Études anté-historiques (1874)

I read Roisel’s Études anté-historiques for the Atlantic land, the flood memories, and the colonies a later writer can set beside Plato. The title page prints two titles, Études anté-historiques and Les Atlantes, then par Roisel. It gives no personal name beyond that. Under the name it quotes Plato and labels the lines Platon. Le Timée. The imprint is Paris, Librairie Germer Baillière, Rue de l’École-de-Médecine, 17, and the year 1874. A printer’s leaf before the title reads Laon, Imprimerie du Journal de l’Aisne. The year is 1874, so I treat the book as public domain and set his own sentence under a date, a place, or an event I would compare. A handwritten line on the blank after the title reads Vignaud. I do not take that hand as the author.

The scan has 583 file pages. Where a running head is numbered, the printed number is the file page minus 11. Printed page 4 is file page 15, printed page 28 is file page 39, and printed page 568 is file page 579. Many chapter openings carry no number of their own. The table of contents gives those openings their pages, and where I also saw the next leaf I say so. The avertissement and the title page have no printed number. I cite those as file pages. For Plato’s own dialogue, see Timaeus and Critias. He does not use the name Mu, and he does not use the name Lemuria.

O Solon! vous autres Grecs, vous êtes toujours enfants. Il n'en est pas un seul parmi vous qui ne soit novice dans la science de l'antiquité.

Roisel. Études anté-historiques (1874), file p. 10

The sense of the epigraph, which he marks as Plato’s Timaeus, is that the Greeks are always children, and that not one of them is anything but a novice in the science of antiquity.

The book at a glance

• Title: Études anté-historiques. The same page prints Les Atlantes.
• Author as printed: Roisel.
• Edition I read: Paris, Librairie Germer Baillière, Rue de l’École-de-Médecine, 17, 1874. Printed at Laon by the Imprimerie du Journal de l’Aisne.
• Length: four parts, thirty chapters, then notes. The table is on two leaves, the second numbered 568. The notes end on printed page 565 with the line Fin des notes.
• What he claims: A great Atlantic land once stood where the ocean is, and the Azores and the Antilles are parts still above water. Geology, shared plants and animals, and traditions on both shores put the centre of the subsidence in the Sargasso. From that land a civilizing people carried bronze, astronomy, and a dual doctrine into Egypt, western Europe, and America. He does not give Plato’s nine thousand years as his own date. The dates he does print are a separate set, and I leave them separate.

Findings worth setting beside other writers

• Where the land was. West of the pillars, as Plato said. The Azores and the Antilles are the emerged parts. Shoals bounded by the Azores, the Canaries, the Antilles, and the Gulf Stream. A footnote after Hamy says the land developed particularly toward the 45th degree of latitude (pp. 27, 30, 31).
• Joined to Europe, then cut off. Verneuil and Collomb: joined to Spain and to the south of France through the whole tertiary epoch. Hamy: a bridge between Spain, Ireland, and the United States, used by plants, animals, and man himself. The tertiary basin of Gascony was that prolongation, detached when the principal Alps were raised (pp. 29, 30).
• The fall, with no year of his own on these pages. He calls the fall sudden, and he says it seems to continue slowly, the shoals still changing. Old charts of the 16th and 17th centuries mark rocks between the Bermudas and the Azores, and between Cape Verde and the Antilles, which modern navigators have not found. Spaniards who haunted the Sargasso in 1802 still claimed to meet some of them (pp. 32, 33).
• What the shores remember. At the conquest of Mexico the islanders told the Spaniards that the Antilles had been one continent and were separated all at once. Local tradition: Yucatan once joined to Cuba. The Caribs: a tumultuous movement of the waters. A Haitian legend: a sudden inundation. The peoples of the Orinoco call the disaster Caténamonoa, submersion in the great lake (p. 35).
• Landa’s Quiché account, and an African twin. The Quichés of central America told of waters swollen over the people’s heads, a thick resin from the sky, a dark rain, and a great noise of fire. De Froberville gives the Amakona of Africa a fertile land called Kassipi where the sea now divides the land of the blacks from the land of the whites. Mouloukou, the good God, was angered, and the sea swallowed the country. From that legend he has the Atlanteans skilled in agriculture and industry, practicing barter and human sacrifice, and using African races in America or in Europe. He sets beside it a negro skull from an old peat bog in Picardy (pp. 36, 37).
• The colony and the Guanches. The Sargasso was the hearth of a colonization felt to the east and to the west. The nation was better placed than any other to discover copper and tin at once. The Guanches are the debris of a nation once flourishing, almost all massacred. Their skin was bistre. No beard. Their language, deeply changed in the continental settlements of the Atlanteans, seemed to relate to no known idiom (p. 38).
• Egypt, and the year 5900. Three human layers. The Ethiopians, enslaved. The Copts or Cushites, of protoscythian origin. Then the living part of the nation, which exercised a preponderant influence from the highest antiquity and consolidated the Nile valley in monarchical form about the year 5900 before our era. The conquerors of the Mexican plateaus and these conquerors both derive, he says, from the Atlanteans (p. 57).
• America’s own kings. Brasseur de Bourbourg’s tradition of Xibalda: two supreme kings, and under them ten other kings, always named two by two. They extended their dominion over almost the whole world. A sudden inundation came, and they all disappeared. He compares that with Plato, and he says the ten sons are in the Critias, not in the Timaeus. Neptune, king of Atlantis, had ten children. The eldest, Atlas, gave his name to the country (p. 41).
• The older clocks, which are not the sinking. Aristotle and Eudoxus make Zoroaster live six thousand years before their time. Hermippus, Diogenes Laertius, Hermodorus, and Plutarch place him five thousand years before the Trojan war, and say he was not the first legislator of Persia. Gosselin fixes Hanno’s voyage at a thousand years before our era. The résumé says a people of apostles, more than ten thousand years before our era, knew the precession of the equinoxes (the Mages chapter, p. 34, and the résumé).
• Bronze starts in the drowned land. The passage from copper alone to bronze is found in America, which is rich in native copper. The country that discovered the alloy with tin had to communicate with the new world and with the tin islands. He places the start of the metallurgical art in Atlantis, because the Azores are only debris, or were part of the neighboring islands Plato speaks of (p. 87).

Avertissement

The warning has no printed number. It is file page 12. A library number, 425315, sits at the foot.

Aucun problème historique ne fut plus controversé que celui de la réalité de l'Atlantide, et nous ne voulons aujourd'hui qu'appeler l'attention du lecteur sur un certain côté de la question qui ne nous paraît pas avoir été suffisamment étudié.

Roisel. Études anté-historiques (1874), file p. 12

No historical problem was more disputed than the reality of Atlantis, and he wants the reader’s attention only for one side of the question which he thinks has not been studied enough. The early times of the historical age are inexplicable, in his view, unless one admits a civilizing people precisely in the place Plato assigned to the vanished continent. The discussion will rest only on that point. He is not writing for those who must be told everything, and he will deal with the old polemics only incidentally.

Le Bronze

The table places this chapter at page 1. The heading leaf is file page 14 and shows no number. The next leaf is printed 4.

