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Andrew Collins
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Biography Andrew Collins was born in 1957. He is a historical writer and the author of a number of books that challenge the way we think about our relationship to the past. Andrew is also a regular lecturer and conference organiser on a variety of inter-related topics. In 1985 he began investigating the idea of an advanced civilisation having existed before recorded history. This study resulted in the publication during 1996 of his highly acclaimed work FROM THE ASHES OF ANGELS. |
It argues that Old Testament encounters between angels and human kind are in fact memories of the trafficking between two separate cultures, each at a different stage of evolution. The book also sets out for the first time the geographical location of the biblical land of Eden and the events surrounding the flood of Noah and the fall of the angels.
It was followed by the publication two years later of Andrew's next book GODS OF EDEN, which argues that the genesis of civilisation was catalysed by the arrival in the Near East, the site of ancient Eden, of priest-shamans from the Nile Valley. It also details the existence and possible science of sound technology in the ancient world.
Andrew's current book, GATEWAY TO ATLANTIS, takes a radical new look at the age-old mystery of Plato's lost island kingdom.
The Lecture...
THE TRUTH OF THE PAST - FINDING HISTORICAL REALITY IN THE ALTERNATIVE FIELD OF RESEARCH
Since I cannot review my own lecture, the entire script is offered.
Over 2000 books and publications have supposedly been written on the subject of Atlantis. I must have written the 2001st book - GATEWAY TO ATLANTIS, published in the UK earlier this year. I began researching the book on the premise that the ice-bound continent of Antarctica was ancient Atlantis. However, reports of the supposed discovery of an Atlantean Temple off the tiny island of Bimini led me to explore the Bahaman link to the mystery. Sadly, this report turned out to be nothing more than a confused story regarding quarry blocks used either as ship's ballast and deposited by a ship-wreck off Moselle Shoals, some 8 miles north of Bimini, or to make sea-walls and jetties off the Miami coast (however, I can't say I didn't enjoy finding this out!). Despite this set-back, I began investigating the Bahaman connection to Atlantis, and quickly found that the entire scene was dominated by one name - Edgar Cayce. During the 1930s, America's 'sleeping prophet' predicted that portions of Atlantis would appear off Bimini in 1968/1969. In the years leading up to this time Cayce's followers made a concerted effort to find previously unknown remains off the coast of Bimini, and in 1968 - the first year of discovery, they announced that a quarter mile long road structure had been found off Paradise Point as well as a rectangular structure of loose stones off the island of Andros. Debate still rages over whether these features have any connection whatsoever to the enigma of Atlantis.
What seems more important, however, is the knowledge that Cayce had business connections with individuals who owned estate on Bimini before he made his famous Atlantis prophecies. They invited him to the island in the hope that he might be able to find buried Spanish treasure using alleged supernatural means. He was unsuccessful in these attempts at psychic questing, and instead offered the businessmen other more ecologically sound methods of raising capital from the natural resources of the island. Despite his influence on Atlantis' Bahaman connection, a large number of underwater features discovered mostly during the 1970s by underwater explorer J. Manson Valentine do still defy explanation, especially those located in the south-west corner of the Great Bahama Bank, the modern name for the ancient Bahaman landmass now lost underwater.
So had we found Plato's Atlantis?
What quickly became clear from my own investigations into Plato's Atlantis is that the Greek philosopher had created in his writings a flawed utopian realm based on the decline of Athens' during his own age. The city of Atlantis was unquestionably a composite view of ancient city-ports such as Carthage in North Africa, seen here, Syracuse in Sicily, Ecbatana in Media and probably even Athens itself.
As regards his Atlantic Island, Plato placed this, like other mythical islands of the Greek Hellenic world, in the Far West - the direction of the setting sun. It was in fact a variation of the concept of the Hesperides, the islands thought which were thought to lie beyond the Western Ocean, as is inferred by their name Hesperides, which derives from the Greek hesper, or vesper, meaning setting sun. It was the hero-god Atlas who was said to have presided over the lands in the extreme west, i.e. North West Africa, as well as the seas beyond here, in other words the Western Ocean.
