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History of Atlantis by Lewis Spence
Index | Chapter: 1 | 2 |3 | 4 |5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |9 | 10 |11 | 12 |13 | 14 |15 | 16
CHAPTER XIII.
THE RELIGION OF ATLANTIS
As regards the type of religion which flourished in Atlantis, the Platonic account affords us some very precise details. For example, we are informed that a particular rite attended the deliberations of the kings which took place once in every six years. Before the assize of justice which was held on that occasion ten bulls were brought into the sacred zone, and each one of the Atlantean kings made a vow to offer up one of these bulls to Poseidon without employing the agency of iron. The animals were then led to the graven copper column and immolated, after which the kings passed the members of each bull through the fire, making a libation of the blood and drenching the column with it, after which the sacrifices were totally consumed by fire. The remainder of the blood was placed in small vases of gold and splashed on to the fire, a little of it being drunk.
Now this ceremony very closely resembles several of those practised by the Aztec peoples. The Mexican priests were in the habit of leading their human victims to a similar graven column, of making libations of their blood from vases of gold, and even of drinking some of it. That they employed human rather than animal sacrifice is simply to be accounted for by the fact that no large animals were known in Mexico, but further north the Indian tribes, from whom the Aztecs were derived, sacrificed the buffalo almost in the self-same manner in which the Atlanteans immolated the bull.
We know also that the bull was the sacred animal of the Aurignacians, as its presence in many of their cave-temples proves, and that they actually sacrificed it there can be little doubt. The cult of the bull was perhaps the first and certainly one of the most widespread religions in Western Europe, and that it penetrated to Egypt is of course well known. Let us examine the bull-worship of Egypt briefly and see if it is capable of throwing any light upon the circumstances of the Atlantean cult.
That bull-worship in Egypt was certainly of very early origin is proved by the statement of Manetho, an Egyptian priest, who traces the cult of Apis to a King of the Second Dynasty, about 3000 B.C. .^Elian, indeed, goes further back and assigns the origin of the practice to Mena, the first king of the First Egyptian Dynasty. This, of course, implies that the cult was probably very much more ancient, as practically everything pristine in Egypt was regarded as having been introduced by Mena, the great culture-hero, or introducer of civilisation into the Nile region. Herodotus describes the Apis bull as black in colour, but having a square spot of white on the forehead, and on the back the figure of an eagle, with double hairs in the tail and the mark of a beetle on the tongue. The Egyptians believed that the soul of Osiris had passed after death into a bull, and that when this bull died it was necessary to find a bull calf which had the self-same markings, in order that the soul of the god might live on.
Now it has been already observed that the cult of Osiris with its concomitant practice of mummification, was of western origin, that indeed it was nothing more nor less than an Egyptian adoption and amplification of the ancient Aurignacian belief that the soul resided in the bones, and that, if the spirit were to survive, the bones must be carefully preserved. It is obvious that this particular cult must have become amalgamated with the other Aurignacian worship of the bull, therefore it is not surprising to find the religion of Osiris associated with the bull and Osiris himself identified with it.
We find the bull in Egypt primarily regarded as an oracle, its every movement being interpreted as having some special significance. We also find that oxen were sacrificed to it, which clearly indicates that it was regarded as being among that class of animal which is thought of by barbarous people as being the chief or "king" of his "people." The Indian tribes of America, for example, were wont to pray to the Great Deer to send his "people" as prey to them, and he was placated whenever a deer was killed. In like manner certain barbarous fishing populations entreated the Great Fish to send shoals of his subjects into their nets. In ancient Peru a Great Potato Mother was worshipped as the prototype of all potatoes, a Maize Mother as the progenitor of the maize plant, and so forth. It seems probable then that the Aurignacians had been in the habit of worshipping a Great Bull who kept them supplied with meat, and that this notion gradually passed into Egypt, whose people probably did not understand or had forgotten its original significance.
We find the Osirian worship linked up with that of the bull by the practice of embalming and mummifying the dead Apis bull, the remains of numerous Apis animals having been discovered in the famous Serapeum.