After the last glacial period the reindeer withdrew north, fleeing a milder temperature. The Finnish race, which had spread as far as the shores of the Mediterranean, likewise looked in the northern regions for the milieu proper to it. Those who did not emigrate had to perish or to undergo the typical change which the new set of conditions had to bring. The Yellow race and the Red race resulted: the first in central Asia, the second in Europe and in America. The tumuli give evident proofs, and he affirms that through the whole period between the epoch of the great glaciers and the appearance of metal arms on the two continents, the red race was predominant there.

Les Tumuli nous en fournissent des preuves évidentes; et nous pouvons affirmer que, pendant toute la période comprise entre l'époque des grands glaciers et l'apparition des armes métalliques sur les deux continents, la race rouge y fut prédominante.

Roisel. Études anté-historiques (1874), file p. 14

On printed page 4 he says that in Europe their civilization was stationary and as if stereotyped. The centuries seem to have piled up without any progress coming to modify the manners and the customs. Always the same instruments, made with the same flints, and after the same types. When bronze appears, it appears with all the perfection of an alloy which modern metallurgy has not thought it should modify. Some take that discovery, or that introduction, as contemporary with no revolution in the state of the country, and therefore as the result of a prolonged development. Others say the tribes representing the polished-stone age in the Gauls were conquered by a people of small stature and of a much more advanced civilization. The bronze arms found in such great number all have the same excellence, not only in their forms but in the proportion of copper and of tin. If the alloy had been perfected by degrees, one would have found the trace of many transitional trials.

He quotes Lubbock: it is very probable that the use of copper spread on the continent only after it was recognized that the addition of a little tin made it harder and more usable. On printed page 5 native copper is an exception, too rare in western Europe to be the base of any important working. England barely offers a few veins. Copper pyrites would have left a surplus of iron in the ancient bronze, and the analysis does not. He finds copper pyrites in any abundance only in the province of Småland in Sweden, then in the county of Cornwall, and archaeologists have never recognized those two countries as the centres of the bronze civilization. The English mines were no less worked at a very remote epoch, but by a people or by colonists come from very far, and the ore seems to have been largely carried away in the raw state into distant countries.

Le Peuple bronzifère

The table places this chapter at page 19. The heading leaf shows no number.

Some scholars thought bronze had been introduced into the Gauls by the Romans. He opens by refusing to discuss that hypothesis as if it were open. Everyone knows the alloy was known in western Europe for a considerable time before the appearance of iron arms. Engelhardt found in the bog of Nydam rings, necklaces, helmets, cuirasses, bucklers, coats of mail, 80 swords, 500 lances, 30 axes, vases, wheels, and coins. The rings and the other instruments were of bronze. The offensive and defensive arms, without exception, were of iron. The coins are Roman. One of the lance-irons bears runic characters, and it is certain that the vanquished, like the victors, carried iron arms.

These arms are not met only in the numerous deposits of Sleswig. They belong to two perfectly distinct types. The first represents Celtic art. The second, less numerous, recalls the Roman style. The form and the ornament of each type differ essentially from those of the bronze arms. The ease with which bronze is worked made it still used for certain instruments. For a long time dagger-arms of bronze were made. In the end, at the occupation, bronze and iron have been found together. That example is enough, he says, to affirm that iron arms were later.

L’Atlantide

The table places this chapter at page 27. The heading leaf shows no number. The next leaf is printed 28.

He will not develop the possibility of geological upheavals. Too many examples of cities that sink, islands that are swallowed, and parts of continents that disappear have occurred since historical times for the fact to be denied. Forster, Dumont d’Urville, Broca, Moerenhout, de Moussy, and others, in order to solve a few ethnological problems, did not hesitate to admit that the great Ocean was once occupied by an immense land, of which the Hawaiian islands, the Marquesas, New Zealand, and so many others would be only the summits.

L'Atlantide, dit Platon, était située à l'ouest des colonnes d'Hercule.

Roisel. Études anté-historiques (1874), p. 27

Atlantis, Plato says, lay west of the pillars of Hercules. He asks whether the proofs of an ancient continent, now swallowed, of which the Azores and the Antilles would be the emerged parts, will not also be found.

Zoologists are nearly agreed in giving every living organization a perfectly determined centre of formation. The tertiary floras of Europe and of northern America have only one such point of departure. Heer, in the Flora tertiara Helvetiae, dwells on the analogy between the present flora of the United States and the Miocene flora of central Europe, which still keeps, without the later disturbances, the Pliocene and Quaternary milieux of that continent. In the middle terrains of the tertiary he has found tulip trees, the cypress of Louisiana, robinias, hickories, maple leaves, magnolia, sassafras, yew, sequoia, and other trees now met only in North America (p. 28).

Hamy had shown Conrad the specific identity of a certain number of the tertiary shells of the United States with the shells of the corresponding French beds. The comparative study of insects has likewise proved that a great number of species still live today on both shores of the Atlantic. Pomel, Aymard, and others described vertebrates whose similar fossils or living forms are met only on the other side of the Atlantic. Such analogies, continuing in genera and into species, authorized zoologists to treat communication between the two tertiary continents as easy. Unger and Oswald Heer were led by botany to plead for a tertiary Atlantic continent, as the only plausible explanation of the analogy between the Miocene flora of central Europe and the present flora of eastern America (p. 28).

The mastodon is the most characteristic animal of the Miocene, and its bones are found by millions through all central Europe. The American soil holds a comparable number. Doctor Kock found in the Ohio one of these pachyderms which seemed to have been stoned by the Indians and then partly burned. The fire had not been accidental. It was lit to kill the animal, dropped into a mudhole, probably a trap. The unconsumed bones had kept their original position. They were upright in the clay, and only the upper parts had been consumed. In the middle of the ashes were numerous fragments of rock which served to stone the animal and which had been brought for that purpose, because the clay bed does not hold the smallest pebble. Kock also found, in the middle of the ashes, bones and stones, several arrowheads, a lance head, and stone axes. The same doctor discovered stone arrows mixed with the bones of another mastodon. One of them was under the thigh of the skeleton, the bone resting on the weapon, so that it could not have been placed there after the animal. The fauna of middle Europe extended over the central part of North America by a land which, of an analogous climate, favored zoological communication between the two continents (p. 29).

According to Verneuil and Collomb, Atlantis would have remained joined to Spain and to the south of France during the whole tertiary epoch. Those two naturalists were the first to point out that the lacustrine deposits of that period, which cover the western Iberian peninsula over a surface of 145,500 square kilometres, attest enormous rivers which for a considerable lapse of time poured their waters into those wide basins (pp. 29, 30).

Hamy adds that such rivers themselves suppose great continents, which in this reconstitution of the past of the hemisphere can be placed only toward the north-west. To the north, the ancient rocks of the Pyrenees. To the west, the granites and gneisses of the Carpentanian mountains, the Silurian massifs of the Sierra Morena, the Lusitanian mountains, of Salamanca and of Villefranche, already barred the way to fresh water. To the south and west, the marine tertiary deposits of Andalusia and Murcia, of Valencia and Catalonia, formed the shores of a Mediterranean into which the waters of the lakes went to empty. There remains the north-west, where without doubt, between Spain, Ireland, and the United States, lay the Atlantic continent, which made a bridge for the slower or quicker migrations of plants, of animals, and of man himself, in the tertiary epoch, toward the American lands. A footnote says that after Hamy, Atlantis developed particularly toward the 45th degree of latitude, and that he will return to that important point (p. 30).

