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

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Lisa Wolfe
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« Reply #450 on: January 27, 2009, 10:55:37 am »

upon the proposition to dig a tunnel from Dover to Calais, as a source of danger, a means of invasion, a threat; and at the end of the island, where the ridge is united to it, they did what England will probably do at the end of the Dover tunnel: they erected fortifications and built a castle, and in it they put a ruler, possibly a sub-king, Heimdal, who constantly, from a high lookout, possibly with a field-glass, watches the coming of the turbulent Goths, or Gauls, or Gael, from afar off. Doubtless the white-headed and red-headed, hungry, breekless savages had the same propensity to invade the civilized, wealthy land, that their posterity had to descend on degenerate Rome.

The word Asas is not, as some have supposed, derived from Asia. Asia is derived from the Asas. The word Asas comes from a Norse word, still in use in Norway, Aas, meaning a ridge of high land.[1] Anderson thinks there is some connection between Aas, the high ridge, the mountain elevation, and Atlas, who held the world on his shoulders.

The Asas, then, were the civilized race who inhabited a high, precipitous country, the meeting-point of a number of ridges. Atlas was the king, or god, of Atlantis. In the old time all kings were gods. They are something more than men, to the multitude, even yet.

And when we reach "Ragnarok" in these Gothic legends, when the jaw of the wolf Fenris reached from the earth to the sun, and he vomits fire and poison, and when Surt, and all the forces of Muspel, "ride over Bifrost, it breaks to pieces." That is to say, in this last great catastrophe of the earth, the ridge of land that led from the British Islands to Atlantis goes down for ever.

[1. The Younger Edda," Anderson, note, p. 226.]

{p. 383}

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« Reply #451 on: January 27, 2009, 10:55:48 am »

And in Plato's description of Atlantis, as received by Solon from the Egyptian priests, we read:

"There was an island" (Atlantis) "situated in front of the straits which you call the Columns of Hercules; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from the islands you might pass through the whole of the opposite continent," (America,) "which surrounds the true ocean."

Now this is not very clear, but it may signify that there was continuous land communication between Atlantis and the islands of the half-submerged ridge, and from the islands to the continent of America. It would seem to mean more than a passage-way by boats over the water, for that existed everywhere, and could be traversed in any direction.

I have quoted on p. 372, ante, in the last chapter, part of the Sanskrit legend of Adima and Héva, as preserved in the Bagaveda-Gita, and other sacred books of the Hindoos. It refers very distinctly to the bridge which united the island-home of primeval humanity with the rest of the earth. But there is more of it:

When, under the inspiration of the prince of demons, Adima and Héva begin to wander, and desire to leave their island, we read:

"Arriving at last at the extremity of the island"--

We have seen that the bridge Bifrost was connected with the extremity of Asgard--

"they beheld a smooth and narrow arm of the sea, and beyond it a vast and apparently boundless country," (Europe?) "connected with their island by a narrow and rocky pathway, arising from the bosom of the waters."

This is probably a precise description of the connecting ridge; it united the boundless continent, Europe, with

{p. 384}

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« Reply #452 on: January 27, 2009, 10:56:00 am »

the island; it rose out of the sea, it was rocky; it was the broken crest of a submerged mountain-chain.

What became of it? Here again we have a tradition of its destruction. We read that, after Adima and Héva had passed over this rocky bridge--

"No sooner did they touch the shore, than trees, flowers, fruit, birds, all that they had seen from the opposite side, vanished in an instant, amidst terrible clamor; the rocks by which they had crossed sank beneath the waves, a few sharp peaks alone remaining above the surface, to indicate the place of the bridge, which had been destroyed by divine displeasure."

Here we have the crushing and instant destruction by the Drift, the terrific clamor of the age of chaos, and the breaking down of the bridge Bifrost under the feet of the advancing armies of Muspel; here we have "the earth" of Ovid "settling down a little" in the ocean; here we have the legends of the Cornishmen of the lost land, described in the poetry of Tennyson; here we have the emigrants to Europe cut off from their primeval home, and left in a land of stones and clay and thistles.