This worship of Serapis or Osiris-Apis spread from Egypt throughout Europe, was adopted by Rome, and finally reached Britain, where a great temple to the dual god was built at York. But it must have met on British soil with a similar faith, with which, perhaps, it amalgamated, for bull-worship and sacrifice had undoubtedly been practised in Britain for centuries. The bull was worshipped by the Celts and its immolation was part of the Druidic ceremonial, as the old Welsh Triads show.
In Scotland its figure is graven on many of the ancient Pictish stones, and these are associated with religious symbols. So late as the beginning of the seventeenth century more than one Highland Presbytery issued a denunciation of the practice of bull-sacrifice by the peasantry. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence that the cult of the bull had a most ancient and enduring influence in Britain, as is attested not only by the foregoing circumstances, but by the popular sport of bull-baiting, which appears to be nothing more or less than the original rite of bull sacrifice in a state of attrition.
It seems clear, then, that the Atlantean system of bull-worship penetrated into all the countries to which the sunken island had once been contiguous. Students of comparative religion are now beginning to see that any theory which does not allow for the origin of any custom, religious or otherwise, in one especial sphere is scarcely worth credit, and if this be admitted, it is obvious that the origin of bull-worship must be looked for in one especial area. This would imply that bull-worship from Britain to India had an Atlantean genesis. But when it is found that in Spain it was associated with the beginnings of the embalmer's craft, and that in Egypt it was identified with mummification, it will scarcely be doubted that the Egyptian and Aurignacian cults must have had a common beginning. If we believe that the Aurignacians came from Atlantis, we can scarcely doubt that they brought the cult of the bull along with them, and surely we find corroboration of the fact in the Platonic account of Atlantis. Indeed the whole circumstances of the bull-cult, as drawn from the comparative study of its phenomena in Spain France, Britain, Crete and Egypt, are eloquent of its origin in sunken Atlantis, where, according to Plato's details, themselves drawn from an Egyptian source, we also find the worship of the bull in full celebration.
How far Plato's account of bull-sacrifice in Atlantis was sophisticated by a similar sacrifice in the Hellenic worship of Bacchus may be gauged from a brief study of the Bacchic ceremony. In one of his phases an early phase Bacchus appears as a bull. Even in the time of Euripides Bacchus was adored in his bull-form in Macedonia, if not in more cultured Athens, and in the Orphic mysteries the worshipper, before he was made one with Bacchus, devoured the raw flesh of a bull. "That a feast of raw flesh of some sort was traditionally held to be a part of Bacchic ceremonial, " says Miss Jane Harrison in her Prolegomena to the study of Greek Religion "is clear." Firminius Maternus, the Christian father, says of the Cretans: "They tear in pieces a live bull with their teeth, and by howling with discordant shouts through the secret places of the woods, they simulate the madness of an enraged animal." If the bull-eater did not inhabit Athens in the days of Plato, he must have been known there at least, and it seems not improbable that Plato coloured his account of the bull-sacrifices of the Atlanteans by the light of what actually happened in the Orphic mysteries.
The connection of the bull with Poseidon brings us to the question of the personnel of the gods of Atlantis. The bull was the especial symbol of this deity, bulls were sacrificed to him, and when we recall that he was the god of the earthquake as well as of the raging sea, the allegorical connection of the bull with this god seems clear enough. It was undoubtedly regarded from very early times as the embodiment of wrath, the bellowing beast which stamped the earth the earth-shaker, so to speak, affording an excellent animal picture of earthquake and tempest. Perhaps Poseidon was himself originally regarded as a bull, precisely as other gods had originally an animal form, and his massive torso in classical art certainly lends some colour to such an assumption. However that may be, the bull was the beast of Poseidon par excellence.
The gods of Atlantis, though dim enough in all conscience, may yet be gathered into a species of provisional pantheon. Poseidon himself was believed by the Greeks to be a Pelasgian or Asiatic deity somewhat resembling the Assyrian Ea or Dagon, whose fish's tail is so prominent in Assyrian and Babylonian sculpture. This god was also worshipped by the Phoenician people of Carthage, but it seems quite probable that, just as Osiris was of western origin, so was Poseidon. In the first place, he, like all the other Titans, hailed originally from the west, and the greater number of the legends connected with him associate him with western localities. Moreover, we find him in Plato's account most definitely associated with Atlantis, where we are told his temple was the chief seat of worship in the island.
