Poseidia: the
land of promise
I grew up on a small island off the southern coast of Puerto Rico. All my friends and I believe it was once a much larger island and part of Atlantis. We remember that we worked in a temple on that island where people with physical and mental problems came to be healed.
The soil on the island was clay and when we were children, when it was raining hard, we would pick up a clump of the clay and hold it out in the rain in the palm of our hands. The water washed away the dirt, and when it was gone we’d have a handful of little quartz crystals.
—anonymous
From 30,000 b.c. until 10,000 b.c., when ocean waters were 350 feet lower than today, the continental shelves around the Atlantic Ocean extended out as far as two hundred miles from the present shorelines of America and Europe. Extensive portions of the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea were also above the surface. Poseidia was a large, pleasant island in 28,000 b.c. located on the Bahama Bank, which at that time was completely above the surface. The Bahama Bank is clearly visible on any map that depicts the ocean floor. Today Poseidia is about seven hundred small islands and cays that extend from fifty miles east of Palm Beach, Florida, for approximately 760 miles southeast in the direction of Haiti. The exposed continental shelves, plus the larger islands that resulted from less water in the ocean, made Poseidia easily accessible to Atlanteans.
islands in vicinity of bahama bank; shaded areas are below the surface today, and clear areas are above the surface today
Jacques Cousteau offers some interesting proof that Poseidia was above the surface so long ago. While in his submarine Calypso, Cousteau explored around Andros, the largest island in the Bahamas. At a depth of 165 feet, he found a huge grotto or cave with large stalactites and stalagmites. Tests of sediments on the walls of the cave confirmed that it was above water in and before 10,000 b.c.43 Andros Island, in the center of the Bahama Bank, has many caves with writing on their walls that is similar to ancient written symbols in the Canary Islands. No one has successfully deciphered these far-flung hieroglyphics.
The Lucayan Caverns near Grand Bahama Island are also now submerged, but were once above the surface. Their winding passages extend underwater for eight miles, and include a huge domed hall and rooms with circular sky lights. Human bones in a group of caverns on Grand Bahama Island, which can only be accessed by diving through a lake, provide additional evidence that many thousands of years ago, when this land was above the surface, people lived in Poseidia.44
Atlanteans who moved westward looking for a new place to live also settled in Cuba and the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. When they arrived in the Yucatan peninsula, they were surprised to find people from Mu and Og (Peru) already living in the most desirable locations. The Lemurians and South Americans were helpful and friendly, however, and shared their knowledge with the newcomers. No serious problems arose between the various groups,45 since they were all compassionate and spiritually advanced. The followers of the virtuous Atlantean leader Iltar and the people from Mu and Og gradually intermarried, and an advanced civilization, the predecessor of the Mayas, developed.
Memories of the people of Mu with whom the Atlanteans met and intermarried in Central America are still evident. Inscriptions on Yucatan monuments indicate they were constructed as memorials to the thousands of unfortunate people in the Motherland of Mu who died when ocean water covered it.46 Carved figures in the yoga position adorn lintels and walls of ancient, disintegrating buildings in Central America. At Palenque a carved figure sits in the cross-legged attitude of meditation and a beautiful bas-relief portrays a person in a yoga position. These features, which were common in the Far East, demonstrate that travel from the Pacific was possible long ago. Immigrants from Lemuria carried their customs with them as they moved to both Asia and Central America.47 The name of Guatemala reflects the presence of people from Mu, for “Guatama” is a name given to the Buddha in the Far East, and was probably a sacred word long before the days of the Buddha. In both the Codex Troanus and the Codex Cortesianus, the Maya recorded the sinking of the land of Mu.
Cuba was a larger island during the last Ice Age and included the Puenta del Este caves on the Isle of Youth, which is now about one hundred miles southwest of the Cuban mainland. The circular openings in the ceilings of these interesting caverns offered opportunities for the inhabitants to view the stars, and the numerous astronomical symbols in these Puenta del Este caves indicate the significance of heavenly bodies to those who spent time in them so long ago. The walls and ceilings of the caverns also contain unusual red and black petroglyphs, as well as pictures of bulls.48 The bull figures are reminders of the importance of bulls in Atlantis, as are the bulls painted 20,000 years ago on walls of the Spanish caves in southwestern Europe.
When sea levels were lower, Atlanteans lived on a long mass of land that included the small island off the coast of Puerto Rico with quartz crystals in the soil. The land extended from Jamaica, across what are now the Lesser Antilles Islands, and continued all the way south to Venezuela. Except for two or three breaks for rivers, this lengthy stretch of firm ground offered a connection between South America and the Caribbean. Along the road, traders led animals loaded with gold, silver, and precious gems from South America, which they used for trade with the people of the Caribbean.