It is, of course, localized in Ceylon, precisely as the mountain of Ararat and the mountain of Olympus crop out in a score of places, wherever the races carried their legends. And to this day the Hindoo points to the rocks which rise in the Indian Ocean, between the eastern point of India and the Island of Ceylon, as the remnants of the Bridge; and the reader will find them marked on our maps as" Adam's Bridge" (Palam Adima). The people even point out, to this day, a high mountain, from whose foot the Bridge went forth, over which Adima and Héva, crossed to the continent; and it is known in modern geography as "Adam's Peak." So vividly have the traditions of a vast antiquity come down to us! The legends

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« Reply #453 on: January 27, 2009, 10:56:09 am »

of the Drift have left their stamp even in our schoolbooks.

And the memory of this Bridge survives not only in our geographies, but in our religions.

Man reasons, at first, from below upward; from godlike men up to man-like gods; from Cæsar, the soldier, up to Cæsar, the deity.

Heaven was, in the beginning, a heavenly city on earth; it is transported to the clouds; and there its golden streets and sparkling palaces await the redeemed.

This is natural: we can only conceive of the best of the spiritual by the best we know of the material; we can imagine no musical instrument in the bands of the angels superior to a harp; no weapon better than a sword for the grasp of Gabriel.

This disproves not a spiritual and superior state; it simply shows the poverty and paucity of our poor intellectual apparatus, which, like a mirror, reflects only that which is around it, and reflects it imperfectly.

Men sometimes think they are mocking spiritual things when it is the imperfection of material nature, (which they set so much store by,) that provokes their ridicule.

So, among all the races which went out from this heavenly land, this land of high intelligence, this land of the master race, it was remembered down through the ages, and dwelt upon and sung of until it moved upward from the waters of the Atlantic to the distant skies, and became a spiritual heaven. And the ridges which so strangely connected it with the continents, east and west, became the bridges over which the souls of men must pass to go from earth to heaven.

For instance:

The Persians believe in this bridge between earth and

{p. 386}

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« Reply #454 on: January 27, 2009, 10:56:22 am »

paradise. In his prayers the penitent in his confession says to this day:

"I am wholly without doubt in the existence of the Mazdayaçnian faith; in the coming of the resurrection of the latter body; in the stepping over the bridge Chinvat; as well as in the continuance of paradise."

The bridge and the land are both indestructible.

Over the midst of the Moslem hell stretches the bridge Es-Sirat, "finer than a hair and sharper than the edge of a sword."

In the Lyke-Wake Dirge of the English north-country, they sang of

The Brig of Dread
Na braider than a thread."

In Borneo the passage for souls to heaven is across a long tree; it is scarcely practicable to any except those who have killed a man.

In Burmah, among the Karens, they tie strings across the rivers, for the ghosts of the dead to pass over to their graves.

In Java, a bridge leads across the abyss to the dwelling-place of the gods; the evil-doers fall into the depths below.

Among the Esquimaux the soul crosses an awful gulf over a stretched rope, until it reaches the abode of "the great female evil spirit below" (beyond?) "the sea."

The Ojibways cross to paradise on a great snake, which serves as a bridge.

The Choctaw bridge is a slippery pine-log.

The South American Manacicas cross on a wooden bridge.

Among many of the American tribes, the Milky Way is the bridge to the other world.

[1. Poor, "Sanskrit Literature," p. 151.]

{p. 387}

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« Reply #455 on: January 27, 2009, 10:56:38 am »

The Polynesians have no bridge; they pass the chasm in canoes.

The Vedic Yama of the Hindoos crossed the rapid waters, and showed the way to our Aryan fathers.

The modern Hindoo hopes to get through by holding on to the cow's tail!

Even the African tribes, the Guinea negroes, believe that the land of souls can only be reached by crossing a river.

Among some of the North American tribes "the souls come to a great lake," (the ocean,) "where there is a beautiful island, toward which they have to paddle in a canoe of white stone. On the way there arises a storm, and the wicked souls are wrecked, and the heaps of their bones are to be seen under the water, but the good reach the happy island."[1]

The Slavs believed in a pathway or road which led to the other world; it was both the rainbow (as in the Gothic legends) and the Milky Way; and, since the journey was long, they put boots into the coffin, (for it was made on foot,) and coins to pay the ferrying across a wide sea, even as the Greeks expected to be carried over the Styx by Charon. This abode of the dead, at the end of this long pathway, was an island, a warm, fertile land, called Buyau.[2]

In their effort to restore the dead men to the happy island-home, the heavenly land, beyond the water, the Norsemen actually set their dead heroes afloat in boats on the open ocean.[3]

Subsequently they raised a great mound over boat, warrior, horses, weapons, and all. These boats are now being dug up in the north of Europe and placed in the

[1. Tylor's "Early Mankind," p. 362.

