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Number 100 • ATLANTIS
RISING 19
CONTENTS
#101
September / October 2013
®
46
ANCIENT
MYSTERIES
FUTURE SCIENCE
UNEXPLAINED
ANOMALIES
23
24
38
34
PUBLISHER & EDITOR
J. Douglas Kenyon
32
CONTRIBUTORS
Robert Bauval
John Chambers
Michael Cremo
Frank Joseph
Julie Loar
Dr. Rita Louise
Jeane Manning
Patrick Marsolek
Marsha Oaks
Martin Ruggles
Robert Schoch, PhD.
Steven Sora
William B. Stoecker
Carly Svamvour
Michael E. Tymn
COVER DESIGN
Ryan Hammer
GRAPHICS
Randy Haragan
Denis Ouellette
Ryan Hammer
ATLANTIS RISING®
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42
7 Letters
10 Alternative
News
Atlantis Off Brazil?
17 Jeane Manning
Power of Water
19 Michael Cremo
Back to the
Sandia Caves
23 Creatures of
the Underworld
Underground
Bases and Ancient
Mythology
24 Facing the
Extinction
Threat
Why So Bad for
Some but Not All?
28
29 Mathematics
of Catastrophe
When Halley’s
Comet Showed Up
32 Ancient Genius
Secrets of Imhotep’s
“Black Box”
34 Legend of the
Swan King
Does the Tale,
Hold Clues to
Our Origins?
38 Atlantis:
Navel of
the World
Was It More Than
Just a Place?
40 The Mystery
of Mary
in Ephesus
42 The Riddle of
Lost Civilization
The Case for
Advanced
Neanderthals
45 Literature from
Another World
The Amazing Gifts
of Patience Worth
46 The Trouble
with Terror
Management
Has the Finality
of Death Been
Oversold?
48 Astrology
50 DVD
57 Puzzle
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ALTERNATIVE NEWS
Tongs from Mini -Sub can retrieve rocks
The Shinkhai 6500
Manned Mini-Sub
PREHISTORIC STRUCTURE
FOUND IN SEA OF GALILEE
POSSIBLE ATLANTIS SITE
DISCOVERED OFF BRAZIL
he long list of possible locations for Atlantis has grown
more lengthy. The latest addition
is off the coast of Brazil where
Japanese scientists in a deep sea
submersible have identified large
deposits of granite and quartz
sand on the ocean floor more
than 8,000 feet below the surface.
That is deemed important because both materials form only
on dry land, hence the region
was, apparently, once above
water.
The discovery, about 900
miles from Rio de Janiero has
caused quite a stir, as talk of Atlantis has once again fired the
public imagination. Though scientists with the Japanese Agency
for Marine-Earth Science and
Technology (JAMSTEC) are
thinking in terms of the so-called
ancient continent of Pangaea
which is believed to have once,
many millions of years ago, included both South America and
Africa in one unified land mass.
The speculation from orthodox
academia is that the granite may
have been left over from the
original splitting apart of the
continents of South America and
Africa. As Gifu University professor Shinichi Kawakami told
Japan Times, “The area in question may have been left in water
as the continent was separated in
line with the movements of [continental] plates.”
T
Still, Robert Ventura Santos,
director of geology for the Geology Service of Brazil (CPRM)
told the UK’s Daily Telegraph,
“This could be Brazil’s Atlantis.
We are almost certain, but we
need to strengthen this hypothesis.”
Plato’s famous description of
Atlantis and its sinking about
eleven thousand five hundred
years ago refers to a region beyond the Pillars of Hercules,
which most scholars believe to be
a reference to the Atlantic ocean,
and which could be construed to
include the new discovery.
First spotted in 2012, the
mass of granite, near an area
called “The Rio Grande Elevation” was surveyed by the JAMSTEC in Shinkhai 6500, a small
state-of-the-art, manned submarine, early in 2013. The area had
previously seen little exploration.
Earlier this year, Atlantis Rising #98 (March/April) reported
on new discoveries near Bimini in
the Bahamas of anomalous quarried stone beneath the ocean surface. Other sites in both the
Caribbean and in the Gulf of
Mexico near Cuba have also
made news in recent years. One
could be forgiven for concluding
that something long lost beneath
the waves may finally be coming
to light. Could Atlantis be rising?
The world and this publication
eagerly await developments.
