Part 6 The Atlantis Encyclopedia....The Hulluk Miyumko to Lemuria

The Atlantis Encyclopedia

by Frank Joseph

The Hulluk Miyumko The California Miwok name for the Pleiades. The Hulluk Miyumko were female deities who gave birth to “beautiful star chiefs,” just as the Atlantean Daughters of Atlas bore sons who were the first leaders of men. (See Pleiades) 

Hun yecil “The Drowning of the Trees,” identically known to the later Aztecs as HunEsil; an episode from the Mayas’ cosmological book, the Popol Vuh. It tells how survivors of an Atlantic cataclysm built a temple near the banks of the Huehuetan River to thank the gods for their escape. The Hun yecil is associated with the final destruction of Atlantis. 

Huruing Wuhti In the Hopi Indian creation story, they were a pair of women who survived the Great Flood. The Huruing Wuhti were later venerated as mother goddesses, because they gave birth to the Hopi people, suggesting Atlantean culture-bearers and tribal progenitors in the American southwest. Chronologist, Neil Zimmerer, writes that the Huruing Wuhti derived their name from a single survivor of the Atlantis catastrophe, who “fled north with many others to start a new kingdom.” 

Hyades “Rainy” or “Deluge,” these Atlantean Daughters of Atlas became a formation of stars in the night sky. When they appear, another constellation of Atlantises, the Pleiades, is in conjunction with the sun at the time of the rainy season, suggesting the deluge that destroyed Atlantis. 

Hy-Breasail Another name for Atlantis in Celtic myth. Some of the Atlantean Tuatha da Danann, after severe military reverses in Ireland, were said to have returned to Hy-Breasail. As late as the 17th century, the island was still pictured and so named on Irish maps of the mid-Atlantic. As encyclopedist, Anna Franklin, observes, “maps have even existed which usually depict it as round, divided in the centre by a river, leading to comparisons with Atlantis.” She goes on to relate that “a redhot arrow was fired” into Hy-Breasail before it was dragged to the bottom of the ocean by the sea-god, Manannan. This variation of the legend suggests the comet or meteor fall that brought about the final Atlantean destruction, an implication reemphasized by Manannan, the Celtic counterpart of Poseidon. Hy-Breasail may be related to the Norse Yggdrasil that grew at the center of the world, itself reminiscent of the Tree of Life at the center of the Garden of the Hesperides, a Greek variation on the Atlantis theme.

Brazil was named by Portuguese sailors familiar with the story of Hy-Breasail. Their suspicions concerning some connection between the lost island and South America were abundantly confirmed by numerous native folk traditions of a sunken realm from which other white-skinned visitors preceded the modern Europeans in antiquity. (See Garden of the Hesperides, Maia, Tuatha da Danann)

The Hydrophoria An annual festival held in Athens to commemorate the near extinction of mankind during the Great Flood, from which only Deucalion (a nephew of Atlas) and his wife, Pyrrha, survived. The Hydrophoria was intended to propitiate the spirits of the dead who perished in the cataclysm by pouring libations of water, signifying the Deluge, into a hole in the ground. A virtually identical commemoration was conducted in Syria, at Hierapolis, by the Phoenicians, but the name of their flood hero is no longer known. 

The Hydrophoria did not memorialize the final destruction of Atlantis, but a previous period of serious geologic upheaval that caused the migration of many Atlanteans throughout the world, as personified in Deucalion and Pyrrha. While some Atlantologists believe this previous “deluge” was an early or mid-third millennium B.C. partial evacuation of the island nation, others assign it to a period immediately anterior to the sudden flourishing of civilization in many parts of the world, including the Nile Valley, Mesopotamia, the Troad, Crete, the Indus Valley, Yucatan, and so on, around 3100 B.C. (See Haucaypata)

Hyne, Cutcliffe J. Author of The Lost Continent (1900), one of the better fictional portrayals of Atlantis that continues to stand the test of time. Even the professional debunker, L. Sprague De Camp, believed Hyne’s “novel is a competent piece of storytelling: fast, well-constructed, colorful, with the leading characters well-drawn and occasional flashes of grim humor.” The Lost Continent imaginatively describes Atlantis though the adventures of Deucalion, the Greek flood hero. (See Deucalion)

I

Iamblichos An important fourth-century neo-Platonist philosopher who insisted upon the historical validity of Plato’s Atlantis account, but stressed, as did Plato, its allegorical significance. (See Krantor of Soluntum, Plato) 

Iberus A Titan associated by Roman scholars with the Spanish peninsula; hence, Iberia. His identification in non-Platonic myth as the twin brother of Atlas signifies the close relationship between Atlantis and its affiliated kingdom in Spain. (See Gadeiros) 

Igh and Imox Among the Chiapenese, a husband and wife who arrived in Central America across the Atlantic Ocean from their splendid kingdom before it was destroyed by a catastrophic flood.

Ik Literally “breath,” in Mayan, for a glyph comprising a “T” in the center of a square, at the top of which a pair of snakes extend left and right. James Churchward identified “T” as the chief emblem of Mu, symbolizing the Tree of Life venerated at the Pacific civilization. The opposing serpents of the Ik-glyph appear to signify Lemurian spiritual energies and/or cultural influences spreading east and west from the central kingdom, which is itself represented by a square embodying the four cardinal directions. The Mayan “breath” and Mu’s Tree of Life refer to the same concept. (See Churchward, Mu) 

Inanna The Sumerian mother-goddess, who lamented that the souls of the drowned had become fish in the sea during a cataclysmic flood. After the catastrophe, Inanna carried the Tablets of Civilization to the Fertile Crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, where society was reborn. The Hittites worshiped her as Inaras, who annually renewed her virginity in a ritual festival, the Purulli, from which the Jewish “Purim” derived. Inanna was known as Ishtar to the Babylonians.

Infoniwa In Chinese myth, a young king invented civilization on a distant island through the guidance of twin gods, Infoniwa (sometimes Infoniwoo) and Awun. They promised to protect his people by warning them in advance of any impending danger. At the precise center of the kingdom, in a holy shrine, were statues of the divine brothers; if the faces of these statues turned red, they warned, the island would be destroyed. 

