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

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Author Topic: RAGNAROK: THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL. BY IGNATIUS DONNELLY  (Read 8480 times)
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« Reply #495 on: January 27, 2009, 11:07:03 am »

"4. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth."

And again, (chap. vi):

"12. And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood;

"13. And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig-tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.

"14. And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.

"15. And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman and every freeman, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains;

"16. And said to the mountains and the rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb

17. For the great day of his wrath is come, and who shall be able to stand?"

Here we seem to have the story of Job over again, in this prefiguration of the future.

The Ethiopian copy of the apocryphal book of Enoch contains a poem, which is prefixed to the body of that work, and which the learned author of "Nimrod" supposes to be authentic. It certainly dates from a vast antiquity. It is as follows:

"Enoch, a righteous man, who was with God, answered and spoke while his eyes were open, and while he saw a holy vision in the heavens. . . .

"Upon this account I spoke, and conversed with him who will go forth from his habitation, the holy and mighty One, the God of the world.

"Who will hereafter tread upon the mountain Sinai, and appear with his hosts, and he manifested in the strength of his power from heaven.

{p. 427}

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« Reply #496 on: January 27, 2009, 11:07:21 am »

"All shall be afraid, and the watchers be terrified. Great fear and trembling shall seize even to the ends of the earth.

"The lofty mountains shall be troubled, and the exalted hills depressed, melting like honeycomb in the flame.

"The earth shall be immerged, and all things which are in it perish. . . .

"He shall preserve the elect, and toward them exercise clemency. . . . The whole earth is full of water."

This is either history or prophecy.

In the Second Epistle General of Peter, (chap. iii,) we have some allusions to the past, and some prophecies based upon the past, which are very curious:

Verse 5. "For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water."

That is to say, the earth was, as in Ovid and Ragnarok, and the legends generally, an island, "standing out of the water and in the water."

Verse 6. "Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished."

This seems to refer to the island Atlantis, "overflowed with water," and destroyed, as told by Plato; thereby forming a very distinct connection between the Island of Poseidon and the Deluge of Noah.

We read on:

Verse 7. "But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men."

Verse 10. "But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up."

{p. 428}

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« Reply #497 on: January 27, 2009, 11:07:37 am »

The Gothic mythology tells us that Surt, with his flaming sword, "shall come at the end of the world; he shall vanquish all the gods; he shall give up the universe a prey to the flames."

This belief in the ultimate destruction of the world and all its inhabitants by fire was found among the American races as well as those of the Old World:

"The same terror inspired the Peruvians at every eclipse; for some day--taught the Amantas--the shadow will veil the sun for ever, and land, moon, and stars will be wrapped in a devouring conflagration, to know no regeneration."[1]

The Algonquin races believed that some day Michabo "will stamp his foot on the ground, flames will burst forth to consume the habitable land; only a pair, or only, at most, those who have maintained inviolate the institutions he ordained, will he protect and preserve to inhabit the new world he will then fabricate."[2]

Nearly all the American tribes had similar presentiments. The Chickasaws, the Mandans of the Missouri, the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, the Muyscas of Bogota, the Botocudos of Brazil, the Araucanians of Chili, the Winnebagoes, all have possessed such a belief from time immemorial. The Mayas of Yucatan had a prediction which Father Lizana, curé of Itzamal, preserved in the Spanish language:

"At the close of the ages, it hath been decreed,
Shall perish and vanish each weak god of men,
And the world shall be purged with ravening fire."

We know that among our own people, the European races, this looking forward to a conflagration which is to end all things is found everywhere; and that everywhere a comet is regarded with terror. It is a messenger of

[1. Brinton's "Myths," p. 235.

2. Ibid.]

{p. 429}

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« Reply #498 on: January 27, 2009, 11:07:54 am »

woe and disaster; it is a dreadful threat shining in the heavens; it is "God's rod," even as it was in Job's day.

I could fill pages with the proofs of the truth of this statement.

An ancient writer, describing the great meteoric shower of the year 1202, says:

"The stars flew against one another like a scattering swarm of locusts, to the right and left; this phenomenon lasted until daybreak; people were thrown into consternation and cried to God, the Most High, with confused clamor."[1]

The great meteoric display of 1366 produced similar effects. An historian of the time says:

"Those who saw it were filled with such great fear and dismay that they were astounded, imagining that they were all dead men, and that the end of the world had come."[2]

How could such a universal terror have fixed itself in the blood of the race, if it had not originated from some great primeval fact? And all this terror is associated with a dragon.