He also gives the tertiary basin of Gascony to that Atlantic prolongation, which was detached from Europe only at the great geological crisis which, sharply separating the tertiary epochs from the following ones, determined the raising of the principal Alps (p. 30).

To rebuild in thought the vast continental fragment that emerged during almost the whole Quaternary, he has only to look at Stieler’s maps, where the various depths of the Atlantic are shown by lighter or darker tints. At the first glance one remarks a vast surface of shoals barely covered by the waters, bounded by the Azores, the Canaries, the Antilles, and the Gulf Stream (p. 31).

Navigators follow an itinerary consecrated by habit, and immense spaces have never been traveled by a single ship. The central part of these submarine plains is known only very imperfectly. Near them Columbus met so many inextricable weeds. These obstacles, called the Sargasso Sea, cover a surface which Humboldt estimated as equal to six times that of France. It would be enough to study the nature of these seaweeds, which according to their species can grow only at known depths, to determine the water-heights of that inhospitable sea (p. 31).

The ancients who tried the adventure near these parts were all seized with fright at the look of that half-liquid and half-vegetable water. Herodotus, Pindar, Plato, Pliny, Strabo, Aeschylus, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus are unanimous. Enormous beds of marine plants and mud hindered navigation on leaving the pillars of Hercules. Gigantic weeds seized the boats, and thousands of water-squirrels in flower surrounded them. Aristotle speaks of ships of Gades which, diverted by an impetuous wind, arrived at a place covered with fields of submerged herbs at high tide and uncovered at the ebb. One would say, the great naturalist writes, sunken shores. Among these floating prairies came to graze tunnies and a thousand fish (pp. 31, 32).

Scylax of Caryanda, in his Periplus, does not forget these banks of seaweed, which made navigation impossible, starting from Cerné. Theophrastus admires their form and size. Avienus, who had at his disposal the accounts of many Phoenician voyages, expands on these obstacles. Plato alludes to them by saying that in the time of Atlantis the sea was navigable (p. 32).

One might have come to the Canaries and the Azores, but the whole Sargasso Sea must have been impassable. That state changed little by little. The ocean currents, after carrying off an enormous quantity of lands barely submerged, cut a calmer course. A few islets that escaped the general collapse had to disappear afterwards. During centuries the scouring of these sedimentary beds gave the Atlantic an aspect quite characteristic. He would not assign any other cause to the immense banks of the Lucayan islands and of Terra Nova (p. 32).

The ancient authors are, so to speak, the only ones who speak of muddy water. Jornandes cites weeds opposing an absolute resistance to all navigation. These immense sheets of herbs likewise seem to have been much more extended, since according to Herodotus one met the muds and the herbs on leaving the pillars of Hercules. According to Aristotle the herbs disappeared at high tide. They were therefore adherent to the bottom, and there were more shoals then than today. The fall of Atlantis, which was so sudden, therefore seems to continue slowly, and the shoals to undergo a certain transformation (pp. 32, 33).

Not only are the herbs much less abundant. The old charts of the 16th and 17th centuries mark, between the Bermudas and the Azores, a series of rocks of which modern navigators have found no trace. It is the same between the Cape Verde islands and the Antilles. These two series of reefs neatly bounded the Sargasso Sea on those old charts. Although the Spaniards who haunted it in 1802 claimed to have still met several fragments, it is no less true that their number is today singularly diminished. The ancient reefs are now indicated only by the course of the Gulf Stream, which skirts them exactly (p. 33).

If one judges by a few considerable deeps neighboring the Canaries, this group was part of the islands which, according to Plato, were close to the central continent. They bear, however, as do the Mexican shores, the traces of the cataclysm which annihilated a whole world, and it doubtless resulted from the tipping determined by the uplift of Taenarum and of the Cordilleras, a movement which, by counter-blow, raised the central Orinoco and Brazil, as well as the whole basin of the Mediterranean. A footnote says one must attribute to this late emersion of the central plains of Colombia the absence of any ancient monument (p. 33).

The lesser Antilles and the American shores have evidently sunk. This whole archipelago, which begins at Cumana and prolongs itself in a semicircle as far as Porto Rico, marks a submarine chain of which these islands would be only the summits. The greater Antilles, as far as Cape San Antonio, underwent the same disturbance. Only after centuries of effort did the Gulf Stream, having filled with its silt the old Bahama canal, succeed in digging its present bed in the strait of Cordova (pp. 33, 34).

The whole of this sea is besides very shallow. The coasts of Colombia and of Guatemala are true lagoons. The islands that extend along Venezuela are separated from the continent only by a water of a few fathoms, and their geological beds correspond. The sulfurous emanations that surround them attest, besides, that the upheaval which disjoined them is quite recent (p. 34).

The African coasts, so calm today, were then in perpetual incandescence. In the relation of the voyage of Hanno, of whose authenticity one no longer doubts, at the height of the Bibaouennes mountains he coasted a land from which came torrents of lava that precipitated into the sea. The ground, he tells it, was so burning that the feet could not bear the heat. For four nights the land appeared covered with fire, from the middle of which rose one that seemed to attain the stars. By day they recognized that it was a high mountain. Gosselin fixes this voyage at a thousand years before our era (p. 34).

Closer to the true centre of the volcanic crisis the testimonies abound. Everywhere one perceives the imprint of fire. Enormous blocks of lava were thrown in every direction, to such distances that it is often hard to realize the isolated situation in which they are found. Overturned mountains, immense crevasses, almost lunar craters, notably that of Palma, of a depth of 5,000 feet (1524 meters), all attest a formidable power. The ancient mountain system was separated into fragments. Islets, reefs, and heaps of piled rocks join the islands of this archipelago. The whole immense region that felt the reaches of this frightful dislocation is still exposed to earthquakes as frequent as they are disastrous. The Cordilleras seem to modify the direction of these shocks and to make this gigantic chain follow them as far as Peru. But the most tormented point is always the Sargasso Sea. The submarine upheavals continue there, and travelers speak with fright of these mysterious commotions (pp. 34, 35).

The space between the Azores and Mexico therefore seems to be under the influence of a quite recent geological disturbance, if one judges by the muddy state the sea still presented a few centuries ago, and by the present volcanic phenomena. The neighboring peoples have kept the memory of the terror that seized their ancestors at the look of this formidable cataclysm, and this memory has been perpetuated through the ages, like that of the later ravages occasioned by the last diluvian waters (p. 35).

At the conquest of Mexico the islanders told the Spaniards that all the Antilles once formed only a single continent, but that they were all at once separated. According to local traditions, Yucatan was formerly joined to Cuba. According to the Caribs, it was a tumultuous movement of the waters that formed the cliffs and the escarpments. The inhabitants of Castile d’Or keep the same memory. A Haitian legend likewise attributes the formation of the Antilles to a sudden inundation, and the peoples of the Orinoco call this disaster Caténamonoa, that is, submersion in the great lake (p. 35).