The association of Atlas in a definite group with other gods whose names still cling to existing countries makes it very plain that his own name was not associated with Atlantis by a mere figment of the Platonic imagination. We find him in Greek mythology grouped along with his brother Titans, Albion and Iberius, the giant gods of Britain and Ireland, in a most definite manner. These, it may be assumed, formed a species of archipelagic pantheon. All three were Titans, and, as we know, the Titans were merely western gods. The myth of the Titans in itself is significant for our study. Indeed, it seems to me that this ancient story of giant gods coming from the west and invading Olympus is almost certainly an allegory of the invasion of Europe, or rather of the Mediterranean area, by the gods of an alien religion, and that some such idea not only originated the myth, but that it lingered long in popular consciousness, is plain from the fact that it was one of the most popular subjects in classical art. We find these gods indissolubly connected with the Atlantic area, and the names of at least two of them still connected with the British islands. It is absurd to suppose that the Greeks invented the names of certain gods or Titans and imposed them as protective deities upon Britain and Ireland. In fact it is known that the names Albion and Iberius are of Celtic origin and have reference to tutelary gods. This being so, how are we to account for Atlas? His island has disappeared, yet his name and that of Atlantis remain. Were Britain, which we are told "arose above the azure main/' to sink back to its original place in the bed of the Atlantic, men ten thousand years hence might well doubt her former existence, and the name of her god Albion might be regarded as merely an effort of classical ingenuity to render more probable what all "sensible" people would look upon as a mere myth.
Surely it seems most likely, then, that these very definite notices of a Titanic pantheon which had its origin in the Atlantic area, and the names of which are still attached to certain of the islands over which they presided, arose out of the memory of an ancient and powerful religion which had a widespread influence not only in the then existing Atlantic archipelago, but which overflowed into the Mediterranean area.
Nor is this theory at all weakened when we come to observe the very great sanctity in which the peoples of the Mediterranean held the western oceanic area, for there they placed the locality of the Fortunate Islands and the Gardens of the Hesperides. The earliest Greek poetry situates the abode of the happy departed spirits far beyond the entrance to the Mediterranean, on islands in the midst of the River Oceanus. Pindar, under Orphic influence probably, alludes to them as the destination not only of divine favourites, but of all righteous persons.
There, he says, the gales of Ocean breathe over the Island of the Fortunate, the earth laughs with golden flowers, and the good appear to occupy themselves chiefly in horsemanship and music. The former avocation, it will be remembered, was in high favour among the Atlanteans. In Greek myth the Fortunate Islands are frequently confounded with the Hesperides, or Islands of the Golden Apples, situated on the River Oceanus, or, according to later notions, off the North and West coasts of Africa. Many details added by popular superstition to the state of happiness which the poets taught as existing in the Fortunate Isles, may be found in the second Book of Lucian, and in his Necyomantia.
The notion that the dead betook themselves to the west, may indeed be added to the number of ideas which in another chapter will be found as composing what the writer calls the Atlantean complex, but it is included in this place not only because we are now dealing with the religious part of our subject, but because it is perhaps rather more dubious than the remainder of the proof which seems to justify the former existence of such a complex. There are, however, good grounds for believing that the whole idea of the continued existence of souls after death in the West arose out of the memory of Atlantis. Indeed, we find it believed in by all those races who must have in some degree acquired the Atlantean civilisation. The Celts, whose long association with the Iberians in Spain must have imbued them with the idea, devoutly believed that the abode of the dead was situated in the Atlantic, and we find the Greeks, Romans and Cretans holding the same belief. The very fact that the whole of Western and Mediterranean Europe looked to the west as the location of the great Island of the Dead, is surely sufficient proof that they regarded it as the ancient home from which their religion and culture
had been drawn. Man's paradise, his sacred soil, is always regarded as that spot whence he originally came. We find both the peoples of Palestine and those of Central America taking the utmost pains and undergoing the utmost dangers in order to bury their dead in ancestral soil. We find the Peruvians passionately attached to their Paccarisca or mythical place of origin often a cave or mountain-side and desiring burial within its precincts. The western half of Crete, in Minoan times, was left almost unoccupied because it was regarded as the home of the departed, just as the western islands of Britain were thought of as being haunted by disembodied spirits, just as Britain itself was regarded by a primeval Europe as an island of ghosts. The Egyptians also looked towards the west as the place of the dead. It will not do to attempt to explain this idea by saying that it is natural for Man to regard the west as the place of sleep after life simply because the sun sets there, for we find many races looking towards other parts of the compass as the region of mortality. The Aztecs, for example, regarded the north as the place of souls. The Chinese looked to the east, and we have seen that Hotu Matua, the culture-hero of Easter Island, although he looked to the west when he called to the spirits who hovered over his submerged home, is still associated with the myth which tells how a large archipelago existed three hundred miles east of the island. Quetzalcoatl, too, the culture-hero of Central America, looked eastwards, and many other myths of an Oriental paradise could be supplied.