2. Poor, "Sanskrit and Kindred Literatures," pp. 3 71, 372.

3. Ibid.]

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« Reply #456 on: January 27, 2009, 10:56:51 am »

great museums. They tell a marvelous religious and historical story.

I think the unprejudiced reader will agree with me that these legends show that some Atlantic island played an important part in the very beginning of human history. It was the great land of the world before the Drift; it continued to be the great land of the world between the Drift and the Deluge. Here man fell; here he survived; here he renewed the race, and from this center he repopulated the world.

We see also that this island was connected with the continents east and west by great ridges of land.

The deep-sea soundings show that the vast bulk of land, of which the Azores are the outcroppings, are so connected yet with such ridges, although their crests are below the sea-level; and we know of no other island-mass of the Atlantic that is so united with the continents on both sides of it.

Is not the conclusion very strong that Atlantis was the island-home of the race, in whose cave Job dwelt; on whose shores Phaëton fell; on whose fields Adam lived; on whose plain Sodom and Gomorrah stood, and Odin and Thor and Citli died; from which the Quiches and the Aztecs wandered to America; the center of all the races; the root of all the mythologies?

{p. 389}


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« Reply #457 on: January 27, 2009, 10:57:13 am »

CHAPTER IV.
OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED.

LET ME consider, briefly, those objections to my theory which have probably presented themsevles {sic} to some of my readers.

First, it may be said:

"We don't understand you. You argue that there could not have been such an ice-age as the glacialists affirm, and yet you speak of a period of cold and ice and snow."

True: 'but there is a great difference between such a climate as that of Scotland, damp and cold, snowy and blowy, and a continental ice-sheet, a mile or two thick, reaching from John o' Groat's House to the Mediterranean. We can see that the oranges of Spain can grow to-day within a comparatively short distance of Edinburgh; but we can not realize that any tropical or semitropical plant could have survived in Africa when a precipice of ice, five thousand feet high, frowned on the coast of Italy; or that any form of life could have survived on earth when the equator in South America was covered with a continental ice-sheet a mile in thickness, or even ten feet in thickness. We can conceive of a glacial age of snow-storms, rains, hail, and wind--a terribly trying and disagreeable climate for man and beast--but we can not believe that the whole world was once in the condition that the dead waste of ice-covered Greenland is in now.

{p. 390}

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« Reply #458 on: January 27, 2009, 10:57:24 am »

Secondly, it may be said--

"The whole world is now agreed that ice produced the Drift; what right, then, has any one man to set up a different theory against the opinions of mankind? "

One man, Mohammed said, with God on his side, is a majority; and one man, with the truth on his side, must become a majority.

All recognized truths once rested, solitary and alone, in some one brain.

Truth is born an acorn, not an oak.

The Rev. Sydney Smith once said that there was a kind of men into whom you could not introduce a new idea without a surgical operation. He might have added that, when you had once forced an idea into the head of such a man, you could not deliver him of it without instruments.

The conservatism of unthinkingness is one of the potential forces of the world. It lies athwart the progress of mankind like a colossal mountain-chain, chilling the atmosphere on both sides of it for a thousand miles. The Hannibal who would reach the eternal city of Truth on the other side of these Alps must fight his way over ice and hew his way through rocks.

The world was once agreed that the Drift was due to the Deluge. It abandoned this theory, and then became equally certain that it came from icebergs. This theory was, in turn, given up, and mankind were then positive that glaciers caused the Drift. But the glaciers were found to be inadequate for the emergency; and so the continents were lifted up fifteen hundred feet, and the ice-sheets were introduced. And now we wait to hear that the immense ice-masses of the Himalayas have forsaken their elevations and are moving bodily over the plains of India, grinding up the rocks into clay and gravel

{p. 391}

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« Reply #459 on: January 27, 2009, 10:57:40 am »

as they go, before we accept a theory which declares that they once marched over the land in this fashion from Hudson's Bay to Cape Horn, from Spitzbergen to Spain.

