Atlantis: The Antedeluvian World - Ignatius Donnelly (short novels to read .txt) 📗

any similarity of origin. In fact, we might just as well go back to the theory of the philosophers of one hundred and fifty years ago, and say that the resemblance between the fossil forms in the rocks and the living forms upon them did not indicate relationship, or prove that the fossils were the remains of creatures that had once lived, but that it was simply a way nature had of working out extraordinary coincidences in a kind of joke; a sort of “plastic power in nature,” as it was called.

We find another proof that Ireland was settled by the people of Atlantis in the fact that traditions long existed among the Irish peasantry of a land in the “Far West,” and that this belief was especially found among the posterity of the Tuatha-de-Dananns, whose connection with the Formorians we have shown.

The Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg, in a note to his translation of the “Popol Vuh,” says:

“There is an abundance of legends and traditions concerning the passage of the Irish into America, and their habitual communication with that continent many centuries before the time of Columbus. We should bear in mind that Ireland was colonized by the Phœnicians (or by people of that race). An Irish Saint named Vigile, who lived in the eighth century, was accused to Pope Zachary of having taught heresies on the subject of the antipodes. At first he wrote to the pope in reply to the charge, but afterward he went to Rome in person to justify himself, and there be proved to the pope that the Irish had been accustomed to communicate with a transatlantic world.”

“This fact,” says Baldwin, “seems to have been preserved in the records of the Vatican.”

The Irish annals preserve the memory of St. Brendan of Clonfert, and his remarkable voyage to a land in the West, made A.D. 545. His early youth was passed under the care of St. Ita, a lady of the princely family of the Desii. When he was five years old he was placed under the care of Bishop Ercus. Kerry was his native home; the blue waves of the Atlantic washed its shores; the coast was full of traditions of a wonderful land in the West. He went to see the venerable St. Enda, the first abbot of Arran, for counsel. he was probably encouraged in the plan he had formed of carrying the Gospel to this distant land. “He proceeded along the coast of Mayo, inquiring as he went for traditions of the Western continent. On his return to Kerry he decided to set out on the important expedition. St. Brendan’s Hill still bears his name; and from the bay at the foot of this lofty eminence be sailed for the ‘Far West.’ Directing his course toward the southwest, with a few faithful companions, in a well-provisioned bark, he came, after some rough and dangerous navigation, to calm seas, where, without aid of oar or sail, he was borne along for many weeks.” He had probably entered upon the same great current which Columbus travelled nearly one thousand years later, and which extends from the shores of Africa and Europe to America. He finally reached land; he proceeded inland until he came to a large river flowing from east to west, supposed by some to be the Ohio. “After an absence of seven years he returned to Ireland, and lived not only to tell of the marvels he had seen, but to found a college of three thousand monks at Clonfert.” There are eleven Latin MSS. in the Bibliothèque Impériale at Paris of this legend, the dates of which vary from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, but all of them anterior to the time of Columbus.

The fact that St. Brendan sailed in search of a country in the west cannot be doubted; and the legends which guided him were probably the traditions of Atlantis among a people whose ancestors had been derived directly or at second-hand from that country.

This land was associated in the minds of the peasantry with traditions of Edenic happiness and beauty. Miss Eleanor C. Donnelly, of Philadelphia, has referred to it in her poem, “The Sleeper’s Sail,”

where the starving boy dreams of the pleasant and plentiful land: “‘Mother, I’ve been on the cliffs out yonder, Straining my eyes o’er the breakers free To the lovely spot where the sun was setting, Setting and sinking into the sea.

“‘The sky was full of the fairest colors Pink and purple and paly green, With great soft masses of gray and amber, And great bright rifts of gold between. “‘And all the birds that way were flying, Heron and curlew overhead, With a mighty eagle westward floating, Every plume in their pinions red. “‘And then I saw it, the fairy city, Far away o’er the waters deep; Towers and castles and chapels glowing Like blesséd dreams that we see in sleep. “‘What is its name?’ ‘Be still, acushla (Thy hair is wet with the mists, my boy); Thou hast looked perchance on the Tir-na-n’oge, Land of eternal youth and joy! “‘Out of the sea, when the sun is setting, It rises, golden and fair to view; No trace of ruin, or change of sorrow, No sign of age where all is new. “‘Forever sunny, forever blooming, Nor cloud nor frost can touch that spot, Where the happy people are ever roaming, The bitter pangs of the past forgot.’

