poseidia and
the yucatan
She dreamed she was in a strange land, far from her homeland of Atlantis that was gone forever. It was hot in this foreign country, and she and her friends were surrounded by a forest which seemed to stretch on and on. The nearby sea was also unfamiliar. Noisy, small monkeys filled the air with loud shrieking. Brightly colored birds fluttered from tree to tree, and strange insects buzzed around her. The woman and her companions wore simple, primitive clothing and lived in huts constructed from gray bark. Her hands were rough and calloused from chopping trees for fires and digging to plant grains and vegetables. She was kneeling, pounding some nameless grain in a wooden bowl. Despite the hardships, she was happy.66
This dream came to renowned author Taylor Caldwell late in her life, after she wrote The Romance of Atlantis. When she was only twelve years old, Caldwell (1900–1985) wrote that detailed novel about the experiences of a princess of Atlantis during the final days of her country on an island in the Atlantic Ocean. Caldwell’s father sent the manuscript to her grandfather, a book publisher, who promptly returned it, saying he was horrified and was convinced it was a fraud. He believed the philosophical and intellectual maturity it reflected indicated that someone much older had written it. Taylor Caldwell set aside The Romance of Atlantis until she was seventy years old, when she sent it to her friend Jess Stern, who was interested in having it published. At that time Caldwell had this dream about her life after she hurriedly left sinking Atlantis.
Many Atlanteans, like those in Taylor Caldwell’s dream who managed to escape from their sinking country during its last moments, found themselves in a difficult, often fearsome situation somewhere on the American continent. Since small groups of refugees did not have the knowledge or the equipment to reproduce the high standard of living they had enjoyed in their homeland, their lives soon disintegrated to primitive living conditions. The more fortunate last-minute refugees from the Atlantic Ridge reached the island of Poseidia on the Bahama Bank in the Caribbean. Here they joined the thousands who had moved there since 28,000 b.c.
The first to arrive in Poseidia were people whom Cayce identifies as Children of the Law of One. Throughout most of its long life, the majority of the inhabitants of Atlantis were spiritual individuals who loved and respected each other. Gradually, with the passage of time, the leaders divided into two groups, the Children of the Law of One and the Sons of Belial. The Children of the Law of One are also referred to as the “Sons of Light,” and the Sons of Belial are called the “Sons of Darkness.” Similar terms are found in the Dead Sea Scrolls.67
The Sons of Belial were selfish, materially oriented individuals who focused on the pleasures of satisfying their own physical appetites and desires, with no respect for others. As their lives filled with thoughts of material objects, they came to believe, like many of us today, that the acquisition of more and more would bring them happiness. When disaster threatened Atlantis, they were so involved in the material world they did not heed the advice of wiser individuals, who urged everyone to leave if they wished to continue their lifetime on this planet.
The main principle of the Law of One is that we all are related; we all are one. The Children of the Law of One focused on love and practiced prayer and meditation, hoping to promote everyone’s spiritual knowledge. They followed the Golden Rule, and also believed that whatever they did to others would happen to them. They honored the Creator from whence they came, who gave them their soul.68 Many individuals on the Earth today are Lemurians and Atlanteans who have returned to participate in another struggle between the forces of good and evil for control of this planet. Some believe that if the creases of the lines that are visible in the palm of your hand when you close it slightly form the letter “M” you were probably one of the Children of Light. A curved “S” or “C” indicates the Sons of Darkness.69 However, one’s actions or thoughts in Atlantis or Lemuria are not really important. What is significant is that today we are all here to help make our world a better place. The Children of the Law of One will continue their good work, and the Sons of Darkness will have an opportunity to redeem themselves.
I dreamed that my ex-husband and I lived in a big house that had large arched porticoes and very filmy, sheer, light drapery hangings of some type. The house was on a hillside, open to fresh air and ocean breezes on all sides. I could feel the breeze and the curtains were flowing softly from the windows. Life was wonderful and I was very happy; I knew that we were living in Atlantis.
