"Nor can any one," says Camden, "conceive why they should call it Ogygia, unless, perhaps, from its antiquity; for the Greeks called nothing Ogygia unless what was extremely ancient." We have seen that Ogyges was connected by the Greek legends with a first deluge, and that Ogyges was "a quite mythical personage, lost in the night of ages."
It appears, as another confirmation of the theory of the Atlantis origin of these colonies, that their original religion was sun-worship; this, as was the case in other countries, became subsequently overlaid with idol-worship. In the reign of King Tighernmas the worship of idols was introduced. The priests constituted the Order of Druids. Naturally many analogies have been found to exist between the beliefs and customs of the Druids and the other religions which were drawn from Atlantis. We have seen in the chapter on sun-worship how extensive this form of religion was in the Atlantean days, both in Europe and America.
It would appear probable that the religion of the Druids passed from Ireland to England and France. The metempsychosis or transmigration of souls was one of the articles of their belief long before the time of Pythagoras; it had probably been drawn from the storehouse of Atlantis, whence it passed to the Druids, the Greeks, and the Hindoos. The Druids had a pontifex maximus to whom they yielded entire obedience. Here again we see a practice which extended to the Ph?nicians, Egyptians, Hindoos, Peruvians, and Mexicans.
The Druids of Gaul and Britain offered human sacrifices, while it is claimed that the Irish Druids did not. This would appear to have been a corrupt after-growth imposed upon the earlier and purer sacrifice of fruits and flowers known in Atlantis, and due in part to greater cruelty and barbarism in their descendants. Hence we find it practised in degenerate ages on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Irish Druidical rites manifested themselves principally in sun worship. Their chief god was Bel or Baal--the same worshipped by the Ph?nicians--the god of the sun. The Irish name for the sun, Grian, is, according to Virgil, one of the names of Apollo--another sun-god, Gryneus. Sun-worship continued in Ireland down to the time of St.
Patrick, and some of its customs exist among the peasantry of that country to this day. We have seen that among the Peruvians, Romans, and other nations, on a certain day all fires were extinguished throughout the kingdom, and a new fire kindled at the chief temple by the sun's rays, from which the people obtained their fire for the coming year. In Ireland the same practice was found to exist. A piece of land was set apart, where the four provinces met, in the present county of Meath; here, at a palace called Tlachta, the divine fire was kindled. Upon the night of what is now All-Saints-day the Druids assembled at this place to offer sacrifice, and it was established, under heavy penalties, that no fire should be kindled except from this source. On the first of May a convocation of Druids was held in the royal palace of the King of Connaught, and two fires were lit, between which cattle were driven, as a preventive of murrain and other pestilential disorders. This was called Beltinne, or the day of Bel's fire. And unto this day the Irish call the first day of May "Lha-Beul-tinne," which signifies "the day of Bel's fire." The celebration in Ireland of St. John's-eve by watch-fires is a relic of the ancient sun-worship of Atlantis. The practice of driving cattle through the fire continued for a longtime, and Kelly mentions in his "Folk-lore" that in Northamptonshire, in England, a calf was sacrificed in one of these fires to "stop the murrain" during the present century. Fires are still lighted in England and Scotland as well as Ireland for superstitious purposes; so that the people of Great Britain, it may be said, are still in some sense in the midst of the ancient sun-worship of Atlantis.
We find among the Irish of to-day many Oriental customs. The game of "jacks," or throwing up five pebbles and catching them on the back of the hand, was known in Rome. "The Irish keen (caoine), or the lament over the dead, may still be heard in Algeria and Upper Egypt, even as Herodotus heard it chanted by the Libyan women." The same practice existed among the Egyptians, Etruscans, and Romans. The Irish wakes are identical with the funeral feasts of the Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans.
(Cusack's "History of Ireland," p. 141.) The Irish custom of saying "God bless you!" when one sneezes, is a very ancient practice; it was known to the Romans, and referred, it is said, to a plague in the remote past, whose first symptom was sneezing.