According to Diego de Landa, the Quichés, or inhabitants of central America, told this catastrophe thus. The waters were then swollen, and there was a great inundation that came above the heads of the inhabitants. They were covered with water, and a thick resin came down from the sky. The face of the earth darkened, and a dark rain began: rain by day, rain by night. And there was a great noise of fire above their heads. Then one saw the men run, pushing one another, full of despair. They wanted to climb onto the houses, and the houses, collapsing, made them fall to earth. They wanted to climb onto the trees, and the trees shook them far off. They wanted to enter the caves, and the caves collapsed before them. The ancestors of the Quichés were witnesses of this terror, for they could not have imagined a tale so faithful to the phenomena that must accompany this prodigious earthquake (p. 36).

De Froberville gives another ancient tradition, kept by the Amakona, an African people, which evidently relates to this cataclysm, whose memory must have engraved itself deeply in the memory of all the riverside peoples. For a very long time the bottom of the sea, which today separates the land of the blacks from the land of the whites, was a country of marvelous fertility. It was called Kassipi. One year the grain was particularly abundant. The inhabitants, whose stores were full to the brim, sanded their roads instead of making a present to the neighboring peoples, who were then suffering a frightful famine. Mouloukou, the good God, was irritated by this wicked indifference. Woe to you, he said to the inhabitants of Kassipi, and this curse was not slow to accomplish itself. The devils took possession of the country. The heart of the inhabitants hardened further, and they made common cause with the demons. The sea invaded their territory, but the evil spirits helped them gain the shore of Africa, where they were well received by the natives because they were intelligent and industrious (pp. 36, 37).

From that epoch, he continues, the Africans sell one another, and the ships of the whites come to take them away. However, since the devils live at the bottom of the sea in the country of Kassipi, and raise terrible storms, the passage is dangerous for ships, and it is the custom to appease them by throwing into the water the slave best made and best dressed of the cargo (p. 37).

From this old legend, the Atlanteans, skilled in the agricultural and industrial sciences, practiced barter and human sacrifices. Before the annihilation of Kassipi they used the African races at various labors, whether in America or in Europe. He thus explains not only the presence, before the Spanish conquest, of a few black peoples in the new world, but the discovery of a negro skull at the bottom of an old peat bog in Picardy (p. 37).

A thousand testimonies therefore place in the Atlantic the centre of a relatively modern subsidence of territory. Even when these proofs did not exist, he would still be obliged to conclude for the reality of the vanished continent, in order to explain the dispersion of the tertiary fauna and flora. He is in the presence of a well acquired fact, and the comparative examination of the traditions and of the old monuments of the two worlds will lead him to the same consequences (p. 37).

The analogies that exist between the dogmas of several ancient peoples, otherwise very far from one another, are so numerous that he must give them a common point of departure, and place it necessarily in the Sargasso Sea. There was the hearth of a vast colonization whose influence was felt toward the east as toward the west, and whose effects would remain inexplicable if a people as numerous as civilized had not existed, precisely in the place which geology, like tradition, gives to Atlantis. This great nation was better situated than any other to discover copper and tin promptly, and the special type of their arms is found identical in all their first colonies (p. 38).

Perhaps one could give an approximate account of what this initiating people must have been, by observing the manners and usages of a few families whose ancestors escaped the great catastrophe. Unfortunately the Guanches, debris of a nation once so flourishing, were almost all massacred by the adventurers who, at various times, attempted the conquest of the Canaries. Genoese, Catalans, Normans, Portuguese, in turn exterminated a great number, and the primordial character of what remains is today altered by successive mixtures. It is enough to go through the accounts of the first invaders, notably of Jean de Béthencourt, to be convinced of his original typical character. The color of their skin was bistre. No beard. Their language, which had been so profoundly modified in the continental settlements of the Atlanteans, seemed no longer to relate to any known idiom. The page I closed on names M. Webb and does not finish his sentence (p. 38).

Les Atlantes en Amérique

The table places this chapter at page 40. The heading leaf shows no number. The next leaf is printed 41.

When the Europeans landed in America, two empires were standing, that of the Incas and that of the Aztecs. Except for a few debris of peoples tending to disappear, the rest of the natives presented only a confused heap of tribes without cohesion or true nationality. Yet from the upper lakes as far as Peru the country is covered with the most admirable ruins it is possible to study. Cities and palaces witness a vanished civilization, leaving no other trace than these prodigious debris. Their incommensurable antiquity could not shake them. No great agglomeration of men came to destroy them, whether from need of materials, or from hatred of the past, or at last to satisfy a curiosity most often as brutal as it was sterile (p. 40).

In Yucatan, where no river flows and where vegetation is so rare, a layer of humus of forty centimetres covers ancient roads frequented for centuries. Trees three metres in diameter have grown on the ruins even of Palanqué. In one of the courts of the palace the accumulation of vegetable earth is ten feet. At Uxmal the granite pavement, on which tortoises were sculpted in relief, has become flat and polished under the feet of multitudes. Lyell saw in the north a few tumuli whose lower terraces had been undermined and destroyed in part by probably diluvian waters, while the nearest river flows a kilometre off (pp. 40, 41).

Whatever conclusions one wishes to draw, it is certain that at an epoch still unknown an industrious and strong race, powerful enough to consecrate the labor of thousands of men to works of art, lived in America. The Incas and the Aztecs were incapable, at the discovery of the new world, of conceiving and executing the least of these marvels. Both confessed besides that they succeeded a much more prosperous state, and admiration was joined in them to the veneration of their ancestors (p. 41).

What were they? What was this people of other times, whose power and intelligence are no longer attested except by their ruins? Brasseur de Bourbourg gathered in central America a precious tradition and throws a bright light on this mystery. The empire of Xibalda, he says, was once governed by two kings, supreme judges of the empire. They had under their orders ten other kings, always named two by two, each sovereign of a great kingdom, and forming among themselves a sort of council. Little by little they extended their dominion over almost the whole world. But a sudden inundation arrived, and they all disappeared (p. 41).

He then compares this memory with what Plato teaches, not in the Timaeus but in his Critias. Neptune, king of Atlantis, had ten children, of whom the eldest, Atlas, gave his name to the country, and who reigned, they and their descendants, during a long series of generations. The leaf numbered 41 breaks off on the age of the eldest (p. 41).

Les Atlantes en Afrique

The table places this chapter at page 56. The heading leaf shows no number. The next leaf is printed 57.

Walkenaer derives the Egyptians from a Chinese emigration. Moreau de Jonnès, from the Indians. De Rougé, from a branch anciently detached from the Syro-Aramean branch and occupying an intermediate place between the Aryas and the Semites. All these hypotheses, however seductive, do not resist criticism. Several have thought to explain everything by seeking in Ethiopia the cradle of the Copts. But one knows today that civilization, far from following the course of the Nile, goes back along it to Nubia. It is no longer permitted to ignore that the monuments of lower Egypt were built by the first dynasties, while those of the upper Nile belong to the twelfth, and that Ipsamboul, though an extreme of the curiosity of tourists, dates only from the reign of Rhamses. From the ethnological point of view the Ethiopians differ essentially from the Egyptians, and the traditions, like the monuments, represent them as yielding place to foreign invaders (p. 56).