—allison
In a city on a beautiful hillside overlooking the sea, the devout Poseidians erected lovely temples, some with large pillars of onyx and topaz inlaid with precious stones that reflected the sun’s light.70 Two of the temples, the Temple Beautiful and the Temple of Sacrifice, became the center of the lives of numerous Atlanteans who wished to raise their level of consciousness ever higher. It is said that “Beauty in mind, body, and soul” was inscribed over the door of the Temple Beautiful, where men and women were equal and they worked together in harmony.
Edgar Cayce says that active participants in the Temple Beautiful and the Temple of Sacrifice wore special headgear and garments, but he does not describe them.71 Like doctors, nurses, train conductors, and royalty today, their clothing was similar to a uniform and indicated one’s field of service. From psychic Betty Bethards we learn that those who participated in the temple’s activities wore a wraparound garment with large sleeves that hung down, resembling one of our hospital gowns. It was tied at the waist with a shiny lightweight metallic band, unlike any metal we know.72
British author Murry Hope (please see her biography in appendix II) adds that the basic color of their garments and their sash, earring, pendant, ring, bracelet, or headband indicated whether they were a healer or student or teacher, and also showed what level of enlightenment they had attained.73 When Atlanteans started the journey toward priesthood, the novices wore pale green robes. As they advanced, light blue clothing distinguished them, and finally they were permitted to don the white garments reserved for the highest-ranking orders. Unique deep-blue gowns were passed down from one generation of sages to the next and worn only on special occasions. A healer with a silver headband specialized in mental healing, and an orichalcum headband indicated proficiency in physical medicine or surgery.74
The orichalcum in the headband was a popular metal in Atlantis, but its composition is somewhat of a mystery. In ancient Greek, the word simply meant “gold metal.” Plato says that orichalcum was something that in his time was only known by name, but was once a precious metal that “sparkled like fire.”75 It was probably an alloy of gold and copper or meteorite iron. Memories of the orichalcum of Atlantis appeared 600 years before Plato’s time in the works of the Greek poet Homer, who mentions it in the Hymn of Aphrodite as a golden metal. Hesiod, another pre-Plato Greek poet (eighth–seventh century b.c.) also refers to orichalcum.
The Temple Beautiful and the Temple of Sacrifice offered students opportunities to participate in a variety of activities intended to purify their bodies and minds. In the Temple Beautiful, the primary goal of the participants was to acquire a thorough understanding of themselves so they would be better equipped to serve others. As they progressed in the seven stations of the Temple Beautiful, a variety of techniques, such as musical experiences and expressive dance forms, furthered the participant’s ability to interpret their emotions and to purge, heal, and unify themselves.76
Young women went to a Temple Beautiful to prepare for the self-sacrifice of motherhood, and to learn how their actions affected the lives of their offspring.77 When they were ready, music assisted them in preparing their bodies and minds for procreation.78 At one station, teachers offered advice to unselfish individuals who wished to become missionaries.79 After completing their training, a group of teachers and caregivers from Poseidia went to Egypt and built a Temple Beautiful in a pyramid shape,80 and a Temple of Sacrifice modeled after the one in their homeland.81 The Temple of Sacrifice was similar to our hospitals and will be described in chapter 11.
Murias was the largest city in Poseidia. From Celtic myths and records and diaries of adventurers who crossed the Atlantic searching for treasures and legends, we know that Murias was the seat of government for the area. Its extensive facilities included a hospital, a home for travelers in distress, and a shipyard with repair facilities. On a hill above the city, the Atlanteans built an exquisite healing temple which offered such remarkable cures that memories of it have never completely disappeared.
Today, for the first time, I read about the “mythical” Atlantis on your website. I was in tears when I read the section about a temple with crystal windows because in the not-so-distant past I had the most vivid dream about a similar place, and the memory of this dream haunts me still.
—anonymous
The architecture of the exquisite healing temple above Murias is thought to have incorporated the vibrational and numerical aspects of sacred geometry, which intensify and focus various subtle cosmic energies for the sensitive person. It also displayed sophisticated knowledge of the structure of the universe, the solar system, and planet Earth in a manner similar to the Great Pyramid in Egypt.82 The temple’s most unusual feature was its translucent rock crystal windows, which local people still remember in contemporary times. The building was dedicated to the Bennu bird and the god Min, both symbolic of rejuvenation, and one of the sources of the island of Bimini’s name.
