RAGNAROK: THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL. BY IGNATIUS DONNELLY

[Lisa Wolfe]

It is true Professor Hartt tells us[1] that there is a marked difference in the complexion of the Botocudo Indians who have lived in the forests of Brazil and those, of the same tribe, who have dwelt on its open prairies; and that those who have resided for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years in the dense forests of that tropical land are nearly white in complexion. If this be the case in a merely leaf-covered tract, what must have been the effect upon a race dwelling for a long time in the remote north, in the midst of a humid atmosphere, enveloped in constant clouds, and much of the time in almost total darkness?

There is no doubt that here and then were developed the rude, powerful, terrible "ice-giants" of the legends, out of whose ferocity, courage, vigor, and irresistible energy have been evolved the dominant races of the west of Europe--the land-grasping, conquering, colonizing races; the men of whom it was said by a Roman poet, in the Viking Age: "The sea is their school of war and the storm their friend they are sea-wolves that prey on the pillage of the world."

They are now taking possession of the globe.

Great races are the weeded-out survivors of great sufferings.

What are the proofs of my proposition that man survived on an Atlantic island?

In the first place we find Job referring to "the island of the innocent."

In chapter xxii, verse 29, Eliphaz, the Temanite, says

When men are cast down, then thou shalt say, There is lifting up; and he shall save the humble person."

Where shall he save him? The next verse (30) seems to tell

[1. "The Geology of Brazil," p. 589.]

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"He shall deliver the island of the innocent: and it is delivered by the pureness of thine [Job's] hands."

And, as I have shown, in Genesis it appears that, after the Age of Darkness, God separated the floods which overwhelmed the earth and made a firmament, a place of solidity, a refuge, (chap. i, vs. 6, 7,) "in the midst of the waters." A firm place in the midst of the waters is necessarily an island.

And the location of this Eden was westward from. Europe, for we read, (chap. iii, v. 24):

"So he drove out the man; and he placed at the EAST of the garden of Eden cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life."

The man driven out of the Edenic land was, therefore, driven eastward of Eden, and the cherubims in the east of Eden faced him. The land where the Jews dwelt was eastward of paradise; in other words, paradise was west of them.

And, again, when Cain was driven out be too moved eastward; he "dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden," (chap. iv, verse 16.) There was, therefore, a constant movement of the human family eastward. The land of Nod may have been Od, Ad, Atlantis; and from Od may have come the name of Odin, the king, the god of Ragnarok.

In Ovid "the earth" is contradistinguished from the rest of the globe. It is an island-land, the civilized land, the land of the Tritons or water-deities, of Proteus, Ægeon, Doris, and Atlas. It is, in my view, Atlantis.

Ovid says, (book ii, fable 1, "The Metamorphoses")

"The sea circling around the encompassed earth. . . . The earth has upon it men and cities, and woods and wild beasts, and rivers, and nymphs and other deities of the

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country." On this land is "the palace of the sun, raised high on stately columns, bright with radiant gold, and carbuncle that rivals the flames; polished ivory crests its highest top, and double folding doors shine with the brightness of silver."

In other words, the legend refers to the island-home of a civilized race, over which was a palace which reminds one of the great temple of Poseidon in Plato's story.

The Atlantic was sometimes called "the sea of ivory," in allusion, probably, to this ivory-covered temple of Ovid. Hence Croly sang:

Now on her hills of ivory
    Lie giant-weed and ocean-slime,
Hiding from man and angel's eye
    The land of crime."

And, again, Ovid says, after enumerating the different rivers and mountains and tracts of country that were on fire in the great conflagration, and once more distinguishing the pre-eminent earth from the rest of the world:

"However, the genial Earth, as she was surrounded with sea, amid the waters of the main," (the ocean,) "and the springs dried up on every side, lifted up her all-productive face," etc.

She cries out to the sovereign of the gods for mercy. She refers to the burdens of the crops she annually bears; the wounds of the crooked plow and the barrow, which she voluntarily endures; and she calls on mighty Jove to put an end to the conflagration. And he does so. The rest of the world has been scarred and seared with the fire, but he spares and saves this island-land, this agricultural, civilized land, this land of the Tritons and Atlas; this "island of the innocent" of Job. And when the terrible convulsion was over, and the

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rash Phaëton dead and buried, Jove repairs, with especial care, "his own Arcadia."

