Gateway to
Atlantis P.4: Urheimat der Arier
In Collins’
Gateway to Atlantis an unusual landscape feature of the region, called the Carolina
Bays in the Bahamas, is brought on as possible evidence of some antique
commentary impact, rather like the Tunguska event of Siberia.
(See Cuba’s
Atlantis on this web site)
The Carolina
Bays are shallow oval depressions widely scattered over some south-eastern
states of the USA, of unknown date and speculative origin. True to the rather
scrupulous candour he has earlier shown in his book,
Collins tells us that these Bays have never evidenced any traces that might
have come from a comet or asteroid and he acknowledges that geologists have not
proposed - among their several theories - any extraterrestrial explanation for
them. Nevertheless, Collins wants to date them to about 8500 BC and relate them
to the fall of a comet, that caused (or at least mightily contributed to) the
end of the last ice age. He mentions the notion of an ex-Second World War
rocket engineer (no prizes given for guessing which side he was on) that there
are two "deep impact sites" in the ocean east of the Bahamas. He
doesn't mention the absence of any sedimentological evidence from seabed cores
in the Atlantic of any such disturbance as the deep impact of a comet or
asteroid would surely make. Nor has any young lava been identified that would
have erupted as a result of the impact, nor is there any extraterrestrial
material in ice cores of the required date or any magnetic record of
disturbance. As a special explanation for the end of the last ice age, the
commentary impact theory leaves much to be desired. For a start, we would have
to wonder how all the other ice ages ended - did a comet always come along to
finish the job?
Needless to
say, Collins belongs to the nightmare-scenario persuasion when it comes to the
end of the last ice age, and even quotes Frank C. Hibben
at some length from his Lost Americans of 1946. (You really would conclude, to
go by the Atlantologists, that no up-to-date, let
alone scholarly, work had been done on glacial geology for the last
half-century.)
So a comet is
quite in order in Collins' eyes as an added ingredient to the pictured mayhem
of mass extinctions that Hapgood ascribed to earth
crust displacement. For Collins, the comet supplies the sudden tsunami to break
up Atlantis in the Antilles, and the postglacial rise in sea level renders that
flooding permanent.
The comet idea
wasn't a new one with the German rocket man: as far back as 1788, Glan Rinaldo
Carli suggested that Atlantis may have been sunk by comet strike, Donnelly more
than toyed with it, and the idea was renewed with Karl Georg Zschaetzsh in 1922 in his ominously titled Atlantis: die Urheimat der Arier, "the
original home of the Aryans."
Collins
realizes that all the amateur geologizing and glyphinterpreting
rather go for nothing unless it can be shown that there were any people in the
region of the Antilles and Bahamas in about 8500 BC to witness his comet,
tsunami and flooding. (By this time, he is taking it for granted in Gateway to
Atlantis that Cuba was the core of Plato's Atlantis and that Plato got it
right, even if accidentally, that the catastrophe occurred in 8500 BC - not
that that is altogether what Plato says. He is also taking it for granted from
hereon that a comet did indeed strike the western Atlantic at that date.) Collins
avers that "outside the constraints of archaeological opinion," a
reference I take it to the sober, systematic search for a body of consistent
evidence that professional archaeologists demand, outside those constraints
"there is compelling evidence to show that the sunken regions of the
Bahamas and Caribbean still hold important clues concerning the historical
reality of lost Atlantis."
What we get is
some footprints of unknown age in mud-rock, the Bimini Road again and those odd
sightings from the air, and reports of underwater caves with bones. It is
certainly true that archaeologists are not going to find any or all of that in
the least bit compelling as evidence for the previous existence of the
"shining jewel" of Atlantis on Cuba and its empire among the
Antillean archipelagos. Collins thinks these areas "may well" provide
us with proof of a settled neolithic culture that was
terminated by this commentary impact of about 8500 BC.
"Neolithic"
means the New Stone Age way of life of the world's earliest farmers, before the
use of metals, usually with pottery but no written records. Even if such a neolithic presence in this region were satisfactorily
demonstrated at an early date of 8500 BC (and there is not a scrap of serious
evidence for that), we should still be obliged to note that such a way of life
was a far cry indeed from Plato's highly sophisticated, indeed luxuriously
oversophisticated, kingdom of Atlantis. Collins even seems to think that
Plato's shipfilled, canal-ringed city of gold and
silver palaces, awash with statuary, may yet be found somewhere near Cuba. Does
he seriously think all that could have arisen in a neolithic
context evidenced at best by some bones, footprints and dubious marks on the
seabed, plus axe, idol, standing stone, earthworks and poor quality
pictographs, all undated. A line of Latin poetry comes to mind as one nears the
end of Collins' weighty and erudite tome, when a putative bunch of neolithic farmers in Cuba with very little to show for them
turn out to be the chief product of all that heavy delving into mythology,
geology, philology, cartography, archaeology and cosmology:
Parturiunt
montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.