And Chambers says:

"The dragon appears in the mythical history and legendary poetry of almost every nation, as the emblem of the destructive and anarchical principle; . . . as misdirected physical force and untamable animal passions. . . . The dragon proceeds openly to work, running on its feet with expanded wings, and head and tail erect, violently and ruthlessly outraging decency and propriety, spouting fire and fury from both mouth and tail, and wasting and devastating the whole land."[3]

This fiery monster is the comet.

[1. Popular Science Monthly," June, 1882, p. 193.

2. Ibid., p. 193.

3. "Chambers's Encyclopaedia," vol. iii, p. 655.]

{p. 430}

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« Reply #499 on: January 27, 2009, 11:08:02 am »

And Milton speaks from the same universal inspiration when he tells us:

       "A comet burned,
That fires the length of Ophiucus huge
In th' arctic sky, and from its horrid hair
Shakes pestilence and war."

And in the Shakespeare plays[1] we read:

"Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!
Comets, importing change of times and states,
Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky;
And with them scourge the bad revolting stars."

Man, by an inherited instinct, regards the comet as a great terror and a great foe; and the heart of humanity sits uneasily when one blazes in the sky. Even to the scholar and the scientist they are a puzzle and a fear; they are erratic, unusual, anarchical, monstrous--something let loose, like a tiger of the heavens, athwart an orderly, peaceful, and harmonious world. They may be impalpable and harmless attenuations of gas, or they way be loaded with death and ruin; but in any event man can not contemplate them without terror.

[1. 1 Henry VI, 1, 1.]

{p. 431}

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« Reply #500 on: January 27, 2009, 11:08:18 am »

CHAPTER VII.
THE EARTH STRUCK BY COMETS MANY TIMES.
IF the reader is satisfied, from my reasoning and the facts I have adduced, that the so-called Glacial Age really represents a collision of the earth with one of these wandering luminaries of space, the question can not but occur to him, Was this the first and only occasion, during all the thousands of millions of years that our planet has been revolving on its axis and circling around the sun, that such a catastrophe has occurred?

The answer must be in the negative.

We find that all through the rocky record of our globe the same phenomena which we have learned to recognize as peculiar to the Drift Age are, at distant intervals, repeated.

The long ages of the Palæozoic Time passed with few or no disturbances. The movements of the earth's crust oscillated at a rate not to exceed one foot in a century.[1] It was an age of peace. Then came a tremendous convulsion. It has been styled by the geologists "the epoch of the Appalachian revolution."

"Strata were upraised and flexed into great (olds, some of the folds a score or more of miles in span. Deep fissures were opened in the earth's crust," like the fiords or great rock-cracks which accompanied the Diluvial or Drift Age. "Rocks were consolidated; and over some parts sandstones and shales were crystallized into gneiss,

[1. Dana's "Text-Book," p. 150.]

{p. 432}

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« Reply #501 on: January 27, 2009, 11:08:29 am »

mica-schist, and other related rocks, and limestone into architectural and statuary marble. Bituminous coal was turned into anthracite in Pennsylvania."[1]

I copy from the same work (p. 153) the following cut, showing the extent to which the rocks were crushed out of shape:

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« Reply #502 on: January 27, 2009, 11:08:58 am »



SECTION ON THE SCHUYLKILL, PENNSYLVANIA.
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« Reply #503 on: January 27, 2009, 11:09:11 am »

P, Pottsville on the coal-measures; 2, Calciferous formation; 3, Trenton; 4, Hudson River; 5, Oneida and Niagara; 7, Lower Helderberg; 8, 10, 11, Devonian; 12, 13, Subcarboniferous; 14, Carboniferous, or coal-measures.

These tremendous changes were caused by a pressure of some kind which came from the east, from where the Atlantic Ocean now rolls.

"It was due to a lateral pressure, the folding having taken place just as it might in paper or cloth under a lateral or pushing movement."[2]

"It was accompanied by great heat which melted and consolidated the rocks, changed their condition, drove the volatile gases out of the bituminous coal and changed it into anthracite, in some places altered it to graphite, as if it had been passed through a furnace."[3]

It also made an almost universal slaughter of all forms of life:

"The extermination of life which took place at this time was one of the most extensive in all geological history; . . . no fossils of the Carboniferous formation occur in later rocks."[4]

[1. Dana's "Text-Book," p. 152.

