rome is said to have been modelled on Troy, and Corcyra on Corinth. The Atlantean capital was encircled by zones of land and water. A common early plan in the Atlantic regions is an island within an island, or a site enclosed by several zones.

Hanno, speaking of ape-like people on the west coast of Africa, says they dwelt in a village on an island within an island. The forts of the Aran Islands, six miles from the coast of Galway, are the home of giants and workers in magic in mainland tradition, and later legend identifies them with Hy-Brasil and Tir-nan-Og. The inhabitants still use the coracle described by Himilco, another Carthaginian traveller, 2,400 years ago. Dun Aengus, the Fort of Angus, on Inishmore, stands on a cliff 300 feet (91 meters) above the Atlantic. A strong oval citadel measures internally 150 by 130 feet (39 meters), with two concentric outer walls that end on the cliff edge, terraces, and steps. The blocks of local limestone are from 3 to 7 feet (2.13 meters) long. Dubh Cathair, the Black Fort, also on Inishmore, stands on a promontory 400 feet (121 meters) above the sea. Recent investigators assign these works to the Bronze Age. Tradition says they were inhabited by the Firbolgs, who after expulsion by the Milesians wandered in Scotland and returned to Ireland. The Firbolgs are the pre-Gaelic people of Ireland, the Iberians, the same race as the Azilian-Tardenoisians who seem to have come from Atlantis.

Atlantean town-planning insisted on three things: a citadel on a lofty eminence, ring upon ring of walls, and alternate zones of land and water. At the height of the Aran forts the water zones were unnecessary, or the engineering of great canals was lost after the break-up and only the general plan remained. E. W. Lynam of the British Museum says the Aran forts form the western end of the long chain of forts whose other end is in Thessaly and Mycenae. Spence reads the eastern and northern examples as two arms radiating from lost Atlantis. With them he classes the brochs of Scotland and the nuraghi of Sardinia. T. Eric Peet, Rough Stone Monuments, says all the nuraghi stand in commanding situations, and the stronger the position the stronger the nuraghe. Donald A. Mackenzie reports towers called talayots in the Balearic Isles, which Peet thinks resemble the nuraghi, and the architecture of all three resembles the beehive tombs of Mycenae. The builders are Iberians, Sergi’s Mediterranean race, and the Picts who built the brochs are of that stock. The brochs are round towers on promontories, many of them once surrounded by walls. The sequence does not run from east to west, because the Iberians did not originate in the eastern Mediterranean.

In America the plan of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, in the letters of Cortes to Charles V, resembles Plato’s city. Mexico stood in a lake. Causeways and canals are the zones, and the great central pyramid of Uitzilopochtli is the high place analogous to the temple of Poseidon. Aztlan, Place of the Flamingo People, is depicted in the same way. Peruvian fortresses add circular or semi-circular walls, a central citadel, and red stone of the kind Plato’s Atlanteans used. One Peruvian shrine stood on an island in a lake, in the Titicaca legend. The ku, or pyramid-temple, of Central America stands on an artificial mound. In Mexico certain hills were sacred to the maize-goddess Coatlicue, and Sahagun says such a mountain existed near Tollan. Her figure was placed on the height, and her son Uitzilopochtli, depicted in some manuscripts as a kind of Atlas upholding a world-direction, was worshipped there. Spence sets Coatlicue beside Cleito, and the first portion of Uitzilopochtli’s name beside Atlas. Farther north, where natural eminences fail, the Mississippi tribes raise pyramids of earth unfaced with stone. The pyramid in Egypt, Central America, and Mexico is a reminiscence of the Atlantean sacred hill. In Central America a shrine stands on the summit. In Mexico and Peru the summit shrine becomes a flimsy timber erection. He says the earliest Egyptian pyramids also carried shrines, later incorporated because robbers reached them too easily. The broch or nuraghe is the shrine on a natural height, which took the place of the pyramid.

The latitude of the continent is the problem Termier says we must not even consider. Spence debates it anyway. He believes the main mass occupied substantially the position J. Starke Gardner claimed for an Eocene continent, in Popular Science for July 1878. Charts that show deep-sea soundings still mark it as Dolphin’s Ridge. A longer submarine spit or peninsula connects its southern side with South America, which may account for the Andean and Inca civilisations and for their difference from Mexico and Central America. From that spit, almost at the junction with South America, another ridge runs to the West African island of St Paul’s. Between the ridge and Madeira the distance is not very vast, and he thinks a land-bridge or islands linked both with Spain and Africa at no very distant geological date.

