A New Interpretation of Pre-History

This view of the probable events prior to the Biblical flood is suggested in The Mayan Prophecies by Gilbert and Cotterell and is interpreted in the light of my own understanding of Ideologics.

Ideologics identifies an ideological spectrum reaching from Feminism on one end to Masculinism on the other and identifies the attributes associated with both. Feminism reflecting the nature of females is passive and non creative, while Masculinism is aggressive and creative. To pursue these attributes within a culture is normally done by deifying the chief god, Gaia in the case of feminism and Yahweh or Allah in the case of masculinism. This has the effect of producing a passive culture attuned to the rhythms of nature on the one hand and an aggressive culture based on creativity on the other. From a survival perspective one orientation works best in some circumstances while the other works better in others.

Passivity works best when the emphasis is on retaining what has been achieved. It is basically conservative in nature. Creativity is best when changes have to be made due to a changing environment, it is basically liberal. Obviously, passivity is usually dominant since creativity is only rarely called for.

The above named book analyzes sunspots in a unique way and produces a natural history that includes periodic extreme change in the environment. This change is associated with polar reversals in the earth’s magnetic field. These changes are demonstrated to occur every few thousand years and are assumed to have been the cause behind the loss of Atlantis. A number of artifacts associated with the Mayan culture are used to reach this conclusion. The actual physical location of Atlantis is determined to have been in the area now occupied by Cuba. The loss of Atlantis is thought to have been as a result of a rising Atlantic Ocean caused by the melting of the ice caps resulting from the above mentioned polar reversal.

I agree, this is very likely what happened, and I would identify the flood involved as the Biblical flood which can be dated by recent core samples from the Greenland glacier. This record of archeological temperatures shows that the last ice age ended about 12,000 years ago, so this suggests to me two significant events. The flooding of the Mediterranean basin and the flooding of Atlantis.

I have a couple of problems with Mr. Cotterell’s interpretation. He identifies 2012 as the date of the next magnetic event and also the year 600 as the last. However, in an appendix he mentions the duration of an event as in the neighborhood of 380 years. The problems I have here are 1) The event in 600 was nowhere near the scale of the flooding of Atlantis, that event being expected to include earthquakes and volcanic eruptions due to the disturbance of the earth’s crust. So, there must be major and minor events and the distinction isn’t clearly made in the book. 2) If a major event takes 380 years to work itself out, how can any one date be identified as particularly significant?

In any case, I identify the last major event as the end of the last ice age, about 12,000 years ago. I can accept that there may be several minor events between major events and Mr. Cotterell seems to say that the complete cycle takes about 18,000 years.

As we look at the archeological record, what actually happened from the temperature perspective is a transition between a period in excess of 100,000 years in which temperatures fluctuated between moderate and cold on a very regular basis to a period of stable moderate temperatures that have now lasted for 12,000 years. In the cold periods, the equatorial regions had temperatures similar to those now seen in the Mediterranean region and the current temperate regions were about 20 degrees colder than they now are. We can expect that ice extended to the Canadian border in cold periods and perhaps to Hudson’s Bay in warm periods. A large amount of free water was therefor frozen in the ice caps and the oceans were decidedly lower than currently seen.

For that reason I expect that the Caribbean region will have had a lot more exposed land and in fact would have resembled the current Aegean Sea, and this is the region we are given to understand was the likely site of Atlantis. The identification of the area as a continent we assign to the magnification so common to story telling.

However, from what we have heard about Atlantis, we would not be remiss in identifying it as a masculinist culture. By that we mean that they were seafaring, and technologically creative. This suggests, no demands, that they worship a masculine god, perhaps not Yahweh, but at least Ra. The crucial thing is that the supreme deity be masculine and no other gods be allowed. This attitude will seek to identify the characteristics of such a god, mainly his creativity, and also to emulate them. Such a thing is not easy to imagine. As religions develop, the gods are associated with visual entities: animals, natural events, heavenly bodies and the like. It is not easy to imagine a culture moving from the worship of a pantheon to the worship of a completely invisible spirit like Yahweh. How would they be inspired to do so? So, a transitional deity like Ra (the Sun) makes a suitable pathway for getting from the feminist pantheons to the monotheism of the spirit. The Sun shares many of Yahweh’s characteristics, mainly that it is one, but also that it is aggressively creative, while the earth is passively receptive to that creativity.

Since the Mayans were apparently the inheritors of some aspects of Atlantan culture and they were sun worshippers, we could reasonably conclude that the Atlantans were too. Or, perhaps they had moved beyond that but still retained the image of the sun as a symbol of Yahweh. At this moment it is unknown, but we may be sure they were masculinists and perhaps the first masculinists to exist. The Atlantans would seem to have mastered the art of sea travel since they appear to have shown up in Egypt. Their story was passed on from the Egyptians to the Greeks, who passed it on to Plato, who was the main source of our own information about this culture.

What Egyptians were these, exactly. I suggest that there was a Pharonic culture prior to the flood that was reduced in significance by the flood but managed to survive and revive the Pharonic tradition. In fact, I suggest that a monument of the first Egyptian culture was left for us and is the Sphinx. This suggests that they had Pharaohs because of the head and probably associated the Pharaoh with the Lion because of the body, which will identify them as Animists, religiously.

This provides us with a probably genealogy of masculinism. It originated in Atlantis, was transmitted by them to the Mayans and the Egyptians, both of which attempted to establish it as the state religion via sun worship. Egypt failed but transmitted it to both the Greeks through word of mouth via traders and to the Semites who were later enslaved by the Egyptians and were therefor attracted to an outlaw religion, since it provided them with an identity distinguishable from that of the Egyptians and which was useful to them in conquering the Palestinian region. The Greeks were also unsuccessful due to the failure to see the need for a state religion so that they retained their feminist mythology which conflicted with their pursuit of intellectualism, the gift of masculinism. The Greeks, as we know passed it on to the Romans, who tried the same approach as the Greeks with the same result. However, the Semites produced Jesus and when his formulation of masculinism was adopted by the Roman Empire, sufficient power existed to impose it on the Empire and eventually on all of Europe.

A long period then followed in which the Europeans consumed Christianity and slowly developed the momentum necessary to bring about the Renaissance and to forge forward after consuming the work done by the Greeks.

It remains then to explain where the Atlantans came from and what happened to them.

My guess on this score is that they were Europeans and ended as what we now call eastern American Indians. That they got to America in the same way that Leif Ericson did and that they intermarried with the Mongolian descended western American Indians.

As for the suggestion posed in the Gilbert book regarding periodic physical upheaval on the Earth due to continuous changes in the Sun’s magnetic field: Mr. Cotterell started with the belief that changes in the environment we are now experiencing might lead to disaster in the future. He therefor identified the Sun’s magnetic field as the likely source of the problem and set about trying to analyze it to produce a history and accurate prediction for the future. He concluded that the likely date to worry about was 2012. He then looked at Mayan mythology and after much interpretation concluded that they believed the same thing as a result of mapping racial memory on the celestial clock. He went on to point out that an American mystic, Edgar Cayce, also predicted this event.

My conclusion is that Mr. Cotterell is likely to be correct in concluding that the Sun’s magnetic field affects movements in the Earth’s crust. I doubt the results of his analysis are conclusive. I don’t think he demonstrated a strong connection between his results and Mayan mythology. Mysticism is an unknown quantity. The productions of the unconscious are invariably symbolic, in my experience, and relate to the dreamer, exclusively. None the less, the methods of Mr. Cayce were unique and may have produced unique results. Certainly his comments on Atlantis are compelling.