We find then that not only was there a well-founded memory of the former existence of a great religion in the Atlantic region, but that the locality in which it had flourished had been erected into a paradise by the peoples who had accepted that religion in part. In part, because they regarded its Titanic pantheon as in a measure inimical to their own, and this especially applies to the Hellenic peoples of the eastern Mediterranean, who, less than any others, perhaps, had come under the influence of the Atlantean culture and religion. Our fragmentary knowledge of Carthaginian religion scarcely permits us to say how far this Asiatic people, settled in North-West Africa, had accepted local beliefs regarding Atlantis, but there can be little doubt that, as many classical authors admit, many of the fundamental ideas connected with the religious mysteries of the Mediterranean races, such, for example, as those of the Cabiri, passed through a Carthaginian crucible before they reached Greece, and that they had no connection with that Palestine, whence the Carthaginians came, is clear enough.
We must regard the Atlantean pantheon as being composed not only of Atlas himself, but of his nine brothers, his mother Cleito, and his brother Saturn. These are all more or less connected with the constellations. Atlas himself is alluded to as a great astronomer, which may simply mean that his pantheon was closely associated with the heavenly constellations. Just as the ancient Christian superstition believed that the stars were the fallen angels, and just as the Babylonians associated their gods with certain planets, so possibly the Atlanteans identified their deities with this or that luminary. Hesperus, the son of Atlas, says Diodorus, became the morning star, and his daughters, the Atlantides, became the constellation of the Pleiades, and Saturn, his brother, the planet of that name. Once the idea of personality, of godhead, had been connected with the planets, they were regarded as powerful enchanters or deities, who were constantly striving to direct the actions of man in such a manner as to bring them into harmony with some vaster plan of their own. The idea of a cosmic symphony had been established. Man must work in harmony with the higher powers. This notion, of course, if it is brought out anywhere in the writings of antiquity, appears in those of Plato. A score, of commentaries were written by his successors regarding his beliefs in this respect. In the very works in which he tells the story of Atlantis he outlines these beliefs.
This leads to the assumption that the religion of Atlantis was closely associated with astrology. It has become a truism almost that the ancient science of astrology had its beginnings in the plains of Babylonia, and indeed it is almost a popular belief nowadays that the ziggurats or temple-towers of Chaldea were the world's first observatories. But the study of star-lore must greatly antedate the civilisation of the Euphrates. The immovable brilliance of the fixed stars must have imprinted itself upon the eye and the imagination of Man almost from the first, must have intrigued and puzzled him, or have been accepted by him without emotion as a phenomenon duly to be explained away in terms of myth.
Anything like direct proof that astrology was of western origin is almost entirely lacking. Indeed all the proof seems to lie in the other direction. We know, however, that the Druids of Britain and Ireland were familiar with it, and one as yet almost unexamined system of astrology provides material for thought on the lines that it may have proceeded from Atlantis. The allusion is to the astrology of the Aztecs of Mexico, which has little or no resemblance to that of the Orient, and which, it is not at all improbable, emanated more or less directly from Atlantis. Regarding the manner in which it reached the American continent, along with other manifestations of the Atlantean culture, the reader must be referred to my Atlantis in America. But when we find that the entire Aztec religion was practically built up out of what is known as the Tonalamatl or Calendar, and that many of its gods were practically mere chronological dates, and when we find that this strange religion had no cultural connections whatsoever with the west, but regarded its beginnings as having originated in the east, the importance of its consideration is borne in upon us.