10 ATLANTIS RISING • Number 101
Granite from the deep ocean floor
Underwater
Monument
rchaeologists from Israel’s Tel Aviv University are struggling to
get to the bottom of a puzzling structure on the floor of the
Sea of Galilee, where the Bible reports Jesus spent much of his time
and performed many miracles, including walking on water. First located in 2003 the find is only now making its way into the public
domain.
The immense, previously unknown, structure of 3-foot-long, volcanic basalt stones is in the shape of a cone approximately 230 feet
in diameter, 39 feet high, and weighing an estimated 60,000 tons.
Professor Shmulik Marco of TAU’s Department of Geophysics and
Planetary Sciences says stone was hauled to the site from more than
a mile away and placed according to a specific construction plan.
At the time of construction, probably more than six thousand years
ago, the site was on dry land, which later submerged. Estimates of
its age are based on accumulations of sand around its base.
The discovery of the site was recently reported in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology. Future exploration, it is hoped,
will reveal more about who built it and why.
A
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Could Government
Intrude into the
Mind’s Domain?
W
Uri Geller in Moscow (Photo: D. Rozhkov)
substantial detail has surfaced on techniques
used in Stargate, which had been developed
at the Stanford Research Institute under Drs.
Harold Putoff and Russell Targ in the 1960s
and 70s. The out-of-body experiences of
Geller and another celebrated psychic Ingo
Swan were central to the original research.
Though publicly ridiculed at the time by academic scientists and debunkers, the project
was, nevertheless, very real. And even though
seemingly abandoned with much fanfare
amidst the controversy, there is substantial
evidence reported in the film that the work
was re-opened to help, like project Prism,
fight the war on terror.
Is Zahi Hawass Making a Comeback?
Zahi
Hawass
e’s back. Zahi Hawass may not be in
charge any more, but he is working on
H
that.
The once ubiquitous Minister of Antiquities under the doomed Egyptian regime of
Hosni Mubarak has survived the attempt by
his enemies to put him in jail, and he is busy
again doing what he does best, seeking publicity for his causes. With his legal troubles
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apparently behind him, the man who was
often called, by himself and others, Egypt’s
real life Indiana Jones is free to travel again
and to make whatever headlines if he can.
Mostly that means complaining about the
way the new regine is running things. Egypt’s
inheritance, he argues, is being plundered. He,
of course, was accused of just that by his enemies, but they were unable to make their
charges stick.
Hawass also says there are some fantastic
discoveries still waiting to be made in Egypt.
One which he predicts will finally turn up is
proof that the great pyramid was really just a
big tomb for the pharaoh Cheops. All those
foolish “new-age archaeologists” (some of
whom have been published in these pages)
who say otherwise will be set right.
The dismembered Osiris, after all, was finally put back together with the help of the
goddess Isis. If Hawass is to achieve a similar
result, he may also need some divine intervention.
Available wher
wherev
ever
ev
er books and ebooks ar
aree sold.
ith all the worry about the U.S. Government’s high-tech spying apparatus at
the NSA, IRS, DOJ, etc., there has yet to be
much talk about its paranormal capabilities,
but perhaps there should be.
Sensational revelations in the spring of
2013, first reported in Britain’s Guardian
newspaper, cited NSA “whistleblower” Edward Snowden to the effect that Internet giants Google, Facebook, Apple, and others
had provided government agents with access
to their servers, potentially facilitating the
reading of e-mails and other communications
from millions of Internet users. Code named
Prism, the program immediately drew fire
from both ends of the political spectrum. Unmentioned in the uproar, however, was the
extent to which the human mind itself seems
destined to become the battlefield of the future. One exception to the silence, however,
may be a new documentary focussing on the
exploits of Israeli psychic Uri Geller.
Entitled Uri Geller Psychic Spy? the film
details the famous spoon-bender’s secret life
as a Mossad and CIA agent. According to
producer Geoffrey Macnab, Geller was involved in global espionage as early as the
1960s, and was secretly reactivated after 9/11.
The story is consistent with news reports
which appeared in the 1990s confirming the
military use of remote viewing in the codenamed “Stargate” project. In the years since,
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Number 101 • ATLANTIS
HAMPTON
ROADS
RISING 11
THE ET FACTOR
Myth, Underground Bases, and
the Extraterrestrial Presence
• BY RITA LOUISE, PhD.
eep in north central New Mexico
is the sleepy little town of Dulce.