Evidence of humans living in South America long ago offers proof that the oceans were carriers, not barriers, in the distant past. Archaeologists have learned that Monte Verde in southern Chile was home to immigrants possibly as long ago as 33,000 years,49 and many other areas in South America were occupied between 13,000 b.c. and 18,000 b.c.50 In a Brazilian rock shelter, 32,000 years ago, artists created permanent paintings in the same style as those which artists made in the caves of southwestern Europe at that time.51
Since the time of Lemuria and Atlantis, adventurers have proved it is quite possible to bridge the oceans and reach the American continent from both the east and the west. Thor Heyerdahl’s trip in 1947 on a primitive balsa raft across the Pacific Ocean from Peru to Polynesia, and the many brave travelers who have duplicated his exploit, demonstrates that the Pacific Ocean was quite accessible to ancient people. Heyerdahl built his flimsy raft Kon Tiki from nine giant balsa logs, just as ancient Peruvians might have done, without using any metal. With five friends, he travelled 3,600 miles across the Pacific, proving that ancient people could cross vast stretches of ocean. Heyerdahl traveled from east to west, but a current north of Hawaii to the southwestern United States, plus the prevailing westerly winds, made the trip in the opposite direction available to Lemurians. Rafts in Micronesia, which go back to at least 60,000 b.c., show that people were not afraid to venture forth. Using the stars, reassuring support from dolphins, the winds, and the ocean’s currents, Lemurians went wherever they wished.
After years of intensive research, Egerton Sykes unearthed reports from a variety of hardy Irishmen who traveled as early as 2000 b.c. westward across the Atlantic Ocean to the magical place they described as the Land of Youth, the Land of Heroes, the Land of Promise, the Great Coast, and the Plain of Desire. (Information about Atlanteans who once lived in the Caribbean, which Sykes gleaned from the journals of these early travelers, will be included in the next chapter.) Ignoring the dire warnings of others, and following shorelines or the ocean’s currents in the direction of the setting sun, the fearless Irish adventurers crossed the Atlantic long before Columbus. Stone markers, or inukshuks, stand where they placed them as they sailed along the coastlines of the North Atlantic. Using simple geometric calculations, they followed these signposts from one point to the next.52
The Gulf Stream, a huge circular moving current in the Atlantic Ocean, contains more water than all the rivers of the world. The enormous current is fifty to one hundred miles wide at the surface and often extends over a mile down. It moves in a clockwise direction from the southern United States, up the coast and across to Europe, and down along the coast of Spain and northwest Africa. From there it proceeds across the Atlantic to the Bahamas, and back up to the southern United States. Columbus spent a long month crossing from Europe to the American continent, but recently, sailors in a ship similar to his, with the help of the more southerly section of the Gulf Stream, made the trip in nineteen days.53 Early Irish sailors were free to travel in the ocean because they were outside the Straits of Gibraltar, which were often controlled by others. Once they learned to correctly follow the clockwise circuit of the current of the Gulf Stream, travel back and forth across the Atlantic was relatively quick and easy.
Ancient Irish stories about the Firbolgs, “the people of the hide boats,” who arrived in Ireland from Atlantis when their homeland on the Atlantic Ridge was sinking, may be what inspired the Irish to build their seaworthy crafts of leather. The currahs, as the monks called their boats, consisted of wooden frames covered with sewn animal skins. They were small and lightweight and proved more stable in heavy seas than larger vessels, for they rode with and on top of the waves. Close to the ocean’s surface, the sailors could more easily “read” its currents. If the small leather currahs did capsize, they were not apt to sink.54
Legends and a few ancient Central American books have survived to remind us of the people from Mu and Atlantis and their descendants who once lived there. Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg, a respected scholar of the nineteenth century, devoted his life to the study of Central American history, philosophy, and religion. In 1845 Brasseur moved to Mexico and learned the local dialects. After he gained the confidence of the natives, they helped him find obscure manuscripts from seventeenth-century Spanish friars, and to translate and understand inscriptions on the stellae that escaped his destructive predecessors. Stellae are stone columns on which the Maya and their ancestors, realizing that records written on softer material would not survive for long, wisely recorded information.
In 1864, Brasseur discovered the Troano Codex in Madrid. It is one of the four Mayan books that escaped the Spaniard’s ruinous fires. Apparently a seventeenth-century priest carried the valuable document to Spain, where it lay neglected for almost two hundred years. A second half of the Troana Codex, the Cortesianus, appeared in another part of Spain a few years later. The Troano Codex, which the Maya wrote at least 3,500 years ago from knowledge accumulated over many centuries, consists of fifty-six pages inscribed on both sides. To form each page, the writers folded and doubled an immense strip they ingeniously made from the bark of a fig tree. If the book is laid flat, it fills the floor of a large room. The pages, which are folded like a fan, are completely covered with a whitish varnish on which the hieroglyphic characters are written in black, red, blue, and brown.