For many years, the king and his subjects were virtuous and prosperous. With opulence, however, came greed. The people grew cynical of any spiritual values and laughed at their king’s belief in the gods’ warning as ridiculous superstition. One night, a blasphemous prankster stole into the shrine and, as a joke, daubed the faces of Infoniwa and Awun with red paint. The king, an old man now and the progenitor of many fine offspring, still honored the gods. When he saw their painted statues, he summoned his royal household and ordered an immediate evacuation. Loaded down with all their possessions as they hurriedly made for the royal yacht, the king and his family members were derided in the streets by mobs of insolent people. But as the ship disappeared over the horizon, the island was convulsed by earthquakes and sank with all its inhabitants into the depths of the sea. Meanwhile, the king with his wife and children landed safely on the shore near Shanghai, where they established China’s first imperial dynasty. 

Although Atlantis was on the other side of the world from China, the resemblance of this legend in so many particulars with Plato’s fourth-century B.C. account  argues for a common source. In both the Chinese and Greek versions, the divine founders are twins, while a prosperous, formerly upstanding people degenerate into selfishness and are punished with the inundation of their island kingdom. In most flood myths around the world, only a patriarch with his family and followers survive, because he believed a warning of some kind that was scorned by others. So too, the deluge hero becomes the founding father of a civilization, people, or dynasty, whose descendants assert their legitimacy by tracing their unbroken lineage to him.

Iopus In Virgil’s Aeneid, “long-haired Iopus, pupil of mighty Atlas,” was a Carthaginian leader who learned from the Titan about astronomy; comets (“the fires of heaven”); human origins; meteorology; and the Hyades, daughters of Atlas and, therefore, “Atlantises.” These studies are preeminently Atlantean, even suggestive of the final destruction. Iopus represented the scientific and cultural legacy of lost Atlantis subsequently inherited by the Phoenicians, who used such knowledge to become the foremost mariners of classical times. (See Hyades) 

The Ipurina Flood Story Indians of the Upper Amazon’s Rio Purus describe a deluge of fiery water which long ago burned up the entire rain forest: “On Earth, all was dark as night, and the sun and moon were hidden.” (See Asteroid Theory)

Iraghdadakh Literally “the Old man,” a deluge hero of the Aleut Indians of the Aleutian Archipelago, who repopulated the world after it was devastated by a great flood, by casting stones on the Earth. This was the same method used by the Greek Deucalion and dozens of other flood heroes around the globe, and it points to a common, pre-Christian missionary experience. (See Deucalion) 

Irin Mage In the Tupi-Guarani story of the creation, early humanity was virtually wiped out by a terrible fire from heaven. It was sent from the supreme god, Monan, in punishment for the sins of the world. But a powerful magician, Irin Mage, appeared at the last moment and summoned a worldwide deluge to extinguish the flames. 

In this South American myth is preserved a folk memory of the cometary havoc wrought worldwide immediately prior to the destruction of Atlantis. Chronologer, Neil Zimmerer, writes that Irin Mage “fled Atlantis when the island sank into the sea, and founded the Nation of Tupinamba,” in prehistoric Brazil.

Isla Mujeres The “Isle of Women” is a narrow, small island 7 miles long, about 3 miles offshore at the northeast point of Yucatan. It was named by the Spaniards, who first landed in the 1520s, for the numerous stone statues they found of what they assumed were representations of different women. Actually, the statues—apparently several hundred of them—portrayed various manifestations of a single deity, the lunar-goddess Ixchel, to whom the island was consecrated as a sacred center; hence, its absence of native population. Isla Mujeres was used by the Mayas only as a place of spiritual pilgrimage. 

At the far southern point of the island stands a small, ruined shrine housing the remains of an altar. The site was ransacked and the island’s statues demolished, their fragments tossed into the sea on orders of Catholic friars who condemned such artwork as satanic. In addition to her attributes as the divine patroness of childbirth and prophesy, Ixchel, “the White Lady,” was the mother of the Maya people. They venerated her as the survivor of a great deluge that destroyed her former kingdom in the Atlantic Ocean. As such, her chief places of worship on islands like Isla Mujeres and Cozumel were chosen to reflect her Atlantean origins.(See Ixchel) 

Island of Jewels In Hindu myth, a paradisiacal realm in the eastern Pacific Ocean, from which the founders of the Brahman caste arrived in India during the distant past. The island was hidden by a misty ether known as the akasha, a poetic metaphor for “ancient memory” or “forgetfulness.” Its beaches were formed of powdered gems, and the forests were perpetually in bloom. At the center of the island was located a magnificent palace, where all wishes were granted. (See Mu) 

Isle of the Sun A magnificent island kingdom in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, from which Manco Capac, his wife, and followers fled during a time of wide-spread degeneracy. Their sinful homeland was destroyed in a flood sent as punishment from the gods. Later, the story was transferred to Lake Titicaca and its small island, which was named Isla del Sol after Maco Capac’s oceanic homeland. (See Manco Capac, Pu-Un-Runa) 

Isle Royale A Lake Superior island near Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where many millions of pounds of copper ore were mined by Atlantean entrepreneurs from 3000 B.C. to 1200 B.C. (See Bronze Age) 

Itaba Tahuana The divine ancestor of Haiti’s Taino natives. He married the four winds, who bore him two sets of twins, from whom early humanity descended. Most of them were sinful, so Itaba Tahuana destroyed them with a cataclysmic flood. 

This figure is doubtless a folk recollection of the Atlantean catastrophe, complete with his twin offspring and marriage to the four “winds,” that is to say, the four cardinal directions, placing him at the center of the world. Even Itaba’s name is an obvious derivation of “Atlas.”