Located on the Archuleta Mesa
on the Colorado-New Mexico
border, Dulce is home to about 3,000 and is
capital to the Jicarilla Apache Nation. In the
early 1980s this seemingly insignificant location became a center of controversy. Physicist
and inventor, Paul Bennewitz, claimed he had
discovered an underground base there occupied by extraterrestrials. His story quickly
spread throughout the UFO community. Sensational allegations included human abduction by these extraterrestrial beings.
Bennewitz also asserted that the extraterrestrials were engaged in the development of advanced technologies including genetic
manipulation. Their plan, according to Bennewitz and other conspiracy theorists, was to
control the governments of Earth by means
of a New World Order. Fantastic rumors soon
emerged of an untoward alliance between
shadowy secret societies such as the Illuminati, the Masons, the Bilderbergers, etc., and
the alien inhabitants of the Dulce base.
If such theories were not strange enough,
it was also purported that an intergalactic war
was raging between multiple ET races and
Earth, indeed, was ground zero. Among the
places where such underground bases were
said to exist, Dulce was the most notorious,
but it was not the only one. Subterranean
bases, according to the conspiracy theorists,
D
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could be found around the world with major mythology. Depending on the culture, they
active outposts all across the United States, have been called Hades, Tartarus, Xibalba,
Australia, Antarctica, and South America. Duat, Patala and Hell. These “homes of the
These bases were said to be connected via an gods,” were not always found deep within the
immense series of tunnels. There were even earth, but were sometimes described as being
assertions that one leads to an active
within a mountain or deep beneath the
base beneath the Vatican which had
waters of the earth. Entrance to their
exerted control over western cividomains, regardless of locality, was
lization for centuries.
often presented as accessible to
The sheer number of recent
humans through some kind of
reports regarding such undercave.
ground bases has led some perThe gods that occupied
fectly sane individuals to
these diverse locations were
wonder aloud whether, in some
often depicted as half man, half
strange way any of this could be
snake or fish, as giants, and as
Dogon
true? And, indeed, an unexpected
monsters. By some reckoning, the
Symbol
source of corroboration may have
final group of gods making their
been available to all of us for a very
appearance on Earth were a group of
long time. Could modern accounts of
“sky gods,” of which it was claimed that
interaction with life beyond Earth originate we were made in their image.
from the same sources which inspired our anIf Earth was visited by extraterrestrials in
cient ancestors? Could the answers we seek be the past, where did they come from? One
found in our mythology? Mythology, after all, possible reference to a point of origin, Sirius,
like many of the claims that come from the comes from the Dogon people of West
UFO community, seems to be something Africa. In their creation story an ark, containmore than just fiction. Traditional mytholo- ing eight amphibious, hermaphroditic, fishgists suggest that the gods we find in myth, like creatures, the Nommo, came to earth in
rather than being literally true, merely repre- our remote past. References to specific consent the forces of nature, archetypes, and spir- stellations permeate mythology, including the
itual truth. They were not simply the product Pleiades, Orion, and the Big Dipper. It seems
of someone’s vivid imagination. That said, Earth was split into four territories associated
does ancient mythology, like today’s extraor- with the cardinal points with different races
dinary report, have any basis in concrete fact? or groups of gods assigned to each quadrant.
After all, stories of underground realms
occupied by “the gods” have pervaded
Continued on Page 59
Number 101 • ATLANTIS
RISING 23
ALTERNATIVE SCIENCE
Why Some Species
and Not Others...
and Why So Many of Those?
• BY WILLIAM B. STOECKER
eriodically there have been planetwide mass extinction events which
have wiped out many plant and animal species. A prime example would
be the asteroid impact of some sixty-five million years ago that ended the Cretaceous and,
apparently, brought an end to the dinosaurs
(although they may have already been in decline or had been wiped out by the Deccan
Traps flood basalt eruptions and climatic
change caused by those eruptions). The much
earlier Permian extinctions were even greater
and were apparently triggered by the Siberian
Traps eruptions. In one sense, these mass extinctions are no mystery: both plant and animal species, on land and in the sea, can be
stressed by rapid climate changes and by truly
catastrophic events, such as the aforementioned mega volcano eruptions, or major
comet or asteroid impacts. Moreover, such
eruptions and/or impacts may also trigger
sudden climate change.