In 10,000 b.c., rising ocean waters completely covered the thriving city of Murias, but the swelling waves stopped climbing before they reached the healing temple with the crystal windows. The unusual structure was safe, but at the water’s edge. The medical opportunities available in Murias were well-known throughout the Western world and enticed Irish, Egyptian, Greek, Phoenician, and Carthagenian travelers to the area for thousands of years.83 Inevitably, earthquakes disrupted the land, broke the temple’s retaining walls, and toppled sections of the beautiful building as if it were a glass toy.
Unusual temples were not the only accomplishment of the Atlanteans in Poseidia. Employing engineering techniques from their earthquake-torn homeland, they erected sturdy pyramids to represent the spiritual life of the soul as it rises to its highest point from a strong base. Although the ocean finally covered the buildings, sonar scans and aerial surveys taken when the water is calm reveal their outlines. Scuba divers also refer to the ruins of ancient buildings under the surface, but the information receives almost no publicity, for authorities rightly fear that treasure hunters will strip them of valuable objects or employ damaging dynamite to explore beneath them.
From the ocean floor on the Bahama Bank, divers brought up limestone discs or “sea biscuits,” as they are called, which many believe were possessions of the Atlanteans who once lived here. In 1949 the Geological Society of America dredged a ton of similar sea biscuits from the sea floor south of the Azores.84 In the shape of a plate, with a depression in the center of one side, the plates are all approximately six inches in diameter and one and one-half inches thick. Their surface is relatively smooth, except rough in the depression. Tests determined that sea biscuits are about 12,000 years old and that they are manmade from limestone, which formed above the surface.85 In the past, Atlantean descendants in Scandinavia placed fresh fruits and vegetables on plates similar to these and left them in rock crevices or carried them to hilltops as a way of paying tribute to the forces of nature.
Just as religious groups left England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to establish colonies in the New World, where they hoped to be free to worship as they pleased, so, as conditions changed in Poseidia, devout people moved away from their pleasant island home to Central America. In 10,600 b.c., a virtuous and moral leader named Iltar led a small group from Poseidia to the Yucatan. The followers of Iltar lived their lives as symbols of the Spirit of the One God and understood the importance of manifesting compassion for others. Focusing on their religious services rather than on acquiring unnecessary material possessions, they constructed energized circles of stones as sites for their worship.86 Circles and pyramids offer opportunities for increased healing and enlightenment, for they enhance the energy fields created by the emotions of those who spend time in them.
A ceremonial circle similar to those the Native Americans have used for hundreds of centuries, or just a circle of crystals on the ground with a lit candle in the center, provides a positive link to the power of the universe and the Creator. If appropriate rituals are performed in a circle and each person intensely focuses on the same desired outcome, it is possible to improve their intuitional facilities or to assist an individual in healing his or her mind and body. In their strong sacred circles, Iltar and his Poseidian followers conducted ceremonies that were designed to cleanse their bodies and minds of anger, hatred, impatience, greed, and other selfish traits.87 Atlanteans regarded Earth as a living creature that responds to the same stimuli and harmonies that are pleasing to humans, and to that end they spent time in stone circles giving strength to the planet. They realized that the health and condition of the Earth was bound up with their own actions and attitudes. In their ceremonies they used the stone pillars of the circles like acupuncture needles to transfer energy from the heavens above to the earth below and provide the living planet with a harmonious source of strength and vitality.
The large, flat-sided stones these prehistoric builders erected in circles are usually positioned so as to reflect sound toward the center. They appear to have been designed to act as giant loudspeakers. The amplification of the strong vibrations of drums played during rituals would have had a moving and powerful effect on the emotions of everyone within the circle.
On the coasts of Spain, Portugal, and Morocco, and throughout southern England, western France, and Scotland, prehistoric builders arranged immense boulders in circles resembling those Cayce describes Poseidians erecting in the Yucatan. Remains of similar circles are also found on Pacific Islands. These constructions, in lands where Lemurians and Atlanteans and their descendants settled, help to demonstrate the remarkable knowledge of our distant ancestors and their concern for Mother Earth.