Italus According to Plutarch, “some say again that Roma, from whom the city was so-called, was daughter of Italus and Leucaria.” Italus was the Latin version of Atlas, while Leucaria was a sea-goddess, one of the Sirens, an inflection of Leukippe, the first woman of Atlantis. Plato outlined the limits of Atlantean influence in Europe by extending them to western Italy. (See Atlas) 

Itzamna The Mayas’ earliest culture-bearer, the “White Man,” who preceded the arrival of the more famous Kukulcan, or “Feathered Serpent.” The latter appears to have represented survivors from the final destruction of Atlantis, in 1198 B.C. Itzamna was the original founder of Mesoamerican civilization. He and his wife, Ixchel, the “White Lady,” were among immigrants fleeing westward during the late fourth millennium B.C., when their Atlantean homeland was beset with the first in a series of four geologic upheavals. In the Maya cosmology, the Chilam Balam, and Juan Darreygosa’s 16th-century Historia de Zodzil, Itzamna bears the title “Serpent from the East” and is described as “the first after the flood.” He arrived on the eastern shores of the island of Cozumel, where the ruins of several temples to him and Ixchel still stand, just off the Yucatan peninsula. 

Moving to the mainland, he built the first version of Chichen Itza and 140 other ceremonial centers and cities. The Mayas believed Itzamna brought all the arts of civilization to Yucatan after the Great Flood. These included city-planning, astronomy-astrology, agriculture, writing, organized labor, sculpture, mathematics, book-illumination, government, and music. He is portrayed in temple art, such as friezes at the Maya ceremonial center of Tikal, in Guatemala, as a long-nosed, bearded man rowing his boat across the sea from which he came. (See Ixchel)

Ix Chebel Yax The Maya goddess of household affairs and wisdom, she was daughter of Itzamna and Ixchel. As such, Ix Chebel Yax was among the first generation of Yucatan-born Atlantean refugees from the final destruction of their homeland. She taught spinning, weaving, dyeing, and basketry, as learned from her mother, the White Lady—qualities which describe the introduction of civilization to Middle America. 

Ixchel The Mayas’ “White Lady,” who brought the civilized arts of weaving, medicine, and prophesy from her lost kingdom over the Atlantic Ocean after a great flood. Both she and her Aztec incarnation, Coyolxauqui, were symbolized by a crystal skull, signifying their special relationship to the moon (the heavenly crystal skull) and, hence, psychic powers. In temple art and surviving codexes, Ixchel is depicted angrily wielding a sky-serpent, or comet, with which she threatens to bring about a deluge for the destruction of a sinful mankind. Other portrayals show her overturning a vase to drench the world with water, likewise suggesting the flood. In the Codex Mendoza, Ixchel appears with her husband, Itzamna, the “White Man,” riding the flood toward Yucatan, her baggage spilling out on the waves. Her myth unmistakably describes Ixchel as a culture-bearer from Atlantis. (See Crystal Skull, Itzamna) 

Ix Pucyola An obscure sea-deity, perhaps the Mayan name for Atlantis. Ix Pucyola means “She, the Destroyer in the Heart of Water.”

Izanagi and Izanami The Japanese creators of all life on Earth. From the Celestial Bridge, or Milky Way, Izanagi stirred the ocean with his jeweled spear. Out of the agitated waters arose the island of Onogoro, where he built an octagonal tower located at the center of the world. Afterwards, while giving birth to fire, Izanami died and went to the Underworld. In mourning for his wife, Izanagi undertook a quest to find her, but she could not return with him because she had tasted a single fruit grown in the dark kingdom. Henceforward, she became the Queen of the Land of the Dead. 

This is almost precisely the Western legend of Persephone, an allegorical myth for the fundamental tenet of eternal rebirth belonging to the Atlantean Navel of the World mystery cult. It appears again in the octagonal tower, its eight sides representing the cardinal and sub-cardinal directions defining the sacred center. 

The resemblance of this Japanese couple to another pair of founders in ancient Mexico is an additional theme connecting Atlantis. Izanagi and Izanami compare with Itzamna and Ixchel, the husband-and-wife creators of Maya civilization, who arrived at the shores of Yucatan following a terrible deluge.

J

Jacolliot, Louis French scholar (1837 to 1890) who collected local and regional myths during a long sojourn through India, where his fluency in Sanskrit enabled him to read about Rutas, a great and highly cultured kingdom that sank beneath the Pacific Ocean in the deeply ancient past. Returning to France, Jacolliot published his findings in Historie des Vierges, to popular acclaim. (See Rutas) 

Jambu A Tantric version of mankind’s birthplace in the “Island of the Blest,” perhaps the most common epithet for Atlantis. Also regarded as the “Land of the Rose Apple Tree,” the Hesperides’ Atlantean Tree of Life, Jambu was similarly circular in configuration, with the god Shiva’s “Diamond Seat” at the island’s sacred center. Shiva is the Hindu Poseidon, whose “seat,” a chariot, was set up in the center of Atlantis.

The S.S. Jesmond A ship associated with the controversial discovery of Atlantis in 1882. On March 1, the 1,465-ton steam schooner was on a routine transatlantic voyage bound from France to New Orleans with a cargo of dried fruit, when Captain David Amory Robson observed “the singular appearance of the sea” some 200 miles southwest of Madeira. Great billows of mud clouded the water, together with a vast carpet of dead fish numbering an estimated .5 million tons spread over 7,500 square miles. At the same moment, a slight submarine volcanic eruption was reported by monitoring stations in the Azores and Canaries. 

The following morning, the Jesmond, still on course, was confronted by an unknown island that gave every indication of having just risen from the sea. It was large, about 30 miles across from north to south, and mountainous, with a smoldering volcano. Captain Robson led a small landing party to investigate the new island. Black basalt predominated, and a fine ooze, with millions of dead fish, seemed to cover everything. The place was utterly barren and cut by numerous fissures, from which steam rose constantly. By accident, one of the sailors found a flint arrowhead. Excited by this discovery, the men began randomly digging. Almost at once, they shoveled up many more arrowheads, together with a few small knives.

