Antediluvian world

by Ignatius Donnelly

  We find the emblem of the Cross in pre-Christian times venerated as a holy symbol on both sides of the Atlantic; and we find it explained as a type of the four rivers of the happy island where the civilization of the race originated.

  We find everywhere among the European and American nations the memory of an Eden of the race, where the first men dwelt in primeval peace and happiness, and which was afterward destroyed by water.

  We find the pyramid on both sides of the Atlantic, with its four sides pointing, like the arms of the Cross, to the four cardinal points-a reminiscence of Olympus; and in the Aztec representation of Olympos (Aztlan) we find the pyramid as the central and typical figure.

  Is it possible to suppose all these extraordinary coincidences to be the result of accident? We might just as well say that the similarities between the American and English forms of government were not the result of relationship or descent, but that men placed in similar circumstances had spontaneously and necessarily reached the same results.

  CHAPTER VI.

  GOLD AND SILVER THE SACRED METALS OF ATLANTIS.

  Money is the instrumentality by which man is lifted above the limitations of barter. Baron Storch terms it “the marvellous instrument to which we are indebted for our wealth and civilization.”

  It is interesting to inquire into the various articles which have been used in different countries and ages as money. The following is a table of some of them:

  Articles of Utility.

  -----------------------------+ | India | Cakes of tea. |

  -----------------------------+ | China | Pieces of silk. |

  -----------------------------+ | Abyssinia | Salt. |

  -----------------------------+ | Iceland and Newfoundland | Codfish. |

  -----------------------------+ | Illinois (in early days) | Coon-skins. |

  -----------------------------+ | Bornoo (Africa) | Cotton shirts. |

  -----------------------------+ | Ancient Russia | Skins of wild animals. |

  -----------------------------+ | West India Islands (1500) | Cocoa-nuts. |

  -----------------------------+ | Massachusetts Indians | Wampum and musket-balls. |

  -----------------------------+ | Virginia (1700) | Tobacco. |

  -----------------------------+ | British West India Islands | Pins, snuff, and whiskey. |

  -----------------------------+ | Central South America | Soap, chocolate, and eggs. |

  -----------------------------+ | Ancient Romans | Cattle. |

  -----------------------------+ | Ancient Greece | Nails of copper and iron. |

  -----------------------------+ | The Lacedemonians | Iron. |

  -----------------------------+ | The Burman Empire | Lead. |

  -----------------------------+ | Russia (1828 to 1845) | Platinum. |

  -----------------------------+ | Rome (under Numa Pompilius) | Wood and leather. |

  -----------------------------+ | Rome (under the Caesars) | Land. |

  -----------------------------+ | Carthaginians | Leather. |

  -----------------------------+ | Ancient Britons Cattle, | slaves, brass, and iron. |

  -----------------------------+ | England (under James II.) | Tin, gun-metal, and pewter. |

  -----------------------------+ | South Sea Islands | Axes and hammers. |

  -----------------------------+

  Articles of Ornament.

  ----------------+ | Ancient Jews | Jewels. |

  ----------------+ | The Indian Islands and Africa | Cowrie shells, |

  ----------------+

  Conventional Signs.

  ----------------------------+ | Holland (1574) | Pieces of pasteboard. |

  ----------------------------+ | China (1200) | Bark of the mulberry-tree. |

  ----------------------------+

  It is evident that every primitive people uses as money those articles upon which they set the highest value—as cattle, jewels, slaves, salt, musket-balls, pins, snuff, whiskey, cotton shirts, leather, axes, and hammers; or those articles for which there was a foreign demand, and which they could trade off to the merchants for articles of necessity—as tea, silk, codfish, coonskins, cocoa-nuts, and tobacco.

  Then there is a later stage, when the stamp of the government is impressed upon paper, wood, pasteboard, or the bark of trees, and these articles are given a legal-tender character.

  When a civilized nation comes in contact with a barbarous people they seek to trade with them for those things which they need; a metal-working people, manufacturing weapons of iron or copper, will seek for the useful metals, and hence we find iron, copper, tin, and lead coming into use as a standard of values—as money; for they can always be converted into articles of use and weapons of war. But when we ask bow it chanced that gold and silver came to be used as money, and why it is that gold is regarded as so much more valuable than silver, no answer presents itself. It was impossible to make either of them into pots or pans, swords or spears; they were not necessarily more beautiful than glass or the combinations of tin and copper. Nothing astonished the American races more than the extraordinary value set upon gold and silver by the Spaniards; they could not understand it. A West Indian savage traded a handful of gold-dust with one of the sailors accompanying Columbus for some tool, and then ran for his life to the woods lest the sailor should repent his bargain and call him back. The Mexicans had coins of tin shaped like a letter T. We can understand this, for tin was necessary to them in hardening their bronze implements, and it may have been the highest type of metallic value among them. A round copper coin with a serpent stamped on it was found at Palenque, and T-shaped copper coins are very abundant in the ruins of Central America. This too we can understand, for copper was necessary in every work of art or utility.