It must not be forgotten that Phaëton was the son of Merops; and Theopompus tells us that the people who inhabited Atlantis were the Meropes, the people of Merou. And the Greek traditions[1] show that the human race issued from Upa-Merou; and the Egyptians claim that their ancestors came from the Island of Mero; and among the Hindoos the land of the gods and the godlike men was Meru.

And here it is, we are told, where in deep caves, and from the seas, receding under the great heat, the human race, crying out for mercy, with uplifted and blistered hands, survived the cataclysm.

And Ovid informs us that this land, "with a mighty trembling, sank down a little" in the ocean, and the Gothic and Briton (Druid) legends tell us of a prolongation of Western Europe which went down at the same time.

In the Hindoo legends the great battle between Rama and Ravana, the sun and the comet, takes place on an island, the Island of Lanka, and Rama builds a stone bridge sixty miles long to reach the island.

In the Norse legends Asgard lies to the west of Europe; communication is maintained with it by the bridge Bifrost. Gylfe goes to visit Asgard, as Herodotus and Solon went to visit Egypt: the outside barbarian was curious to behold the great civilized land. There he asks many questions, as Herodotus and Solon did. He is told:[2]

"The earth is round, and without it round about lies the deep ocean."

[1. "Atlantis," p. 171.

2. The Fooling of Gylfe--The Creation of the World--The Younger Edda.]

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The earth is Ovid's earth; it is Asgard. It is an island, surrounded by the ocean:

"And along the outer strand of that sea they gave lands for the giant-races to dwell in; and against the attack of restless giants they built a burg within the sea and around the earth."

This proves that by "the earth" was not meant the whole globe; for here we see that around the outside margin of that ocean which encircled Asgard, the mother-country had given lands for colonies of the giant-races, the white, large, blue-eyed races of Northern and Western Europe, who were as "restless" and as troublesome then to their neighbors as they are now and will be to the end of time.

And as the Elder and Younger Edda claim that the Northmen were the giant races, and that their kings were of the blood of these Asas; and as the bronze-using people advanced, (it has been proved by their remains,[1]) into Scandinavia from the southwest, it is clear that these legends do not refer to some mythical island in the Indian Seas, or to the Pacific Ocean, but to the Atlantic: the west coasts of Europe were "the outer strand" where these white colonies were established; the island was in the Atlantic; and, as there is no body of submerged land in that ocean with roots or ridges reaching out to the continents east and west, except the mass of which the Azores Islands constitute the mountain-tops, the conclusion is irresistible that here was Atlantis; here was Lanka; here was "the island of the innocent," here was Asgard.

And the Norse legends describe this "Asgard" as a land of temples and plowed fields, and a mighty civilized race.

And here it is that Ragnarok comes. It is from the

[1. Du Chaillu's "Land of the Midnight Sun," vol. i, pp. 343, 345, etc.]

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people of Asgard that the wandering Gylfe learns all that he tells about Ragnarok, just as Solon learned from the priests of Sais the story of Atlantis. And it is here in Asgard that, as we have seen, "during Surt's fire two persons, called Lif and Lifthraser, a man and a woman, concealed themselves in Hodmimer's holt," and afterward repeopled the world.

We leave Europe and turn to India.

In the Bagaveda-Gita Krishna recalls to the memory of his disciple Ardjouna the legend as preserved in the sacred books of the Veda.

We are told:

"The earth was covered with flowers; the trees bent under their fruit; thousands of animals sported over the plains and in the air; white elephants roved unmolested under the shade of gigantic forests, and Brahma perceived that the time had come for the creation of man to inhabit this dwelling-place."[1]

This is a description of the glorious world of the Tertiary Age, during which, as scientific researches have proved, the climate of the tropics extended to the Arctic Circle.

Brahma makes man, Adima, (Adam,) and he makes a companion for him, Héva, (Eve).

They are upon an island. Tradition localizes the legend by making this the Island of Ceylon.