Robson returned on March 3 with ship’s tools and 15 volunteers. Before nightfall, they unearthed the stone statue of a woman; it was a bas-relief sculpted into one side of an oblong rock and slightly larger than life-size, heavily encrusted with marine growth. Further inland, the men came upon two walls of unmortared stone. Nearby, they excavated a sword made of some unfamiliar yellow metal, followed by a number of spear-heads, ax-heads, and metal rings. Finally came pottery figures of birds and other animals, plus two large flat-bottom jars containing bone fragments and a virtually intact human skull. With weather deteriorating, Captain Robson brought the finds aboard his vessel, marked the island’s position (latitude 250 North, longitude 230 40’ West), then hoisted anchor. He arrived in New Orleans at noon, March 31. 

The Jesmond’s encounter was described first in a front page story of a local periodical, then quickly syndicated to more than a dozen newspapers across the country. A reporter for the New Orleans’ Times-Picayune wrote that the artifacts, which he personally handled, did not impress him as fakes, and he wrote that the Captain offered to “show the collection to any gentleman who is interested.” On May 19, Robson returned to London—without his finds, the whereabouts of which have not been known since. Lawrence D. Hill, whose investigation of the Jesmond incident is the most thorough, concluded that the sword and other metal objects were tumbaga, an alloy 80 percent gold and 20 percent copper. Robson, writes Hill, had the artifacts melted down and split the resultant gold with his crew. The ship’s log was discarded by the British Board of Trade in keeping with its policy of destroying such documents after seven years.

The episode was not a hoax, because the mysterious island was sighted at the same location by James Newdick, captain of another steamer, the Westbourne, sailing for Marseilles out of New York. Moreover, as mentioned previously, an undersea seismic event was simultaneously recorded in the Azore and Canary Islands. The location of the arisen island, although within the immediate sphere of Atlantean influence, implies it was not actually Atlantis itself, but probably the scene of a colony or closely allied kingdom. 

Some internal evidence in the Jesmond story supports an Atlantean interpretation: Hill believed the metal sword Captain Robson found was tumbaga, which is as much as saying it was orichalcum; this is a term Plato uses to define an alloy technique metalsmiths used in Atlantis, when they combined rich copper with gold. 

A modern undersea research expedition to the position recorded by Captain Robson seems justified.

Job Regarded as the oldest book in the Hebrew bible, 26:5–6 recounts, “The primeval giants tremble imprisoned beneath the waters with their inhabitants. The unseen world [the bottom of the sea] lies open before them, and the place of destruction is uncovered.” These enigmatic references appear to describe the Atlanteans, described by Plato as Titans, and sunken Atlantis in “the unseen world.” 

Jormungandr The name of the Midgaard Serpent in Norse myth and a metaphor for geologic violence particularly associated with the mid-Atlantic Ocean. Jormungandr dwelt under the sea. Whenever he tightened his coils about the world, earthquakes and tempests lashed out. In the Twilight of the Gods (Goetterdaemmerung or Ragnarok), the monster’s death agonies caused a worldwide flood, part of the universal destruction that ended a former age of greatness. 

Jubmel Laplanders of the remote Arctic Circle remember a terrible god of vengeance who, like Zeus in Plato’s story of Atlantis, wanted to punish all human beings for their wickedness. Their myth contains some of the most colorful descriptions of a falling comet and the awful flood that Jubmel generated: 

The lord of heaven himself descended. His terrifying anger flashed with the red, blue and green of serpents, all on fire. Everyone went into hiding, while the children wept with fear. The god spoke in his anger, “I shall gather the sea together upon itself, form it into a towering wall of water and throw it against you wicked children of the Earth, exterminating you and all living things!” Foaming, crashing, rising to the sky rushed the wall of water over the sea, crushing everything in its path, until neither mountains nor highlands were revealed any longer by the sun, which could not shine in heaven. The groans of the dying filled the Earth, mankind’s home, and dead bodies rolled about in the dark waters.

K

Ka’ahupahau A Hawaiian goddess who dwells in a cave, where she guards the waters off Oahu, near the entrance to Pearl Harbor, against man-eating sharks. Ka’ahupahau was widely believed to have alerted the captain of an American destroyer, who sank a Japanese mini-submarine—a kind of 20th-century shark—endeavoring to attack the U.S. naval installation on December 7, 1941. She is described as a fair skinned woman with long, wavy, light-colored hair, one of several mythic personalities suggesting racially alien visitors to Polynesia in the ancient past from Lemuria. (See Lemuria) 

Kaboi A flood hero revered by the Karaya Indians, whose ancestors he led into a massive cave as a place of refuge. After the waters retreated, they followed him back into the world and were guided by the song of a bird. This bird motif recurs in several deluge traditions around the world, not only in Genesis. Kaboi is familiar throughout South America, known as Ka-mu to the Arawaks, Ta-mu to the Caribs, Kame to the Bakairi, and Zume to the Paraguayans.

Kadaklan Founder of Burotu, the Melanesian version of Lemuria. (See Burotu, Lemuria) 

Kahiki The splendid, vanished island kingdom from which Lono, the white-skinned culture-bearer, arrived in ancient Hawaii. Kahiki is a Polynesian variant of the lost civilization of the Pacific better known as Mu or Lemuria. (See Lono, Lemuria, Mu) 

Kaimanawa Wall Located immediately south of Lake Taupo, on New Zealand’s North Island, the stone structure is more probably a step pyramid or terraced, ceremonial platform of the kind found throughout ancient Polynesia, although among the very largest examples. Childress, who investigated the site in 1996 when it came to the attention of the outside world, wrote (in A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Armageddon) that: 

...the blocks seem to be a standard one point-eight meters long by one point-five meters high. The bottom block runs straight down to one point-seven meters and beyond. The stone is local ignimbrite, a soft volcanic stone made of compressed sand and ash. The nearest outcrop of such stone is five kilometers away. The blocks run for twenty five meters in a straight line from east to west, and the wall faces due north. The wall consists of approximately ten regular blocks that are seemingly cut and fitted together without mortar (119). 

For lack of any datable material, the Kaimanawa Wall’s age is elusive. Century old trees growing through the structure predate it to prehistory, but the Maori, who arrived in New Zealand 700 years ago, were not its builders, because they never erected monumental structures. It may have been raised more than 2,000 years ago by the Waitahanui, whose elders apparently preserve some knowledge of the ramparts. 