Like Atlantis, the Hesperides were rumoured to exist beyond the Pillars of Hercules. For instance, Statius Sebosus, the Roman geographer of c. 100 BC, recorded that it took 40 days to sail between the Isles of Gorgades, or Gorgons, and the Hesperides. Since there is clear geographical evidence that the Gorgades were the Cape Verde islands, which lie off the west coast of Africa, then the Hesperides were even further west - in the direction of the setting sun. Yet if we consult a map we can see that the only island group which lies west of the Cape Verdes is the Caribbean. Confirmation that the Hesperides were the Caribbean islands of Cuba, Hispaniola and Puerto Rica is the knowledge that it took Christopher Columbus just 33 days to sail between the Cape Verdes and the Caribbean on his Third Voyage in 1498, just seven days short of Statius Sebosus's estimate.
From my own research into the primary sources behind the Atlantis account it became clear that Plato too became aware of the existence of the Bahamas and Caribbean, most likely through stories and rumours reaching the Mediterranean world in which he moved. In my opinion it was from this sailor's lore that he derived the idea of Atlantean kings ruling over a series of Atlantic islands focused around a central metropolis. For me, all the indications are that the description Plato gives of his Atlantean island matches very well the topography of Cuba, the largest and most fertile of the Caribbean islands.
I also concluded that Plato's claim that Atlantis' destruction in one single night and day through earthquakes and floods was based on catastrophe legends told to Phoenician and Carthaginian mariners by the indigenous peoples of the Bahamas and Caribbean. They were retold to the first Spanish explorers to reach the islands, and speak of a catastrophic event involving a period of darkness, as well as an all-encompassing flood which engulfed a former great landmass, leaving behind the thousands of islands and cays which today make up these same archipelagos. In my opinion, these stories relate to a cosmic event which occurred at the end of the last ice age and involved the creation of 500,000 elliptical craters in the eastern states of the United States. These are the so-called Carolina Bays, which are found across six states and range in size from a few hundred metres to 11 kilometres in length. The latest theories regarding their formation feature the fragmentation of a comet into literally millions of pieces which impacted a wide area, including a large part of the Atlantic Ocean off the United States, sometime between 8500 and 9000 BC. Such an event would have caused super-tsunami waves that would have engulfed the low-lying regions of the Bahamas and Caribbean killing everything in their path. Moreover, according to Italian academic Emilio Spedicato of Bergamo University, who is with us here today, this impact event on the western Atlantic seaboard most probably catalysed the retreat of the ice sheets which had covered North America and Europe for anything up to 40,000 years. With the disappearance of the ice, the rising meltwater would have drowned the same low lying regions, now on a more permanent basis. This was the memory preserved by the indigenous peoples of the Bahamas and Caribbean and retold to ancient mariners prior to Plato's age.
No other theory fitted all the evidence. Yet the response to the publication of my book GATEWAY TO ATLANTIS was a complete eye opener, for it seemed that even after presenting this evidence for the first time a large percentage of the readers refused to even consider this solution. Since there was such a great desire to believe in Atlantis as a super continent that produced a mother civilisation of immense sophistication there was great opposition to my views. This is despite the fact that the Caribbean had been proposed as the site of Atlantis as early as 1796 by the Guatemalan scholar Dr Felix Cabrera, and had been popular though out the nineteenth century. Indeed, it was the most popular location of Atlantis through until the publication in 1882 of American congressman Ignatius Donnelly's classic work ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD, which first popularised the idea that Atlantis covered a larger part of the North Atlantic Ocean and was destroyed utterly by earthquakes and floods in 9500 BC, a view unsubstantiated in either archaeology or marine geology.
It was against a backdrop of such ideas that Edgar Cayce, with the help of Russian born occultist Helena Petrova Blavatsky, French phililogist the Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg and the Scottish mythologist Lewis Spence, conceived of an Atlantis that stretched from the Bahamas to the African coast, a sheer impossibilty in geological terms.
