Checkmite
Skepticifimisticalationist
Ah, Bimini. A beautiful, if insignificant, speck of land is the Bimini Island, located opposite Miami on the eastern edge of the Gulf Stream. Bimini is often the “gateway” to the Bahamas for small private cruisers, who stop to take on water at Alice Town, the island’s only settlement. There is a bar in Alice Town (which shall remain nameless) where the underwear (yes, underwear) of countless previous patrons is tacked to the wall and hung from lines, with names and dates going back 50 years written on them; you’re free to leave yours there if you want. But the reason most people visit Bimini is for the scuba diving.
Off Bimini, in extremely shallow water, there lies a formation of fractured beachrock similar to other formations of fractured beachrock, yet different because the formation is actually a road or wall built by either aliens or Atlanteans, depending on who’s trying to sell you the bridge. The formation in question, typically yclept the “Bimini Road”, does not resemble its original structure, of course. In the mid 1920s, after a bad hurricane, a few American companies in charge of repairing stateside harbors harvested tons upon tons of stones from the Bimini Road. And other formations around Bimini. They’ve left calling cards behind, as well, in the form of tool marks on a few rejected stones. These tool marks can still be seen today, and when “discovered” are hailed as evidence by proponents of a theory regarding an ancient civilization which selected the Bimini region as their home.
Most people reject this theory, including most scientists. According to proponents, that’s because it would upset currently held scientific theories concerning the history of the Bahamas islands, and scientists can’t handle being proven wrong. Actually, the reason this theory is usually rejected out of hand is not out of favor to the incumbent theories, but rather out of disdain for the methodology used to arrive at it. You see, the proponents of an ancient civilization on Bimini didn’t simply happen upon the stones, examine them, and work out a theory to explain them. Instead, they arrived with a theory already on their minds, and checked over the evidence to see whether it was compatible with their theory. That theory involves a great island civilization that sunk into the ocean long, long ago…an island named Atlantis.
Atlantis is, to be brutally precise, a fairy tale invented by one Greek philosopher named Plato. Some may feel that this analysis is too bold; however, considering that no mention of Atlantis has been found anywhere in any classical literature or art outside of Plato’s two dialogues, the Timaeus and the Critias, the only reasonable conclusion is that it never existed independent of them.
The first mention of Atlantis is in the Timaeus. In it, a man named Critias tells a story told to him by his grandfather, who was also named Critias. That older Critias learned the story from his grandfather, named Dropides, who swore that he heard it from the great Greek scholar Solon, who in turn was told the story by Egyptian priests from a city called Sais. Those priests heard the story from their predecessors, and so on down the line. According to the story, Solon was visiting Sais and was talking with the Egyptian priests. The priests asked Solon to tell them the oldest story he could think of; he gives them the canned Greek “creation myth”.
According to Solon…according to Dropides, according to Critias the elder, according to Critias, according to Plato, the Egyptians began to tell a very “old” story.
So apparently, there was a huge island outside the Mediterranean, and behind it was a continent so big the Egyptians called it “boundless”. Already the words are suspect, being that all of North America and South America themselves can barely be called “larger than Libya (Africa) and Asia put together”, let alone an island between the Americas and the Med. But perhaps I’m arguing semantics? Let’s continue.
Coming from a Hellene, this story sounds like propaganda. Proud Athens, all by herself, fending off the brutish warrior thugs of “Atlantis” – thugs who managed to capture nearly the entire Mediterranean! – and liberating the world from slavery. It’s a wonderful and powerful story. And what happened to these knights in shining armor, the Athenians? What happened to the Atlantean hordes?
Talk about fixing something that wasn’t broke. This seems like an almost intentional parody of the deus ex machina concept. After the war, both the good guys and the bad guys were just obliterated. Must’ve ruined a perfectly good day for the Athenians.
In the Critias, Plato covers some of the political and demographic aspects of the Atlantean culture, none of which are pertinent to the existence argument.