The spiritual people of the past preferred to build their homes in a circular or octagonal shape.88 They considered a round home to be more harmonious to the spirit, and believed the geometric shape would better channel the energy of the universe. Cayce says a circular home contributes to a person’s ability to be productive. Many Native Americans lived in circular tents. Numerous ruins of round houses built from stone are found in several parts of Easter Island.89 Almost all ancient cities in Central America were circular,90 and of course Plato tells us Poseidon constructed the Atlantean City of the Golden Gates in the same pattern.
Since the early residents of the Yucatan were almost totally attuned to the spiritual, the priests and priestesses were the government. Unselfish leaders like Iltar were convinced that the welfare and happiness of the people was their most important responsibility. The Golden Rule was really the law of the land. To ascertain how to improve their governing of the people, in a manner similar to shamans in indigenous cultures, the priests and priestesses used their psychic abilities to talk and listen to the one great Creator. Unlike many of us today, they communicated and prayed regularly, not just when they were in trouble.
The diet of these early inhabitants of Central America is slowly coming to light. Using slash-and-burn agriculture, 10,000 years ago people grew corn, squash, and pumpkins. Fruits and nuts were readily available in their natural state, and coconuts from the Pacific reached the American continent at least 12,000 years ago.91 Since the distant past, spiritual individuals have realized that meat consumption is not conducive to developing the psychic aspect of one’s mind, so meat was probably not included in their meals.
Natural destructions are unusually severe in the unstable lands of Central America, and the catastrophes that bruised the Earth’s fragile surface severely threatened the survival of those who lived there. Time and time again, tidal waves covered cities in low areas along the coast and earthquakes toppled buildings and stimulated fiery volcanoes to fling out deadly rocks and boiling lava. During these difficult periods, the massive underground caves in the Yucatan, Guatemala, Belize, and the northern regions of El Salvador and Honduras offered safe shelter to hundreds of fortunate families.
Prehistoric people made use of these caverns for innumerable centuries before the Mayan culture is commonly thought to have existed. The immense cave system, with its innumerable interconnected caverns of spacious rooms and high ceilings, is a natural formation, but residents also carved out additional areas, which are referred to as the Loltun Caverns. Often priests used captives to carve the stepwork and chambers and, when the work was completed, the priests sacrificed the workers to keep the location secret and unknown to outsiders.92
Abundant artworks in the caves reflect the Lemurian and Atlantean ancestry of these early inhabitants. Painted symbols and bas-relief carvings on the walls, such as circles, spirals, swastikas, and equidistant crosses, are similar to those people left in the Canary Islands, South America, and southwestern Europe. Many inscriptions that embellish the Loltun Caverns were fashioned over 15,000 years ago. They demonstrate the interminable hours that artists spent in the dark, damp caverns, waiting for the day when floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions would cease, and they would be free to return to a more normal life.
Certain symbols can be powerful, for each one contains vibrations that are related to the original thought that created it. If a person intensely concentrates on a symbol, it can lead to an altered state of consciousness and comprehension of that initial concept. Remote indigenous people, isolated from our current civilization, retain a belief in the power of symbols as they tattoo spirals and other signs onto their bodies. They believe these characters help them to gain added strength from the energy of the Earth and all that is beyond.
Early occupants of the Loltun Caverns carved and reshaped the huge stalactites, stalagmites, and rock pillars of the caverns into strange stone figures. When Manson Valentine explored here in the mid-twentieth century, he found various male faces carved with facial hair, including a nine-foot-tall giant with a full beard. The features of the sculptures are quite different from the current local Mayan population, who have no knowledge of those who created them so long ago.
Some of the most striking drawings in the Loltun Caverns are outlines of hands with mutilated thumbs or cut-off fingers.93 These gruesome depictions are similar to those left in the caves of southwest France and in the Pyrenees,94 and they imply that the artists had a common origin. The most prevailing belief is that the hand prints are the artist’s signature. There is no logical explanation for the mutilation—perhaps it was incorporated into a magical or initiation ceremony.
