A Second Chance

We've all heard of Atlantis, that advanced, moral civilization of virtuous men and women. They mastered science and technologies way more advanced than any other culture at the time, and managed to run a nearly Utopian society at the height of their reign...

_{source: Wikimedia Commons}

Although this legend started as a rather modest part of Plato's writings on the hubris of nations in his work called Criteas, it has been re-told many times by many storytellers and has been embellished with every iteration; the latest version I've seen was in Aquaman , where the Atlantians have evolved to live and breathe underwater and are still way ahead of us in the science- and technology departments. In Plato's original though, the Atlantians start out as a great naval force that attacked an imaginary version of Athens, approximately 9000 years before his own time. Plato's fictional Athens beat and drove back the Atlantians. Furthermore he wrote that these God-like people had become greedy, petty and morally bankrupt, which made the Gods angry enough for them to sink the island and central city of Atlantis in a terrible night of fire and earthquakes.

Atlantis is not the only civilization to be terminated by deity as a consequence of their terrible behavior, and not the only one to perish in a flood either. In the Christian Bible it's the descendants of Cain that are wiped out by God in the Biblical Flood. Cain killed his brother Abel after complaining to God because He seemed to favor Abel's sacrifices over his. Cain and Abel were Adam and Eve's first two sons, which makes Cain the first born human, and Abel the first to die. But after the Flood, only descendants of Noah remain, all descendants of Seth, Adam and Eve's third son. Noah, who built the Ark to preserve the planet's fauna (and flora?), was also the last of the absurdly long living descendants of Adam and Eve, he was the last of the antediluvian patriarchs and his children lived a lot shorter. Moses only got to live 120 years.

There are many more cultures with creation legends that incorporate some sort of flooding and some sort of rebirth of humanity, a second chance if you will. Even in the oldest written legend we know of, the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, the city state of Uruk goes under in a deluge, almost exactly the same way as told in the Bible. A thought that sometimes haunts me is this: are we Atlantis? Are we Cain? is Earth Uruk? Gilgamesh also got greedy in his own way, and also attained God-like powers, just like the Atlantians, and lived extremely long, like Adam and Eve's early descendants. Are we them? Here's someone who shares this concern, Graham Hancock who's known for his pseudo-scientific books, but who I listen to with great interest nonetheless, and who regularly has some wisdom to share as he dares to connect the spiritual to the scientific. How dare he..? ;-) Here he gives us the account of yet another story, another prophecy of the downfall of men and the anger of the Gods...

Erratum:

I have to stop this; I made a stupid mistake, again, this time by relying too blindly on memory alone… The Sumerian flood story did come from the story of Gilgamesh, but it wasn’t Gilgamesh himself nor Uruk that got destroyed. Here’s the real story with source, it’ll show how similar this story is to the Biblical version:

The Sumerian hero Gilgamesh traveled the world in search of a way to cheat death. On one of his journeys, he came across an old man, Utnapishtim, who told Gilgamesh a story from centuries past. The gods brought a flood that swallowed the earth.

The gods were angry at mankind so they sent a flood to destroy him. The god Ea, warned Utnapishtim and instructed him to build an enormous boat to save himself, his family, and “the seed of all living things.” He does so, and the gods brought rain which caused the water to rise for many days. When the rains subsided, the boat landed on a mountain, and Utnapishtim set loose first a dove, then a swallow, and finally a raven, which found land. The god Ishtar, created the rainbow and placed it in the sky, as a reminder to the gods and a pledge to mankind that there would be no more floods.
source: HistoryWiz

_{THOTH's PROPHECY read from the Hermetic Texts by Graham Hancock}

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