Gateway to
Atlantis P.3: Seven Cities, El Dorado
There follows
in Collins Gateway to Atlantis, a detour into pre-Columbus legends of Antilia and the Seven Cities, El Dorado and the like. The
Phoenician theme is then resumed with the conclusion that the a-t-l element of
the name Atlantis is a Phoenician root, out of the Semitic linguistic context
of the Phoenician language, meaning "elevate." Certainly, this is as
good a philological speculation as any other and may well explain the
background of the Atlas myth and the naming of the Atlas Mountains. It is not
obvious that it would have anything to do with Plato's naming of his lost
island. He presumably wanted to give his island a name in the setting of his
own culture's mythology and in keeping with the location he chose for it in the
already named Atlantic Ocean (so called after the mountains that ran down to
it). He may very well, as we have seen, also have had in mind recent memories
of the flooding of the little island of Atalante, close to Athens. There is
absolutely no reason to connect Atlantis with the fantasy island Antilia (or an earlier version as Atulliae)
of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century European maps. This island, as we have
seen, was most likely a conjectural reflection of the shape of Portugal
projected on to the western Atlantic. The Portuguese "Ante ilha" is at least as good a philological speculation
to explain the name Antilia as anything to do with
a-t-l.
Collins' next
step is to recall certain American legends of their peoples' coming to their
present homes from islands to the cast the Aztecs' Aztlan is, not surprisingly
with a name like that, the site we have heard most about. These stories were,
of course, recorded very late on by Christian or Christianized writers and
local origins for them have been proposed by orthodox historians. When such
legends involve emergency crossings of waters in the dark over sands or stepping
stones, Collins thinks they might hark back to forced emigrations from some
larger landmass in the region of the West Indies that was flooded by the rising
sea levels of the end of the ice age. On this interpretation, the peoples of
Mexico and Central America (and some of the south-east states of North America)
could have come to their historical homelands from somewhere in the Caribbean
or the waters of the Bahamas. Collins tells us that seven caves are often
mentioned in the folklore as the place of genesis of the people who later left
for the mainland: seven caves like the seven bays or seven cities of the
fabulous island of the pre-Columbian maps, though the seven in the latter case
may be related to a legend of seven bishops who fled to sea from the Moorish
conquest of Spain. As a way of putting the ancestors of the Aztecs and so forth
on an Atlantis that was more or less the same place as the Antilia
of the old maps (until flooding reduced it, that is), all this seems pretty
thin, one faint possibility heaped on another, as with Lewis Spence.
By now it is
becoming clear that Collins has set his sights on Cuba as the last, best relic
of old Atlantis - for him, Cuba is Antilia, as others
have suggested despite the different shapes and orientations of the real island
and the cartographic fantasy. So Collins wants to cry up the archaeology of
Cuba. It is one of the admirable things about his writing that he does often
candidly sketch in the objections to his ideas that he clearly recognizes. In
this case, he admits that the pre-Columbian inhabitants of Cuba, the Taino,
with their New Stone Age style of life weren't really up to much as potential
heirs of Atlantean civilization and, worse still, probably only came to Cuba
themselves in about AD 500 having originated in the region of the mouth of the
Orinoco in Venezuela at the other end of the island chain.
In the search
for something a little more impressive than the Taino, we get reports of late
nineteenth-century claims of mounds, enclosures, a jade axe, a black idol on
Cuba: a paltry haul, I should say, and most of it not available for inspection
any more. More modern archaeology reveals a picture of mesolithic
life on Cuba before the neolithic Taino, with flints,
bones and shells, back to perhaps 5000 BC. Some standing stones and earthworks
have been compared to the products of farming people in Florida at about 2000
BC and this seems to hearten Collins to go on and write of
"prehistoric culture of immense sophistication," but I should say
that would depend on your idea of sophistication. The prospect of cave art is
raised before us in this connection, but it doesn't turn out to be anything
like Lascaux or Altamira. There are stick men, animals and fish, attributed to
the Taino, in certain Cuban caves. Some drawings may be the work of black
slaves on the plantations. But there are also, in Cave I on the "Isle of
Youth" off the southern coast of Cuba, some geometric and abstract designs
that Collins feels are in a different league.
The piece de
resistance on this Isle of Youth is a complex of concentric circles, about a metre in diameter, with a "double arrow" reaching
out from its centre; this reminds Collins, as he told
us right at the start of his book, of our solar system. He is keen to say how
super all this geometric stuff is (no stick men here) but it can't be said that
the two small photographs in his book do much to encourage us to share this
view.