Now, from this story we have certain specific facts about Atlantis, which we should need to use were we to attempt to find the island. According to Plato,
Despite many exhaustive searches, there is nothing on this earth that matches Plato’s (Critias’s, Dropides’s, Solon’s, the priests’) 4 basic criteria. Some have insisted that Plato’s story was allegory, and was really inspired by the destruction of the Santorini volcano and its island. However, the only fact to link Santorini and Atlantis is that they were both islands that were destroyed. Santorini was not in the Atlantic, was not destroyed 9,000 years before Plato’s time, was not sunk by earthquakes and floods, and did not leave any part of the sea “impassable”, with a mud shoal or otherwise (in fact, the opposite happened – the Santorini destruction made the former center of the island “navigable” by erasing it). Santorini fails every single criteria. Santorini was not Atlantis.
That’s not to say that there wasn’t an island in Antarctica or off the coast of South America or Africa, or in a lake in the Andes that was home to a city and that sunk. There are plenty of such instances, all through world history. But those places were not Atlantis. They bear no resemblance to Atlantis. There was no Atlantis.
Still, some see hope in the Bahamas. The Bahamas are in the Atlantic, did exist 9,000 years before Plato, and were technically largely sunk by flooding – even if the “cataclysmic flood waters” rose only about an inch every hundred years or so. As it relates to the Bermuda Triangle, this would be its ultimate victim…an entire civilization!
However, most proponents don’t propose that the Atlanteans were victims of the Bermuda Triangle. Rather, they propose that the Atlanteans are responsible for the Bermuda Triangle. But how can this be? How can this race of conquest-driven blowhards be responsible for airplane and ship disappearances thousands of years after its death? Plato’s Critias describes the Atlanteans as a race ruled by kings, with warriors who used swords, bows, and chariots. What’s missing?
The reason for the “Atlantean Blame” theory lies not with Plato, but with someone who lived 10,000 years later…a “sleeping medium” that gave Atlantis a mondo facelift and threw the old Greek philosopher’s description more or less to the dogs. I speak of course of “Edgar Cayce”, who wove stories of an Atlantis with airplanes, supercomputers, and whiz-bang neeto keeno sexy-cool “crystal” energy sources. Abuse of these energy sources, said Cayce, destroyed Atlantis by causing volcanic upheavals. Unfortunately, like Santorini, Cayce’s “Atlantis” bears absolutely nothing in common with Plato’s Atlantis, save that we’re dealing with an island that sank. However, according to Cayce, sunken “Atlantis” would actually pop back up:
Sadly, Poseidia – or any part of Atlantis – did not rise again, as well we all know. The islands in the Bahamas now are the same islands that were there in Cayce’s time. However, when dealing with proponents of Atlantis, we must remember that we are dealing with people who are willing to fudge details in order to make their theories work. The same people who will take Plato’s work and arbitrarily say “Well, he got this and this and this slightly wrong, but the rest of the work is completely accurate” are the same people who look at Cayce’s prediction about an island rising from the depths and say “Well what he really meant was that the Bimini Wall would be discovered in ’68 or ‘69”, as indeed it was “discovered” in 1968. But while Cayce may have said “rise again” when he really meant “be discovered”, his words about crystal sources are taken for Gospel by his followers, who insist that some of these sources are still active, and cause planes and ships to disappear in the waters of the Bermuda Triangle.
There may have been an ancient civilization which lived on Bimini Island 10,000 years ago. There are several mysteries introduced by this hypothesis, of course. The first is why this civilization didn’t bother to rebuild itself, either on the remaining islands or on nearby continental masses…or did they? The author of our Bermuda Triangle book, Quasar, draws similarities between the Bimini Wall (which is presumably collapsed) and Peruvian Indian walls. Of course, Peru is on the other side of a continent from the Bahamas, and it seems odd that the Atlanteans wouldn’t have stopped in, say, the Yucatan or Columbia and built the structures there as well. In fact, given that the Peruvian Indians built their walls only around 1,000 years ago, one would wonder why no Atlanteans built any walls at all in the centuries following their escape, or why wall-building knowledge was “passed down” for over 9,000 years (again assuming a “dry Bahamas” time-window of 10,000 years ago) before the recipients of this ancient wisdom bothered to implement it at all.
