Lost worlds - Mankinds oldest shared trauma

Hey there, travelers!

A quick announcement before we get into today’s post: we finally bit the bullet and made a newsletter! If you don’t want to miss out on weirdly interesting posts like this one, or the development of our books, be sure to subscribe! We promise not to flood your inbox, only bring you a list of things once a month to bring a little spark to your life. You can find the form on our website (https://dlkardenal.weebly.com), and on the sidebar of this blog (click on the sandwich lines in the top left corner). Now, back to why you’re here!

The concept of lost civilizations is a fascinating one. As a child, I always imagined them as a place of magic, heroes, and epic stories. Most of these were inspired by mythology which I still adore—you might have noticed subtle hints of this—but even people from ancient times had legends and stories about long-lost empires. There is some truth behind every tale and myth, but apart from that, they are a great source of inspiration for writers, artists, movie makers, and musicians.

I. Atlantis

The one everyone heard about is, of course, the city under the sea, the Lost City of the Ancients, the birthplace of Aquaman, and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey's weird DLC – Atlantis. Although scientists claim that it was only a philosophical work of Plato, many people actually believed, that Atlantis existed somewhere. According to Plato, it was a continent somewhere in the Atlantic ocean (noticed the name?) and it was the empire of the god Poseidon. It was a political utopia, an ideal state but they became greedy and aggressive, so the gods punished them and the island sank into the ocean. They also had a legendary metal named orichalcum which was the key to their wealth and success (although this detail is only an addition, Plato never mentioned it). Plato heard the story from Solon—or more accurately, from his teachings, since Solon lived more than a hundred years before Plato—, who heard it in Egypt from a priest of Neith. They claimed that the catastrophe in which Atlantis has fallen happened 9000 years before. There is a papyrus from Egypt, which is now in Saint Petersburg in a museum, mentioning that a shipwrecked boy met a hermit and told him about his lost home and that’s where it all came from. I also read somewhere that instead of a boy, there was a dragon, living on a prosperous island far away, but when he was away a star fell from the sky and destroyed the land.

There is also a mention in the Indian Mahabharata about a city submerged into the Arabian Sea. For a long time, people thought that it is their interpretation of Atlantis, but interestingly, archeologists actually found the city of Dwaraka underwater in the ’60s, now serving as an excavation site. 

Other Egyptian sources also mentioned that Egypt had a trading relationship with that sunken civilization, which fueled the idea that Atlantis might have been somewhere in the Mediterranean sea. This resonates well with the volcanic eruption on Thera, that destroyed half of the island, and the effects of this cataclysm were palpable in Egypt and Greece as well, and nearly destroyed the Cycladic civilization on Crete. Nowadays scientists are in a kind of consensus, that the myth of Atlantis is based on the event in Thera. I and my family visited that island when I was a kid, and let me tell you, seeing the crate, where once the volcano was, and the cities now underwater was truly amazing. 

Since Plato wrote about Atlantis there were several theories about its location beside Thera. Some said that it was actually Antarctica before it froze and somehow went to the South Pole (don’t ask me how they imagined that). I also read that Atlantis could have been now submerged parts of Ireland, or that the Azorean islands are the remains of that mysterious continent. 

Speaking of mysterious, the Atlantis myth was also abused by occultists throughout history. Many occult practices were claimed to originate from there, even the Nazis had the theory that the Nordic-Atlantean or the Aryan-Nordic master race originally came from Atlantis. Even now, can you imagine how many New Age websites I found that talked about Atlantis, and how magic, and healing crystals, and higher frequency level people (what are even those?) came from there. A lot. Although I realized recently that there is whole lore of conspiracy theorists, so Atlanteans actually came from another planet, but I always mix up if they were Pleiadians or the people from Sirius... The conspiracy theory lore is hard, but it could make an excellent fantasy book. 

Atlantis also broke into pop culture, there was a Disney movie, with Milo, and Kida and healing crystals, and also before that Aquaman came from Atlantis in the comics and recently hit the big screen (with spectacular city-under-the-sea aesthetics, let me tell you).

II. Lemuria

Atlantis is the most famous lost civilization but not the only one. Our next on the menu is the continent of Lemuria. The zoologist Philip Sclater proposed the theory, that a continent should have existed between Madagascar and India based on the lemur fossils he found in those places, but not in Africa and Arabia. Some scientists also proposed that we can’t find the missing link between humans and apes, because it is on Lemuria which is now under the sea. (Actually, this is not true, there is no missing link, but the relationship between humans and the sea is an interesting anthropological topic. I might write a post about this some other time.)

It was later proved that these findings can be explained by continental drift, but they didn’t know this in 1864 when Mr. Sclater came up with his idea. Some Tamil writers have associated Lemuria with Kumari Kandam, a legendary sunken landmass mentioned in Tamil literature, claiming that it was the cradle of civilization. Many ancient and medieval Tamil and Sanskrit works mention the loss of landmasses in South India due to flood, which can be parallel with many other civilizations' myth about a great flood. Then the Tamil Revivalists in the last century picked up the idea and ran away with it.

Kumari Kandam is theorized as an isolated landmass. Geographically, it was located in the Indian Ocean. Chronologically, it is said to be a very ancient civilization, writers only claim that it was several thousands of years old. While Atlantis submerged in one night, this happened during a thousand-year period, but it was also a utopia, isolated from other nations, mostly from Indo-Aryan’s corruption.  The Kumari Kandam proponents laid great emphasis on stating that the Kanyakumari city was a part of the original Kumari Kandam. Some of them also argued that the entire Tamil Nadu, the entire Indian peninsula, or even all of India was a part of Kumari Kandam. This helped ensure that the modern Tamils could be described as both indigenous people of South India and the direct descendants of the people of Kumari Kandam. This, in turn, allowed them to describe the Tamil language and culture as the world's oldest. I hope we all feel the political intentions behind the legend. (Funny enough, here in Hungary they spend a lot of money on researching our origins, to give us some ancient legend as well. I don’t understand why they don’t just visit our local conspiracy theorist shamans with clear sight who can tell for sure that we are the only true heirs of Atlantis, and the tons of stadiums are really spaceships because soon we will go home to the pleiads. Or to Sirius, I can never remember it.) 

All these ancient legends about lost lands can be traced back to major geological events, like volcanic eruptions, and that great flood that is present in almost every ancient civilization’s mythology. Many scientists suspect, that this is the generational trauma of the land losses after the last ice age when the sea melted and the water level rose more than 100 meters. It is incredible that after thousands of years, people still remember these events in their own ways. And also support the state, that behind every story, every creature, every legend there is some truth. Mostly huge traumas.

And, because we have three major oceans, there has to be a lost continent on the Pacific Ocean as well. Because this post is already long enough, we will come back next week with the third continent, Mu – the most absurd of them all – and a bonus, the lost city of Irem.

Until next time!

Cheers,

Lory