  All these nations were familiar with gold and silver, but they used them as sacred metals for the adornment of the temples of the sun and moon.

  The color of gold was something of the color of the sun’s rays, while the color of silver resembled the pale light of the moon, and hence they were respectively sacred to the gods of the sun and moon. And this is probably the origin of the comparative value of these metals: they became the precious metals because they were the sacred metals, and gold was more valuable than silver—just as the sun-god was the great god of the nations, while the mild moon was simply an attendant upon the sun.

  The Peruvians called gold “the tears wept by the sun.” It was not used among the people for ornament or money. The great temple of the sun at Cuzco was called the “Place of Gold.” It was, as I have shown, literally a mine of gold. Walls, cornices, statuary, plate, ornaments, all were of gold; the very ewers, pipes, and aqueducts—even the agricultural implements used in the garden of the temple—were of gold and silver.

  The value of the jewels which adorned the temple was equal to one hundred and eighty millions of dollars! The riches of the kingdom can be conceived when we remember that from a pyramid in Chimu a Spanish explorer named Toledo took, in 1577, $4,450,284 in gold and silver.

  (“New American Cyclopaedia,” art. American Antiquities.) The gold and silver of Peru largely contributed to form the metallic currency upon which Europe has carried on her commerce during the last three hundred years.

  Gold and silver were not valued in Peru for any intrinsic usefulness; they were regarded as sacred because reserved for the two great gods of the nation. As we find gold and silver mined and worked on both sides of the Atlantic at the earliest periods of recorded history, we may fairly conclude that they were known to the Atlanteans; and this view is confirmed by the statements of Plato, who represents a condition of things in Atlantis exactly like that which Pizarro found in Peru.

  Doubtless the vast accumulations of gold and silver in both countries were due to the fact that these metals were not permitted to be used by the people. In Peru the annual taxes of the people were paid to the Inca in part in gold and silver from the mines, and they were used to ornament the temples; and thu
s the work of accumulating the sacred metals went on from generation to generation. The same process doubtless led to the vast accumulations in the temples of Atlantis, as described by Plato.

  Now, as the Atlanteans carried on an immense commerce with all the countries of Europe and Western Asia, they doubtless inquired and traded for gold and silver for the adornment of their temples, and they thus produced a demand for and gave a value to the two metals otherwise comparatively useless to man—a value higher than any other commodity which the people could offer their civilized customers; and as the reverence for the great burning orb of the sun, master of all the manifestations of nature, was tenfold as great as the veneration for the smaller, weaker, and variable goddess of the night, so was the demand for the metal sacred to the sun ten times as great as for the metal sacred to the moon. This view is confirmed by the fact that the root of the word by which the Celts, the Greeks, and the Romans designated gold was the Sanscrit word karat, which means, “the color of the sun.” Among the Assyrians gold and silver were respectively consecrated to the and moon precisely as they were in Peru. A pyramid belonging to the palace of Nineveh is referred to repeatedly in the inscriptions. It was composed of seven stages, equal in height, and each one smaller in area than the one beneath it; each stage was covered with stucco of different colors, “a different color representing each of the heavenly bodies, the least important being at the base: white (Venus); black (Saturn); purple (Jupiter); blue (Mercury); vermillion (Mars); silver (the Moon); and gold (the Sun).” (Lenormant’s “Ancient History of the East,” vol. i., p.

  463.) “In England, to this day the new moon is saluted with a bow or a courtesy, as well as the curious practice of ‘turning one’s silver,’

  which seems a relic of the offering of the moon’s proper metal.”

  (Tylor’s “Anthropology”, p. 361.) The custom of wishing, when one first sees the new moon, is probably a survival of moon-worship; the wish taking the place of the prayer.

  And thus has it come to pass that, precisely as the physicians of Europe, fifty years ago, practised bleeding, because for thousands of years their savage ancestors had used it to draw away the evil spirits out of the man, so the business of our modern civilization is dependent upon the superstition of a past civilization, and the bankers of the world are to-day perpetuating the adoration of “the tears wept by the sun” which was commenced ages since on the island of Atlantis.

  And it becomes a grave question—when we remember that the rapidly increasing business of the world, consequent upon an increasing population, and a civilization advancing with giant steps, is measured by the standard of a currency limited by natural laws, decreasing annually in production, and incapable of expanding proportionately to the growth of the world—whether this Atlantean superstition may not yet inflict more incalculable injuries on mankind than those which resulted from the practice of phlebotomy.

  PART V.

  THE COLONIES OF ATLANTIS.

  CHAPTER I.

  THE CENTRAL AMERICAN AND MEXICAN COLONIES.

