Spontaneous Human Combustion

Spontaneous Human Combustion

East Indian Baby Suffers Continued Spontaneous Immolation

CHENNAI: Rahul has been virtually in flames four times since he was born two-and-a-half months ago. Doctors say it's due to a rare condition called spontaneous human combustion (SHC).

Afflicted with the disorder, seen only in 200 people across the world in the past 300 years, the child is undergoing treatment at Kilpauk Medical College (KMC) Hospital.

Rahul was nine days old when he first "caught fire" in the presence of his mother Rajeshwari who watched in disbelief as there was no source of fire in the vicinity. She took him to the Villupuram Medical College from where the baby was discharged three days later. After coming home, he suffered burns again.

"Doctors say he is a healthy child and his organs are fine. The last time he caught fire was a fortnight ago, and this time it was head to toe," said Rajeshwari who hails from a village near Tindivanam.

Paediatrician Dr Narayana Babu, who is treating Rahul, said the baby emitted some highly combustible gas through the pores of his skin, which made him catch fire. "We have not identified the gas yet," said Dr Babu.

The case has stunned doctors in the city. There are many theories about the poorly understood condition, ranging from high acetone content in the body to the paranormal. Some doctors say everyone has certain amount of alcohol present in their blood and when its content is high, it combines with the gases in the body; resulting in burns.

"More than 20 years ago, we saw a similar case of a 23-year-old man, but it went undocumented," said Dr Jayaraman, former head of the burns unit in KMC. "Several theories of SHC do the rounds but they are very vague and not backed by scientific proof. Though there is no special cure for the condition, it can be treated like a regular burn injury," he said.

Dr Kalpesh Gajiwala, a burns specialist at the Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai, said it was surprising that it happened to a child in a village, where children are usually breastfed and breast milk, would rarely ever be converted to methane. "A plausible hypothesis for SHC is that some bacteria, such as the methanogenic micro-organism-archaebacteria, in the intestine convert the food into methane, which is a combustible substance," said Dr Gajiwala.

A small spark, which need not be an obvious one, anywhere nearby, can trigger the fire, said the doctor. "Let us say if the child is covered with a silk cloth which can generate static electricity, the combustible gas and the electricity can cause fire," he said.

"The boy should not be near inflammable substances. It's better if he is kept in a cold place," said Dr Babu. - Times of India

  

PYROKINETICS

Pyrokinesis (pyrokinetics) was the name coined by horror novelist Stephen King for the ability to create or to control fire with the mind that he gave to a character in Firestarter

The following cases of apparently paranormal firestarters involve some aspects common in people who exhibit psychic / poltergeist - like powers. Unfortunately we don't have much detail about the girls involved, so the case must remain intriguing though unsupported by independent evidence. However, it would be interesting to know if prior to or at the time of the alleged fire-starting incidents, these two girls had made claims of mediumship, telepathy or any other 'psychic' abilities.

In November 1890, in Thorah, near Toronto, Canada, strange things started happening around a 14 year-old English girl called Jennie Bramwell, the adopted daughter of a farmer, Mr. Dawson, and his wife. The girl had been ill and gone into a trance, crying out 'Look at that!' pointing to a ceiling which was ablaze. Shortly after, to the astonishment of Mr. and Mrs. Dawson, she pointed to another fire. The following day numerous fires broke out around the house; as soon as one was put out, another started. In one instance while Mrs. Dawson and the girl were seated facing a wall, the wallpaper suddenly caught fire, Jennie's dress then burst into flames and Mrs. Dawson burnt her hands extinguishing the fire. Fires continued to break out in the house for a whole week. A report in the Toronto Globe, for 9th November, described charred pieces of wallpaper, which looked as if they'd been burned using a blazing lamp.

The situation became unbearable, all the furniture was moved into the yard, and the unfortunate girl, blamed for the fires, was sent back to the orphanage from where she'd come. With her leaving, the phenomena stopped. The reporter from the Toronto Globe depicted her as 'a half-witted girl [who] had walked about the house with a match, setting light to everything she came across.' However, he had difficulty explaining how the fire on the ceiling, and those on the walls had been started. Charles Fort, describing the case, commented wryly - 'I'll not experiment, but I assume that I could flip matches all day at a wall, and not set wallpaper afire.'

The reporter wanted to know if Jennie had any knowledge of chemistry, as according to him the 'half-witted' little orphan was 'well-versed in rudiments of the science.' He subsequently made inquiries around town, and discovered that the girl was also 'an incorrigible little thief', and that she had visited the chemist many times on errands.

So, the mystery was solved: the girl had stolen "some chemical," which she had spread over various parts of the Dawson's house in order to start the fires.

In January 1895 there were fires in the house of an out of work carpenter, Adam Colwell in Brooklyn, New York. The fires were investigated by police and firemen who witnessed furniture burst into flames and subsequently reported that the cause of the fires was unexplained. However, the Fire Marshall suspected the pretty adopted daughter of the Colwells, Rhoda, as playing some part. He stated that 'It might be thought that the child Rhoda started two of the fires, but she can not be considered guilty of the others, as she was being questioned, when some of them began. I do not want to be quoted as a believer in the supernatural, but I have no explanation to offer, as to the cause of the fires, or of the throwing around of the furniture.'

Mr. Colwell asserted that on the afternoon of the 4th of January whilst in the company of his wife and stepdaughter Rhoda, a crash was heard - a large, empty stove had fallen over, four pictures also fell off the walls. Shortly afterwards a bed caught fire, a policeman was called who saw wallpaper start to burn. Another fire started and a heavy lamp fell from a hook onto the floor. The house burned to the ground and the family, who had lost everything apart from their clothes, were taken to the police station. Captain Rhoades, of the Greenpoint Precinct said that he could attribute the strange fires to 'no other cause than a supernatural agency.'

