The formation of pumice a sort of stony "froth" made of
siliceous glass is characteristic of the Indonesian volcanoes, and is
indeed the cause of their explosive eruptions of incomparable force. The
phenomenon is quite similar to the "popping" of popcorn. The water-soaked
siliceous magma of the submarine volcano (the primeval Krakatoa) built
up tremendous pressures under the weight of the crust and the overlying
sea water. Eventually, the topping crust which formed the volcanic peak
gave, and the eruption occurred, explosively.
 Thus released, the overheated water dissolved
in the hot magma turned instantly into vapor, literally bursting like popcorn, except
that in a worldwide scale. The sea was impelled, in a huge tsunami that
was the event mythified as "the Flood from below". Simultaneously, the
ashes and debris were thrown up into the stratosphere, as "soot". This
fly ash eventually fell back to the earth and the sea, choking all life
in the region, and causing the enormous quantities of rain, "the Flood
from above". Further away, it settled over the Ice Age glaciers, causing
their melting and triggering the end of the Pleistocene, precisely as related
above.
Interestingly enough, the Hindus associate
this sort of stuff this vitreous "seafroth" with Krishna and Balarama, the archetypes of
Hercules and Atlas. Balarama is the alias of the Serpent
Shesha,
whose name means (in Sanskrit) "residue" and, more exactly, the kind of
foam such as ambergris or pumice stone thrown over the beaches by the seas.
The whole story is a clever allegory of the explosion of Mt. Atlas, the
World s Pillar, ejecting the huge amounts of pumice stone and fly ash that
covered the soil and the seas of Atlantis, and choking out all its paradisial
forms of life.
The Titans and Atlas in particular were likened to Serpents (or Dragons), and to "weak-legged", anguipedal, Civilizing Heroes such as Erychthonios, Cadmus, Hercules, Quetzalcoatl, Kukulkan, etc.. All such indeed derive from the Nagas ("Serpent-people", "Dragons") of India and Indonesia, as we argue elsewhere.
The Illusory, Chimerical Atlantises
As we said above, the Cretan "Atlantis" of certain authorities is an illusion, as are all others outside the two
Indies. Nevertheless, the explosion of the Thera volcano closely parallels
the one of the Krakatoa of 1883, as some have noted. But it is far too
small and far too wrongly sited in relation to the Pillars of Hercules
for to be the right time and the right place.
Moreover, Crete lacked the
size and the importance that Plato attributes to Atlantis, being puny in
comparison to, say, the contemporary civilizations of Egypt, Babylon and
Mycenian Greece. And the Theran cataclysm never sunk Crete underseas,
or even hampered its existence in any notable way. In fact, the name of Crete (Kriti) means "swept", rather than "sunken one", as does the name of Atlantis in the holy tongues of India. So, Crete was recognizedly "swept" by the Theran cataclysm, but not indeed "sunken" by it, as Atlantis was.
The prehistoric explosion of the Krakatoa
volcano that sundered open the Strait of Sunda was, by comparison a million
times stronger. If the Theran explosion could sweep away the considerable
extent of Minoan Crete, we are led to conclude that the one of the Indonesian
volcano could well have wiped out an entire continental-sized civilization,
and have triggered the chain of events that culminated in the end of the
Pleistocene Ice Age.
Equally illusory are the Atlantises of
the Bosphorus (Moreau de Jonnés), of Spain (R. Hennig), of Libya
(Borchardt), of Benin, in Africa (Leo Frobenius) and the even less likely
one of the North Sea (Olaus Rudbeck), the Americas (several authors) and
Antactica (idem). Even more impossible are the Atlantises located in sunken
islands of continents of the Atlantic Ocean and, particularly, the Sargasso
Sea, for they are not even geophysical possibilities.
The Mid-Atlantic Ridge and Donnelly s
Atlantis
There are no sunken continents at the bottom
of the Atlantic Ocean, as an extensive study of this region has unequivocally
shown. What this detailed research disclosed is the existence of the
Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a vast submarine cordillera that divides the Atlantic
Ocean at the middle. This feature corresponds to the rift from whence the
Tectonic Plates issue, causing the continents to drift away from the spot, at the rate of a few centimeter per year.
Hence, despite the brilliant plea of Ignatius
Donnelly, this ridge corresponds not to a sunken continent, but to land
that is slowly rising out of the sea bottom.
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