The Kaimanawa Wall is almost certainly a Lemurian ruin, part of a ceremonial center created by missionaries or survivors from Mu. (See Mu, Waitahanui)

Kalevala “Land of Heroes,” the national epic of the Finnish people, a 19th-century collection of pre-Christian ballads, lyrical songs, incantations and oral traditions.

The Kalevala describes an ancient cosmic disaster, in which a “fire from heaven” devastates much of the world, causing unprecedented earthquakes and unusually high tides in Finland. 

Kanamwayso In Micronesian myth, a splendid kingdom from which sorcerers very long ago sailed throughout the Pacific. The stone ruins at Nan Madol, on the island of Pohnpei, are allegedly the remnants of their work. 

Falling stars and earthquakes were responsible for setting Kanamwayso aflame and dropping it to the bottom of the ocean, where it is inhabited by the spirits of those who perished in the cataclysm, who still preside over the ghosts of all persons who perish at sea. (See Mu) 

Katkochila When mortals stole the magic flute of this Wintun Indian god, he devastated the Earth with a “fire from heaven” extinguished only by a universal flood that killed off most mankind. Katkochila’s South American tradition is in common with deluge stories everywhere—namely, human irreverence punished with celestial fire and earthly inundation. 

Kaveripoompattinam Described in the “Manimekalai,” the Tamil epic, as a harbor city preceding the birth of civilization on Sri Lanka, Kaveripoompattinam slipped beneath the Indian Ocean, where its ghostly ruins are still alleged to lie not far from the shore at Poompuhar. 

Kesara Queen of the Fomorach and the first ruler of Ireland. She arrived with her followers from Atlantis in the late fourth millennium B.C. during a period of severe geologic upheavals that generated similar migrations to various parts of the world. 

Kircher, Athanasius German polymath of the 17th century, this Jesuit priest was a pioneering mathematician, physicist, chemist, linguist, and archaeologist; the first to study phosphorescence; inventor of, among numerous futuristic innovations, the slide projector and a prototype of the microscope. The founding father of scientific Egyptology, his was the first serious investigation of temple hieroglyphs. 

Kircher was also the first scholar to seriously investigate the Atlantis legend. Initially skeptical, he cautiously began reconsidering its credibility while assembling mythic traditions of numerous cultures in various parts of the world about a great flood. “I confess for a long time I had regarded all this,” he said of various European traditions of Atlantis, “as pure fables to the day when, better instructed in Oriental languages, I judged that all these legends must be, after all, only the development of a great truth.” 

His research led him to the immense collection of source materials at the Vatican Library, where, as Europe’s foremost scholar, its formidable resources were at his disposal. It was here that he discovered a single piece of evidence which proved to him that the legend was actually fact. Among the relatively few surviving documents from Imperial Rome, Kircher found a well-preserved, treated leather map purporting to show the configuration and location of Atlantis. The map was not Roman, but brought in the first century A.D. to Italy from Egypt, where it had been executed. It survived the demise of Classical Times, and found its way into the Vatican Library. Kircher copied it precisely, adding only a visual reference to the New World, and published it in his book, Mundus Subterraneus: The Subterranean World, in 1665. 

His caption states it is “a map of the island of Atlantis originally made in Egypt after Plato’s description,” which suggests it was created sometime following the 4th century B.C., perhaps by a Greek mapmaker attached to the Ptolemies. More probably, the map’s first home was the Great Library of Alexandria, where numerous books and references to Atlantis were lost, along with another million plus volumes, when the institution was burned by religious fanatics. In relocating to Rome, the map escaped that destruction.

Similar to modern conclusions forced by current understanding of geology in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, Kircher’s map depicts Atlantis, not as a continent, but an island about the size of Spain and France combined. It shows a large, centrally located volcano, most likely meant to represent Mount Atlas, together with six major rivers, something Plato does not mention. Kritias describes large rivers on the island of Atlantis, but does not indicate how many. Although the map vanished after Kircher’s death in 1680, it was the only known representation of Atlantis to have survived the Ancient World. Thanks to his research and book, it survives today in a close copy. Kircher was the first to publish a map of Atlantis, probably the most accurate of its kind to date. 

Curiously, it is depicted upside down, contrary to maps in both his day and ours. Yet, this apparent anomaly is proof of the map’s authenticity, because Egyptian mapmakers, even as late as Ptolemaic times, designed their maps with the Upper Nile Valley located in the south (“Upper” refers to its higher elevation) at the top, because the river’s headwaters are located in the Sudan. 

Kitchie Manitou The Muskwari Indians of North America recounted that this widely known god destroyed the world first with heavenly fire, then a great flood. The Potawatomi version, like Plato’s account, cites the immorality of the inhabitants of a great island. Kitchie Manitou had made their homeland a veritable paradise, but because men became “perverse, ungrateful and wicked,” he sank it, drowning the sinners. Only one man and his wife survived by escaping “in a big canoe.” 

Kleito Literally “famous,” or “splendid.” According to Plato, she was an early inhabitant of the Atlantic island that would eventually become Atlantis. After the death of her parents, Kleito was visited by the sea-god Poseidon. Their children—five sets of twin boys—formed the royal house that ruled Atlantis until its destruction. Her home was on a hill not far from the sea and south of a prominent mountain. It was here that Poseidon encircled her dwelling place, thereby defining it as a holy precinct, with a concentric canal. Two others were later added to form three additional land rings, from and around which the city of Atlantis grew over the centuries.

Kleito represents the pre-civilized natives of the Atlantic island, just as Poseidon less certainly may signify the arrival of an early sea-people already in possession of the civilized arts. A shrine dedicated to her was certainly the oldest structure on Atlantis, and preserved at its central, most sacred island. It might have been simply an ancestral monument or the chapel for an unknown religion, one of many cults practiced by the Atlanteans, but certainly its most venerable. 