Nor is the selectivity of extinctions always a mystery. Large things, including the
largest animals and plants, are less common
than small things. There are many grains of
dust but far fewer planets. There are many
tiny crustaceans and few whales. Also, predators are less common than their prey species.
We can easily visualize how, at the end of the
Cretaceous, the largest dinosaurs and marine
reptiles might be so reduced in number that
P
24 ATLANTIS RISING • Number 101
survivors would have trouble finding mates,
causing a further decline, and also a reduction
in genetic diversity leading to inbreeding.
Meanwhile, smaller animals, including mammals, would, though greatly reduced in number, still be numerous enough to avoid these
problems and to rebuild their populations. It
is also quite possible that the smallest dinosaurs would be unable to compete with the
mammals.
Catastrophic climate change is, in some
respects, not mysterious at all. It’s not, for example, that we don’t know what causes ice
ages—we know of too many causes. The sun’s
energy output is not constant, and the Earth’s
orbit periodically becomes more, and then
less, elliptical; and its axis of rotation wobbles
in a complete circle every 25,920 years. The
present positions of the continents, which
slowly drift about over the eons, separating
and then recombining, allow the buildup of
continental ice sheets in the Antarctic and sea
ice in the partially enclosed Arctic Ocean;
and the ice, reflecting the sun’s energy, causes
further cooling. Massive volcanic eruptions
can inject dust and sulfur compounds into
the upper atmosphere, reflecting yet more energy. The variables are so complex that we
cannot predict the outcome.
But what of mass extinctions that affect
one region of the earth more than others?
What of mass extinctions that wipe out some
predators but not others, or some relatively
small and numerous herbivores but not others? The extinctions at the end of the last
major glaciation, though far less extreme than
the Cretaceous or Permian extinctions, were
very, very selective.
This last glaciation is believed to have
begun roughly 76,000 years BP, possibly triggered by a mega volcano in Indonesia, although some researchers believe that the
buildup of massive ice sheets, primarily in Europe and North America, somehow triggered
the vulcanism. Researchers differ in their
opinions, and there is much uncertainty; but
the climate varied back and forth, and the ice
sheets advanced and, at times, even retreated
a bit. The peak of the cold period was perhaps 17,000 BP, and then the climate generally
warmed until about 12,800 BP, when the climate abruptly became, once again, much
colder, until about 11,600 BP, when the Earth
suddenly warmed; the glaciers mostly melted;
and sea levels rose rather abruptly. The event
of 12,800 BP is generally referred to as the
Younger Dryas; the name comes from a flowering tundra plant, Dryas octopetalia, an indicator of a colder climate. Two less extreme
colder periods were the Older Dryas and the
Oldest Dryas. It is important to understand
how rapidly these climate changes occurred;
the last major glaciation took only a few
decades to cover much of the Northern
Hemisphere and parts of the Southern in ice
sheets, although it took centuries for them to
reach their full depth. As an example, recently
Mt. St. Helens rebuilt some of its glaciers that
Continued on Page 26
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MYSTERIES
The Step
Pyramid of
Saqqara
ANCIENT GENIUS
The Secrets of Imhotep and the “Black Box” of Saqqara
ring Boris Karloff and the 1999 loose remake
blockbuster by Stephen Sommers starring
Brendan Fraser. The latter went on to gross
n the region of Greater Cairo, in the 415 million dollars and spawned several senortheast segment of the modern city, quels in 2001 with The Mummy Returns, in
stands a lonely obelisk. It marks the po- 2004 Revenge of the Mummy, and many
sition of the most revered ‘learning cen- spinoffs, such as The Scorpion King, as well
ter,’ a ‘university,’ of the ancient world. No as a series of novels, cartoons, and comic
Egyptologist really knows how old this mys- books. Second after Tutankhamun, or perterious center is, who first put it at that place haps now on par with the boy-king,
and why, let alone what systems of science Imhotep’s name has thus entered modern
and knowledge were taught there. Most, how- pop culture. It would not be an exaggeration
ever, believe that Heliopolis was there long to say that Imhotep ranks in the Top 10 list
before the pyramids. It was known as Innu by of Super-villains of History, thanks to Boris
the ancient Egyptians; later the Hebrews
Karloff and Brendan Fraser.