The constructions of the most ancient dynasties already witness a very advanced civilization. If this civilization had developed little by little on the soil of Egypt itself, it would not have begun with such master-strokes. From the earliest times, differences of caste manifest themselves which would not have been established if the autochthonous nation had not been under the play of a dominating people who brought their myths and their customs. This conquest coincides with the appearance in that country of the calendar, of the signs of the zodiac, and of the civil and religious institutions. One always speaks of the secret science of the Egyptian priests, and of the calculated ignorance in which they left the great mass of the population. It would be simply absurd, if one did not see the evident proof of a superposition of races, and, in these priests, the representatives of foreign invaders (p. 57).

He therefore remarks in Egypt three perfectly distinct human layers. The Ethiopians, enslaved. The Copts or Cushites, of protoscythian origin, recognizable by their bridled eyes and their hooked noses, and whose monuments equally represent them under the play of a northern people. Then at last this last people, which constituted the living part of the nation and exercised, from the highest antiquity, a preponderant influence the length of the Nile valley, before it consolidated that valley definitively in monarchical form, about the year 5900 before our era (p. 57).

La remarquable analogie qui existe entre ces conquérants et l'antique nation qui couvrit de ses oeuvres gigantesques les plateaux du Mexique a été signalée par la plupart des archéologues.

Roisel. Études anté-historiques (1874), p. 57

The remarkable analogy between these conquerors and the ancient nation that covered the plateaus of Mexico with its gigantic works has been pointed out by most archaeologists. He must admit that the ones, like the others, derive from the Atlanteans, since they alone could rally, by a long series of colonizations, countries so far apart. One must not without doubt attribute to a common origin the few secondary analogies that can be met. The sentence continues off the leaf I closed (p. 57).

Les Atlantes en Europe

The table places this chapter at page 74. The heading leaf shows no number. The next leaf is printed 75.

What opinions have not been advanced on the Iberians? Several scholars, preoccupied no doubt by the need to prop up the Mosaic datum, have seen in this people the eldest sons of the Caucasian race. Broca does justice to this singular hypothesis. The comparison of the ancient Iberian language, still spoken on the slopes of the western Pyrenees, with what remains of the protoscythian idioms, will furnish precious teachings (p. 74).

Everyone knows that the American languages possess in the highest degree the agglutinative character. It is not only a synthesis that brings together into one homogeneous whole the elements of an idea, however complex it may be. It is an intertwining of words one inside another. Lieber compares the way the roots absorb one another to a box that contains another, which contains a third, which in its turn contains a fourth, and so on. These languages doubtless present a great inequality of development, but they never lose their polysynthetic tendency. This tendency is so little the consequence of the normal development of grammatical forms, such as one sees among the other races, that linguists have constantly gathered these idioms into one and the same bundle. The persistence of so distinctive a character is the least equivocal sign that the populations who practice them are linked by a common origin (pp. 74, 75).

There is something else besides the diffusion of a wholly personal language among peoples of different stocks. The American populations evidently have, in relation to the intellect, a common and particular aptitude. The analytic spirit seems their absolute default. Instead of disengaging their thought from the conception under which it was produced, they do nothing in their linguistic developments but exaggerate this first tendency (p. 75).

Maury remarks that this character of the American languages is so inherent in the red race that certain peoples, in prolonged contact with the Spaniards, have adopted, because of the slight importance of the words, a great number of European terms, while keeping in all the grammatical constructions the polysynthetic form. He finds the same characters on this continent in two refugee peoples, one on the Caucasus, the other on the Pyrenees. This fact must not astonish if one admits with him that the red race was primitively spread over the whole of Europe, and that its debris, pushed back by the Pelasgians, then by the Celts, found asylum only on the summits of these two mountain chains. Despite a dispersion into so many diverse places, the members of this ancient family are therefore found again by the comparison of languages. The analogies of Eskuara, which approaches no Semitic, Pelasgian, or Indoceltic idiom, are still being stated where the leaf numbered 75 breaks off (p. 75).

Les Atlantes bronzifères

The table places this chapter at page 87. The heading leaf shows no number.

The invention of bronze had to be preceded by the use of copper alone, and this period of transition is met in America, which abounds precisely in ores of native copper. The country where the alloy of this metal with tin was discovered therefore had to communicate with the new world, as with the tin islands. He places the point of departure of the metallurgical art in Atlantis, since the Azores are only debris, or were part of the neighboring islands of which Plato speaks. A footnote says he can speak here only of known deposits, but if one judges by those of the neighboring countries, how much metallurgical wealth Atlantis must have contained (p. 87).

One generally believes that the ancients meant by tin islands not the Cassiterides but England. One has only to go through the accounts of their voyages toward these powerful stanniferous beds for no doubt to be possible on this subject. According to Avienus, Himilco’s expedition lasted four months, and was continually hindered by the calm of the air and the abundance of marine plants. Sir Lévis, instead of looking for where these weeds might have been met, is where the leaf I opened breaks off (p. 87).

Les Protoscythes

The second part opens here. The table places the chapter at page 99. The heading leaf shows no number.

If one judges by the deep imprint left on the peoples of the ancient continent, the most prosperous of all the Atlantean colonies was the one established on the coasts of western Europe. The Bacchus figures and the Hercules figures, engendered by this fruitful land, carried far the admirable astronomical precepts that served as the base of the most ancient cosmologies. All, by the remarkable concordance of their doctrines, evidently had a common initiation, whose traces he finds as far as America. He must necessarily consider his own country as very near the great civilizing centre (p. 99).

Gréve maintained already in 1805 that the religious dogmas of Gaul had been carried not only into Greece but into Persia and to the Indies, by the disciples of the Druids. Several scholars have likewise sought to raise the Oc… and the leaf breaks off on that word (p. 99).

Les Mages

The table places this chapter at page 113. The heading leaf shows no page number in the head. A figure 8 sits at the foot, in the place of a signature, not as a page I will cite.

All the ancients place the apostolate of Zoroaster precisely at the moment when the white race was beginning to appear. Aristotle and Eudoxus make him live six thousand years before their time. Hermippus, Diogenes Laertius, Hermodorus, and Plutarch place him five thousand years before the Trojan war, and according to them this legislator of Persia was not the first. Hermippus gives him as master the Mage Aronace, which proves that the science was already very ancient in Iran and dates from the Turanian preponderance. Aristotle, Hermippus, Theopompus, and Eudoxus considered the Magi as anterior to the Egyptian priests. Clearchus of Soli thought the same as to the Brahmans. According to Franck, such was the opinion of most of the ancient authors.

The Mahabadians carefully kept the primitive religious books, and counted Zoroaster only as the third prophet. The Mazdeans attached no importance to the doctrines that had preceded that of their favorite apostle. They spoke of him only as a memory of his predecessors, and their belief was even, on a great number of points, in complete opposition to the ancient one. The leaf breaks off on that word.

L’Astronomie atlante

The table places this chapter at page 122. The heading leaf shows no number.