The universality of an error proves nothing, except that the error is universal. The voice of the people is only the voice of God in the last analysis. We can safely appeal from Caiaphas and Pilate to Time.

But, says another:

"We find deep grooves or striations under the glaciers of to-day; therefore the glaciers caused the grooves."

But we find striations on level plains far remote from mountains, where the glaciers could not have been; therefore the glaciers did not cause the striations. "A short horse is soon curried." Superposition is not paternity. A porcelain nest-egg found under a hen is no proof that the hen laid it.

But, says another

"The idea of a comet encountering the earth, and covering it with débris, is so stupendous, so out of the usual course of nature, I refuse to accept it."

Ah, my friend, you forget that those Drift deposits, hundreds of feet in thickness, are there. They are out of the usual course of nature. It is admitted that they came suddenly from some source. If you reject my theory, you do not get clear of the phenomena. The facts are a good deal more stupendous than the theory. Go out and look at the first Drift deposit; dig into it a hundred feet or more; follow it for a few hundred miles or more; then come back, and scratch your head, and tell me where it came from! Calculate how many cart-loads there are of it, then multiply this by the area of your own continent, and multiply that again by the area of two or three more continents, and then again tell me where it came from!

{p. 392}

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« Reply #460 on: January 27, 2009, 10:57:52 am »

Set aside my theory as absurd, and how much nearer are you to solving the problem? If neither waves, nor icebergs, nor glaciers, nor ice-sheets, nor comets, produced this world-cloak of débris, where did it come from?

Remember the essential, the incontrovertible elements of the problem:

1. Great heat.

2. A sudden catastrophe.

3. Great evaporation of the seas and waters.

4. Great clouds.

5. An age of floods and snows and ice and torrents.

6. The human legends.

Find a theory that explains and embraces all these elements, and then, and not until then, throw mine aside.

Another will say:

"But in one place you give us legends about an age of dreadful and long-continued heat, as in the Arabian tale, where no rain is said to have fallen for seven years; and in another place you tell us of a period of constant rains and snows and cold. Are not these statements incompatible?"

Not at all. This is a big globe we live on: the tropics are warmer than the poles. Suppose a tremendous heat to be added to our natural temperature; it would necessarily make it hotter on the equator than at the poles, although it would be warm everywhere. There can be no clouds without condensation, no condensation without some degree of cooling. Where would the air cool first? Naturally at the points most remote from the equator, the poles. Hence, while the sun was still blazing in the uncovered heavens of the greater part of the earth, small caps of cloud would form at the north and south poles, and shed their moisture in gentle rain. As the heat brought to the earth by the comet was accidental and

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« Reply #461 on: January 27, 2009, 10:58:05 am »

adventitious, there would be a natural tendency to return to the pre-comet condition. The extraordinary evaporation would of itself have produced refrigeration. Hence the cloud-caps would grow and advance steadily toward the equator, casting down continually increasing volumes of rain. Snow would begin to form near the poles, and it too would advance. We would finally have, down to say the thirty-fifth degree of north and south latitude, vast belts of rain and snow, while the equator would still be blazing with the tropical heat which would hold the condensation back. Here, then, we would have precisely the condition of things described in the "Younger Edda" of the Northmen:

"Then said Jafnhar: 'All that part of Ginungagap' (the Atlantic) 'that turns toward the north was filled with thick, heavy ice and rime,' (snow,) 'and everywhere within were drizzling gusts and rain. But the south part of Ginungagap was lighted up by the glowing sparks that flew out of Muspelheim' (Africa?). Added Thride: 'As cold and all things grim proceeded from Niflheim, so that which bordered on Muspelheim was hot and bright, and Ginungagap' (the Atlantic near Africa?) 'was as warm and mild as windless air.'"

Another may say:

"But how does all this agree with your theory that the progenitors of the stock from which the white, the yellow, and the brown races were differentiated, were saved in one or two caverns in one place? How did they get to Africa, Asia, and America?"

In the first place, it is no essential part of my case that man survived in one place or a dozen places; it can not, in either event, affect the question of the origin of the Drift. It is simply an opinion of my own, open to modification upon fuller information. If, for instance, men dwelt in Asia at that time, and no Drift deposits

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« Reply #462 on: January 27, 2009, 10:58:18 am »

fell upon Asia, races may have survived there; the negro may have dwelt in India at that time; some of the strange Hill-tribes of China and India may have had no connection with Lif and Lifthraser.