called it On, and even much later the Greeks
The truth, however, is that very
gave it the current name of Heliopolis, which
little is known about Imhotep the
means ‘City of the Sun.’ Today the local inman. Although often referred to as
habitants call it Ain Shams, ‘Eye of the Sun.’
a ‘genius,’ ‘inventor of architecture,’
Egyptologists tell us that in its heydays
‘father of science’ and other such
Heliopolis was headed by a high priest, the
high epithets by Egyptologists
our mau, the ‘Chief of Observers’ or
and historians alike, when it
‘Chief of the Astronomers,’ whose main
comes to who Imhotep really
function was to observe the night sky and
was, it’s all down to guesswork
the motion of the stars—-and that one
and speculation. As high priest of
such high priest, indeed the earliest
Heliopolis during the Third Dyknown by name and most revered, was
nasty of Egyptian kings, Imhotep’s
a man, once believed a god, called
name, however, appears less than
Imhotep, ‘He who comes in Peace.’ So
half-a-dozen times in contemporary
famous and admired was Imhotep that
texts, with little or no information
during the latter part of the pharaonic
attached to it. The most recent accivilization he was venerated as a god,
ademic work on the Third Dyand later the Greeks regarded him as the
nasty, which also refers to
‘father of medicine’ and associated
Imhotep, which we consulted
him with Asclepius. Imhotep
for research in our present
even gained super-villain starbook, devotes barely seven of
dom status from Hollyits 300 pages to him, and most
wood with the original
of the information is culled from
1932 The Mummy starImhotep
much later writings, the earliest being
• BY ROBERT BAUVAL
I
32 ATLANTIS RISING • Number 101
nearly 1000 years after his death. One could
say that Imhotep is a sort of ‘Jesus’ of the ancient world, highly mythologized and eventually divinized, but with little or no
contemporary archaeological or textual evidence which has survived concerning the
man himself. Perhaps, though, the main reason for this huge lacuna is that Egyptologists
have generally ignored one of Imhotep’s most
important proficiencies and aptitudes—-indeed, we believe, the most important: his
highly advanced knowledge of astronomy.
Imhotep’s architectural masterpiece, the fabulous Step Pyramid Complex at Saqqara, has
for too long been studied as just that, an architectural masterpiece. But we, on the other
hand, have come to see it as something else
or, to put it differently, an astronomical ‘manual’ in stone. The Step Pyramid Complex, in
fact, is a sort of pharaonic Da Vinci Code,
which, if properly understood and decoded,
can take us into the mind, and even the origin, of the architect; i.e., astronomer genius
who created it. Because, to put it in simple
terms, the Step Pyramid Complex was designed according to what can be termed ‘sacred
astronomy;’
i.e.
astronomical
observations and calculations incorporated
into the architecture and alignments of the
complex.
The “Black Box” of the Step Pyramid
Complex
“Nothing,” wrote the enthralled Egyptologist Wendy Wood, “in the architecture of archaic tombs, would constitute an adequate
preparation to the technical mastering of
which suddenly appears in the Step Pyramid
Complex.”
(Louvre)
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ANCIENT MYSTERIES
• BY FRANK JOSEPH
hile first collecting research materials during 1980 for my investigation into the lost empire
of Atlantis, a peculiar motif
began to emerge almost of its own accord
from time to time. Over the thirty-three years
since, this recurring theme eventually opened
up a line of inquiry that not only affirmed
the sunken kingdom’s historical reality but revealed its spiritual core as the axis mundi, or
“Navel of the World.”
It appears in numerous references
throughout Classical and pre-Classical traditions to some anciently splendid realm destroyed by a catastrophic flood; and it is
associated with a tree (sometimes a pillar, hill
or mountain), an egg-shaped, sacred stone
and different cultural inflections on the name
“Id”—-Eide, Hyade, etc. These are perhaps linguistic versions of Atlas, the Greek Titan envisioned as a mountain—a giant holding up
the sky—from whom the drowned island derived its name. The capital—Atlantis—means,
literally, “Daughter of Atlas.”
