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Atlantis is a fictional island mentioned in Plato's works Timaeus and Critias as part of an allegory on the hubris of nations. In the story, Atlantis is described as a naval empire that ruled all Western parts of the known world, making it the literary counter-image of the Achaemenid Empire. After an ill-fated attempt to conquer "Ancient Athens," Atlantis falls out of favor with the deities and submerges into the Atlantic Ocean. Since Plato describes Athens as resembling his ideal state in the Republic, the Atlantis story is meant to bear witness to the superiority of his concept of a state.
Horus, also known as Hor, in Ancient Egyptian, is one of the most significant ancient Egyptian deities who served many functions, most notably as the god of kingship, healing, protection, the sun, and the sky. He was worshipped from at least the late prehistoric Egypt until the Ptolemaic Kingdom and Roman Egypt. Different forms of Horus are recorded in history, and these are treated as distinct gods by Egyptologists. These various forms may be different manifestations of the same multi-layered deity in which certain attributes or syncretic relationships are emphasized, not necessarily in opposition but complementary to one another, consistent with how the Ancient Egyptians viewed the multiple facets of reality. He was most often depicted as a falcon, most likely a lanner falcon or peregrine falcon, or as a man with a falcon head.
Ignatius Loyola Donnelly was an American Congressman, populist writer, and fringe scientist. He is known primarily now for his fringe theories concerning Atlantis, Catastrophism, and Shakespearean authorship. These works are widely regarded as examples of pseudoscience and pseudohistory. Donnelly's work corresponds to the writings of late-19th and early-20th century figures such as Helena Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, and James Churchward.
Pseudoarchaeology—also known as alternative archaeology, fringe archaeology, fantastic archaeology, cult archaeology, and spooky archaeology—is the interpretation of the past by people who are not professional archaeologists and who reject or ignore the accepted data gathering and analytical methods of the discipline. These pseudoscientific interpretations involve the use of artifacts, sites or materials to construct scientifically insubstantial theories to strengthen the pseudoarchaeologists' claims. Methods include exaggeration of evidence, dramatic or romanticized conclusions, use of fallacious arguments, and fabrication of evidence.
Graham Bruce Hancock is a British writer who promotes pseudoscientific theories involving ancient civilizations and hypothetical lost lands. Hancock speculates that an advanced ice age civilization was destroyed in a cataclysm, but that its survivors passed on their knowledge to hunter-gatherers, giving rise to the earliest known civilizations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica.
Mu is a lost continent introduced by Augustus Le Plongeon (1825–1908), who identified the "Land of Mu" with Atlantis. The name was subsequently identified with the hypothetical land of Lemuria by James Churchward (1851–1936), who asserted that it was located in the Pacific Ocean before its destruction. The place of Mu in both pseudoscience and fantasy fiction is discussed in detail in Lost Continents by L. Sprague de Camp.
Lemuria, or Limuria, was a continent proposed in 1864 by zoologist Philip Sclater, theorized to have sunk beneath the Indian Ocean, later appropriated by occultists in supposed accounts of human origins. The theory was discredited with the discovery of plate tectonics and continental drift in the 20th century.
Abbé Charles-Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg was a noted French writer, ethnographer, historian, archaeologist, and Catholic priest. He became a specialist in Mesoamerican studies, travelling extensively in the region. His writings, publications, and recovery of historical documents contributed much to knowledge of the region's languages, writing, history and culture, particularly those of the Maya and Aztec civilizations. However, his speculations concerning relationships between the ancient Maya and the lost continent of Atlantis inspired Ignatius L. Donnelly and encouraged the pseudo-science of Mayanism.
Atlantis: The Antediluvian World is a pseudoarchaeological book published in 1882 by Minnesota populist politician Ignatius L. Donnelly. Donnelly considered Plato's account of Atlantis as largely factual and suggested that all known ancient civilizations were descended from this lost land through a process of hyperdiffusionism.
James Churchward was a British writer, inventor, engineer, and fisherman.