This is the Greek story of Elysion; these are the Elysian Fields of the Egyptians; these are the Gardens of the Hesperides; this is the region in the West to which the peasant of Brittany looks from the shores of Cape Raz; this is Atlantis.

The starving child seeks to reach this blessed land in a boat and is drowned.

“High on the cliffs the light-house keeper Caught the sound of a piercing scream; Low in her hut the lonely widow Moaned in the maze of a troubled dream; “And saw in her sleep a seaman ghostly, With sea-weeds clinging in his hair, Into her room, all wet and dripping, A drownéd boy on his bosom bear. “Over Death Sea on a bridge of silver The child to his Father’s arms had passed! Heaven was nearer than Tir-na-n’oge, And the golden city was reached at last.”

CHAPTER VIII.

THE OLDEST SON OF NOAH.

That eminent authority, Dr. Max Müller, says, in his “Lectures on the Science of Religion,”

“If we confine ourselves to the Asiatic continent, with its important peninsula of Europe, we find that in the vast desert of drifting human speech three, and only three, oases have been formed in which, before the beginning of all history, language became permanent and traditional—assumed, in fact, a new character, a character totally different from the original character of the floating and constantly varying speech of human beings. These three oases of language are known by the name of Turanian, Aryan, and Semitic. In these three centres, more particularly in the Aryan and Semitic, language ceased to be natural; its growth was arrested, and it became permanent, solid, petrified, or, if you like, historical speech. I have always maintained that this centralization and traditional conservation of language could only have been the result of religious and political influences, and I now mean to show that we really have clear evidence of three independent settlements of religion—the Turanian, the Aryan, and the Semitic—concomitantly with the three great settlements of language.”

There can be no doubt that the Aryan and another branch, which Müller calls Semitic, but which may more properly be called Hamitic, radiated from Noah; it is a question yet to be decided whether the Turanian or Mongolian is also a branch of the Noachic or Atlantean stock.

To quote again from Max Müller:

“If it can only be proved that the religions of the Aryan nations are united by the same bonds of a real relationship which have enabled us to treat their languages as so many varieties of the same type—and so also of the Semitic—the field thus opened is vast enough, and its careful clearing, and cultivation will occupy several generations of scholars.

And this original relationship, I believe, can be proved. Names of the principal deities, words also expressive of the most essential elements of religion, such as prayer, sacrifice, altar, spirit, law, and faith, have been preserved among the Aryan and among the Semitic nations, and these relies admit of one explanation only. After that, a comparative study of the Turanian religions may be approached with better hope of success; for that there was not only a primitive Aryan and a primitive Semitic religion, but likewise a primitive Turanian religion, before each of these primeval races was broken up and became separated in language, worship and national sentiment, admits, I believe, of little doubt. . . . There was a period during which the ancestors of the Semitic family had not yet been divided, whether in language or in religion. That period transcends the recollection of every one of the Semitic races, in the same way as neither Hindoos, Greeks, nor Romans have any recollection of the time when they spoke a common language, and worshipped their Father in heaven by a name that was as yet neither Sanscrit, nor Greek, nor Latin. But I do not hesitate to call this Prehistoric Period historical in the best sense of the word. It was a real period, because, unless it was real, all the realities of the Semitic languages and the Semitic religions, such as we find them after their separation, would be unintelligible. Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic point to a common source as much as Sanscrit, Greek, and Latin; and unless we can bring ourselves to doubt that the Hindoos, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Teutons derived the worship of their principal deity from their common Aryan sanctuary, we shall not be able to deny that there was likewise a primitive religion of the whole Semitic race, and that El, the Strong One in heaven, was invoked by the ancestors of all the Semitic races before there were Babylonians in Babylon, Phœnicians in Sidon and Tyrus—before there were Jews in Mesopotamia or Jerusalem.

The evidence of the Semitic is the same as that of the Aryan languages: the conclusion cannot be different….

“These three classes of religion are not to be mistaken-as little as the three classes of language, the Turanian, the Semitic, and the Aryan.

They mark three events in the most ancient history of the world, events which have determined the whole fate of the human race, and of which we ourselves still feel the consequences in our language, in our thoughts, and in our religion.”

We have seen that all the evidence points