The most ancient peoples all began by dividing time into months of twenty-eight days, then into hebdomadal years of thirteen months, worth three hundred sixty-four days. He remarks this particularly among the Protoscythes, and this ancient usage explains their singular predilection for the cult of the moon.

A method so primitive could result from independent observations, and there is no cause for surprise at meeting it almost universally spread. One might admit, says Rodier, that each isolated people had the idea of sharing, into four equal quarters or weeks, the duration of a vague month of twenty-eight days, a mean between the duration of a sidereal revolution and of a synodic revolution of the moon. One might further admit that each of them, isolated, imagined applying the name of the seven planets to the seven days of the week. But when one sees, among all, the names succeed in the same order, although this order seems purely arbitrary and in flagrant contradiction with the order in which the planets are ranged, one is forced to recognize that the hebdomadal cycle was imagined by a people who transmitted it. The leaf breaks off on “tel.”

Les Religions primitives

The table places this chapter at page 143. The heading leaf shows no number.

He turns to the beliefs the Atlanteans met among the peoples of this continent. As soon as man began to reason, he sought to account for the world that surrounded him. The incessant play of natural forces was bound to impress him vividly. The influence of the sun, the myriads of stars that traveled its extent, and the precision of their course, life and its developments, were bound to strike primitive man with admiration or with terror, and to lead him to place in the universe an indefinite number of occult powers, endowed with energy sufficient to engender all these phenomena.

As he was conscious of being himself a force acting freely, he thought that all the forces that manifested themselves around him were equally free, and he necessarily prejudged them intelligent like himself. Each body had a particular genius whose intelligence was proportioned to the power manifested. These directing spirits were classed as good and bad, according as the objects that contained them were favorable or harmful.

Les Emblèmes atlantes

The table places this chapter at page 154. The heading leaf shows no number.

Why, asks de Lorgues, does the serpent figure in the learned sanctuaries of Memphis as under the juggler’s hut of the Ohio and of Lake Erie? Did the American savages go seek this emblem in Greece, ask it of Iran? He sees in it the proof of the considerable extension, not of the protoscythian race alone, but of the Atlanteans. It is probable that these, before their great intellectual development, practiced the cults of the phallus and of the serpent particular to their ancestors, and that they identified them deeply with their scientific doctrines. He will therefore find them everywhere their colonists established, and it was principally among the lower classes that these primordial dogmas were perpetuated.

From the Mexican coasts as far as the confines of Asia, the reptile was adored. He finds it again in China, in Japan, in India, in Egypt, in Phoenicia, in Greece, in Rome, at Lavinium, among the tribes of Finnish race, among the African populations, at Palanqué, where it was represented as the first cause of all creation and of all generation. According to Irving, the images of the serpent were equally very numerous in Mexico. The leaf breaks off on “sur.”

La Substance

The third part opens here. The table places the chapter at page 171. The heading leaf shows no number. This chapter adds no Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria, or flood claim.

He begins with a few fundamental principles. Substance, by the sole fact that it exists, could not be divisible to infinity. One can always, it is true, in thought divide a part, whatever it is. The annihilation of all reality would be the necessary consequence of such a possibility, and he needs only a few words to show how paradoxical such a hypothesis is. If the divisibility of substance had no limit, the dimension of the last particle would be infinitely small and would equal zero. Since one cannot arrive at forming a number by adding zero to zero as many times as one likes, zero to zero, the sum remaining always equal to zero, it is certain that, whatever the number of material fractions divided to infinity, thought will never be able to compose the smallest of visible bodies.

Les Minéraux

The table places this chapter at page 189. The heading leaf shows no number. It adds no Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria, or flood claim.

Solid bodies are engendered by the fixity of certain associations of atoms, and by the vibratory harmony of their molecules, unseizable by our instruments. An apparent immobility results, which one calls inertia. The movements particular to each mineral species exist no less in the very essence of bodies. A complete science has been founded on these principles. Homeopathy assures that the more the constituent particles of medicines are isolated, the more the vibrations proper to their composition are powerful, and that the movements they transmit are only the more energetic. The phenomena of acoustics destroy entirely the repugnance some minds might feel at admitting that mineral molecules execute movements without disagreeing. The leaf breaks off while he is still on small vibrating bodies and a mechanical paradox.

L’Action sphéroïdale

The table places this chapter at page 206. The heading leaf shows no number. It adds no site and no date for a lost land.

As soon as a certain number of atoms can attach themselves to a preexisting equilibrium, they group themselves into active spheroids. This state is the commencement of all action, the phenomenon to which all the others must be brought back. Sometimes they are aerolites, sometimes aqueous or vaporous balls, sometimes simple living cells. Always the point of departure is the spheroidal state, with its attractions, its repulsions, its internal movements, whose transformations engender all the ulterior acts. The universe subsists only in virtue of this fundamental law. A footnote says he does not want to overload this third part with too many details, and sends the reader to the researches, so interesting, of M. Boutigny touching the spheroidal state.

Le Sphéroïde vivant

The table places this chapter at page 216. The heading leaf shows no number. It adds no Atlantis claim.

Schleiden, then Dutrochet, established irrefutably that every plant is formed by an assemblage of juxtaposed vesicles, pressing more or less on one another as they grow in the spaces they occupy, and thus taking the polyhedral form. Each of these vesicles or cells has a life of its own, like a closed organ, and a life of relation as an integral part of the general organization. This solidarity was not necessarily all the individual aptitudes of the cell. Aptitudes always ready to manifest themselves, when favorable circumstances furnish the occasion. Turpin demonstrated that cells can become reproductive germs and, though identical, engender by association any organ of the plant. Schwann proved that such is equally the origin and the composition of animal tissues. Gruby demonstrated that organic bodies all have as point of departure a typical cell. Virchow established definitively cellular unity of every organization, in the state of health as in the state of disease.

Embryologie

The table places this chapter at page 236. The heading leaf shows no number. It adds no Atlantis claim.

One used to admit three modes of reproduction: the sexual, gemmiparity or reproduction by bud, and fissiparity or reproduction by scission. Microscopic studies have led science to consider them no longer except as the varied forms of the primitive mode, budding. It operates either at the interior or at the exterior of the federations of cells. The volvox secretes within itself a certain number of globules which by their accumulation end by tearing it and destroying it. Once launched into the liquid, these globules grow, soon explode in their turn, and the generations succeed one another with a strange rapidity. In these stages of life the male element has not yet developed. Soon it appears, at first confused in the same being with the female element, and these parallel buddings often manifest themselves only at certain determined epochs. In the higher animals the sexes separate definitively. Among the superior ones the young are born alive, while among most species the egg appears before the entire development of the embryo.

Les Fédérations cellulaires

The table places this chapter at page 261. The heading leaf shows no number. It adds no Atlantis claim.

He follows the embryo in its developments. Before any organic distinction, the mass is composed of identical and perfectly independent cells. But little by little all place themselves voluntarily where it is necessary, and draw a sort of sketch of the future being. The contours of the body at first, then those of the transitory organs that are to serve as functional apparatus to the fetus, are only simply indicated. No tissue is yet distinct. And yet, in this vital canvas, the plan of the embryo is thus indicated, whose organization is realized only as a sketch, and is determined, according to needs, by parallel specializations. The cells therefore float primitively in the whirl they constitute, then group themselves according to the end to be attained and the possibility of action, and soon reveal all the power their typical organization contains.