2. Ibid., p. 155.

3. Ibid., p. 155.

4. Ibid., p. 157.]

{p. 433}

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« Reply #504 on: January 27, 2009, 11:09:23 am »

it was accompanied or followed, as in the Drift Age, by tremendous floods of water; the evaporated seas returned to the earth in wasting storms:

"The waters commenced the work of denudation, which has been continued to the present time."[1]

Is not all this a striking confirmation of my theory?

Here we find that, long before the age of man, a fearful catastrophe happened to the earth. Its rocks were melted--not merely decomposed, as in the Drift Age,--but actually melted and metamorphosed; the heat, as in the Drift Age, sucked up the waters of the seas, to cast them down again in great floods; it wiped out nearly all the life of the planet, even as the Drift Age exterminated the great mammals; whatever drift then fell probably melted with the burning rocks.

Here are phenomena which no ice-sheet, though it were a thousand miles thick, can explain; here is heat, not ice; combustion, not cold; and yet all these phenomena are but the results which we have seen would naturally follow the contact of the earth with a comet.

But while, in this particular case, the size of the comet, or its more fiery nature, melted the surface of the globe, and changed the very texture of the solid rocks, we find in the geological record the evidences of repeated visitations when Drift was thrown upon the earth in great quantities; but the heat, as in the last Drift Age, was not great enough to consume all things.

In the Cambrian formation, conglomerates are found, combinations of stones and hardened clay, very much like the true "till."

In the Lower Silurian of the south of Scotland, large blocks and bowlders (from one foot to five feet in diameter)

[1. Dana's "Text-Book," p. 156.]

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« Reply #505 on: January 27, 2009, 11:09:39 am »

are found, "of gneiss, syenite, granite, etc., none of which belong to the rocks of that neighborhood."

Geikie says:

"Possibly these bowlders may have come from some ancient Atlantis, transported by ice."[1]

The conglomerates belonging to the Old Red Sandstone formation in the north of England and in Scotland, we are told, "closely resemble a consolidated bowlder drift."[2]

Near Victoria, in Australia, a conglomerate was found nearly one hundred feet in thickness.

"Great beds of conglomerate occur at the bottom of the Carboniferous, in various parts of Scotland, which it is difficult to believe are other than ancient morainic débris. They are frequently quite unstratified, and the stones often show that peculiar blunted form which is so characteristic of glacial work."[3]

Professor Ramsay found well-scratched and blunted stones in a Permian conglomerate.

In the north of Scotland, a coarse, bowlder-conglomerate is associated with the Jurassic strata. The Cretaceous formation has yielded great stones and bowlders. In the Eocene of Switzerland, erratics have been found, some angular and some rounded. They often attain great size; one measured one hundred and five feet in length, ninety feet in breadth, and forty-five feet in height. Some of the blocks consist of a kind of granite not known to occur anywhere in the Alps.

Geikie says:

"The occurrence in the Eocene of huge ice-carried blocks seems incomprehensible when the general character of the Eocene fossils is taken into account, for these have a somewhat tropical aspect. So, likewise, the appearance of ice-transported blocks in the Miocene is a sore puzzle,

[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 478.

2. Ibid., p. 479.

3. Ibid.]

{p. 435}

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« Reply #506 on: January 27, 2009, 11:09:54 am »

as the fossils imbedded in this formation speak to us of tropical and sub-tropical climates having prevailed in Central Europe."[1]

It was precisely during the age when a warm climate prevailed in Spitzbergen and North Greenland that these erratics were dropped down on the plains of Italy!

And, strange to say, just as we have found the Drift-deposits of Europe and America unfossiliferous,--that is to say, containing no traces of animal or vegetable life,--so these strange stone and clay deposits of other and more ancient ages were in like manner unfossiliferous.[2]

In the "flysch" of the Eocene of the Alps, few or no fossils have been found. In the conglomerates of Turin, belonging to the Upper Miocene period, not a single organic remain has been found.

What conclusion is forced upon us?