Yet the Atlantis of individuals such as Madame Blavatksy, Brasseur de Bourbourg, Spence, Cayce and others of the late-nineteenth, early twentieth century was never based on a literal translation of Plato's Atlantis account. Indeed, it has very little factual reality whatsoever, having been born out of both Platonic misconceptions and fanciful elaborations, such as the view that Atlantis achieved advanced technology which included death rays and the creation of animal-human hybrids. Such fantasies originate in the deep dark recesses of the modern mind, and not those of Plato or any other writer of antiquity.
ANTARCTICA AS ATLANTIS
One thing that surprised me from the responses to my book were that most people now believed that Atlantis was Antarctica. This, as I have said, was my own view before I began work on GATEWAY TO ATLANTIS.
The thoughts behind Atlantis being Antarctica go back a long way. They are rooted in the fantasy of Edgar Allen Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, who both wrote stories which featured an Antarctican civilisation of immense antiquity. More interestingly, the grandfather of Fortean research, Charles Fort, wrote a work entitled simply `X', which proposed that human life as we knew it came originally from Antarctica. Sadly, the book never reached the light of day.
The first serious suggestion that Antarctica might have been the setting for a lost civilisation came from the works of Professor Charles Hapgood, most particularly his 1966 classic MAPS OF THE ANCIENT SEA-KINGS. Having discerned the outline of the coastline of Antarctica on ancient portolan maps, such as the Piri Reis map of 1513 and the Buache map of 1737, Hapgood proposed that there had existed, prior to the rise of civilisation, a sea-faring culture of immense sophistication which mapped the prehistoric world, including Antarctica. This opened the doors to allow the Canadian writers Rose and Rand Flem-ath to propose in their book WHEN THE SKY FELL that Antarctica had been the location of Plato's antediluvian civilisation before it was engulfed by ice when the poles shifted in around 9500 BC. This idea was taken up, in part at least, by Graham Hancock in his 1995 book FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS. It is also to be found in Colin Wilson and Rand Flem-ath's new book THE ATLANTIS BLUEPRINT, published this month.
Although we now know that the north-west region of Antarctican continent, around the area known today as the Weddell Sea, was occupied by Late Palaeolithic settlers, who came most probably from Island Southeast Asia (after the work of Flavio Barbiero), there are fundamental reasons why Antarctica cannot be Atlantis. These are follows:
- Atlantis means 'daughter of Atlas', the daughter being the female determinative of any island in the Greek language. The name was applied in the plural, Atlantides, to islands in general located in the Atlantic Ocean. Atlas was the hero-god and Titan of Greek myth who presided over the lands in the extreme west, as well as the uncharted waters beyond the Pillars of Hercules. This is why the Western Ocean was known as the Atlantic ('of Atlas'), even in Plato's age. Yet the term Atlantic was not applied to all oceans beyond the Pillars of Hercules, only those in the Western Ocean. Those that encircled the ancient world in general were known as Okeanos, the Ocean River. In consequence, it is clear that, in similar with mythical islands such as the Hesperides and the Fortunate Isles, Atlantis was located in the Western Ocean. Antarctica is due south of the African continent. Nowhere does Plato suggest that Atlantis was due south of the Pillars of Hercules.
- Atlantis was said by Plato to stand in front of an 'opposite continent', to which it was linked via a series of 'other islands'. With point one in mind, our best shot at the identity of this 'opposite continent' is the Americas, suggesting that the 'other islands' were island chains such as the Bahamas, the Lesser Antilles and the Mid-Caribbean group. This implies that Atlantis stood in the same general vicinity as these island chains. If Antarctica was Atlantis, then what was the 'opposite continent' - the back end of the Asian continent? If so, what were the 'other islands' which linked it with Atlantis? Australia? Indonesia? It just doesn't make sense.
- Plato states that where Atlantis had once stood was a shallow sea of mud and shoals, which in his day prevented 'voyagers' from reaching the 'opposite continent'. Aristotle, Pseudo-Scylax and Himilco (via Avienus) also mention this shallow sea, with the last two adding that it was covered by seaweed. There seems to be little question that what these ancient writers were alluding to is the Sargasso Sea, a vast area of seaweed the size of Europe which stretches between the Azores in the Mid-Atlantic and the Bahamas on the western Atlantic seaboard. There is mounting evidence to show that ancient Phoenician and Carthaginian mariners reached the Sargasso Sea (Himilco, the fifth-century BC Carthaginian navigator, saying that it could not be crossed in four months). If Atlantis is to be placed in the vicinity of Antarctica, how might we explain Plato's reference to the 'shallow sea', since none exists in the vicinity of the Antarctic continent. It makes more sense to conclude that Plato was alluding to the Sargasso Sea.