The word tonalamatl means "Book of the Good and Bad Days," and it is primarily a Book of Fate from which the destiny of children born on such and such a day, or the result of any course to be taken or any venture made on any given day, was forecasted by divinatory methods similar to those which have been employed by astrologers in many parts of the world and in all times. It was indeed a book of augury and over its days certain gods presided. These days thus became significant for good or evil, according to the nature of the gods who presided over them or over the precise hour in which a person was born, or any act performed. As in Eastern astrology, a kind of balance was held between good and evil, so that if the god presiding over the day was inauspicious, his influence might in some measure be counteracted by that of the deity who presided over the hour in which a child first saw the light, or an event occurred.
Now the twenty gods who presided over its twenty day-signs are all capable of being identified with certain stars or planets. Quetzalcoatl, for example, can be identified as the planet Venus, and it is notable that several of the gods in this calendar can be equated with certain members of the Atlantean pantheon, Quetzalcoatl, for instance, with Atlas, as has already been demonstrated, and Coatlicue with Cleito, whilst Tlaloc, Tezcatlipoca and Xochiquetzal have all an Atlantean significance, so far as their myths and symbols are concerned, as has been proved in other parts of this work.
We find, too, that the method in which the Aztecs and the Maya of Central America computed the synodic revolutions of the planet Venus has a distinct Atlantean connection, as that planet was particularly identified with the god Quetzalcoatl, who was said to have come from some locality in the Atlantic Ocean, and who, like Atlas, bore the world upon his shoulders. He was also regarded as the inventor of the tonalamatl, which was thus looked upon as the sacred divinitory book or table of a culture-hero who had come from some region in the Atlantic Ocean. This in itself is surely sufficient proof that the astrological system of Mexico either emanated from Atlantis or had Atlantean associations. Its methods are wholly unlike those of the East, and that it had been introduced into America seems plain enough. Greek myth assures us that the Atlantean deities were closely associated with the stars and that Atlas was a great astrologer. When we find him in another form in America, but with the self-same attributes as those of Atlas, and regarded as the creator of the astrological system of Central America (which he carried to its shores) in an Atlantic locality, a good deal of adverse proof will be required to discredit the theory that Central American astrology did not draw its origins from Atlantean sources.
We can imagine the Atlantean religion, then, as associated with a pantheon of Titanic beings and as having a powerful astrological connection. These are no mere surmises, but basic facts. That the early Hellenic, Mediterranean and British religions were also founded on a similar basis is obvious, and it was only in later historical times that notions similar to those which must have obtained in Atlantis began to be overlaid by departmental deities, gods of the virtues and vices, gods of trades and agriculture. The older gods of Europe, like those of Atlantis, were Titanic and eponymous, having a relation to the regions over which they ruled. The Celtic gods of Britain, for example, and of Scotland and Ireland in especial, are known to have been gigantic forms, whose names and legends still haunt many a locality. Practically every mountain in Scotland has its familiar giant. Cornwall overflowed with them, and such names as Scarborough and the Giants' Causeway are eloquent of their former presence. The Scottish mountains harboured Titans, who were great stone-throwers, like the Titans of Central America, and the Fomorians of Ireland were of monstrous height. A careful examination of the giant-lore of Europe undoubtedly brings to light the existence of a former great Titanic pantheon, and it is remarkable that the majority of the legends connected with these gigantic beings speak of them as having come out of the western seas. The Fomorians, as their name implies, are merely "the People out of the Sea," the Greek Titans had the same origin, the giants of Spanish lore almost invariably dwell on islands, and those of Cornwall seem to be associated with sunken Lyonesse. The Anglo-Saxon word, Etin, still found in Scottish legend, is merely the same as Jotunn, the Scandinavian form, and both can be philologically equated with Titan. All these allied words refer back to the Sanskrit root, "tith," "to burn," which shows that the idea of these beings was connected with that of conflagration, or earthquake, and we know from the terms of myth that the Titans were further associated with the forgings of thunder-bolts and terrestrial disturbances. It is not in Greece alone that we find the story of the battle between the gods and Titans. It is substantially outlined in Irish myth in the wars of the Fomorians with the Tuatha de Danaan, and in Britain by the exploits of Arthur and his knights (each of whom can be referred to a plafe in the Celtic pantheon) with the British giants. In the story of Atlantis there can be no doubt we have the origin of these numerous legends. The Atlanteans, the tall Aurignacians, were almost certainly those "giants," and the Azilians, their successors, the giant-worshippers, who invaded Europe at widely different periods, and left behind them so many stories of tall, skin-clad, club-wielding men, who for generations put up a stern fight against newer races until they were killed out or absorbed.