The fact that
the caves with geometric designs have what are apparently artificially
constructed light holes in their roofs and that the cave with the circles and
arrows possesses "roughly seven bays" encourages Collins to speculate
that this was the site of the birthplace of the chiefs of old Antilia (with its seven bays): and further that the circle
design with arrow represents the sunbeam penetrating into the womb-cave of
their nativity! As to the date of all this, well 'the cave art on Mona [another
small island between Puerto Rico and Hispaniola, with art derived from Cuba]
probably dates back to somewhere between 5000 BC and AD 250. In other words, it
probably has a vague date of some sort. So all this bric-a-brac of idols and
axes and standing stones and might-be-old cave glyphs is being used by Collins
to suggest that Cuba could have been the place from which the later
Meso-Americans - or at least their chiefs and teachers - originated, to develop
their Olmec, Maya, Zapotec, Toltec and Aztec civilizations on the mainland.
Cuba and its little island with a cavern of 'roughly' seven bays is Antilia of the Seven Cities, Aztlan, Atlantis!
There follows
a straight-faced discussion as to whether Cuba or Hispaniola better fits
Plato's description of Atlantis - this despite Collins' earlier recognition
that Plato cannot be regarded as wholly reliable in detail and, in any case,
neither Caribbean island could conceivably fit Plato's description taken as a
whole and at face value. Still, for Collins the mountains of north-west Cuba
are Plato's ring of mountains on Atlantis, Cuba's western plain is the great (rectangular?)
plain of Atlantis, the Isle of Youth is Atlantis City itself at one end of a
now submerged connection to the main island, and the caves of the Isle are the
place where Plato's Atlantean dynasty was born. The ever-reliable candour of Collins prompts him to say that "Sadly, no
evidence of a true Atlantean city has been found . . . we have no Atlantean
kings, no circular hydraulic systems, no canals and no evidence of maritime
activity before the arrival of the earliest Palaeo-Amerindians
sometime around 6000 BC" I like that reference to "a true Atlantean
city" when there's no city there at all, true Atlantean or otherwise, and
one wonders at the scale of maritime activity that went on after the arrival of
the Palaeo-Amerindians for that matter.
The best
Collins can come up with in the way of any more corroboration of Plato on Cuba
consists of a couple of pictographs of exceptionally poor quality, apparently
representing bulls. One is of unknown provenance somewhere on the island and
the other is from the province of Havana. Neither is dated. Associated stick
men call the poor old Taino to mind, but perhaps the bulls and men together
represent bullfighting and were done by African slaves after Havana built a
bullring. Collins would like to think these pictures somehow took us back to
Plato's bull sacrifices on Atlantis, but he admits that no bovine bones have
ever been found in old archaeological sites in Cuba. It's all a bit thin again.
Not for the
first time in the literature of Atlantis, it is myth and folklore that fill the
breach when hard archaeological evidence is lacking. Collins talks of Caribbean
tales about the Antilles as previously one great island that turned into a
string of separate isles in the aftermath of floods; he says there were similar
stories in the Bahamas. He rules out a volcanic tsunami (at least in the
Bahamas) as the cause of this flooding, which would not of course be permanent
if such was the mechanism. He sees that the postglacial rise in sea level was a
slow process that submerged, say, the Grand Bahama Bank over many, many
centuries between about 8000 and 3000 BC. And then he remembers his cave on the
Isle of Youth and has second thoughts about that design of concentric circles
and double arrow. Perhaps it doesn't show the sun sending out a beam to
fertilize the womb-cave of the old chiefs after all, which may come as a relief
to any of us who had difficulty with that interpretation. Recalling, of another
cave design, that "for some reason it bore a resemblance to a comet in the
sky," Collins concludes that it must have been a comet that broke up old Antilia and thereby destroyed Plato's Atlantis. The big
design with the circles and arrow is an image of comet debris hitting water,
like what you see when you kick a pebble into a puddle: a non-seismic,
non-volcanic tsunami. "What if," he asks, "this cave imagery was
recalling some kind of oceanic impact?" He confides in us that "the
feeling that at some time in prehistory the Bahamas and Caribbean had been
devastated by a comet impact would not leave me."
These writers
are always seeing "resemblances," "for some reason," always
asking themselves "What ifs?" (and building an awful lot on them),
speculating about "some kind" of something or other and "having
feelings" that, no matter how hard they may try, they just can't avoid.
An unusual
landscape feature of the region, called the Carolina Bays, is brought on as
possible evidence of some antique cometary impact, rather like the Tunguska
event of Siberia (which, incidentally, other exponents of "alternative
history" have interpreted as a UFO crash).
Next part
four, Nov. 17, 2002: Atlantis: die Urheimat der Arier.
See also:
Cuba's Gateway
To Atlantis P. 2: Cocaine
Gateway to
Atlantis P.4: Urheimat der Arier
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