- Plato tells us that 'voyagers' travelled via Atlantis and 'other islands' to the 'opposite continent'. Moreover, that 'in those days' the Western Ocean was traversed by mariners from his own world. Surely, this describes transatlantic journeys which took place prior to Plato's age, c. 350 BC. Evidence has recently come to light of Phoenician and Carthaginian contact with the Canary Isles as early as the sixth-century BC (after the work of Pablo Atoche Peña). The Canaries would unquestionably have been used as a maritime staging post for transatlantic journeys which would have utilised the Canary Current, the North Equatorial Current and the Trade Winds to reach the Caribbean. Moreover, there is every indication that the root language behind the Atlantis legend was not high Atlantean, or Egyptian, but West Semitic, the language of the Phoenicians and their sister colony, the Carthaginians. If Atlantis was Antarctica, how might we explain the transoceanic voyages referred to by Plato and the West Semitic root to the story?
Despite this clear evidence against Antarctica being Atlantis, Antarctica remains the most popular theory regarding the true location of Plato's Atlantic Island. Moreover, the writings of Donnelly, Spence, Brasseur de Bourbourg, Cayce, etc., which expound the view that Atlantis was a huge supercontinent in the Atlantic Ocean, are more-or-less unshakable. The reason for this stubbornness to accept more historically reliable solutions to the Atlantis mystery stem from the fact that there is an overwhelming need among new age mystics to believe in a antediluvian world that predates our own, and which seeded all civilisations of both the ancient and new world. Moreover, there seems to be a great necessity for people to believe that displaced Atlanteans founded Egyptian civilisation. Cayce, for instance, has displaced Atlanteans arriving in Egypt in 10,500 BC and leaving as a legacy the Sphinx monument, the Great Pyramid and other monuments on the Giza plateau, all built around this time. The likes of Graham Hancock, Robert Bauval, John Anthony West, etc., have all cited this very 10,500 BC date as sep tepi, the First Occasion, when the neteru-gods are supposed to have arrived in Egypt from Atlantis. The shared use of this date cannot be coincidental.
Such views have, I'm afraid, only hindered our search to find any real answers regarding the origins of Egyptian civilisation. Again and again we have been told that the date 10,500 BC is encoded into the astro-archaeology of the Giza monuments, and yet it is clear that this is nowhere near the true answer to the mystery.
As we have seen, there is now undeniable geological evidence to demonstrate that the Sphinx is older than the conventional date of 2500 BC, applied to it by conventional Egyptologists. Furthermore, Colin Reader has put forward convincing evidence to indicate that the Sphinx Temple, the Mortuary Temple of Khafre, seen here, and the Causeway adjoining the Second Pyramid also predate the Fourth Dynasty, when the Giza plateau is thought to have been established as a Memphite necropolis. Yet still there is no clear indication exactly when this early building phase took place, and who might have been responsible for the construction of these monuments.
All we can say is that Egyptian mythology does indeed seem to reflect events which occurred in a distant epoch known as sep tepi, the First Occasion. This is particularly so if we look at the Building Texts on the wall at the Temple of Edfu. They speak of an enemy snake called the Great Leaping One, whose appearance heralds the end of the first period of creation in the primordial world. It brings a period of darkness and floods that drown the inhabitants of the Island of Creation, who afterwards are termed ddw-ghosts, showing that they are dead. There seems every reason to propose that this great snake is an abstract memory of an impact event recalled by the precursors of the dynastic Egyptians.