Brasseur learned from the Cortesianus that a fearful cataclysm caused a large island in the Atlantic Ocean to sink into the waters with millions of inhabitants. Brasseur’s concentrated years of study led him to believe that passing comets, falling meteors, and similar terrible, natural objects from the skies destroyed at least one advanced civilization in the past. These revelations were too much for the nineteenth-century academic community and, in spite of his careful scholarship, Brasseur’s colleagues rudely scorned and avoided him for the rest of his life.
Dr. Augustus Le Plongeon and his wife, Alice Dixon, lived in the Yucatan from 1873 until 1885. They learned the language of the Maya, studied their culture, listened to their stories, and participated in their shamanic rituals. He came to realize that beneath the natives’ everyday life there existed a strong current of occult wisdom and practice that stemmed from the very distant past.55 For example, he learned that the ordeals in the rites of initiation to the mysteries that the priests practiced in Xibalba, in the heart of the Guatemalan mountains, were similar to the trials of initiations to the greater mysteries in ancient Egypt.56 Le Plongeon was a Mason and was amazed to discover evidence of Masonic rites in ancient Mayan sculpture.
Le Plongeon and his wife were the original excavators of Chichén Itzá, which they documented with 500 photographs. From their contacts with the people and a variety of other sources, the Le Plongeons ascertained that some ancestors of the Maya were from the Motherland of Mu. His excellent translation of the Troana about the terrible sinking of Mu reads as follows:
In the year six Kan, on the eleventh Mulue, in the month Zac, there occurred terrible earthquakes, which continued without intermission until the thirteenth Chuen. The country of the hills of mud, the ‘Land of Mu,’ was sacrificed. Being twice upheaved, it suddenly disappeared during the night, the basin being continually shaken by volcanic forces. Being confined, these caused the land to sink and rise several times and in various places. At last the surface gave way, and the ten countries were torn asunder and scattered in fragments; unable to withstand the force of the seismic convulsions, they sank with sixty-four millions of inhabitants, eight thousand and sixty years before the writing of this book.57
Writings the Le Plongeons translated on a temple at Uxmal, which stated the building was constructed in memory of Mu, the land to the west from whence came sacred mysteries, helped to confirm the startling information.58 Since assertations of this type were unacceptable to the scientific community, like Brasseur, Le Plongeon lost all credibility and his fellow scholars permanently ignored him. In addition, the Mexican government confiscated many valuable relics the natives had shared with Le Plongeon. Near the end of his life he no longer trusted the Mexicans and lost all interest in sharing his discoveries with the outside world. After he died, his wife revealed that her husband had hidden a precious map to the site of underground rooms where there were perfect records of the Maya. Hopefully, one day someone will rediscover these significant memories of the past.
The Lacandon Indians in southern Mexico are Maya who lived completely removed from civilization for hundreds of centuries until fifty years ago when a startled surveyor stumbled upon one of their villages. The Lacandons believe their language is the oldest in the world.59 One night in a dark hut, deep in the rainforest of Chiapas in southern Mexico, I listened to an elderly Lacandon chant the songs of his ancestors. As he sang, he changed the notes in pitch, intensity, and amount of vibrato, depending on the meaning of the words. Even before the singsong words were translated from his language to Spanish to English, I understood the main character and his frantic action and terrified feeling as a fierce jaguar attacked and killed him.
The fact that Lacandons continued to use this ancient language, their skills at making cloth from tree bark just as their ancestors had done for thousands of years, and my observations in the village convinced me of the validity of their memories of their origin. Lacandon Kin Garcia asserts the Maya originally came from the land of Atlantis, but they have very strong hereditary connections with the Tibetans and the Indians of North America. Kin reports that these distant ancestors gave his people sacred geometry, knowledge of the universe, and books inscribed on rocks and monuments.60
The Aztecs also remember the homeland of their ancestors. When Cortez and his Spanish soldiers invaded Mexico in 1519, these highly civilized people lived north of the Maya in and around what is now Mexico City. As the Spaniards stared at the gleaming beauty of the Aztec capital, with its magnificent pyramids painted pink with volcanic ash and palaces higher than the tallest churches in Spain, it seemed as if they were dreaming. The canals, lakes, freshwater aqueducts, and perfectly paved streets of the city—which was larger than Paris, the biggest metropolis in Europe—added to the scene. Montezuma, the handsome emperor, with his carefully trimmed beard and gracious manners, resembled a European nobleman.