A more exhaustive study of the giant-lore of Europe, and especially of its western portions, would in all probability throw a great flood of light upon the whole circumstances of the Atlantean legend, especially if the central story of the battle between the Titans and the gods and the Atlantean origin thereof were carefully kept in view. It might also have good results as bringing out more specific information regarding the general characteristics of the Titan deities, and thus enlightening us upon the pantheon of Atlantis, whence probably the idea of all had sprung. The giant of European traditon is either a cave-dweller, or has his home in an island or in a castle perched on some craggy height, and the nature of these abodes indicates in some measure the Atlantean origin of the stories connected with them. The British Islands alone are capable of supplying a wealth of illustration to such a thesis, and if these records were carefully examined there is little doubt that the research would be justified by results. The very fact that the eponymous deities of our twin islands, Albion and Iberius, are grouped in classical myth along with the figure of Atlas, the god of Atlantis, should be sufficient to give pause to those who might be dubious regarding the utility of such an examination.
The rites connected with this ancient Titanic religion are by no means well-known, for the very good reason that when it is first recorded in history it is as a dying religion, but one circumstance connected with it obtrudes itself. The great Titanic gods are one and all the possessors of a gigantic appetite. Saturn devours his children. The Dagda, one of the ancient Irish gods, has an appetite which is never satiated, although his porridge pot is ever full. Crom Cruach, another Irish deity, whose statue was overthrown by St. Patrick, can only be appeased by the sacrifice of large numbers of children. The appetite of Gargantua, the Breton giant, who is one of the Gorics of the French peninsula, has become classical through the lively pen of Rabelais, and the giants of Britain and the Jotunn of Scandinavia alike were famous for devouring sheep and oxen whole. It is remarkable, too, that Moloch, a god especially favoured by the Carthaginians a people with many Atlantean memories was a great devourer of children. From the collective idea of these sprang the idea of the ogre that is the Orcus or creature of the lower world, the submerged world. In America we find a similar state of things a belief in an older panthem of giants, indeed a nation of ogres, among the Aztecs, a people especially prone to cannibalism and human sacrifice. Wherever the Atlantean tradition is to be found, indeed, the idea of the immolation of human beings is likewise to be encountered, and although we discover in Plato's account nothing at all which would justify us in saying that the Atlanteans as a race were prone to human sacrifice, it is not too much, in view of what is said regarding their exceeding wickedness, to suppose that they may have been addicted to practices of the kind, especially when we find the rites of the holocaust, and especially of infant sacrifice, associated with the religious beliefs of the people who seem to have emanated from the sunken continent. This idea is in no way incompatible with a very considerable advance in civilisation, as is obvious from all we know of the Aztec religion, and there are certainly many circumstances connected with the Aurignacian culture which might lead us to infer that cannibalism and infant sacrifice were not unknown to its creators.
One religious system which survived into the historical period has certain traits which would seem to connect it with the Atlantean religion, such as it is assumed to have been in the the foregoing pages. The reference is to Druidism. Now it is well known that Druidism was not a religion of Celtic provenance, but of Iberian origin. Caesar, in a well-known passage, remarks that it was thought to have arisen in Britain, and to have been brought thence into Gaul. The Iberians, who seem to have instituted it, were, as has been said before, the direct descendants of the Azilians, one of the waves of Atlantean immigrants, so that it seems more than probable that Druidism was the last phase of an imported Atlantean religion. We know that it was also practised in Spain and in the Canary Islands, the last terrestrial vestiges of Atlantis.
Rice Holmes, writing of Druidism (Ancient Britain, p. 289), says: "It is not unreasonable to believe that the Celts learned it from some non-Aryan people, for there is nothing to show that the Gauls whom the Romans first encountered had ever heard of it."