In another creation myth recalled in Egyptian texts of Heliopolitan origin the lioness goddess Sekhmet reigns down fire on those who have turned away from the teachings of the sun-god Ra. People attempt to hide in holes or reach higher ground in order to avoid death. Sekhmet is only stopped from destroying the rest of the human race after she drinks an intoxicating brew which the gods send to flood the land. This story hints clearly at a mighty conflagration and flood preserved in the minds of dynastic Egyptians. Only recently it has been realised that a layer of burnt ash exists in the geological records of Egypt for around 9000 BC, as revealed for the first time in GATEWAY TO ATLANTIS. This same layer has been detected in several other regions of the globe including Siberia, Russia, the United States, South Africa, Europe and Australia. Something devastating happened during this epoch and there is every reason to assume that it was recalled in the myths and legends of indigenous peoples around the world who preserved a memory of it across countless generations. Although 9000 BC is not 10,500 BC, it conforms very well to the dating for the Carolina Bays which remain as evidence of a suspected cometary impact on the western Atlantic seaboard, an event which may well account for many fire and flood legends worldwide - including those in Egypt. Is this why the pharaonic Egyptians appeared to preserve the significance of this early epoch of mankind thousands of years before the advent of their own age?
That such memories can persist across many millennia should not come as any surprise. The native peoples of Arizona recount the story of how a fiery chariot descended downwards on to a local landscape in some distant epoch where is today to famous Barringer, or Devil's, Crater, caused by a meteorite impact. Yet we know that the Barringer Crater could be anything between 15,000 and 30,000 years old, suggesting that the indigenous peoples had preserved the memory of this event over countless generations. Did this also happen in Egypt?
One Coptic Egyptian legend speaks of a mythical king named Surid who learnt of an imminent disaster that was to befall Egypt. In order to find out more, he instructed his priests to consult the altitude of the stars. They informed him that a deluge would `overwhelm the land, and destroy a large portion of it for some years'. According to the Arab historian named Ahmad al-Makrizi (1360-1442), who quotes a variation of this story, in addition to a flood, a `fire was to proceed from the sign (of) Leo, and to consume the world'.
Why Leo? Why was the fire to proceed from the sign of the lion?
This same theme is echoed in a now lost Coptic text known as the Abou Hormeis papyrus, which recorded that `the deluge was to take place when the heart of the Lion entered into the first minute of the head of Cancer, at the declining of the star'. The `heart of the lion' was an ancient term for the `royal star' Regulus in the constellation of Leo. Since the stars of Cancer follows Leo only in the precessional cycle (Leo follows Cancer in the yearly cycle), this suggests a time-frame when Leo marked the equinoctial horizon. The last time that the star Regulus rose in the eastern sky just prior to the sun was in approximately 9220 BC, indicating that the events recalled in the Coptic legend stem from this distant epoch.
The age of the Sphinx is actually irrelevant. Since it faces east it is an equinoctial marker, watching the passage of time through its observation of the slow shift in the precessional cycle across its 25,773-year cycle. That the Sphinx takes the form of a lion is significant, since it is a lion in the form of the goddess Sekhmet that became an abstract symbol of the fiery conflagration which nearly destroyed the human race. Indeed, Sekhmet is mentioned in connection with Rostau - the ancient name for the Giza necropolis - on the famous Dream Stela of Thutmosis IV, which stands between the paws of the Sphinx. In my opinion the Sphinx personifies not just Sekhmet, but also her fiery attributes as recalled in the story of Ra.
Is it possible that the Sphinx stands as a reminder not so much of the age of Leo and the date 10,500 BC, but of the leonine catastrophe which once nearly destroyed the world and will one day happen again? Perhaps when the leonine monument again looks upon the stars that shone forth when the first catastrophe occurred sometime around 9000 BC, it will happen again. Curiously, 9000 BC is the date most associated with the Carolina Bays, implying that this was also when Atlantis was thought to have been destroyed by the same cosmic forces.
This is the sort of information that is on offer if we want to truly get to grips with the destruction of Atlantis and the mysterious origins of Egyptian civilisation, even if it still gives us no clear indication of the founders of the Egyptian race. Yet the blind acceptance in the psychic readings of Edgar Cayce, and the belief that Atlantis was an all-powerful mother civilisation which seeded the world, are holding back progress in these fields and preventing academics from entering the alternative history camp.