Les Types

The table places this chapter at page 286. The heading leaf shows no number. The only count it prints is not a date for Atlantis.

The present fauna comes from the transformation of the first cellular associations of atoms, which modified themselves in a thousand ways, according to the milieux and the needs that resulted. All, by the necessity of being that characterizes substance, adapted themselves to the different conditions of existence, and the succession of habitats determined the ascending march of organisms. While a climatic change prolonged has not developed new aptitudes in the cells, the same phenomena reproduce themselves necessarily. Historical man dates only from three or four thousand years, and during that period he has been able to observe no considerable transformation. Science has nevertheless noted a few alterations, slight no doubt, but which tend each day to modify species. Nothing would be more difficult today than to establish a quite exact classification. When Bates described certain lepidoptera of the Amazon valley, one would think oneself the witness of the birth of a few new races. So great is the impossibility of explaining otherwise the facts observed with so much… and the leaf breaks off.

L’Absolu

The table places this chapter at page 302. The heading leaf shows no number. It adds no lost land and no flood.

He sums up in a few words this long excursion in the domain of science. The evidence of our own reality and of that of the ambient world makes him affirm that the cause had to be substantial. Phenomena do not give experimental knowledge of the principle of which the universe is constituted. He knows that it is multiple, since it is acting, and that the unity of this number is the atom, whose individuality will always remain inaccessible. Reason alone conceives, beyond every sensible observation, all that he knows of it: that it exists, that it is extended, indivisible, perpetually active, and that it possesses all the attributes necessary to its function of cause. Because of the perfect weighing in which the atoms find themselves in the cosmic ocean, no phenomenon would witness their presence if they were not impressed by transmitted vibrations. The balanced ether therefore equals, in the last analysis, absolute rest. It is the primordial night, containing in power all realities. They are the fruitful shadows, commencement and end of all the manifestations of the absolute. The leaf breaks off on “sombre.”

L’Inde

The fourth part opens here. The table places the chapter at page 319. The heading leaf shows no number.

A marvelous accord, says Creuzer, bursts out more and more between the religious systems of anterior Asia and those of high Asia, and, in general, as to the essential points, between all the mythologies of India, of Persia, of Egypt, of Phoenicia, and of many other countries. All present among themselves more resemblance than the schisms of a few modern cults. Unless one is blinded by the most deplorable prevention, one must admit that they are only the diverse forms of one and the same doctrine.

The search for this unique doctrine, anterior to the most anciently known religions, will be the subject of the fourth part. Bringing together the dogmas common to all these theologies, he will easily find the mother idea again, and he will begin with the study of the people that perhaps kept the highest formulas. Whatever it be, Creuzer says again, the true… and the leaf breaks off.

L’Iran

The table places this chapter at page 341. The heading leaf shows no number.

The religion of the primitive populations of Iran consisted in a blind adoration of the Elohim, that is, of supernatural powers which one supposed to inhabit voluntarily all the bodies of nature. But soon, says Creuzer, to this cult comes to attach itself a sacerdotal system and a religious legislation which in itself carries a much more metaphysical character. It seems that this new doctrine was brought from Media or from Bactria, and communicated to the higher castes. These two elements, amalgamated together, formed a singularly remarkable system which one calls the Medo-Persian religion or Magism. A footnote says these are the apostle-invaders who, in consequence of their preponderance as civilizers, form the higher castes. Everywhere one remarks the establishment of social classes neatly defined, one must conclude that there was superposition of races.

Creuzer neatly admits that the religious civilization of Asia is due to the Magi. Roisel says he will not return to all the different considerations that made him adopt this opinion. Relying on the identity of the ancient apostolates, Guigniaut wrote for his part, and the leaf breaks off on that colon.

Les Gaules

The table places this chapter at page 368. The heading leaf shows no number.

All the great dogmas of classical antiquity were only the developments of ideas expressed by two Iberian roots. First, U, ur, which signified at once light and water. Second, By, bai, force or life. From ur is joined as, another radical of which he has spoken many times, coming from uras, urah, urhan, the first luminary, or the primitive waters. The Greeks and the Romans kept urhan without any alteration, some to make of it Ouranos and the others Uranus. There is no doubt that the final proper to the genius of their languages, and, as expressing the active substance, this god was endowed with the two sexes or venerated under a double form. In this last case Uranus was always the male principle of the generative duality, and associated either with Urania, or with Ghé, or with Tite, with Titaia. A footnote says the name Titaia is composed of the Morinian word tite, which nourished by the breasts, whence tette, téter, and so on, to which the Gauls added their famous diphthong ai. The male principle was even often called Tit, masculine of Tite. The Gauls, says Lamennais, did not know the Dis of Greek mythology, but Tit, Tic, Tiec, which means father. Sometimes this second principle was designated under… and the leaf breaks off.

L’Amérique

This is the fourth part’s America, not the earlier chapter of the Atlanteans in America. The table places it at page 393. The heading leaf shows no number.

When the Europeans penetrated into America, says Lamennais, the Mexicans recognized a supreme god whom they called Tent, Téot, or rather Teoth. The Théocalli, or house of god, wrote Humboldt for his part, was dedicated to Tercat-Lipoca, the first Aztec divinity after Teoth, who is the invisible being. According to the same author, the Toltecs, or sectaries of this unknown god, named him Tloque-Nahuaque because he exists only by himself and contains everything in him. He is equally known in Peru, and Roisel has found him again throughout the ancient continent.

As among all the Protoscythes, he will point out here the Phallus generally adored. The mount Escurrucham was venerated by the Mexican natives, as well as the Mérou could be by the Indians. The abbé Brasseur traces this cult back to the very remote epoch of the introduction into the new world of the god Votan or Vogan, so celebrated in western Europe, and whose apostle keeps the name. He does not doubt that it was much earlier. The legend of Votan is none the less one of the most ancient of which America has kept the memory. Charençay occupied himself with it for a long time. The leaf breaks off on “et,”.

L’Égypte

The table places this chapter at page 411. The heading leaf shows no number. It is the religions of Egypt, not a second geography of the Nile.

He has said that the religions of Egypt and of Asia had among themselves the most remarkable analogies. The identity is such that most mythologists consider them as having been calqued the ones on the others, and it has always been impossible not to give them a common origin.

In all Egyptian theology, says Creuzer, as in all the oriental theologies, the system of emanation dominates, which consists not only in distinguishing but in separating the various attributes of the great Being, in such a way that each attribute becomes a person apart, and that one sole God makes a multitude of gods. But, at the same time, brought back to its own source, each attribute, god itself in God, is by that sole fact identical with God. Each emanation, each person, considered in its highest power, is the great Being from which it emanated. The reigns, Creuzer adds, of the first gods, who succeed one another during innumerable centuries up to the human dynasties, are only the symbols of substance, coming out little by little from its depths in order to… and the leaf breaks off.

L’Asie antérieure

The table places this chapter at page 434. The heading leaf shows no number.