Quasar would counter this, as he does in his book, by suggesting that a good portion of the Bahamas were still dry as late as 1513, and that the Bimini Road (or nearby structures) was among the stoneworks still standing on dry land at that time. This would definitely place our Atlanteans and Peruvians a bit closer together in time…but what is our evidence? According to Quasar, it’s the infamous map of Admiral Piri Reis! The Piri map shows an island near the North American coast with what could be construed as a “row of polygonal, joined stones” in the center. Contemporary cartographers often drew not-to-scale landmarks on their islands to help the reader connect an island on the map with an island he was theoretically looking at. Since this “island” had polygonal stones in its center, it meant the Bimini Wall was on dry land in 1513. That’s what Quasar says in his picture caption, anyway. Well, friends, I won’t delve into the Piri map any further than to point out the fact that it wasn’t drawn by a “cartographer”, but by Piri himself, using several different maps (in different scales), many of which were outdated. Though the Piri map was finished in 1513, it cannot be used as a method of connecting absolutely anything with a particular year. The Piri map has been thoroughly trashed elsewhere, and a quick Google will find you enough information to discredit it thoroughly.
So we’re left with an island that sunk thousands of years ago, with hidden “power sources” that still zap unwary travelers today. Our only source for this information is Edgar Cayce, but we’re supposed to believe it anyway. But what are our alternatives? In the next installment, we will study ways that planes and ships can “disappear” without Atlantean crystal energy beams. We will also discuss Quasar’s theories regarding Zero Point energy, and the odd claims of a little “mad scientist” from Canada named John Hutchison.
Off Bimini, in extremely shallow water, there lies a formation of fractured beachrock similar to other formations of fractured beachrock, yet different because the formation is actually a road or wall built by either aliens or Atlanteans, depending on who’s trying to sell you the bridge. The formation in question, typically yclept the “Bimini Road”, does not resemble its original structure, of course. In the mid 1920s, after a bad hurricane, a few American companies in charge of repairing stateside harbors harvested tons upon tons of stones from the Bimini Road. And other formations around Bimini. They’ve left calling cards behind, as well, in the form of tool marks on a few rejected stones. These tool marks can still be seen today, and when “discovered” are hailed as evidence by proponents of a theory regarding an ancient civilization which selected the Bimini region as their home.
Most people reject this theory, including most scientists. According to proponents, that’s because it would upset currently held scientific theories concerning the history of the Bahamas islands, and scientists can’t handle being proven wrong. Actually, the reason this theory is usually rejected out of hand is not out of favor to the incumbent theories, but rather out of disdain for the methodology used to arrive at it. You see, the proponents of an ancient civilization on Bimini didn’t simply happen upon the stones, examine them, and work out a theory to explain them. Instead, they arrived with a theory already on their minds, and checked over the evidence to see whether it was compatible with their theory. That theory involves a great island civilization that sunk into the ocean long, long ago…an island named Atlantis.
Atlantis is, to be brutally precise, a fairy tale invented by one Greek philosopher named Plato. Some may feel that this analysis is too bold; however, considering that no mention of Atlantis has been found anywhere in any classical literature or art outside of Plato’s two dialogues, the Timaeus and the Critias, the only reasonable conclusion is that it never existed independent of them.