An American warship, on passage from Newport, Rhode Island, to Gibraltar, charted 3,200 miles (5149 kilometers) of the Atlantic bed with the tonic depth-finder invented by Harvey Hayes of the United States Navy. He prints the name tonic. A sound impulse from a steel disc in the bottom is echoed from the sea floor, and the timing gives the depth. Four minutes do the work that had taken three hours. The destroyer Stewart was equipped for a trial. An official report says the apparatus worked throughout. Soundings were taken for depths up to 3,200 fathoms, the greatest nearly four miles. Off Newport the bed dips to 2,750 fathoms, over three miles, and at that depth it undulates like a plateau almost as far as the Azores.

In August 1923 a Western Union vessel searching for a cable laid twenty-five years before found, at the spot where it had been laid, that the ocean bed had risen by nearly two and a quarter miles. Spence offers that against the assertion that no movement has taken place in the bed of the Atlantic.

Dolphin's Ridge, then, I accept as the site of lost Atlantis.

Lewis Spence, The Problem of Atlantis (1925), p. 205

It was connected by an island chain with Antilia, a mass similar in size, whose remains are the Antilles, where an analogous civilisation flourished until a much later period. The ridge on the chart is a long oval, with a bulge on the north-western side. The Azores sit on its extreme eastern coast. Plato’s lofty and precipitous seaward side, and the level plain surrounded by mountains descending toward the sea, is, with Donnelly, a faithful description of that elevation as the Challenger sounded it. The mountains that sheltered the plain from the north are the present peaks of the Azores.

On 14 February 1909 a communication in The Times pointed out that in outline and in detail the prehistoric civilisation of Crete corresponded to Plato’s Atlantis. F. K. Hoare, in the Westminster Gazette of 11 October 1919, says the disappearance of the island corresponds to the collapse of the empire of Knossos, followed by the replacement of Cretan sailors by Phoenicians at Egyptian ports, and that in nine hundred years an unhistorical age might have taken the collapse too literally. The facts, Spence says, do not agree. The downfall of Cretan civilisation took place about 1200 B.C., about the Twentieth Dynasty, and it is unlikely that only six hundred years later Egyptian priests told a Greek that the disappearance went back nine thousand years.

His conclusion reverses the Times argument. Cretan civilisation was modelled on Atlantis. Knossos stands on a level plain surrounded by mountains. There are no zones of land and water, though the drainage might approximate to them. The bull was sacred, and the arena was almost certainly used for bull-fights. There was no racecourse. The horse was unknown in ancient Crete until near the end. After the downfall, the Cretans, with other racial elements, invaded mainland Greece, which may have given rise to the idea of an Atlantean invasion. The Cretans were largely of the Iberian race he derives from Atlantis. They worshipped a goddess connected with the serpent, like Coatlicue, and like her connected with sea-shells offered as votive objects. Pottery figurines of both goddesses have a general likeness. Vast tanks lay near the palace. In the labyrinth, rites of a secret religion like that of Osiris or the Cabiri probably took place. Early Minoan civilisation dates roughly from about 3400 B.C. The Iberian stock found on Crete a race approximating to the Hellenic Greeks, among whom fair and rufous types predominated. An ordinary female type has dark reddish hair and sharp features, such as is often seen in the north of Scotland. The dress is a many-flounced bell-shaped skirt, a jacket, and on ceremonial occasions a short apron like that of the Freemasons, with similar designs. The whole civilisation is, for him, the fag-end of an old culture, introduced from elsewhere.

He asks whether a last spur or island survived until about 3500 B.C., and whether its people, ships having then ploughed the Mediterranean for 1,500 years, sailed east rather than settle the coasts of Spain or Italy, and came to Crete. Tradition in a score of nations places Atlantis outside the Pillars of Hercules. The alleged dimensions are a confused folk-memory of the island chain that stretched for thousands of miles to Antilia.

On the date of the city he separates himself from a literal reading of Plato.

There were certainly cities in Egypt in pre-dynastic times about 6000 B.C., and if we allow a thousand years for the spread of the Atlantean civilisation to the Nile-land, no great stretching of the probabilities is required to date the founding of Atlantis at not later than 7000 B.C.

Lewis Spence, The Problem of Atlantis (1925), p. 209

On the same pages he suggests that no city or civilised state of Atlantis existed at the period Plato alludes to, about 9600 B.C. The rude colonists who reached Europe then, the Azilian-Tardenoisians, were reinforced from the island, and the news of the city’s foundation spread later through uncivilised Europe. Before the city, a large Azilian-Tardenoisian settlement of no barbarian kind may have stood on the site for another two thousand years or more.

The memory of the earliest civic community, he says, could not be wholly lost. Troy vanished, and men thought it had never been, until Schliemann brought it to light. The man who justified his dreams of Troy entertained as firm a belief in a submerged Atlantis. If Britain sank and London vanished, the saga would persist. Atlantis is, in his phrase, that earliest metropolis of the world.