We find many points of resemblance between the customs of the Irish and those of the Hindoo. The practice of the creditor fasting at the door-step of his debtor until he is paid, is known to both countries; the kindly "God save you!" is the same as the Eastern "God be gracious to you, my son!" The reverence for the wren in Ireland and Scotland reminds us of the Oriental and Greek respect for that bird. The practice of pilgrimages, fasting, bodily macerations, and devotion to holy wells and particular places, extends from Ireland to India.
All these things speak of a common origin; this fact has been generally recognized, but it has always been interpreted that the Irish camp, from the East, and were in fact a migration of Hindoos. There is not the slightest evidence to sustain this theory. The Hindoos have never within the knowledge of man sent out colonies or fleets for exploration; but there is abundant evidence, on the other hand, of migrations from Atlantis eastward. And how could the Sanscrit writings have preserved maps of Ireland, England, and Spain, giving the shape and outline of their coasts, and their very names, and yet have preserved no memory of the expeditions or colonizations by which they acquired that knowledge?
Another proof of our theory is found in "the round-towers" of Ireland.
Attempts have been made to show, by Dr. Petrie and others, that these extraordinary structures are of modern origin, and were built by the Christian priests, in which to keep their church-plate. But it is shown that the "Annals of Ulster" mention the destruction of fifty-seven of them by an earthquake in A.D. 448; and Giraldus Cambrensis shows that Lough Neagh was created by an inundation, or sinking of the laud, in A.D. 65, and that in his day the fishermen could
"See the round-towers of other days In the waves beneath them shining."
Moreover, we find Diodorus Siculus, in a well-known passage, referring to Ireland, and describing it as "an island in the ocean over against Gaul, to the north, and not inferior in size to Sicily, the soil of which is so fruitful that they mow there twice in the year." He mentions the skill of their harpers, their sacred groves, and their singular temples of round form.
THE BURGH OF MOUSSA, IN THE SHETLANDS
We find similar structures in America, Sardinia, and India. The remains of similar round-towers are very abundant in the Orkneys and Shetlands.
"They have been supposed by some," says Sir John Lubbock, "to be Scandinavian, but no similar buildings exist in Norway, Sweden, or Denmark, so that this style of architecture is no doubt anterior to the arrival of the Northmen." I give above a picture of the Burgh or Broch of the little island of Moussa, in the Shetlands. It is circular in form, forty-one feet in height. Open at the top; the central space is twenty feet in diameter, the walls about fourteen feet thick at the base, and eight feet at the top. They contain a staircase, which leads to the top of the building. Similar structures are found in the Island of Sardinia.
ROUND-TOWER OF THE CANYON OF THE MANCOS, COLORADO, U.S.
In New Mexico and Colorado the remains of round-towers are very abundant. The illustration below represents our of these in the valley of the Mancos, in the south-western corner of Colorado. A model of it is to be found in the Smithsonian collection at Washington. The tower stands at present, in its ruined condition, twenty feet high. It will be seen that it resembles the towers of Ireland, not only in its circular form but also in the fact that its door-way is situated at some distance from the ground.
It will not do to say that the resemblance between these prehistoric and singular towers, in countries so far apart as Sardinia, Ireland, Colorado, and India, is due to an accidental coincidence. It might as well be argued that the resemblance between the roots of the various Indo-European languages was also due to accidental coincidence, and did not establish 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 Abbe 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 Ph?nicians (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 he 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 Bibliotheque Imperiale 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 blessed 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 drowned 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 Muller, 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 Muller 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 Muller:
"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 relics 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, Ph?nicians 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 to the fact that this original seat of the Ph?nician-Hebrew family was in Atlantis.
The great god of the so-called Semites was El, the Strong One, from whose name comes the Biblical names Beth-el, the house of God; Ha-el, the strong one; El-ohim, the gods; El-oah, God; and from the same name is derived the Arabian name of God, Al-lah.
Another evidence of the connection between the Greeks, Ph?nicians, Hebrews, and Atlanteans is shown in the name of Adonis.