In certain areas of the Loltun Caverns, sensitive visitors experience intense, concentrated forces, which they believe radiate more energy than the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt.95 Artworks offer evidence that these rooms were set aside as sacred places where priests or shamans, during hallucinatory out-of-body experiences, gained access to what they refer to as “the other world.” Some priests describe communicating with their ancestors in this invisible place. Others seem to enter another dimension where knowledge is more readily available to them, like Cayce’s searching the Akashic Records. To these skillful communicators with the spirits of the past, birds symbolized the flight of the soul. Paintings deep in the Loltun caves of the Yucatan depict a figure wearing a mask and a bird headdress. They are almost identical to pictures of bird-shamans in several European caves, such as the one with claws for hands, wearing a bird mask, which enhances a wall in the depths of the Lascaux cave in France. The French bird-shaman’s penis is erect, something that frequently occurs during trance states, and it points toward a speared bison whose head is turned to look at his own intestines falling from his wound.96 Next to the depiction of the bird-shaman in the Loltun Cavern is a staff similar to those still carried by shamans today, topped with a bird. Phallic monuments stand outside three sites in the Yucatan that contain pictures of these bird-shamans. A similar figure and his staff are depicted in an ancient Arizona rock engraving.97
In the seventeenth century, when the Spaniards were so cruelly destroying the Maya’s advanced civilization, the Loltun Caverns offered local people excellent hiding places for their irreplaceable books and riches. There is a report of an old Mayan hermit who guards priceless treasure hidden in the Yucatan, deep in these caves.98 The hermit’s precious valuables may refer to something tangible, or perhaps the account alludes to the superior insights and higher spiritual knowledge of the Maya and their ancestors that we have yet to fully comprehend. The caverns in the Yucatan are especially extensive and confusing, with narrow, winding passageways and steep cliffs, so explorers have not completely investigated them. Someday a skillful searcher will discover valuable records of the civilizations of Mu and Atlantis, and perhaps even some of their treasured gold and crystal possessions. Books of the Maya are another possibility, or the map to Mayan records that Le Plongeon secreted away in a cave.
The sea eventually covered countless buildings off the coast of the Yucatan. Like ghosts of the past, ruins of the structures are visible under the water today, as well as roads that travel from the coastline and disappear into the Caribbean Sea. Scientists have recently confirmed that prior to 9000 b.c., people lived in Belize on the southern coast of the Yucatan peninsula. Someday Western archaeologists will acknowledge the Lemurians and Atlanteans and their descendants who settled here.
66. Caldwell, The Romance of Atlantis.
67. Cayce, Edgar Evans, On Atlantis, p. 70.
68. Cayce, Readings 877–26.
69. Bethards, Atlantis, p.28
70. Cayce, Readings 364–12.
71. Ibid., Readings 1007–3 and 2690–1.
72. Bethards, Atlantis, p. 33, 34.
73. Hope, Practical Atlantean Magic, p. 153.
74. Ibid.
75. Plato, Critias.
76. Cayce, Readings 1207–1.
77. Ibid., Readings 2454–3.
78. Ibid., Readings 2581–2.
79. Ibid., Readings 1678–2.
80. Fix, Pyramid Odyssey, p. 100.
81. Cayce, Readings 1193–1.
82. Sykes, Atlantis, Volume 27, No. 4.
83. Ibid.
84. Donato, A Re-examination of the Atlantis Theory.
85. Ibid.
86. Cayce, Readings 5750–1.
87. Cayce, Readings 5750–1.
88. Hope, The Ancient Wisdom of Atlantis, p. 111.
89. Brown, The Riddle of the Pacific.
90. Zapp and Erikson, Atlantis in America.
91. Ibid.
92. Gregory Berg, private correspondence.
93. http://www.students.tulane.edu.
94. Hadingham, Secrets of the Ice Age, p. 145.
95. Umland, Mystery of the Ancients.
96. Halifax, Shamanic Voices, p. 17.
97. Bahn and Vertut, Images of the Ice Age, p. 190.
98. Walton, Mount Shasta, p. 11.