Saturday, November 13, 2010

Atlantis, Lemuria, and Hyperborea

It looks like I have to throw in a piece here about this topic, because all those TV channels making sensational documentaries --  History Channel, Discovery Channel, BBC and so on -- they're all totally out to lunch on the topic of Atlantis in my humble opinion.

What Atlantis is concerned, history won't help because historical records are very young indeed, at least the vast majority of them, and although archeological evidence can point to very old times, it's so sketchy that most deductions must be considered guesswork. And then we have geology, geological evolution, continental changes and so on, but one should keep in mind, I think, that according to Rudolf Steiner's descriptions of Atlantean humanity, culture and civilization, the physical bodies of humans and animals were probably too soft to leave any traces like fossils and such. Furthermore, the structures of buildings and means of communications and so on (like roads?) were probably not made of hard material either but blended into the natural landscapes of enormous vegetations; people were united with their natural surroundings and listened to the trees and the winds to be instructed what to do. A civilization made of softness that would leave no trace on the ocean floor. This may have been the age of huge reptiles on other continents, the beasts that descended into corporeality prematurely so to speak.

The physical human form as we know it today was developed under the leadership of Manu, the Initiate of the Atlantean Sun-Oracle who guided the remnant of the Atlantean nation over to Asia to establish the new post-Atlantean civilization, and the rest is history beginning with ancient India and the seven Holy Rishis. That's why Noah's Ark corresponds to the physical human form being developed for the post-Atlantean Age.

I did see a documentary about the Atlantis legend on BBC or one of the Discovery channels a little while back, and the researchers' approach is extremely materialistic, they're looking for this lost civilization like it was ancient Greece with old buildings and so on. Of course they won't find that, and the only source they give credit to, namely Plato, isn't of any help whatsoever.

Lemuria is far, far more distant of course, and Hyperborea belongs to an extremely remote past (before Lemuria), although it's mentioned in Greek myth. The fact remains, though, that whenever we trace history backwards in time, there is always a point at the transition from prehistory to history proper where historical and mythological events blend. Hyperborea, Lemuria, and Atlantis belong to the realm of mythology, and "official" recognition of these things (like from the scientific community and so on) cannot be expected until heresy has become orthodoxy, i.e. until myths, legends, fairy tales and religious lore are recognized as just as real as physical history.

A couple of movies come to mind as pointers toward Atlantean humanity. First we have The Emerald Forest (1985, based on a true story), depicting "The Invisible People" of the Amazon forest, who may have preserved the closest we've got of a faint echo of the Atlantean lifestyle. The other is the more recent sci-fi flick Avatar (2009) where we meet a race on another planet where they blend with nature and use their means of transportation accordingly. Steiner says the Atlanteans had vehicles, but we make an error if we think of those in modern terms; I think it's more like they were riding the winds or making their vehicles out of such airy substance, like perhaps flying leaves -- and like I mentioned, one must eliminate, or "suggest away", the present human form altogether, because it only came into existence when Atlantis was sinking and Manu brought his people over to Asia.

With all the above in mind, we arrive at a past epoch on a lost continent which, although it MAY have existed as recently as up until only about 15,000 years ago or less, has left behind almost no physical trace. (Nature, including the human form, has densified much, much more recently than commonly assumed according to Steiner.) Because although Atlantis has existed, it's a myth, a legend, a fairy tale, even more so than the Bible and similar old texts, it's not history in the modern sense, so it eludes hard sciences like archeology. We'll never reach recognition of Atlantis through materialistic science; instead we must lift natural science to a higher, much more delicate plane where myths and legends are recognized as real events side by side with historical events.

90 per cent of what I've been summing up here is to be found in Rudolf Steiner's lectures and books, especially Cosmic Memory - Prehistory of Earth and Man (GA 11) and Occult Science (Geheimwissehschaft, GA 13) -- BASIC books. The objection is sometimes made that such ideas are faith-based and not knowledge-based. My response to this argument is twofold. Firstly, anthroposophy seeks to change the apprehension of the spiritual, of the occult, from that of faith (as Martin Luther understood it) to knowledge, that knowledge should replace faith in religious-spiritual matters. At the present time in history, we're in a transition stage, and this is one of the reasons why Rudolf Steiner's epistemology and doctoral thesis Warheit und Wissenschaft (GA 3; Truth and Knowledge in English) is crucial to comprehension.

Secondly, alternative notions of the distant past, like the Triassic period 230 million years ago, the Cretaceous period 65 million years ago and so on, are just as faith-based as any other, just like the primordial chemical soup and the Big Bang theory. If that were not the case, the latest fashionable theory, namely Stephen Hawking's M theory with its claim to be the ultimate origin and explanation of everything that exists, would not be a challenge to the other theories. The so-called experts, whose wildest speculations are cited ad nauseam in TV documentaries on the basis of their assumed authority as researchers and scientists, not unlike the Dominican theologians of the Middle Ages, are just as confused and mixed up about the distinction between faith and knowledge and between history and myth as anybody else in orthodox academia.

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