TT #11 - HOW TO FIND ATLANTIS

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INTRODUCTION

Welcome to my Thursday Thirteen #11. For many years I’ve been researching many mysteries, one of them being Atlantis. Hence, this week I thought I’d dedicate this post to trying to rationalise the subject. Hopefully it will give you food for thought, and make you decide I’m not a total crackpot.
I’ve also included pieces from the writers’ prompt, Three word Wednesday, in this post. By doing so, I hope to offer a little variation. I hope you enjoy reading it.

COUNTDOWN

13. Many researchers feel the genesis of Atlantis comes from the eruption of Thera in the 2nd millennium BC. A huge disaster, part of the island sank, and there is evidence it wiped out the seafaring Minoan civilization on Crete.

12. Plato first wrote about Atlantis, and many feel his assertion that it was ‘beyond the Pillars of Hercules’ places it in the Atlantic. The ‘pillars’ are the Straits of Gibraltar. However, many miss the fact that the Atlantic was mysterious at the time, and Plato could have used ‘mysterious’ as a metaphor.

11. Atlantis serves a purpose in human advancement. Whenever it is popular, you usually find it is at a time of social or political change. Philosophers have always used it as a metaphor for the perfect society being considered at the time.

10. This could be what Plato had in mind. His philosophy revolved around the idea of the ‘ideal form’ to everything, and the idea of the perfect republic. Hence, the Atlantis myth is a perfect metaphor of what he hoped to achieve in his philosophy.

9. This is hinted at with his Royal City of Atlantis. An island with a temple at its centre, and surrounded by a number of circular canals, with a tunnel going from its border to its centre, if you draw a plan of the city, you are actually drawing a perfect seven ringed mandala – a symbol for reaching higher consciousness.

8. Some researchers believe the pyramids, being similar in many parts of the world, were built by the survivors of Atlantis. How else do we explain their universality? Easy. All tribal societies represented nature with fertility, building earth mounds to represent the ‘womb’ of the Earth. As mathematics came into being, the pyramid is a natural extension of the mound. The universality is in human psychology.

7. Various ‘structures’ under the water close to coastlines have been thought of as belonging to Atlantis. Others say they are natural formations. But what if they are natural formations partially sculpted into early temples? Could this give a hint of the reality of a lost civilization in prehistory?

6. Humans almost certainly populated the Earth in stages, moving out from their natural habitat in Africa. The ‘Out of Africa’ hypothesis places this mass movement in stages between 55,000 and 15,000 years ago.

5. How was this done without boats? No matter how you look at it, there were times when they would have had to cross large expanses of water. It is highly likely that there were rudimentary, ocean-going boats tens of thousands of years ago.

4. Once built, it is ridiculous to imagine these boats being abandoned. Rather, I would argue a ‘fisheries revolution’ occurred in many parts of the world in deep prehistory. With static ports, social and technological evolution would occur, making them seem like ‘gods’ to the Stone Age inlanders.

3. Between 12,000 to 8,000 years ago, the end of the last ice age raised water levels, swamping most coastal areas worldwide. The above civilization would have been wiped out, its rudimentary cities buried below the coastal silt, only its rudimentary temples remaining.

2. Survivors of this civilization would have moved inland, and being more advanced, would have been responsible for kick-starting the known ‘agricultural revolution’. They are known throughout the world through the Hero myths, of strangers coming along following a great flood and bringing knowledge and agriculture.

1. Of course, the above is speculative, but I suggest it is totally rational. And it speaks of a possible global cosmopolitan civilisation in our deep past, remembered, today, only through myths of gods.

© Anthony North, May 2008

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A GOTHIC ROMANCE - Fiction

To be a Goth is the most satisfying thing in the world. Oh, I remember when I first moved into the Goth scene in the early 1980s. Their parties were better than the average parties; their dress, black, chained, dark black around the eyes, post-punk.
It began in the UK, spread to so many other countries, and is still alive and well today, even though it was dismissed as a fad – something that would soon be scratched out.

Well, as I entered the party, it was clear the critics were wrong.

The music was loud, heavy, chaotic, and in no time at all I existed in a swirling mass of bodies. Many of the girls I had been with before, and they simply gave me blank stares, emotionless.
It wasn’t that I was too exuberant, or anything like that. Just … well, you know.
But it was a new girl I spotted tonight – late teens, vibrant, just finding her feet in the Goth culture.
It took no time at all to woo her – kiss her on the neck. After all, I’d had a reputation for some time. And it was inevitable we’d end up at my place, where we …
Well, a gentleman never tells. But as I took one last look at the corpse and closed my lid, I knew she’d be as everlasting as my Goth culture, come tomorrow.

© Anthony North, May 2008

SCRATCH IT

I want to scratch it, it’s a bitch,
you’ve no idea how much I itch;
It’s gone on for day, the infernal thing,
so bad at times it starts to sting;
It isn’t your average annoying stigma,
but it certainly is one big enigma;
My finger works, trying to ease it quick,
causing effects that, frankly, would make you sick;
Where is it? I hear you, pray,
below my neck is all I’ll say;
Other than that I’m telling you,
you’d scratch it yourself,
if you only knew

(c) Anthony North, May 2008

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AN AVERAGE ESSAY

I keep hearing about this thing called average. It gets everywhere. It can be used to describe people, things, thoughts, lifestyles, events. You name it, it can be infected by this thing called average.
It gets annoying at times – you know, something you’d like to scratch out of your life. But escape from the average is quite impossible. Everyone talks about it, and even laws and rules are based upon it.

Only thing is, as soon as you try to find it, it disappears.

It simply does not exist in your neck of the woods. Which is maybe the most important thing we can say about average.
Average is an ‘ideal’, designed to provide a rough guide to planners, thinkers, statisticians, politicians, etc, in order for them to make policy decisions about us. Or at least, that’s what I used to think
Today, we live in a mass media world, where images constantly bombard the younger generations. And the more the media grows, the more I see people wearing identical clothes, speaking in identical slang, dancing in identical ways, and having identical expressions, ways and thoughts.
Maybe the curse of the average was not simply an ideal, but a growing control mechanism. It’s rather strange that, as we celebrate the individual today, the average is becoming a reality.

© Anthony North, May 2008

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