But if we will suppose that the scene of man's survival was in that Atlantic island, Atlantis, then this would follow:

The remnant of mankind, whether they were a single couple, like Lif and Lifthraser; or a group of men and women, like Job and his companions; or a numerous party, like that referred to in the Navajo and Aztec legends, in any event, they would not and could not stay long in the cave. The distribution of the Drift shows that it fell within twelve hours; but there were probably several days thereafter during which the face of the earth was swept by horrible cyclones, born of the dreadful heat. As soon, however, as they could safely do so, the remnant of the people must have left the cave; the limited nature of their food-supplies would probably drive them out. Once outside, their condition was pitiable indeed. First, they encountered the great heat; the cooling of the atmosphere had not yet begun; water was a pressing want. Hence we read in the legends of Mimer's well, where Odin pawned his eye for a drink. And we are told, in an American legend, of a party who traveled far to find the life-giving well, and found the possessor sitting over it to hide it. It was during this period that the legends originated which refer to the capture of the cows and their recovery by demi-gods, Hercules or Rama.

Then the race began to wander. The world was a place of stones. Hunger drove them on. Then came the clouds, the rains, the floods, the snows, the darkness; and still the people wandered. The receded ocean laid bare the great ridges, if they had sunk in the catastrophe,

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« Reply #463 on: January 27, 2009, 10:58:30 am »

and the race gradually spread to Europe, Africa, and America.

"But," says one, "how long did all this take?

Who shall say? It may have been days, weeks, months, years, centuries. The Toltec legends say that their ancestors wandered for more than a hundred years in the darkness.

The torrent-torn face of the earth; the vast rearrangement of the Drift materials by rivers, compared with which our own rivers are rills; the vast continental regions which were evidently flooded, all testify to an extraordinary amount of moisture first raised up from the seas and then cast down on the lands. Given heat enough to raise this mass, given the cold caused by its evaporation, given the time necessary for the great battle between this heat and this condensation, given the time to restore this body of water to the ocean, not once but many times,--for, along the southern border of the floods, where Muspelheim. and Niflheim met, the heat must have sucked up the water as fast almost as it fell, to fall again, and again to be lifted up, until the heat-area was driven back and water fell, at last, everywhere on the earth's face, and the extraordinary evaporation ceased,--this was a gigantic, long-continued battle.

But it may be asked:

"Suppose further study should disclose the fact that the Drift is found in Siberia and the rest of Asia, and over all the world, what then? "

It will not disprove my theory. It will simply indicate that the débris did not, as I have supposed, strike the earth instantaneously, but that it continued to fall during twenty-four hours. If the comet was split into fragments, if there was the "Midgard-Serpent" as well as the

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« Reply #464 on: January 27, 2009, 10:58:46 am »

"Fenris Wolf" and "the dog Garm," they need not necessarily have reached the earth at the same time.

Another says:

"You supposed in your book, 'Atlantis,' that the Glacial Age might have been caused by the ridges radiating from Atlantis shutting off the Gulf Stream and preventing the heated waters of the tropics from reaching the northern shores of the world."

True; and I have no doubt that these ridges did play an important part in producing climatic changes, subsequent to the Drift Age, by their presence or absence, their elevation or depression; but on fuller investigation I find that they are inadequate to account for the colossal phenomena of the Drift itself--the presence of the clay and gravel, the great heat and the tremendous downfall of water.

It may be asked,

"How does your theory account for the removal of great blocks, weighing many tons, for hundreds of miles from their original site?

The answer is plain. We know the power of the ordinary hurricanes of the earth. "The largest trees are uprooted, or have their trunks snapped in two; and few if any of the most massive buildings stand uninjured."[1] If we will remember the excessive heat and the electrical derangements that must have accompanied the Drift Age, we can realize the tremendous winds spoken of in many of the legends. We have but to multiply the hurricane of the West Indies, or the cyclone of the Mississippi Valley, a hundred or a thousand fold, and we shall have power enough to move all the blocks found scattered over the face of the Drift deposits or mixed with its material.

[1. Appletons' "American Cyclopædia," vol. ix, p. 80.]

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