Chapter 1810

[←1800]

To make a difference between Lemuria and Atlantis, the ancient writers referred to the latter as the Northern or Hyperborean Atlantis, and to the former as the Southern. Thus Apollodorus says (Mythology, Book ii): “The golden apples carried away by Hercules are not, as some think, in Lybia; they are in the Hyperborean Atlantis.” The Greeks naturalized all the Gods they borrowed and made Hellenes of them, and the moderns helped them. Thus also the Mythologists have tried to make of Eridanus the river Po, in Italy. In the myth of Phaeton it is said that at his death his sisters dropped hot tears which fell into Eridanus and were changed into amber! Now amber is found only in the northern seas, in the Baltic. Phaeton, meeting with his death while carrying heat to the frozen stars of the boreal regions, awakening at the Pole the Dragon made rigid by cold, and being hurled down into the Eridanus, is an allegory referring directly to the changes of climate in those distant times when, from a frigid zone, the polar lands had become a country with a moderate and warm climate. The usurper of the functions of the Sun, Phaeton, being hurled into the Eridanus by Jupiter’s thunderbolt, is an allusion to the second change that took place in those regions when, once more, the land where “the magnolia blossomed” became the desolate forbidding land of the farthest north and eternal ice. This allegory covers then the events of two Pralayas; and if well understood, ought to be a demonstration of the enormous antiquity of the human races.