Kmukamtch The Klamath Indians of south-central Oregon and northern California say this shining demon from the sky endeavored to destroy the Earth with a celestial flame followed by a worldwide deluge. In mythic traditions among numerous cultures, a frightening comet is often described as a bright demon or angry god. Among the California Modoc, Kmukamtch is, literally “the Ancient Old Man from Mu,” the creator of mankind (See Hathor, Mu) 

Kodoyanpe The ancestral flood hero of California’s Maidu Indians and creator of the first human beings from wooden images. 

Krakatoa A 6,000-foot (above sea-level) volcano on Pulau Rakata Island in the Sunda Straits of Indonesia. At 10 a.m., on August 27, 1883, Krakatoa exploded, sending ash clouds to an altitude of 50 miles, and generating shock waves registered around the Earth several times. The detonation could be heard in Australia, 2,200 miles away. Some 5 cubic miles of rock debris were discharged, and ash fell over 300,000 square miles. The volcanic mountain collapsed into the sea, spawning tsunamis (destructive waves) as far away as Hawaii and South America, reaching heights of 125 feet, and claiming 36,000 human lives on Java and Sumatra. Krakatoa’s geological history not only makes the destruction of Atlantis credible through close comparison, but demonstrates how the Earth energies common to both events were brought about.

Krantor of Soluntum A 4th-century neo-Platonist, a contemporary and colleague of Iamblichus, who played a important part in confirming Plato’s account of the sunken civilization by personally traveling to the Nile Delta, where he found the same Temple of the Goddess Neith, inscribed with identical information presented in the Dialogues. (See Iamblichos, Plato, Solon) 

Krimen South America’s Tupi-Guarani Indians tell how three brothers—Coem and Hermitten, led by Krimen—escaped the Great Flood, first by hiding in caves high up in the mountains, then by climbing trees. As in the Greek version of Atlantis, the brother motif plays a central role. 

Kritias The second of two Dialogues composed by the Greek philosopher, Plato, describing the rise and fall of Atlantis, left unfinished a few years before his death in 348 B.C. The text is formed from a conversation (more of a monologue) between his teacher and predecessor, Socrates, and Kritias, an important fifthcentury B.C. statesman. He begins by saying that the events described took place more than 9,000 years before, when a far-flung war between the Atlantean Empire and “all those who lived inside the Pillars of Heracles” (the Mediterranean) climaxed with geologic violence. The island of Atlantis, according to Kritias, was greater in extent than Libya and Asia combined, but vanished into the sea through a series of earthquakes “in a day and a night.” Before its destruction, it ruled over an imperial system from the “Opposite Continent” in the far west, to Italy in the central Mediterranean, including other isles in its sphere of influence and circum Atlantic coastal territories. 

The beginnings of this thalassocracy occurred in the mythic past, when the gods divided up the world between themselves. As part of his portion, Poseidon was given the Atlantean island. Its climate was fair, the soil rich, and animals— even elephants—were in abundance. There were deep forests, freshwater springs, and an impressive mountain range. The island was already inhabited, and Poseidon wed a native woman. The sea-god prepared a place for her by laying the foundations of a magnificent, unusual city. He created three artificial islands separated by concentric moats, but interconnected by bridged canals. At the center of the smallest, central island stood his wife’s original dwelling place on a hill, and it was here that the Temple of Poseidon was later erected, together with the imperial palace nearby. 

Poseidon sired five sets of twin sons on the native woman, and named the island after their firstborn, Atlas. These children and their descendants formed the ruling family for many generations, and built the island into a powerful state, primarily through mining. The completed city is described in some detail, with emphasis on the kingdom’s political and military structures. Although their holdings kept expanding in all directions, the Atlanteans were a virtuous people ruled by a beneficent, law-conscious confederation of monarchs. In time, however, they were corrupted by their wealth and became insatiable for greater power. The Atlanteans built a mighty military machine that stormed into the Mediterranean World, conquering Libya and threatening Egypt, but were soundly defeated by Greek forces and driven back to Atlantis. 

Kritias breaks off abruptly when Zeus, observing the action from Mount Olympus, convenes a meeting of the gods to determine some terrible judgement befitting the degenerate Atlanteans.

Kukulcan The Mayas’ version of the “Feathered Serpent,” known throughout Middle America as the leading culture-bearer responsible for Mesoamerican civilization. According to their epic, the Popol Vuh, he was a tall, light-eyed, bearded, blond (“his hair was like corn silk”) visitor from his homeland, a great kingdom across the Atlantic Ocean. It reports that he arrived at the shores of Yucatan on a “raft of serpents,” perhaps a ship decorated with serpentine motif, or as Dr. Thor Heyerdahl suggested, a vessel whose reed hull twisted in the waves like writhing snakes.

Kukulcan was accompanied by a group of wise men who taught the natives astrology-astronomy, city-planning, agriculture, literature, government, and the arts. He put an end to human and animal sacrifice, saying that the gods accepted only flower offerings. Unfortunately, the Mayan words for “flower” and “human heart” were almost indistinguishable, and the Mayas eventually returned to human sacrifice and ritual removal of the heart. Kukulcan was much beloved and built the first cities in Yucatan. In time, however, he got into political trouble of some kind, and disgraced himself through drunkenness and sexual excesses, the common course of civilizers alone (or almost) among so-called primitive natives. He was forced to leave, much to the distress of most people. They wept to see him board his ship again, but he promised that either he himself or his descendant would come back someday. With that, he sailed, not to his homeland in the east, but into the Pacific Ocean, toward the setting sun. 

Kukulcan was doubtless an important, though not the only nor necessarily the first, culture-bearer from Atlantis, probably before the final destruction of that city, because the Mayas’ account makes no mention of any natural disaster. They portrayed him in temple art as a figure supporting the sky , the archetypical Atlas. In any case, Kukulcan represents the arrival of Atlantean culture-bearers in Middle America.

Kuksu Revered by South America’s Maidu and Pomo Indians as the creator of the world, he later, in response to the wickedness of mankind, set the Earth ablaze with celestial flames, then extinguished the conflagration with an awful deluge. Such native versions, while similar to the biblical version, differ importantly with the addition of a “fire from heaven” immediately preceding but inextricably bound to the flood. 