Chapter XVII. The Flood

The question he opens, and does not treat as already settled, is whether the Biblical and pagan Deluge retains a memory of the Atlantean cataclysm. Genesis, chapters vi to viii, has the sons of God see that the daughters of men are fair and take wives, precisely as Poseidon and his sons did, and it has giants, the Titans, in the earth in those days. The Babylonian account is older. Gilgamesh, a hero with the attributes of Hercules, journeys to Ut-napishtim. The ark is built at the behest of Ea, lord of the waters, god of the primeval deep, founder of Babylonian culture, a figure Spence calls almost identical with Poseidon. He reads the Babylonian story as the destruction of a large portion of the earth, and he sets it apart from a mere flooding of a river plain. The tablets come from the palace library of Assurbanipal at Nineveh. Berosus has Cronus warn Sisuthrus that on the fifteenth day of the month Desius a flood will destroy mankind. Shuruppak is thought of as the origin of the Deluge, and traces there imply that the site was once destroyed by flooding. The story must be older than the date mentioned, perhaps not much later than the submergence of Atlantis.

The prophet Hud returned into Hadramaut and was buried near Hesec, where a small town still standing is called Kahr Hud, the Sepulchre of Hud. Spence finds a strong resemblance to the Popol Vuh. Greek floods have already been alluded to. Most mortals perish, and the small remainder die for want of food. Dardanus, overtaken in Samothrace, resembles Atlantis in certain passages. The assumption that Egypt has no Flood tradition is, he says, scarcely correct, because Plutarch, Plato, and Diodorus Siculus all speak of Osiris as connected in some manner with a deluge.

The Hindu account has Satyavrata, seven days, an ocean that overflows, a large vessel, and Vishnu as a vast fish. The vessel is tied with a great sea-serpent to the fish’s horn. A demon is slain, the Vedas are recovered, and Satyavrata is appointed the seventh Menu under the name Vawaswata. He keeps that spelling. Jayadeva’s verse, which he quotes, hails the recovery of the Veda.

The legend of Ys, or Ker-Is, in Brittany belongs to the early Christian epoch. The prince is Gradlon, surnamed Meur, the Great, patron of Gwennole, first abbé of the first monastery in Armorica. An immense basin has a secret gate, and the king alone has the key. In one version Princess Dahut steals the key at a secret banquet and opens the sluice. In the second the city is rich in commerce and the arts, luxury angers St Gwennole, and he foretells ruin. The site is the Étang de Laval, the shores of the Bay of Trépassés, or the basin that is now the Bay of Douarnenez. A strong dike, sluices, and a silver key on the king’s neck open both the sluices and the city gates. The palace is of marble, cedar, and gold. Dahut had made a crown of her vices and taken for her pages the seven capital sins. One night she opens the sluices by mistake, meaning to open the gates for her lover. St Gwennole wakes Gradlon. The daughter rides behind him. A voice says to throw the demon he carries into the sea. Dahut falls, the torrent stops, and Gradlon reaches Quimper. A ballad, which Spence says has been tampered with, makes Gradlon the leader of the extravagance and Dahut a mermaid combing golden hair. He quotes a short exchange of fishermen, and I leave the verse on his page.

Celtic variants put a drowned land in Cardigan Bay and in Lough Neagh. He quotes a line of Tom Moore on the fisherman straying on Lough Neagh’s bank, and the towers seen under the water. Giraldus Cambrensis, in the Topography of Ireland, tells of a wicked tribe and a proverb that if the well-spring is left uncovered the province is inundated. A young woman leaves the well open to fetch her crying child, and she, the boy, the tribe, and the cattle are drowned in an hour. Fishermen see round ecclesiastical towers under the water. The Welsh bard Gwyddno, in the twelfth century, shares two strophes with the Breton poem.

Before the French Revolution a statue of Gradlon on his horse stood between the two towers of Quimper cathedral. In 1793 the populace beheaded it. It was restored in 1859. Legend says Gradlon introduced the vine. On St Cecilia’s Day a chorister with a flagon, a napkin, and a golden hanap mounts the crupper, offers wine to the statue’s lips, drinks, wipes the moustache, puts a laurel in the hand, and throws the hanap to the crowd. Whoever catches it uninjured and presents it to the chapter receives two hundred crowns. Spence treats Gradlon Meur as a god. Meur, Mheur, or Mhor, “great,” is the same element as in the Cailleach Mheur of the Scottish Highlands, and the figure is a deity of deluge. The palace has the strong dike, the basin, the gates on the seaway, as in Atlantis and in Carthage, and a palace of cedar, silver, and gold in the later telling of the same legend. The city is wicked, and the destruction is retribution. If Ys is not a variant of Atlantis, he says, he is greatly mistaken.