As everywhere, he finds in Phoenicia the memory of the western apostles. Eusebius places at the commencement of the history of Tyre a divine scribe, inventor of all the sciences, Taaut, who assists Cronos absolutely as Thoth assists Osiris, and has the law engraved by his companions the Cabiri, on columns or on tables of stone. A footnote says he would not repeat too often that the name of this god was known in both worlds, and that Louis Rochet occupied himself at length with the Tao of the Japanese. After having been interpreted and commented by a series of more or less mythological personages, the doctrine contained in these inscriptions was in some sort renewed by the god Surmo-Beel and the goddess Thuro. From them the current passes to Mochus, Theodotus, and Hypsicrates.

He has here the traces of the two successive apostolates he has always pointed out, analogous to those of the Egyptian Hermes figures, and separated from one another by a considerable lapse of time. The first spread the usage, and the leaf breaks off.

La Grande Mère

The table places this chapter at page 441. The heading leaf shows no number.

He has said that the Protoscythes considered the world as having been engendered by the union of the two principles, male and female, and that the Atlanteans associated their scientific doctrine with this dogma become traditional. They taught, under an allegorical form, that substance contains two inseparable causes, force and matter, represented by two lights of different sexes, and that from this duality all things are born. A footnote gives M. Béron’s attribution of the appearance of phenomena to the spontaneous development of two luminous vibrations of the ether, of unequal amplitudes.

These male and female lights were often reunited in one and the same divinity, sometimes man-woman, sometimes woman-man, according as one wished to honor more particularly the one principle or the other. Did one want to bring out the idea of fecund power? The male god had the first rank. Did one represent nature animated by the eternal energy? A goddess figured as mother of all beings. But did one imagine gathering these two conceptions in one unique divinity? One adored it under the androgyne form. The hermaphrodites do not… and the leaf breaks off.

La Grèce

The table places this chapter at page 462. The leaf numbered 462 does not carry the heading. It is already inside a festival of mourning and return, and the sentences on it are Syrian and Egyptian, not yet a Greek philosopher.

In the days of mourning one wept the disappearance of the god. In the days of joy one celebrated his resurrection, and the two feasts were consecutive. The image of the god was placed on a funeral bed or on a catafalque, sometimes colossal. At Byblos the weepings and the lamentations ended with the solemn burial of Adonis. Numerous rites were observed, and particularly a service of the dead. It is only by reading Theocritus that one can form an idea of the magnificence that surrounded the feast of joy. At Alexandria the whole feast was celebrated with a grandeur, with a pomp truly royal. A footnote says these feasts were solstitial in Syria and equinoctial in all Greece. De Sacy thinks that those of the Egyptians, after having been long attached to the fixed epochs of the solar year, were afterwards displaced, to obviate the difficulties that were bound in the long run to result from the precession, and became mobile.

During the feasts of mourning, the women of Syria, singing psalms, remained the night before their houses, their eyes incessantly fixed toward the north pole, called the point of the death and the resurrection of Adonis. Despite its mixture with the astronomical dogmas, this formula of the Word still had all the clearness of its primitive signification, for Adonis is particularly designated, in the Bible, as the unique. The funeral lamentations of the unique were a universal feast of mourning, above all among the women who in the middle of the sobs repeated this refrain of a litany that can be compared only to the Stabat: Hélas! Monseigneur! Hélas! Where is your Lordship! The leaf breaks off on the captivity of Babylon.

Les Philosophes

The table places this chapter at page 493. The heading leaf shows no number, and it opens on Thales before the leaf ends.

The influence of the neighboring nations had been all-powerful on the beliefs of Greece. It was necessarily the same as to speculative doctrines. Whoever has studied the philosophers of classical antiquity has been struck by a few dazzling truths that are as if scattered in their teaching. They were far, however, from seizing the precise signification, and the decadence was complete when they substituted, for these last gleams of Atlantean science, their own lucubrations. He will therefore have to examine the transformations which the Hellenic spirit made these wrecks of vanished times undergo. The first thinker whom history attaches to Greece is Thales.

Phoenician in origin, he was born not far from Ephesus. One remarks in him no trace of that indomitable imagination that disfigured everything it touched. The floats of the ether, commencement and end of all things, were for him the unique principle of the universe. And he set this great doctrine, so little understood by his contemporaries, in the mysteries of the great goddess. The leaf breaks off there.

Résumé

The table places this chapter at page 526. The heading leaf shows no number.

The reader now knows the general idea that unites the four parts of the work. He undertook to prove that, well before historical times, the Atlanteans had acquired a marvelous science of which humanity is barely beginning to reconstitute the elements, and whose powerful wrecks are found in the Gauls, Egypt, Persia, and the Indies. A footnote quotes Buffon: in gathering the debris that remains, one would not dare to doubt that the sciences were very anciently cultivated, and perfected beyond what they are today. One of the most remarkable cosmogonic traditions gathered by Genesis represents, under an allegorical form, Jehovah separating the upper waters from the terrestrial waters of which the globe is formed. He finds the doctrine again by attributing the appearance of the worlds to the separation, into spheroidal masses of aqueous vapors, born of the luminous vibration of a body from space. I print Jehovah because that is the name in this footnote. The book does not print Jehovih.

The perfection of their astronomical institutions has given him the measure. Has the mind not been seized with admiration at the thought of this people of apostles who, more than ten thousand years before our era, knew the precession of the equinoxes, modifications so slow that several stars undergo… and the leaf breaks off.

l'esprit n'est-il pas saisi d'admiration à la pensée de ce peuple d'apôtres qui, plus de dix mille ans avant notre ère, connaissait la précession des équinoxes

Roisel. Études anté-historiques (1874), p. 526

Notes

The table places the notes at page 535. The first note’s leaf shows no number. They are not a new narrative of Atlantis. The last printed page of them is 565, and it closes Fin des notes.

The mild temperature of northern Europe, before the cooling that ends the Quaternary epochs, is attested by the abundance of the bones of pachyderms found in the north of Siberia. The cause of these heaps must be the one that still produces, under a much lower latitude, the same phenomena. Charton gives the striking description of the Métels, or snow-hunts, that today ravage the shores of the Caspian. They are whirlwinds, whistlings, storms so furious, winds so disordered, that it seems everything is going to be destroyed and dissolved in a last cataclysm. One sees whole troops of horses, surprised by the Métel, resist in vain the violence of the wind, press against one another, and advance little by little, despite their efforts, over the ice of the shore, until those of them, lacking a footing, are all swallowed in the sea. In 1827 the Kirghiz of the lower horde thus lost 280500 horses. A footnote says Atkinson describes the frightful typhoons of central Asia, which make disappear troops of wild animals under the heaping of the sands. This cause of vast destruction must be equally recalled. These hecatombs existed in other times in the high regions, and the note continues off the leaf.

The close, on printed page 565, is not a new site. He repeats that there is no solidarity possible except among the members of a well characterized human family. He asks what one is to think of modern reveries, of theories of political equality between races of different aptitudes and of contrary instincts. By the heritage of past times, and above all by conquests and naturalizations without limits, several of these races that will never fuse collide on this soil, and one would want them to profess the same sentiments, and all to understand a social order that was instituted only by one of them. I leave that as his last printed claim. It adds no island and no year for the sinking.