In the non-Platonic rendition, an ancient
oak, a form Atlas himself assumed, grew in
the middle of his garden, where its apples of
eternal life were tended by a serpent-dragon,
Ladon, coiling around its bough, attended by
Atlas’ seven daughters, the Hesperides. Their
leader, Hespera, after whom they were collectively known, “embraces the centricity of the
universe,” according to encyclopedists,
Martha Ann and Dorothy Myers Imel. Such
imagery is familiar in the Caduceus, a wand
entwined with serpents ascending to a winged
sun-disc (i.e., enlightenment), internationally
known as a medical insignia, and symbolic of
the oak in the Atlantean Garden of the Hesperides. Its bough is synonymous for the
human spinal column, the real “Tree of Life”;
its “golden apples,” the “fruit” of spiritual illumination; and Ladon, the “serpent energy”
of Kundalini associated with the seven major
chakras. Their embodiment in the Hesperides,
“Daughters of Atlas,” and, therefore, in effect,
“Atlantises,” demonstrates the Atlantean origin of this deeply ancient concept.
Roger Cook, a published expert in the interpretation of archetypes, points out that
“the image of the Cosmic Tree or Tree of Life
belongs to a coherent body of myths, rites,
images and symbols which together make up
what the historian of religion, Micrea Eliade,
has called the ‘symbolism of the Center.’ In
the symbolic language of mythical religion,
it is often referred to as the ‘navel of the
world’—Divine Egg.”
Alluding to Atlantis in the Odyssey
[Chapter XVIII], Homer wrote of Ogygia as
the Umbilicus maris, or Omphalos thallasses,
the “Navel of the Sea.” The oceanic location
of Ogygia is re-affirmed by his fellow Greeks’
name for the North Atlantic Ocean: Kronios
W
38 ATLANTIS RISING • Number 101
Atlantis
NAVEL
OF THE
WORLD
Was It More Than Just a Place?
Pontus, the “Sea of Kronos”; Romans identically referred to the Atlantic as Chronis maris. Kronos was king of the
Titans, ruler of the world before
the ascension of the Olympian
gods. Forewarned that one of
his 12 children would be his
undoing, he devoured them
all. His wife, Idaea, wrapped
an egg-shaped stone with
swaddling clothes, then presented it to her husband in
the hope he would mistake
it for their infant son, Zeus.
The deception succeeded,
and Kronos quite literally
swallowed the ruse.
Zeus grew up to become a
handsome youth, all the while
concealing his true identity, and
was eventually chosen as cupbearer to his ignorant father. In this
capacity, the lad was able to slip Kronos an emetic that made him regurgitate first Idaea’s stone, followed by the
remainder of his cannibalized progeny.
They made war on the Titans, overthrew
them to establish the Olympian New Order,
and Zeus himself set up the vomited stone,
the Omphalos, at the center of the world,
where it served as the foremost oracle. This
allegorical tale of Kronos is a mythic rendering of Navel of the World origins in Atlantis.
After the Hesperides, Atlas sired another
septuplicate set of daughters, the Hyades.
Their Atlantean origins echo in Idaea, the
wife of Kronos, who vomited the stone she
gave him. They not only personify the Navel
of the World cult but comprise the Atlantean
name by which it was known—Hyade, or
At(las). It may be traced in an almost straightline progression from the mythic realm of lost
Atlantis to the neighboring Canary Islands,
across the Mediterranean to Asia Minor and
India. Its reappearance at the spiritual center
of cultures wholly unrelated to Greek legend
suggests the migration of cult practitioners
among survivors fleeing eastward from the destruction of Atlantis.
The first step from traditional myth to
archaeological reality took place in the
Continued on Page 66
Atlas
ALTERNATIVE ARCHAEOLOGY
Facial reconstruction
from a Neanderthal
Skull (Smithsonian,
Washington, D.C.)
The Riddle of
Lost
Civilization
The Case for
Advanced
Neanderthals
•
study appearing in a December 2012 issue of the Hungarian scientific journal PloS ONE, declared that prehistoric artists were more
scientifically accurate in depicting the movements of animals than
are their modern colleagues.
By comparing drawings of four-legged animals found on cave walls with
roughly parallel published drawings from the 1880s, researchers at Eotvos
University in Budapest were able to show that modern depictions of the walking or trotting motions of animals had the positioning of the legs wrong more often than did the ancients.
Where the prehistoric artists had an error rate of 46.2%, the
modern artists were wrong 83.5% of the time.