Augustus Henry Julian Le Plongeon was a British-American antiquarian and photographer who studied the pre-Columbian ruins of America, particularly those of the Maya civilization on the northern Yucatán Peninsula. While his writings contain many notions that were not well received by his contemporaries and were later disproven, Le Plongeon left a lasting legacy in his photographs documenting the ancient ruins. He was one of the earliest proponents of Mayanism.
Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge was an English Egyptologist, Orientalist, and philologist who worked for the British Museum and published numerous works on the ancient Near East. He made numerous trips to Egypt and Anglo-Egyptian Sudan on behalf of the British Museum to buy antiquities, and helped it build its collection of cuneiform tablets, manuscripts, and papyri. He published many books on Egyptology, helping to bring the findings to larger audiences. In 1920, he was knighted for his service to Egyptology and the British Museum.
Mayanism is a non-codified eclectic collection of New Age beliefs, influenced in part by Pre-Columbian Maya mythology and some folk beliefs of the modern Maya peoples.
Alice Dixon Le Plongeon (1851–1910) was an English photographer, amateur archeologist, traveller, and author. She was one of the first people to excavate and study the ancient Maya sites of Chichen Itza and Uxmal.
Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme in History, Science, and Literature is a study by L. Sprague de Camp that provides a detailed examination of theories and speculations on Atlantis and other lost lands, including the scientific arguments against their existence. It is one of his most popular works. It was written in 1948 and first published serially in the magazine Other Worlds Science Fiction in 1952–1953; portions also appeared as articles in Astounding Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction, Natural History Magazine, and the Toronto Star. It was first published in book form by Gnome Press in 1954; an updated edition was published by Dover Publications in 1970. De Camp revised the work both for its first book publication and for the updated edition.
William Niven was a mineralogist and archeologist noted for his discovery of the minerals yttrialite, thorogummite, aguilarite and nivenite, as well as a set of controversial tablets. Originally from Scotland, Niven came to the United States in 1879, where he became heavily involved in mineralogy and mining.
Psychic archaeology is a loose collection of practices involving the application of paranormal phenomena to problems in archaeology. It is not considered part of mainstream archaeology, or taught in academic institutions. It is difficult to test scientifically, since archaeological sites are relatively abundant, and all of its verified predictions could have been made via educated guesses.
Queen Moo is a mythical Mayan queen written about by Augustus Le Plongeon and his wife, Alice Dixon Le Plongeon. The Plongeons undertook the first excavation of Chichen Itza in 1875, and based their theories about Queen Moo on the murals and inscriptions that they found there. It is generally accepted that Plongeon's theories are not supported by the archaeological evidence.
Hyperdiffusionism is a pseudoarchaeological hypothesis that postulates that certain historical technologies or ideas were developed by a single people or civilization and then spread to other cultures. Thus, all great civilizations to engage in what appear to be similar cultural practices, such as the construction of pyramids, derived them from a single common progenitor. According to proponents of hyperdiffusion, examples of hyperdiffusion can be found in religious practices, cultural technologies, megalithic monuments, and lost ancient civilizations.
References
- ↑ Google Books website, Lifting the Veil on the Lost Continent of Mu, the Motherland of Men, by Jack Churchward
- ↑ Google Books website, Psalms Code II: The Secret of the Lord - Almanac of Mankind - The Jesus Cycle, by Savasan Yurtsever, page 344
- ↑ Amazon website, Life and Teachings of the Masters of the Far East Vol. 3 (1935), by Baird T. Spalding
- ↑ Duke University Press website, Hispanic American Historical Review, Book Reviews (Feb 1932), pp. 77-79
- ↑ Natural History Magazine website, Picks from the Past section, Lost Continents, page 3
- ↑ Mason, Mike; Aniolowski, Scott David; Fricker, Paul (2020). Malleus Monstrorum Volume 1: Monsters of the Mythos. Chaosium Inc. p. 115. ISBN 978-1-56882-315-7.