A North American tribe known by the same name told of a turquoise house on a large island, long ago, on the other side of the western horizon. Before it was gradually engulfed by the Pacific Ocean, sorcerers who lived in the house took ship for California, where their descendants still make up a shamanistic society among the Kuksu.

Kumari Kandam In Tamil tradition, the “Land of Purity,” a sophisticated kingdom of high learning, south of Cape Comorin, in the distant past. Like Mount Atlas, after which Atlantis derived its name, Kumari Koddu, the great peak of Kumari Kandam, gave its name to the “Virgin Land.” During a violent geologic catastrophe, Kumari Koddu collapsed into the Indian Ocean, dragging the entire island kingdom to the bottom of he sea. Survivors migrated to the subcontinent, where they sparked civilization in the Indus Valley. (See Mu) 

Kumulipo A Hawaiian creation chant in which the kumu honua, or origins of the Earth, are described in connection with a splendid island, where humans achieved early greatness, but were mostly destroyed by a terrible flood, “the overturning of the chiefs.” The Kumulipo is a folk memory of the Pacific Ocean civilization overwhelmed by natural catastrophe, as affirmed by repeated references to Mu.

Kung-Kung A flying dragon in the Chinese story of creation, which caused the Great Flood by toppling the pillars of heaven with his fiery head. In the traditions of other ancient peoples, most particularly the Babylonians, sky-borne dragons are metaphors for destructive comets. (See Asteroid Theory)

Kurma The avatar of Vishnu, in Vedic myth, as a turtle in the “second episode” of the deluge story. Following the cataclysm, Kurma dove to the bottom of the sea, where he found treasures lost during the Great Flood. He returned with them to the surface, and led the survivors to life in a new land. Remarkably, his myth is virtually identical to numerous Native American versions—Ho Chunk, Sioux, Sauk, and so on—which refer to the North American Continent as “Turtle Island” after the giant turtle that saved their ancestors from drowning in the Great Flood. 

Kusanagi A magical sword originally belonging to Sagara, a dragon- or serpent-god living in an opulent palace at the bottom of the sea. It passed for some time among various members of Japan’s royal household, to whom it brought victory, but was eventually returned to its rightful owner. The Kusanagi sword appears to have been a mythic symbol for some technological heirloom from lost Lemuria. Sagara also possessed the Pearl of Flood, able to cause a terrible deluge at his command.

Kuskurza Flood hero of the Hopi Indians in the American Southwest. He and his people fled the cataclysmic destruction of their magnificent homeland formerly located far out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. As the flood began to rise, Kuskurza led them westward from island to sinking island until they reached safety on the eastern shores of North America. The Hopi account of what appears to be the Atlantean catastrophe reads in part, “Down on the bottom of the seas lie all the proud virtue, and the flying patuwvotas, and the worldly treasures corrupted with evil, and those people who found no time to sing praises to the Creator from the tops of their hills.” (See Hemet Maze Stone, Vimana)

L

Ladon The serpent who guards the Tree of Life in the Garden of the Hesperides, scene of a mystery cult in Atlantis known as “The Navel of the World.” When Ladon entwines his length around its bough he becomes the Kundalini snake winding about the human spinal column, the symbolic force of rising consciousness and spiritual power. The Golden Apples of immortality he protects are the fruits of enlightenment. These concepts, so long associated with Eastern thought, originated in Atlantis, where even their appearance in classical Greek myth still predated Buddhism by centuries. Ladon was also the name of a Trojan warrior, another linguistic connection between the Trojans and their Atlantean ancestry.

Lak Mu-ang A pillar venerated in its own small shrine at the spiritual center of Thailand, in the capital city of Bangkok. It is a copy of the original brought to southeast Asia by the Thens from their drowned homeland in the Pacific Ocean. They managed to carry away just one column that belonged to the most important temple in Lemuria before the entire structure was engulfed by the sea. Arriving on the shores of what much later became Thailand, the Thens set up the Lak Mu-ang at the center of their new capital, Aiyudiya. During centuries of subsequent strife, the city was sacked and its sacred souvenir lost, but memory of it persisted with the relocation of various Thai capital cities, each one erecting a simulacrum of the original pillar. 

In 1782, King Rama I, who traced his royal descent from the lost motherland of Mu, erected a ceremonial column at the precise center of the city. The original La Mu-ang was so ancient, however, no efforts succeeded to preserve it against decay, and it was eventually replaced with a replica by Rama VI. Today’s Bangkok Lak Mu-ang is continually decorated with gold-leaf by anyone wishing to pay homage to their country’s sacred center. The shrine itself is decorated with symbols and images of the Lemurian homeland from which the column was brought so long ago, such as stylized swastikas and scenes of a tropical island suggestive of the land of Mu itself. The small shrine in which it stands is an elaborate pavilion with intricate gold-in layed doors and is set, untypically, below ground level in a sunken court, suggesting the undersea condition of the civilization from which the pillar was taken. 

The name recurs at important monumental sites in Thailand: Mu-ang Fa Daet, Ban Mu-ang Fai, Mu-ang semay, and Mu-ang Bon, where the original Lak Mu-ang may have been installed by immigrants from Mu. (See Thens)

Lam Abubia The “Age Before the Flood,” preserved by Babylonian and Assyrian scribes from their Sumerian predecessors, it described a highly advanced land of wise men and sorcerers who ruled the world until a natural catastrophe annihilated their oceanic kingdom. Only a few survivors managed to reach Mesopotamia, where they worked with native residents to build civilization anew. 

Lankhapura In ancient Hindu tradition, the capital of a great empire believed to have been swallowed by the sea toward the end of the Treta yuga, 1621 or 1575 B.C. Lankhapura’s demise corresponds with the cataclysmic eruption of Thera, in the Aegean, and the penultimate destruction of Atlantis. 

Lapita People An archaeological term for a sophisticated culture that flourished throughout the western Pacific for 1,000 years after 1500 B.C. The Lapita People are associated with the survivors of Mu, who dispersed after its destruction in the 16th century B.C.