The first mention of Atlantis is in the Timaeus. In it, a man named Critias tells a story told to him by his grandfather, who was also named Critias. That older Critias learned the story from his grandfather, named Dropides, who swore that he heard it from the great Greek scholar Solon, who in turn was told the story by Egyptian priests from a city called Sais. Those priests heard the story from their predecessors, and so on down the line. According to the story, Solon was visiting Sais and was talking with the Egyptian priests. The priests asked Solon to tell them the oldest story he could think of; he gives them the canned Greek “creation myth”.
According to Solon…according to Dropides, according to Critias the elder, according to Critias, according to Plato, the Egyptians began to tell a very “old” story.
So apparently, there was a huge island outside the Mediterranean, and behind it was a continent so big the Egyptians called it “boundless”. Already the words are suspect, being that all of North America and South America themselves can barely be called “larger than Libya (Africa) and Asia put together”, let alone an island between the Americas and the Med. But perhaps I’m arguing semantics? Let’s continue.
Coming from a Hellene, this story sounds like propaganda. Proud Athens, all by herself, fending off the brutish warrior thugs of “Atlantis” – thugs who managed to capture nearly the entire Mediterranean! – and liberating the world from slavery. It’s a wonderful and powerful story. And what happened to these knights in shining armor, the Athenians? What happened to the Atlantean hordes?
Talk about fixing something that wasn’t broke. This seems like an almost intentional parody of the deus ex machina concept. After the war, both the good guys and the bad guys were just obliterated. Must’ve ruined a perfectly good day for the Athenians.
In the Critias, Plato covers some of the political and demographic aspects of the Atlantean culture, none of which are pertinent to the existence argument.
Now, from this story we have certain specific facts about Atlantis, which we should need to use were we to attempt to find the island. According to Plato,
- Time - Atlantis existed 9,000 years before Plato’s time…that would be 10,000 years before our time.
- Size - Atlantis was larger than Libya and Asia put together. Friends, even if we’re talking about then-known Libya and Asia, that’s bloody huge.
- Location - Atlantis was outside the Mediterranean Sea, in the Atlantic Ocean, and situated in front of the Straits of Heracles (Gibraltar).
- Method of Destruction - Atlantis was sunk by violent earthquakes and floods, rendering the ocean in its immediate vicinity impassable by creating a shoal of mud.
Despite many exhaustive searches, there is nothing on this earth that matches Plato’s (Critias’s, Dropides’s, Solon’s, the priests’) 4 basic criteria. Some have insisted that Plato’s story was allegory, and was really inspired by the destruction of the Santorini volcano and its island. However, the only fact to link Santorini and Atlantis is that they were both islands that were destroyed. Santorini was not in the Atlantic, was not destroyed 9,000 years before Plato’s time, was not sunk by earthquakes and floods, and did not leave any part of the sea “impassable”, with a mud shoal or otherwise (in fact, the opposite happened – the Santorini destruction made the former center of the island “navigable” by erasing it). Santorini fails every single criteria. Santorini was not Atlantis.
That’s not to say that there wasn’t an island in Antarctica or off the coast of South America or Africa, or in a lake in the Andes that was home to a city and that sunk. There are plenty of such instances, all through world history. But those places were not Atlantis. They bear no resemblance to Atlantis. There was no Atlantis.
Still, some see hope in the Bahamas. The Bahamas are in the Atlantic, did exist 9,000 years before Plato, and were technically largely sunk by flooding – even if the “cataclysmic flood waters” rose only about an inch every hundred years or so. As it relates to the Bermuda Triangle, this would be its ultimate victim…an entire civilization!
However, most proponents don’t propose that the Atlanteans were victims of the Bermuda Triangle. Rather, they propose that the Atlanteans are responsible for the Bermuda Triangle. But how can this be? How can this race of conquest-driven blowhards be responsible for airplane and ship disappearances thousands of years after its death? Plato’s Critias describes the Atlanteans as a race ruled by kings, with warriors who used swords, bows, and chariots. What’s missing?