The Druidic religion, from what we know of it, appears to have had a strong resemblance to the Atlantean. The first notices of it make it clear that in Caesar's time it had become Celticised, but behind the Celtic pantheon there loomed great figures like Merlin and Crom Cruach, the Dagda and Balor, which obviously show that at one time the Druidical religion had boasted of a Titanic pantheon. Moreover the Druids sacrificed human beings, imprisoning them in monstrous idols of wickerwork and burning them alive as an offering to the gods. They also immolated captives for the purpose of divination. One of their chief doctrines was the transmigration of souls, which is often erroneously believed to be a purely Oriental idea. It is thought that the Druids owed their conception of immortality to the influence of Pythagoras, as Diodorus Siculus and Timagenes imply, and Pythagorean symbols, or, properly speaking, one example of them, have been found on a British uninscribed gold coin found at Reculver. But it is strange that if the Druids held the Pythagorean doctrine that it should not be more fully represented in their surviving literature, as found, for example, in the Welsh Triads. The Druidic doctrine of Abred, which alludes to the innermost of three concentric circles representing the totality of being in the Druidic cosmogony, has been taken by some authorities as having reference to the Pythagorean doctrine, but is in reality quite different from that doctrine. The Druids believed that there was an Elysium in the west, which again points to an Atlantean origin for their faith rather than to a Greek one. Rice Holmes says wisely: "If the Druids, as Caesar said, taught that souls passed 'from one person to another' they meant, perhaps, that after death the soul entered a new body the ethereal counterpart of that which it had left behind."
We find, too, that the Druids had a pillar of "orichalcum" or bronze, such as stood in the temple of Poseidon in Atlantis. This pillar was discovered at the end of last century at Coligny, in the department of the Am. It is a calendar engraved with lucky and unlucky days according to the revolutions of the moon, and the language in which it is couched is the subject of dispute, some authorities holding that it is Celtic, while others believe it to be Ligurian. The Ligurians were a people utterly different from the Celts, having affiliations with the older populations of France. Moreover we find that the Druids, according to Pliny, sacrificed white bulls before cutting the mysterious mistletoe from the oak. It is in the remains of Druid poetry, too, as found in the Welsh Triads, that we discover those recurring notices which manifestly apply to certain phases of Atlantean history. It seems then most probable as has been said, that Druidism was the last phase of the ancient religion of Atlantis.
It has often seemed strange to the writer that European Theosophists should seek to draw and infer the origin of the system they support from Oriental sources, when it must be manifest, as the founder of modern Theosophy upheld, that the very beginnings of the system emanated from Atlantis. It has always seemed to the writer a work of supererogation to seek to prove that the ancient world-religion originated in the East, when in the very lands in which those persons reside who stress its Oriental origin numerous evidences of its past abound. Let Theosophists and mystics generally pay more consideration not only to the evidences of the Atlantean origin of world-religion and philosophy, but make a deeper study of the remains of the Atlantean system as observed in Druidism, the ancient religion of our own island. To nothing, perhaps, more than mysticism does the old proverb, "Far fowls have fair feathers," seem to apply strikingly to-day, when we find students of the mysterious making deep excursions into the tenets of Vedic, Buddhistic and Egyptian religion and almost entirely neglecting that which is nearer to their hand, at their very doors, so to speak, and the fragments of which can be gleaned from British folklore. It may be argued that no such body of literature as is to be found in the Vedic writings, for instance, or in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, is available to the student. That is a wretched plea, for a literature, if not so extensive, at least equally mystical, is available to him in the Welsh Triads, the Irish legends and the vast epic of the Grail, which contains an extraordinary amount of Druidic reminiscence overlaid by early Christian ideas. Let the Theosophist and the student of world-religion betake himself to the source rather than to the affluents. This is not to say that he should neglect the Indian and Egyptian phases of the subject, but that he should prefer the later Eastern above the earlier Western mysticism has always seemed to the writer as being a curiously perverted choice. We find the germs of a mysticism in Europe among the Aurignacians 25,000 years ago. From that germ sprang the whole process of Egyptian religion, with the associated rites of the embalmer's art. The proof is irrefragable, and should not Mysticism commence the study of its alphabet with the A of Atlantis?