  The western shores of Atlantis were not far distant from the West India Islands; a people possessed of ships could readily pass from island to island until they reached the continent. Columbus found the natives making such voyages in open canoes. If, then, we will suppose that there was no original connection between the inhabitants of the main-land and of Atlantis, the commercial activity of the Atlanteans would soon reveal to them the shores of the Gulf. Commerce implies the plantation of colonies; the trading-post is always the nucleus of a settlement; we have seen this illustrated in modern times in the case of the English East India Company and the Hudson Bay Company. We can therefore readily believe that commercial intercourse between Atlantis and Yucatan, Honduras and Mexico, created colonies along the shores of the Gulf which gradually spread into the interior, and to the high table-lands of Mexico. And, accordingly, we find, as I have already shown, that all the traditions of Central America and Mexico point to some country in the East, and beyond the sea, as the source of their first civilized people; and this region, known among them as “Aztlan,” lived in the memory of the people as a beautiful and happy land, where their ancestors had dwelt in peace for many generations.

  Dr. Le Plongeon, who spent four years exploring Yucatan, says: “One-third of this tongue (the Maya) is pure Greek. Who brought the dialect of Homer to America? or who took to Greece that of the Mayas?

  Greek is the offspring of the Sanscrit. Is Maya? or are they coeval? . .

  . The Maya is not devoid of words from the Assyrian.”

  That the population of Central America (and in this term I include Mexico) was at one time very dense, and had attained to a high degree of civilization, higher even than that of Europe in the time of Columbus, there can be no question; and it is also probable, as I have shown, that they originally belonged to the white race. Desire Charnay, who is now exploring the ruins of Central America, says (North American Review, January, 1881, p. 48), “The Toltecs were fair, robust, and bearded. I have often seen Indians of pure blood with blue eyes.” Quetzalcoatl was represented as large, “with a big head and a heavy beard.” The same author speaks (page 44) of “the ocean of ruins all around, not inferior in size to those of Egypt” At Teotihuacan he measured one building two thousand feet wide on each side, and fifteen pyramids, each nearly as large in the base as Cheops. “The city is indeed of vast extent . . .

  the whole ground, over a space of five or six miles in diameter, is covered with heaps of ruins—ruins which at first make no impression, so complete is their dilapidation.” He asserts the great antiquity of these ruins, because he found the very highways of the ancient city to be composed of broken bricks and pottery, the debris left by earlier populations. “This continent,” he says (page 43), “is the land of mysteries; we here enter an infinity whose limits we cannot estimate. .

  . . I shall soon have to quit work in this place. The long avenue on which it stands is lined with ruins of public buildings and palaces, forming continuous lines, as in the streets of modern cities. Still, all these edifices and balls were as nothing compared with the vast substructures which strengthened their foundations.”

  We find the strongest resemblances to the works of the ancient European races: the masonry is similar; the cement is the same; the sculptures are alike; both peoples used the arch; in both continents we find bricks, glassware, and even porcelain (North American Review, December, 1880, pp. 524, 525), “with blue figures on a white ground;” also bronze composed of the same elements of copper and tin in like proportions; coins made of copper, round and T-shaped, and even metallic candlesticks.

  Desire Charnay believes that he has found in the ruins of Tula the bones of swine, sheep, oxen, and horses, in a fossil state, indicating an immense antiquity. The Toltecs possessed a pure and simple religion, like that of Atlantis, as described by Plato, with the same sacrifices of fruits and flowers; they were farmers; they raised and wove cotton; they cultivated fruits; they used the sign of the Cross extensively; they cut and engraved precious stones; among their carvings have been found representations of the elephant and the lion, both animals not known in America. The forms of sepulture were the same as among the ancient races of the Old World; they burnt the bodies of their great men, and enclosed the dust in funeral urns; some of their dead were buried in a sitting position, others reclined at full length, and many were embalmed like the Egyptian mummies.

  When we turn to Mexico, the same resemblances present themselves.

  The government was an elective monarchy, like that of Poland, the king being selected from the royal family by the votes of the nobles of the kingdom. There was a royal family, an aristocracy, a privileged priesthood, a judiciary, and a common people. Here we have all the several estates into which society in Europe is divided.

  There were thirty grand nobles in the kingdom, and the vastness of the realm may be judged by the fact that each of these could muster one hundred thousand vassals from their
own estates, or a total of three millions. And we have only to read of the vast hordes brought into the field against Cortez to know that this was not an exaggeration.

  They even possessed that which has been considered the crowning feature of European society, the feudal system. The nobles held their lands upon the tenure of military service.

  But the most striking feature was the organization of the judiciary. The judges were independent even of the king, and held their offices for life. There were supreme judges for the larger divisions of the kingdom, district judges in each of the provinces, and magistrates chosen by the people throughout the country.

  There was also a general legislative assembly, congress, or parliament, held every eighty days, presided over by the king, consisting of all the judges of the realm, to which the last appeal lay “The rites of marriage,” says Prescott, “were celebrated with as much formality as in any Christian country; and the institution was held in such reverence that a tribunal was instituted for the sole purpose of determining questions relating to it. Divorces could not be obtained until authorized by a sentence of the court, after a patient hearing of the parties.”