Once again, mainstream history on Earth had been contradicted. The
long-standing consensus has been that the processes which would ultimately
lead to civilization didn’t really get going until about six thousand years ago
when we invented the wheel. Before that, in the four millennia following the
great warm-up at the close of the last ice age, humans were, at best, just
primitive farmers. Before that, we had been, for around forthy thousand
years, essentially hunter-gatherers, savages—‘cave men’—incapable of much
more than making good spearpoints. That is the story that everyone learns
in school. To suggest otherwise is to invite scorn from the knowledge establishment. Nevertheless, as readers of this magazine well know, there is plenty
of powerful evidence to the contrary, and more is uncovered every day. Indeed, if nothing else, the amazing artistic sophistication of the cave
painters,seems sufficient to turn conventional wisdom on its head.
BY MARTIN
RUGGLES
A
42 ATLANTIS RISING • Number 101
The lower symbol on the ceiling of Spain’s Altamira
Cave has been dated to at least 35,600 years BP, 20,000
years older than the bison at the top.
Researchers in Spain’s El Sidrón Cave
(Photo: CSIC Comunicación)
A full thirty-five thousand
years ago, painters in the Coliboaia Cave in Romania were producing sophisticated portraits of
many animals including a horse,
bear heads, and a rhinoceros. The
artists used black paint. The artwork is even older than the famous masterpieces previously
found in other European caves
like Lascaux and Chauvet (dated
to almost twenty thousand years
ago). Still older cave art has now
been discovered, but more on
that later.
Such findings certainly provoke many questions: Where did
the ancient artists learn the techniques that would not be rediscovered for many thousands of
years? Were they simply born geniuses, or did they learn their
amazing skills at the feet of culture bearers from an earlier for-
gotten era? Indeed, could their
awe-inspiring masterpieces be the
last remains of a much more ancient and forgotten culture—one
not at its dawn, but in its late twilight?
From a strictly human perspective the puzzles presented are
complex enough, but what about
when the story is expanded to include our so-called ‘country
cousins’ the Neanderthals? The
plot, we might say, thickens, and
the story of the origins of civilization becomes very mysterious indeed. Many of the milestones
which we think of as representing
exclusively human achievement
were, it turns out, also passed by
this once derided group, albeit
much earlier.
The GEICO caveman of recent television fame has a point.
To say that something is “so sim-
See Our Great 8-page Catalog Beginning on Page 74
ple a caveman could do it,” does
not give him the respect he deserves. Assuming that these “cavemen” were largely Neanderthal,
they were certainly capable of
muvh more than that for which
they have been given credit.
Neanderthals, in fact, some
believe, may well be the source of
that great lost culture for which
many of us have searched. Researcher Dr. Robert Schoch is
among those who argue that Neanderthals may deserve much
more credit for very early developments, which heretofore have
been chalked up to so-called
modern humans. Even mainstream science has now accepted
that, at the very least, Neanderthals used body paint, wore
jewelry, and worked with tools;
and now, we learn that they produced exceptional cave art thousands of years before humans did.
Neanderthals probably came
to Europe, science concedes, over
a quarter-million years ago, which
means they had much more time
to advance their culture than we
humans have had in evolving
ours. Modern humans, it is believed, did not arrive in Europe
until about forty-two thousand
years ago. And, it now appears,
Neanderthals were blowing paint
over their hands to make stencils,
at least as long as thirty-seven
thousand years ago. That is the
age of art recently found in
Spain’s El Castillo caves.
Science now recognizes that
all signs point to much greater
antiquity for both humans and
Neanderthals than was once believed. It is no longer controversial to talk in terms of at least a
half-million years. The question
arises: could the great lost ancient civilization for which so
many have searched, have been,
in fact, Neanderthal?
As Robert Schoch and Oana
R. Ghiocel explained in their article for Atlantis Rising (#89)
“The Enigma of the Carpathian
Sphinx,” some very ancient artifacts may have gone unrecognized—regarded simply as natural
formations. According to Schoch
and Ghiocel, one formation in
Carpathian
Sphinx
particular, located in the southern Carpathian mountains of Romania, the so-called Carpathian
sphinx, could be evidence of a
very old and very advanced lost
civilization. Some scholars such
as Romanian Dan Braneanu and
Peruvian Daniel Ruzo have argued that a primordial civilization was destroyed long before
the earliest civilization acknowledged by conventional historians.
Neanderthal child
reconstructed face
Ancient Saga
Named for the German Neander Valley, where they were first
discovered in 1856, Neanderthals,
a sub species of the Genus
Homo, have been extinct for
about thirty-two thousand years.