What was the origin of all this civilization? Montezuma told the Spaniards his distant ancestors came from a land to the east called Aztlan, which was now in the sea. In their language atl means “water” and tlan is “a place” or “land,” so Aztlan means “water land” or perhaps “island.”61 The Aztecs remembered that Aztlan had a high mountain, a garden where the gods lived,62 and many flamingos. Thousands of beautiful pink and orange flamingos still congregate and breed in Andros Island, in the center of what was once Poseidia.
The Aztecs attempted to preserve memories of their past in stone carvings. Many years ago a German archaeologist found a frieze on a temple deep in the jungle of northern Guatemala that apparently depicts a destruction of Atlantis. The relief depicts a scene in which a pyramid or temple is falling apart and slipping into the water (ocean). Next to the blocks of the crumbling building a large volcano is erupting. A man rowing a boat has adornments in his ears, indicating he is a priest. Before him, a drowning person wears a headdress, which suggests he or she represents the lower classes.
For thousands of years, the Caribs of Central America have preserved memories of their ancestors who were members of a large group of seven families who left their homes on a now-submerged land far to the east in the sunrise sea. The seven families traveled to the west in seven fleets of ships, and finally came to an island they called Caraiba, where they settled.63 The Caribs refer to their original homeland as the old, red land. In a similar way, the Toltecs, predecessors of the Aztecs in Mexico, remember that their ancestors came from the old, old, red land. (Please see the biography of Lucille Taylor Hansen in appendix II, for her interesting research with Native Americans was the source of this information.) A high incidence of red clay in parts of the Atlantic Ridge offers an explanation for the Native American references to Atlantis as the old, red land.64
The Caribs told Hansen that descendants of the seven families from the old, red land lived happily in Caraiba for a very long time. Visiting priests from Atlantis taught the people the religion of Tupan and referred to them as the Tupi, meaning “the sons of Pan.” “Pan” was another name for the old, red land. Many generations later, a particularly devastating natural catastrophe on Caraiba compelled the Tupi to leave their sinking island home. They traveled a little further to the west in seven even larger fleets and came to a sea they named Caribbean, after Caraiba.
When they reached the Caribbean, the Tupi ancestors of the Caribs separated. Some settled on nearby mountainous land where they farmed by terracing, a technique their distant forebears employed on the steep mountainsides of Atlantis. Other Tupi moved to the south and journeyed up the Amazon River. The Guarahis of Paraguay continue to worship the god Tupan. At least one of the seven groups of these Atlanteans from Caraiba went north to the Mississippi River Valley. For a long time representatives of the seven extended families met every 104 years to coordinate calendars and compare adventures, but communication became an increasing problem, and they gradually lost touch with one another.65 In the same way, after many generations, descendants of Lemurians and Atlanteans who settled in Central America gradually forgot the past history of their ancestors.
43. Fix, Pyramid Odyssey, p. 215.
44. Collins, Gateway to Atlantis, p. 330.
45. Cayce, Readings 5750–1.
46. Churchward, The Lost Continent of Mu, pp. 80–84.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., p. 251, 265.
49. N.Y. Times, July 22, 1986, from Tom D. Dillehay.
50. The Economist, “The First Americans,” Feb. 21, 1998, p. 79, 80.
51. Katz, “The Way We Were,” Newsweek, November 10, 1986, p. 72.
52. Nova, WGBH Transcripts, December 15, 1987, Secrets of the Red Paint People, pp. 6–7.
53. Nova, The Gulf Stream, February 28, 1989.
54. Zapp & Erikson, Atlantis in America, p. 285.
55. Tompkins, Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, p. 166.
56. Le Plongeon, Sacred Mysteries, pp. 41–43. For example, the ancient Maya wisemen practiced clairvoyance and with magic mirrors they predicted the future. Surrounding themselves with clouds, they could appear to make themselves invisible and materialize amazing objects. Although there is no proof Lemurians or Atlanteans carried the techniques for these occult skills to Central America, it is impossible to prove they didn’t.
57. Le Plongeon, Alice and Augustus, Queen Moo and the Eastern Sphinx, p. 147.
58. Hatt, The Maya, p. 9.
59. Muck, The Secret of Atlantis, p. 129.
60. Red Star, Star Ancestors, p. 74.
61. Berlitz, Atlantis, The Eighth Continent, p. 56.
62. Tompkins, Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, pp. 4, 9.
63. Hansen, The Ancient Atlantic.
64. Donato, A Re-examination of the Atlantis Theory.
65. Hansen, The Ancient Atlantic.