"Adima and Héva lived for some time in perfect happiness--no suffering came to disturb their quietude; they had but to stretch forth their hands and pluck from surrounding trees the most delicious fruits--but to stoop and gather rice of the finest quality."

This is the same Golden Age represented in Genesis, when Adam and Eve, naked, but supremely happy, lived

[1. Jacolliet, "The Bible in India," p. 195.]

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upon the fruits of the garden, and knew neither sorrow nor suffering, neither toil nor hunger.

But one day the evil-one came, as in the Bible legend the Prince of the Rakchasos (Raknaros--Ragnarok?) came, and broke up this paradise. Adima and Héva leave their island; they pass to a boundless country; they fall upon an evil time; "trees, flowers, fruits, birds, vanish in an instant, amid terrific clamor";[1] the Drift has come; they are in a world of trouble, sorrow, poverty, and toil.

And when we turn to America we find the legends looking, not westward, but eastward, to this same island-refuge of the race.

When the Navajos come out of the cave the white race goes east, and the red-men go west; so that the Navajos inhabit a country west of their original habitat, just as the Jews inhabit one east of it.

"Let me conclude," says the legend, "by telling how the Navajos came by the seed they now cultivate. All the wise men being one day assembled, a Turkey-Hen came flying from the direction of the morning star, and shook from her feathers an ear of blue corn into the midst of the company; and in subsequent visits brought all the other seeds they possess."[2]

In the Peruvian legends the civilizers of the race came from the east, after the cave-life.

So that these people not only came from the east, but they maintained intercourse for some time afterward with the parent-land.

On page 174, ante, we learn that the Iroquois believed that when Joskeha renewed the world, after the great battle with Darkness, he learned from the great tortoise

[1. Jacolliet, "The Bible in India," p. 198.

2. Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. iii, p. 83.]

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--always the image of an island--how to make fire, and taught the Indians the art. And in their legends the battle between the White One and the Dark One took place in the east near the great ocean.

Dr. Brinton says, speaking of the Great Hare, Manibozho:

"In the oldest accounts of the missionaries he was alleged to reside toward the east, and in the holy formula of the meda craft, when the winds are invoked to the medicine-lodge, the east is summoned in his name, the door opens in that direction, and there at the edge of the earth, where the sun rises, on the shore of the infinite ocean that surrounds the land, he has his house, and sends the luminaries forth on their daily journey."[1]

That is to say, in the east, in the surrounding ocean of the east, to wit, in the Atlantic, this god, (or godlike race,) has his house, his habitation, upon a land surrounded by the ocean, to wit, an island; and there his power and his civilization are so great that he controls the movements of the sun, moon, and stars; that is to say, he fixes the measure of time by the movements of the sun and moon, and he has mapped out the heavenly bodies into constellations.

In the Miztec legend, (see page 214, ante,) we find the people praying to God to gather the waters together and enlarge the land, for they have only "a little garden" to inhabit in the waste of waters. This meant an island.

In the Arabian legends we have the scene of the catastrophe described as an island west of Arabia, and it requires two years and a half of travel to reach it. It is the land of bronze.

In the Hindoo legend of the battle between Rama, the

[1. Brinton's "Myths of the New World," p. 177.]

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sun, and Ravana, the comet, the scene is laid on the Island of Lanka.

In the Tahoe legend the survivors of the civilized race take refuge in a cave, in a mountain on an island. They give the tradition a local habitation in Lake Tahoe.

The Tacullies say God first created an island.

In short, we may say that, wherever any of these legends refer to the locality where the disaster came and where man survived, the scene is placed upon an island, in the ocean, in the midst of the waters; and this island, wherever the points of the compass are indicated, lies to the west of Europe and to the east of America: it is, therefore, in the Atlantic Ocean; and the island, we shall see, is connected with these continents by long bridges or ridges of land.

This island was Atlantis. Ovid says it was the land of Neptune, Poseidon. It is Neptune who cries out for mercy. And it is associated with Atlas, the king or god of Atlantis.

Let us go a step further in the argument.

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http://www.sacred-texts.com/atl/rag/rag29.htm

[Lisa Wolfe]

CHAPTER III.
THE BRIDGE.