("Mountains are in labour, there'll be
born a laughable mouse.")
Horace, Ars Poetica, line 139
To pile on top
of such a truly laboured construction the idea that,
much later, Phoenician merchants (for whom there is likewise not a scrap of
serious evidence in the New World) could have taken an accurate memory of this
Atlantis back to Plato might strike many as laughable indeed.
Gateway to
Atlantis ends in a notable flight of fancy about Cronus, father of the Olympian
gods, the Nephilim giants of the Bible, and a voyage from the Levant to Mexico
via Britain and Cuba with a black-skinned crew somewhere between 2200 and 1250
BC. Collins opines that "whether they might have utilized the North-west
Passage or the North Equatorial Current via the Canary Isles is open to
debate." He's telling us. There's a strong hint, throughout the closing
passages, of that hoary notion of a ruling elite coming in from outside to
direct the affairs of the less advanced people they settled among. Something I
find difficult to avoid is the feeling that this is the old colonialist
attitude resurfacing at the end of the twentieth century, which saw it taken to
horrible extremes by the Nazis (no strangers themselves to entertaining every
sort of alternative archaeology).
Like the rest
of the Atlantological riters,
Collins makes much throughout of stray finds and random similarities, yet
consistently they make very little of one of the most important aspects of real
archaeology: its insistence on full cultural context and repeated association
of finds, with corroborated dates.
His resort to
folklore is positively Donnellian in its recklessness,
seizing on anything like tales of fire or ones from the sky as evidence of
commentary catastrophe, and quietly downplaying such grotesque and impossible
twaddle as serpent-bodied goddesses without navels that inextricably goes with
these tales - and reveals their highly imaginative nature.
Lastly,
Collins' work evinces that need to subvert the findings, indeed the entire
approach, of the academic archaeologists that we almost always find - more or
less virulently - in all the writers of "alternative archaeology." I
suppose that the proponents of theories wildly divergent from the conclusions
of the paid, appointed professors are always under pressure to do down the
work, the attitudes and even the motives of the professionals. After all, how
can it be that the university professors disagree with, worse still ignore, the
startling insights achieved by the independent researchers? They must be blind,
or hidebound, or jealous, or fearful for their own jobs, surely. The
"alternative archaeologists" seem to find the published work of the
professionals unrewarding in its lack of colourful
hypotheses, its emphasis on data to do with potsherds and pollen grains, its
graphs and sections, its statistics, its satisfaction with modest gains in
detailed knowledge and its rigorous testing of all interpretations of its
material, old and new. I sympathize with their evident bafflement when faced
with the publications of the professionals. But then I would be baffled if I
browsed through some article in Nature about cell chemistry or stellar physics.
(I wouldn't, however, tend to think that the authors of such articles were
generally up to no good.) It has to be said that ploughing through books like
Gateway to Atlantis can itself call for some stern dutyfulness
on the reader's part, just to keep on with it, not so much to the bitter as the
anticlimactic end. Whole tracts of these "alternative" archaeological
writings manage to be both thin and heavy going at the same time, with nothing
at all certain to show for it at the end, as I fear more - even among their
most well disposed readers - have found out than
would care to admit it.
Collins has
not contributed any startling new details to our diagnostic list of features of
the Atlantis myth. The literal reliance on Plato, the idea of a vanished primal
civilization, the ready resort to folklore, the predisposition to catastrophe,
the theme of secret elites, the fixation on transatlantic intercourse before
Columbus, the penchant for amateur philologizing and geologizing, the defiance
of the academic archaeological establishment - all these are well-worn signs of
the Atlantis myth syndrome. What, perhaps, he has highlighted more than most -
though he's by no means the only exemplar, far from it - is the potential for
hard labour without significant issue that is
contained in this whole genre.
It has to be
said that ploughing through books like Gateway to Atlantis can itself call for
some stern dutyfulness on the reader's part, just to
keep on with it, not so much to the bitter as the anticlimactic end. Whole
tracts of these "alternative" archaeological writings manage to be
both thin and heavy going at the same time, with nothing at all certain to show
for it at the end, as I fear more - even among their most well
disposed readers - have found out than would care to admit it.
But our main
task now is to make a full characterization of the multi-symptomed
Atlantis myth syndrome and to ask why its "victims" (to keep up the
medical simile for a moment) are so prone to it - both the writers and the
readers of the genre. In what follows, it should not be thought the suggestion
is being made that all the proponents of Atlantology
have ever presented all the features of the syndrome, or that any particular
one of them has shown signs of any particular tendency.
Continued in
part five
See also:
Cuba's Gateway
To Atlantis P. 2: Cocaine
Gateway to
Atlantis P.3: Seven Cities, El Dorado
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