Returning to the view first expounded by the likes of Madame Blavasky that an Atlantean root race was responsible for the foundation of civilisation, we find that myths and legends worldwide of culture heros bringing the rudiments of sophisticated settled lifestyles to primitive peoples are also cited with frequency as evidence of displaced Atlanteans seeding civilisation. This is especially so in the Americas. Quetzalcoatl's entry into Mexico, Itzamna or Kukulcan's founding of the Maya, or Votan's serpent dynasty in Guatemala have all been cited as evidence of how the Atlantean's colonised the world.
Yet the story of the feathered serpents, as I have discovered from my research for GATEWAY TO ATLANTIS, is complex. They are composite characters whose origins lie not in some sunken supercontinent but in the islands of the Caribbean, which would appear to have been the original homeland of the Mesoamerican peoples. They seem to have been part of an elite which created settlements in the Caribbean before venturing on the Gulf coast of Mexico and the Yucatan with indigenous islanders in order to establish ruling dynasties. Admittedly, their true homeland remains unknown although there is increasing evidence to indicate that they were transatlantic voyagers of exactly the type described by Plato in his Atlantis account. Yet these individuals come not from Atlantis itself, which I see in terms of the Caribbean islands, but the ancient world where they seem to be linked with those other feathered serpents, the Watchers and their progeny the Nephilim as found in the Book of Enoch.
This is especially apparent in the account of Votan, the culture hero of Tzendales, a people of the province of Chiapas in southern Mexico and Guatemala. He is said to have been a feathered serpent, who actually described himself as a 'Son of the Serpent,' who was of the line of Chivim, a name which in Hebrew means 'son of the serpent', a term also used to describe the Nephilim. Votan is said to have come originally from a place called Valum Chivim, identified in eighteenth century texts as the Levant coast of Syria, and to have settled first in a place called Valum Votan, identified by Friar Ramon de Ordoñez y Aguilar, canon of the cathedral town of Ciudad-Réal in Chiapas in 1773, as Cuba. Indeed, romantically he has Votan leaving Havana with a flotilla of boats, which then enter the Gulf of Mexico and finally make first landing in the Lagoon de Terminos of the Yucatan coast. Votan and his followers then penetrate the Rio Usumacinta and go on to found Na-Chan, the City of Serpents, identified by Ordoñez with the Maya city of Palenque.
As early as 1796 Felix Cabrera, the Guatemalan doctor who identified Atlantis as the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, realised that there was good evidence that Votan was a trans-Atlantic voyager from the eastern Mediterranean. He suggested that his place of departure to the New World was the Phoenician port of Gades in Spain. Furthermore, that the Dwelling Place of the Thirteen Snakes encountered by him on his oceanic journey was the 13 islands of the Canaries, a shroud observation for his age, especially as it has only recently come to light that Phoenician mariners traded with the Canaries. Yet somehow Cabrera overlooked the fact that Ordoñez identified Valum Votan as Cuba, and instead saw him as having made landfall on Hispaniola, an opinion that almost certain had political implications.
The point of this exercise is to express just how much a fervent belief in the idea of an Atlantis of the heart as opposed to an Atlantis of history has hijacked any sense of reasoning when it comes to interpreting ancient myth and legend. There seems to be an inherent need for blind faith over and above sober rationality when it comes to passionate issues such as Atlantis. It has clouded our view of the origins of Plato's lost Atlantic Island to the point that the most obvious answers to the enigma are ignored often in favour of pseudo-history without any basis in historical reality.
I am not dismissing the value of psychically inspired inspiration. As many of you will be aware I listen to what psychics have to say, and recall this information as new pieces of the jigsaw slot into place. Invariably, good psychics are always proved right in the end. However, before such times psychic information must always remain purely that - psychic information, and not presupposed historical reality. We must get things in perspective if we are to embrace such wild disciplines. The subtleties of the psychic can be used to explore the true roots of history, but only in so far as suggesting new lines of enquiry. Beyond that you risk treading the path of the mystic, which is a personal quest and nothing more. Gut feelings are generally rewarding, but until they become reality they are of value only to the believer. Put aside the devotion to the personal quest and be prepared to accept new theories, no matter how different they might differ from your own beliefs, and then we really do stand a chance of bringing to light the truth of the past.
Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you very much.
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