Lara Along with thousands of other refugees, he escaped the late fourth-millennium B.C. seismic upheavals of Atlantis to settle with his wife, Balma, in Ireland, where these earliest Atlantean immigrants were known as the Fomorach. Lara was the son of their leader, Fintan.

Law of One According to Edgar Cayce, this monotheistic cult arose in Atlantis as a reaction to the Followers of Belial, who made a religion of materialism. Tenets of the Law of One included social service for the less fortunate, acts of charity, abstinence, and humility. Although more of a social service creed than a theology with any original spiritual ideas, Cayce regarded it as a forerunner of Christianity. In any case, both the Law of One and its opposite number in the Followers of Belial were symptoms of the overall decline of Atlantean civilization during its final phase, when the former quest for enlightenment degenerated into a narrow minded religious struggle for ascendancy. The Followers of Belial finally triumphed politically, only to have the technology they idolized blow up in their faces. Both sides were intolerant of opposing views, and together they contributed, despite their intense mutual animosity, to the social chaos of Atlantis in its latter days. (See Cayce)

le Cour, Paul French professional Atlantologist who, in 1926, stated that Atlantis was not a “continent,” but a large island not far outside the Strait of Gibraltar. 

Lemmings Every three or four years, hundreds of thousands of lemmings (Lemmus lemmus) head away from the Norwegian coasts, swimming far out into the Atlantic Ocean, where they thrash about in a panicky search for dry land, then drown. The small rodents do not begin to move in packs, but usually head out individually, their numbers growing into a large mass. After rejecting overpopulation versus food resources as the cause, animal behaviorists do not understand why the self-destructive migrations take place. But it is the singular manner in which the process occurs that points to something special in their migratory pattern. 

Lemmings have a natural aversion to water and hesitate to enter it. When confronted by rivers or lakes, they will swim across them only if seriously threatened, and otherwise move along the shore or bank. Their mass-migrations into the ocean dramatically contradict everything known about the creatures. Natural scientists recognize that lemmings seek land crossings whenever possible, and tend to follow paths made by other animals and even humans. Their suicidal instinct may be a persistent behavioral pattern set over thousands of years ago, when some land-bridge, long since sunk, connected the Norwegian coast to a former island in the Atlantic. The other three lemming genera (Dicrostonyx, Myopus, and Synaptomys), whose habitats have no conjectured geographical relationship to such an island, do not participate in migratory mass-suicides. 

Nostophilia is a term used to describe the apparent instinct in certain animals which migrate to locations often very great distances from their usual habitat. Perhaps some behavioral memory of a large, lost island that for countless generations previously sheltered and nurtured the lemmings still survives in the evolutionary memories and compelling instincts of their descendants.

Lemuel Literally, the “king” (el) of Lemu(ria), the contemporary civilization of Atlantis in the Pacific. His royal identity is underscored in the Old Testament (Proverbs, viii, 31), where he is described as a monarch. The 18th-century American revolutionary, Thomas Paine, wrote in The Age of Reason that the verse in which he appears “stands as a preface to the Proverbs that follow, and which are not the proverbs of Solomon, but of Lemuel; and this Lemuel was not one of the kings of Israel, nor of Judah, but of some other country, and consequently a Gentile” (134). The Lemurians reputedly proselytized the tenets of their spirituality far and wide, so the biblical “proverbs” associated with King Lemuel may have been remnants of Pacific contacts in deep antiquity. (See Lemuria)

Lemuria An ancient civilization of the Pacific predating both the emergence and destruction of Atlantis. The name derives from a Roman festival, celebrated every May 9, 11, and 15, to appease the souls of men and women who perished when Lemuria was destroyed by a natural catastrophe. These dates probably represent the days during which the destruction took place. The Lemuria festival was believed to have been instituted by the founder of Rome, Romulus, as expiation for the murder of his twin brother, Remus. During the observance, celebrants walked barefoot, as though they had fled from a disaster, and went through their homes casting black beans behind them nine times in a ritual of rebirth; black beans were symbolic of human souls which were still earthbound (that is, ghosts), while 9 was a sacred numeral signifying birth (the nine months of pregnancy).

The ritual’s objective was to honor and exorcise any unhappy spirits which may haunt a house. This part of the Roman Lemuria is identically observed by Japanese participants in the Bon Festival, or “Feast of Lanterns,” when the head of the household walks barefoot through each room of his home exclaiming, “Bad spirits, out! Good spirits, in!” while casting beans behind him.

Obviously, both ancient Rome and Japan received a common tradition independently from the same source, when Mu was destroyed in a great flood. A graphic reenactment of that deluge occurred on the third day of the Roman Lemuria, when celebrants cast 30 images made of rushes into the River Tiber. What the images represented (perhaps human beings?), and why they were put together from rushes is not precisely known, but they were plainly meant to simulate loss in a torrent of water. Nor is the specific significance of 30 understood, although Koziminsky (citing Heydon’s similar opinion) defines it as appropriately calamitous (49). 

The name, “Lemuria,” is not confined to Rome, but occurs as far away as among the Chumash Indians of southern California. They referred to San Miguel Island, site of an un-Indian megalithic wall, as “Lemu.” Laamu is in the Maldives, south of the Indian subcontinent at the equator, featuring the largest hawitta, or stone mound, in the islands, constructed by a foreign, red-haired, seafaring people during prehistory. Throughout Polynesia, Lemu is the god of the dead, who reigns over a city of beautiful palaces at the bottom of the sea. On the Polynesian island of Tonga, Lihamui is the name of the same month, May, just when the Roman Lemuria was celebrated. 

In some of these names, “l” and “r” become interchangeable. The Roman festival may also have been called “Remuria,” just as Polynesia’s god of the dead was sometimes prayed to as “Remu.” Lima, the Peruvian capital, was preferred by the Spanish conquerors over the native “Remu,” which was probably itself a linguistic twist, like the others, on the name of a pre-Inca city, originally known as “Lemu.” If so, it represents another Lemurian influence on coastal Peru. “Lemuria” is a variant of “Mu,” which, according to Churchward, means “mother.” “Lemuria,” then, may have been an equivalent of “motherland.” (See Bon, Mu)

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