Fossil remains found in many
parts of Europe have been dated
to as long as six-hundred thousand years ago. In Croatia remains found in Vindija Cave
have been dated to between
thirty-three and thirty-two thousand years ago. Much of the
most recent, and astonishing research has been conducted on
the Iberian peninsula, where fossils have been dated to forty-five
thousand years BP. Mainstream
archaeology usually assigns several cultural classifications to Neanderthals, the earliest being the
Mousterian stone-tool culture
going back about three-hundred
thousand years.
The Neanderthal brain is
thought to have been at least as
large as the human. One study
using 3D computer-assisted reconstructions of Neanderthal infants found in Russia and Syria
showed that while human and
Neanderthal brains were the same
size at birth, the adult Neanderthal brain was larger. Neanderthals were also physically
much bigger and stronger than
humans.
Genetic studies now suggest
that modern humans owe part of
their DNA to Neanderthals, and
Continued on Page 69
Number 101 • ATLANTIS
RISING 43
SPIRITUALITY
Could the Finality of Death Have Been Oversold?
• BY PATRICK MARSOLEK
ow often do you think about
dying? How do you respond
when you see someone close to
you die or have a close brush
with death? Does thinking about death motivate you to do the things that are important
to you? Many social psychologists suggest
that the fear of death creates an unconscious
terror that drives whole cultures. Terror Management Theory (TMT) proposes that awareness of the finality and inevitability of death
causes us to create many different meaningful
structures in our lives in order to give us selfesteem and a purpose. TMT is a very popular
materialistic model for explaining why we
have the cultural values we have as well as
many of our driving beliefs. We’ll take a look
at TMT and some of the underlying assumptions of this theory in relation to non-materialistic views of our reality.
Terror Management Theory is derived
from the anthropologist Ernest Becker’s
work. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The
Denial of Death, Becker expanded upon the
writings of Sigmund Freud, Søren
Kierkegaard, Norman O. Brown, and Otto
Rank and placed the fear of death as a
stronger influence than sex. Becker suggested
that the terror of our ultimate annihilation
creates an unconscious anxiety which people
spend their lives trying to understand and relieve. He proposed that when people are re-
H
46 ATLANTIS RISING • Number 101
minded of their own death, they become
more entrenched in their cultural beliefs and
undertake behaviors that will enhance their
self-esteem, even if the choices they make are
unhealthy. There is a large amount of research being
done that supports TMT. In a typical experiment, individuals are exposed to thoughts of
death or pain and then given questionnaires
that reveal changes in their beliefs or priorities. In a study recently reported in Science
Magazine, researchers studied groups of professional rowers, students, and college professors who did not have strong religious beliefs.
After thinking about death, or even just
preparing for a stressful event, these individuals were shown to become stronger believers
in science. Other studies showed people exposed to fear of death or pain became more
greedy, while others undertook more self-esteem enhancing behavior, even at the risk of
negatively affecting their health. Other researchers have shown that members of a religious group respond to death
with less tolerance for other religious groups, seeming to support
the idea of identification with
one’s religion or culture. The focus of these studies,
and it seems of TMT in general,
is the effects of a brief, and sometimes unconscious, exposure to
death on an individual. In the literature, the term Mortality
Salience is used to refer to the
state where thoughts of one’s death are
brought closer to the surface but not held in
immediate awareness. One might say Mortality Salience is the attitude of a Western, materialistic culture, where avoidance of death is
the norm. Death is all around us, but we prefer not to think about it, let alone talk about
it. TMT breaks down, though, with those
who have had more in-depth exposure or experience to death. Members of hospice communities often welcome their encounters with
death and embrace the deaths of their patients as an end to suffering or a transitional
experience. Carol Purslow’s MA dissertation
on “Death Anxiety and Experiences of Transcendence” studied skydivers in an attempt to
study people who face death regularly. She
found that veteran skydivers faced death regularly without a heightening of cultural beliefs
or defenses. Similarly, older people show less
of a fear response than younger people in
their 20’s or 30’s or those going through a
midlife crisis. Otto Rank, one of the psychologists Becker drew upon for
TMT, believed that fear of death
could be transformative because
of the felt sense of timelessness
and immortality that can come
from a ‘vital experience.’ Today
psychologists would call this a
‘peak experience,’ where one has
a direct perception that someErnest
how transcends culturally-based
Becker
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