The reason for the “Atlantean Blame” theory lies not with Plato, but with someone who lived 10,000 years later…a “sleeping medium” that gave Atlantis a mondo facelift and threw the old Greek philosopher’s description more or less to the dogs. I speak of course of “Edgar Cayce”, who wove stories of an Atlantis with airplanes, supercomputers, and whiz-bang neeto keeno sexy-cool “crystal” energy sources. Abuse of these energy sources, said Cayce, destroyed Atlantis by causing volcanic upheavals. Unfortunately, like Santorini, Cayce’s “Atlantis” bears absolutely nothing in common with Plato’s Atlantis, save that we’re dealing with an island that sank. However, according to Cayce, sunken “Atlantis” would actually pop back up:
Sadly, Poseidia – or any part of Atlantis – did not rise again, as well we all know. The islands in the Bahamas now are the same islands that were there in Cayce’s time. However, when dealing with proponents of Atlantis, we must remember that we are dealing with people who are willing to fudge details in order to make their theories work. The same people who will take Plato’s work and arbitrarily say “Well, he got this and this and this slightly wrong, but the rest of the work is completely accurate” are the same people who look at Cayce’s prediction about an island rising from the depths and say “Well what he really meant was that the Bimini Wall would be discovered in ’68 or ‘69”, as indeed it was “discovered” in 1968. But while Cayce may have said “rise again” when he really meant “be discovered”, his words about crystal sources are taken for Gospel by his followers, who insist that some of these sources are still active, and cause planes and ships to disappear in the waters of the Bermuda Triangle.
There may have been an ancient civilization which lived on Bimini Island 10,000 years ago. There are several mysteries introduced by this hypothesis, of course. The first is why this civilization didn’t bother to rebuild itself, either on the remaining islands or on nearby continental masses…or did they? The author of our Bermuda Triangle book, Quasar, draws similarities between the Bimini Wall (which is presumably collapsed) and Peruvian Indian walls. Of course, Peru is on the other side of a continent from the Bahamas, and it seems odd that the Atlanteans wouldn’t have stopped in, say, the Yucatan or Columbia and built the structures there as well. In fact, given that the Peruvian Indians built their walls only around 1,000 years ago, one would wonder why no Atlanteans built any walls at all in the centuries following their escape, or why wall-building knowledge was “passed down” for over 9,000 years (again assuming a “dry Bahamas” time-window of 10,000 years ago) before the recipients of this ancient wisdom bothered to implement it at all.
Quasar would counter this, as he does in his book, by suggesting that a good portion of the Bahamas were still dry as late as 1513, and that the Bimini Road (or nearby structures) was among the stoneworks still standing on dry land at that time. This would definitely place our Atlanteans and Peruvians a bit closer together in time…but what is our evidence? According to Quasar, it’s the infamous map of Admiral Piri Reis! The Piri map shows an island near the North American coast with what could be construed as a “row of polygonal, joined stones” in the center. Contemporary cartographers often drew not-to-scale landmarks on their islands to help the reader connect an island on the map with an island he was theoretically looking at. Since this “island” had polygonal stones in its center, it meant the Bimini Wall was on dry land in 1513. That’s what Quasar says in his picture caption, anyway. Well, friends, I won’t delve into the Piri map any further than to point out the fact that it wasn’t drawn by a “cartographer”, but by Piri himself, using several different maps (in different scales), many of which were outdated. Though the Piri map was finished in 1513, it cannot be used as a method of connecting absolutely anything with a particular year. The Piri map has been thoroughly trashed elsewhere, and a quick Google will find you enough information to discredit it thoroughly.
So we’re left with an island that sunk thousands of years ago, with hidden “power sources” that still zap unwary travelers today. Our only source for this information is Edgar Cayce, but we’re supposed to believe it anyway. But what are our alternatives? In the next installment, we will study ways that planes and ships can “disappear” without Atlantean crystal energy beams. We will also discuss Quasar’s theories regarding Zero Point energy, and the odd claims of a little “mad scientist” from Canada named John Hutchison.