THE deep-sea soundings, made of late years in the Atlantic, reveal the fact that the Azores are the mountaintops of a colossal mass of sunken land; and that from this center one great ridge runs southward for some distance, and then, bifurcating, sends out one limb to the shores of Africa, and another to the shores of South America; while there are the evidences that a third great ridge formerly reached northward from the Azores to the British Islands.

When these ridges--really the tops of long and continuous mountain-chains, like the Andes or the Rocky Mountains, the backbone of a vast primeval Atlantic-filling, but, even then, in great part, sunken continent, were above the water, they furnished a wonderful feature in the scenery and geography of the world; they were the pathways over which the migrations of races extended in the ancient days; they wound for thousands of miles, irregular, rocky, wave-washed, through the great ocean, here expanding into islands, there reduced to a narrow strip, or sinking into the sea; they reached from a central civilized land--an ancient, long-settled land, the land of the godlike race--to its colonies, or connections, north, south, east, and west; and they impressed themselves vividly on the imagination and the traditions of mankind, leaving their image even in the religions of the world unto this day.

As, in process of time, they gradually or suddenly settled

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into the deep, they must at first have formed long, continuous strings of islands, almost touching each other, resembling very much the Aleutian Archipelago, or the Bahama group; and these islands continued to be used, during later ages, as the stepping-stones for migrations and intercourse between the old and the new worlds, just as the discovery of the Azores helped forward the discovery of the New World by Columbus; he used them, we know, as a halting-place in his great voyage.

When Job speaks of "the island of the innocent," which was spared from utter destruction, he prefaces it by asking, (chap. xxii):

"15. Hast thou marked the old way which wicked men have trodden?

"16. Which were (was?) cut down out of time, whose foundation was overflown with a flood."

And in chapter xxviii, verse 4, we have what may be another allusion to this "way," along which go the people who are on their journey, and which "divideth the flood," and on which some are escaping.

The Quiche manuscript, as translated by the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg,[1] gives an account of the migration of the Quiche race to America from some eastern land in a very early day, in "the day of darkness," ere the sun was, in the so-called glacial age.

When they moved to America they wandered for a long time through forests and over mountains, and "they had a long passage to make, through the sea, along the shingle and pebbles and drifted sand." And this long passage was through the sea "which was parted for their passage." That is, the sea was on both sides of this long ridge of rocks and sand.

[1. Tylor's "Early Mankind," p. 308.]

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The abbé adds:

"But it is not clear how they crossed the sea; they passed as though there had been no sea, for they passed over scattered rocks, and these rocks were rolled on the sands. This is why they called the place 'ranged stones and torn-up sands,' the name which they gave it in their passage within the sea, the water being divided when they passed."

They probably migrated along that one of the connecting ridges which, the sea-soundings show us, stretched from Atlantis to the coast of South America.

We have seen in the Hindoo legends that when Rama went to the Island of Lanka to fight the demon Ravana, he built a bridge of stone, sixty miles long, with the help of the monkey-god, in order to reach the island.

In Ovid we read of the "settling down a little" of the island on which the drama of Phaëton was enacted.

In the Norse legends the bridge Bifrost cuts an important figure. One would be at first disposed to regard it as meaning, (as is stated in what are probably later interpolations,) the rainbow; but we see, upon looking closely, that it represents a material fact, an actual structure of some kind.

Gylfe, who was, we are told, A king of Sweden in the ancient days, visited Asgard. He assumed the name of Ganglere, (the walker or wanderer). I quote from the "Younger Edda, The Creation":

"Then asked Ganglere, 'What is the path from earth to heaven?'"

The earth here means, I take it, the European colonies which surround the ocean, which in turn surrounds Asgard; heaven is the land of the godlike race, Asgard. Ganglere therefore asks what is, or was, in the mythological past, the pathway from Europe to the Atlantic island.

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"Har answered, laughing, 'Foolishly do you now ask. Have you not been told that the gods made a bridge from earth to heaven, which is called Bifrost? You must have seen it. It may be that you call it the rainbow. It has three colors, is very strong, and is made with more craft and skill than other structures. Still, however strong it is, it will break when the sons of Muspel come to ride over it, and then they will have to swim their horses over great rivers in order to get on.'"