The test he takes from Gomme is recurrence. The scattered myths can be pieced together into practically every detail of Plato. The literary form of the Greek account approximates the original myth. The others are broken lights of it.

Chapter XVIII. Conclusion

A reconstruction may seem impertinent while the knowledge is fragmentary. The proof, he says, gives an outline. The race was composite, as was natural for peoples spread over a broad oceanic belt.

Thus the Aurignacians or Crô-Magnons, the first Atlantean wave in Europe, were exceptionally tall, sons of the gods indeed, the male height averaging from 6 ft. 1 in. to 6 ft. 7 in., although the women were small, the proof of a mixed race.

Lewis Spence, The Problem of Atlantis (1925), p. 227

They were fair or brunette, and probably had blue or brown eyes, like the Guanches. The second race, the Azilian-Tardenoisians, were shorter and darker. From their maritime habits he deduces that they were originally insular, possibly on some of the larger islands west of Atlantis, the direction from which Celtic tradition brings them. He alludes to the Fomorians, who in Irish legend arrive in Erin from the west. When these races first arrived in the Biscay region, Atlantis was still in the Stone Age.

A Stone Age, he repeats, is not a low civilisation. Mexico and Central America were still in the Stone Age when Europeans found them, and the life was as advanced, as complex, and as colourful as that of China a generation ago. They had a social system of long civilised usage, a legal code, and developed arts. The Atlantis of the period before the final catastrophe enjoyed a civilisation closely akin to ancient Central America. Its architecture held in embryo the tendencies of both Egypt and Mexico: the pyramid based on the sacred hill and crowned by a shrine. These structures were probably of earth faced with stone, and they were not of stone alone as in Egypt, where the pyramid is a memory of the sacred hill. The Babylonian or Sumerian ziggurat evolved from the same idea of a hill crowned by a shrine. Dwelling-houses would resemble those of Egypt and Mexico, brick or adobe sun-dried from mud.

The religion approximated to Egypt and Mexico, and it did not partake of the gloomy horrors of the latter, which were of relatively late introduction. The spirit of both was the worship of nature and of natural forces, wind, water, and growth. The gods resembled those of the other two countries. The theology was the prototype of the mysteries found in the East and in America, which have influenced mystical societies to the present day. The Osirian religion and the religion of the Popol Vuh approximate the faith of Atlantis: resurrection after death as the core, and the growth of the crops as the symbol of bodily resurrection. With it went the cult of the twin, widespread in Asia, Europe, and America.

The government was monarchical, and the monarchy was limited by the heavenly powers. It was a theocracy, as in Mexico and Egypt. No measure of real national importance could be initiated without sanction from the gods. The Mexican tlatoani, the king, was the mouthpiece of the oracles.

From some such centre the seeds of civilisation spread over Europe and North Africa. The culture-bed of the world’s civilisation is, by the admission of the men of science he has cited, officially unknown. The material nucleus is lost. The races who found refuge on European soil were of a physical type superior to any at present existing, with a greater cranial capacity. The first wave, the Crô-Magnons, brought the seeds of Europe’s present civilisation, and the culture progressed from west to east. Egypt and the East may have offered, at first, conditions closer to the old island. In the event, the renaissance of the Crô-Magnon spirit in the British races outstripped Oriental advancement.

He then makes the claim as a Scotsman. Scotland’s superiority in the mental and spiritual spheres springs, he devoutly believes, almost entirely from the preponderant degree of Crô-Magnon blood in her people, shown in height, cranial capacity, and other physical signs. England draws sanity, physical prowess, and a marked superiority in the things of the mind from the same source. Iberian blood is also Atlantean, and that admixture has endowed her with her greatest poets. To an admixture of Crô-Magnon and Iberian blood he owes the genius of Shakespeare and Burns, Massinger and Ben Jonson. Milton, Scott, and, in his own time, H. G. Wells and Galsworthy are almost purely Crô-Magnon. Literary types strongly resemble a bust of a Crô-Magnon man made under scientific supervision by a Belgian sculptor. I report the boast as his, with the names he attaches to it.

The essay, he says, is inadequate and tentative. Enthusiasm has outstripped caution. Errors are due to a spirit of experiment, and they should not stultify future effort. He has tried to clear the ground. The case should not be judged by the shortcomings of its advocate. On the last pages he allows another class of evidence, and he limits it. Men of insight have written of strange visions and of stranger supernatural communications about the pristine life of Atlantis. In some cases the content appears to him highly improbable, having regard to the proven facts of science. He is too ignorant of the powers of the human soul to weigh that evidence with justice. Imagination, rightly interpreted, is one of the most powerful aids to historical work. The material case remains the one he has argued. Atlantis sleeps beneath the seas.

The book ends on page 232, with the same Edinburgh press named on the title leaf.