That, written in the rocky pages of the great volume of the planet, are the records of repeated visitations from the comets which then rushed through the heavens.

No trace is left of their destructive powers, save the huge, unstratified, unfossiliferous deposits of clay and stones and bowlders, locked away between great layers of the sedimentary rocks.

Can it be that there wanders through immeasurable space, upon an orbit of such size that millions of years are required to complete it, some monstrous luminary, so vast that when it returns to us it fills a large part of the orbit which the earth describes around the sun, and showers down upon us deluges of débris, while it fills the world with flame? And are these recurring strata of stones and clay and bowlders, written upon these widely separated pages of the geologic volume, the record of its oft and regularly recurring visitations?

[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 480.

2. Ibid., p. 481.]

{p. 436}

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« Reply #507 on: January 27, 2009, 11:10:06 am »

Who shall say? Science will yet compare minutely the composition of these different conglomerates. No secret can escape discovery when the light of a world's intelligence is brought to bear upon it.

And even here we stumble over a still more tremendous fact:

It has been supposed that the primeval granite was the molten crust of the original glowing ball of the earth, when it first hardened as it cooled.

But, lo! the microscope, (so Professor Whichell tells us,) reveals that this very granite, this foundation of all our rocks, this ancient globe-crust, is itself made up of sedimentary rocks, which were melted, fused, and run together in some awful conflagration which wiped out all life on the planet.

Beyond the granite, then, there were seas and shores, winds and rains, rivers and sediment carried into the waters to form the rocks melted up in this granite; there were countless ages; possibly there were animals and man; but all melted and consumed together. Was this, too, the result of a comet visitation?

Who shall tell the age of this old earth? Who shall count the ebbs and flows of eternity? Who shall say how often this planet has been developed up to the highest forms of life, and how often all this has been obliterated in universal fire?

The earth is one great tomb of life:

        "All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom."

In endless series the ages stretch along--birth, life, development, destruction. And so shall it be till time is no more.

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« Reply #508 on: January 27, 2009, 11:10:35 am »

CHAPTER VIII.
THE AFTER-WORD.

WHEN that magnificent genius, Francis Bacon, sent forth one of his great works to the world, he wrote this prayer:

"Thou, O Father, who gavest the visible light as the first-born of thy creatures, and didst pour into man the intellectual light as the top and consummation of thy workmanship, be pleased to protect and govern this work, which coming from thy goodness returneth to thy glory. . . . We humbly beg that this mind may be steadfastly in us; and that thou, by our hands and the hands of others, on whom thou shalt bestow the same spirit, wilt please to convey a largess of new alms to thy family of mankind."

And again he says:

"This also we beg, that human things may not prejudice such as are divine; neither that from the unlocking of the gates of sense, and the kindling of a greater natural light, anything of incredulity, or intellectual night, may arise in our minds toward divine mysteries."

In the same spirit, but humbly halting afar after this illustrious man, I should be sorry to permit this book to go out to the world without a word to remove the impression which some who read it, and may believe it, may form, that such a vast catastrophe as I have depicted militates against the idea that God rules and cares for his world and his creatures. It will be asked, If "there is a special providence even in the fall of a sparrow," how

{p. 438}

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« Reply #509 on: January 27, 2009, 11:10:58 am »

could He have permitted such a calamity as this to overtake a beautiful, populous, and perhaps civilized world?

Here we fall again upon the great debate of Job, and we may answer in the words which the author of that book puts into the mouth of God himself, when from out the whirlwind he answered him:

"Shall he that contendeth with the Almighty instruct him "He that reproveth God, let him answer."

In other words, Who and what is man to penetrate the counsels and purposes of the Creator; and who are you, Job?--

"Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare it, if thou hast understanding.

"Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? Or who has stretched the line upon it?

"Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? Or who laid the corner-stone thereof?

"When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy."

Consider, Job, the littleness of man, the greatness of the universe; and what right have you to ask Him, who made all this, the reasons for his actions?

And this is a sufficient answer: A creature seventy inches long prying into the purposes of an Awful Something, whose power ranges so far that blazing suns are seen only as mist-specks!

But I may make another answer:

Although it seems that many times have comets smitten the earth, covering it with débris, or causing its rocks to boil, and its waters to ascend into the heavens, yet, considering all life, as revealed in the fossils, from the first cells unto this day, nothing has perished that was worth preserving.

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