Muspel is the blazing South, the land of fire, of the convulsions that accompanied the comet. But how can Bifrost mean the rainbow? What rivers intersect a rainbow?

"Then said Ganglere, 'The gods did not, it seems to me, build that bridge honestly, if it shall be able to break to pieces, since they could have done so if they had desired.' Then made answer Har: 'The gods are worthy of no blame for this structure. Bifrost is indeed a good bridge, but there is nothing in the world that is able to stand when the sons of Muspel come to the fight.'"

Muspel here means, I repeat, the heat of the South. Mere heat has no effect on rainbows. They are the product of sunlight and falling water, and are often most distinct in the warmest weather.

But we see, a little further on, that this bridge Bifrost was a real structure. We read of the roots of the ash-tree Ygdrasil, and one of its roots reaches to the fountain of Urd:

Here the gods have their doomstead. The Asas ride hither every day over Bifrost, which is also called Asa-bridge."

And these three mountain-chains going out to the different continents were the three roots of the tree Ygdrasil, the sacred tree of the mountain-top; and it is to this "three-pronged root of the world-mountain" that the

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Hindoo legends refer, (see page 238, ante): on its top was heaven, Olympus; below it was hell, where the Asuras, the comets, dwelt; and between was Meru, (Mero Merou,) the land of the Meropes, Atlantis.

The Asas were clearly a human race of noble and godlike qualities. The proof of this is that they perished in Ragnarok; they were mortal. They rode over the bridge every day going from heaven, the heavenly land, to the earth, Europe.

We read on:

"Kormt and Ormt,
And the two Kerlaugs
These shall Thor wade
Every day,
When he goes to judge
Near the Ygdrasil ash;
For the Asa-bridge
Burns all ablaze--
The holy waters roar."

These rivers, Kormt and Ormt and the two Kerlaugs, were probably breaks in the long ridge, where it had gradually subsided into the sea. The Asa-bridge was, very likely, dotted with volcanoes, as the islands of the Atlantic are to this day.

"Then answered Ganglere, 'Does fire burn over Bifrost?' Har answered: 'The red which you see in the rainbow is burning fire. The frost-giants and the mountain-giants would go up to heaven if Bifrost were passable for all who desired to go there. Many fair places are there in heaven, and they are protected by a divine defense.'"

We have just seen (p. 371, ante) that the home of the godlike race, the Asas, to wit, heaven, Asgard, was surrounded by the ocean, was therefore an island; and that around the outer margin of this ocean, the Atlantic,

[1. Elder Edda, "Grimner's Lay," 29.]

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the godlike race had given lands for the ice-giants to dwell in. And now we read that this Asa-bridge, this Bifrost, reached from earth to heaven, to wit, across this gulf that separated the island from the colonies of the ice-giants. And now we learn that, if this bridge were not defended by a divine defense, these troublesome ice-giants would go up to heaven; that is to say, the bold Northmen would march across it from Great Britain and Ireland to the Azores, to wit, to Atlantis. Surely all this could not apply to the rainbow.

But we read a little further. Har is reciting to Ganglere the wonders of the heavenly land, and is describing its golden palaces, and its mixed population of dark and light colored races, and he says:

"Furthermore, there is a dwelling, by name Himinbjorg, which stands at the end of heaven, where the Bifrost bridge is united with heaven."

And then we read of Heimdal, one of the gods who was subsequently killed by the comet:

"He dwells in a place called Himinbjorg, near Bifrost. He is the ward," (warder, guardian,) "of the gods, and sits at the end of heaven, guarding the bridge against the mountain-giants. He needs less sleep than a bird; sees an hundred miles around him, and as well by night as by day. His teeth are of gold."

This reads something like a barbarian's recollection of a race that practiced dentistry and used telescopes. We know that gold filling has been found in the teeth of ancient Egyptians and Peruvians, and that telescopic lenses were found in the ruins of Babylon.

But here we have Bifrost, a bridge, but not a continuous structure, interrupted in places by water, reaching from Europe to some Atlantic island. And the island-people regarded it very much as some of the English look

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