However, a Mr. J.L. Hope of Flushing, Long Island, came to see Captain Rhoades and told him that Rhoda had worked for him as a housemaid and, between 19th November and 19th December, four mysterious fires had broken out. This was enough to convince the Captain of Rhoda's guilt in the present case as well, and she was warned to admit the truth. Frightened, she wept that she had indeed started the fires as she disliked the place she lived and wanted to get away. The girl had also knocked the pictures off the walls and dropped lighted matches into the beds, continuing with her mischief even after the police, firemen and detectives arrived at the house.

Though the police Captain had previously thought the fires 'supernatural' he now found a natural explanation in Rhoda's now well-attested fire-starting tendencies. The New York Herald ran the story as 'Policemen and firemen artfully tricked by a pretty, young girl.' So instead of investigating the fires in Flushing the Captain gave the girl some 'wholesome advice' to which she apparently listened, and closed the case.

Such fire starting seems intimately connected with poltergeist activity (the moving about of furniture for example) and young girls. Some, though not all, of the fire-starters seem to be orphans in unhappy situations, and this may, in some cases, explain the motive. But since the methods by which these unusual fires were started are a mystery (explanations at the time obviously being ludicrous i.e. tossing lighted matches at the wall, ) we are still left with the puzzle that certain young people are possessed with the allegedly paranormal ability to unconsciously start fires without any visible means. As mentioned time and time again on Mysterious People, however, the sources for such 'paranormal' stories, especially those from the 19th century and earlier, are usually newspaper accounts, which unfortunately means that the events may or may not have happened as described. We can never be sure.
-----

In the year 1882, in Paw Paw, Michigan, Dr L. C. Woodman heard rumors of a man with a remarkable ability. It was said a 24 year-old man, named A.W. Underwood, had to take great care whenever he breathed, apparently to avoid causing fires.

At first the doctor thought the stories were mere exaggerations, but one day there was a knock on his door, and in walked A.W. Underwood himself, looking for help.

Dr. Woodman was persuaded to make tests in the presence of himself and some of his colleagues, and to their amazement Underwood performed incredible feats which they could not explain. In an article from Michigan Medical News, dated September 11, 1882, Doctor Woodman stated:

“He will take anybody’s handkerchief and hold it to his mouth rub it vigorously with his hands while breathing on it and immediately it bursts into flames and burns until consumed. He will strip and rinse out his mouth thoroughly, wash his hands and submit to the most rigid examination to preclude the possibility of any humbug, and then by his breath blown upon any paper or cloth envelop it in flame. He will, while out gunning and without matches desirous of a fire lie down after collecting dry leaves and by breathing on them start the fire.. ”

Dr. Woodman stated publicly that he was sure that Underwood’s ability was authentic.

The doctor also noticed that Underwood would hold the cloth or other material against his mouth so that he could force his breath through it, thus condensing whatever strange process it was.

The doctors washed Underwood’s mouth out with various mixtures, and obliged him to wear surgeon’s rubber gloves - but it made no difference - the phenomenon carried on as normal.

A similar case was reported In 1927, when Vice President of the U.S., Charles Dawes, personally investigated the case of a car mechanic in Memphis, Tennessee, who supposedly had the mysterious ability to set inflammable material alight merely by breathing on it.

The man took General Dawes’ handkerchief, breathed on it, and it caught fire.

No reasonable explanation could be found, but Dawes and his colleagues decided it was a genuine ability and not a trick.

If genuine, these cases are unusual in that both Underwood and the anonymous car mechanic seemed to be able to control the phenomenon and produce it at will.

Paranormal researcher Charles Fort wrote of an incident which took place at Bridgewater, Scotland, in May 1878. Mysterious fires were being started with no apparent cause, loud raps were heard and household items such as dishes and loaves of bread moved about. After a police investigation a servant girl, Ann Kidner, aged 12, was arrested, and accused of tossing lighted matches, but was released by the magistrate because of insufficient evidence.

In October 1886, a 12 year-old boy named Willie Brough, of Turlock, Madison County, California, was accused of setting things on fire ‘by his glance,’ and was expelled from Turlock School after five unexplained fires had started in his presence. His parents thought him possessed by the devil and sent him away.

-----

In 1982 Benedetto Supino, an Italian adolescent boy, discovered something quite strange about himself. He was sitting in a dentist's waiting-room reading a comic book when all of the sudden the thing burst into flames right there in his hands.

At the time, no doubt, he claimed total innocence to deaf ears. Once a fiery pattern was established after a few more incidents, his surrounding adults may have been more likely to believe him - especially when they actually saw him accidentally ignite things without a match in sight.

As we already said, Benedetto Supino discovered his strange powers at a young age - around 10 - when a dentist's comic book flamed-up in his hands. Although there were instances of the boy starting a flame with sufficient intention and concentration, it seems that usually neither was the case.

Paranormal.About.com gives an example of the latter happening:

"One morning [Supino] was awakened by a fire in his own bed – his pajamas were in flames and the boy suffered severe burns."

Doesn't sound like a terrific gift there, does it? The same article goes on to give other instances of flames starting by his intention, or merely by his presence:

"On another occasion, a small plastic object held in his uncle’s hands began to burn as Benedetto stared at it. Just about everywhere he went, furniture, paper, books and other items would start to smolder or burn. Some witnesses even claimed to see his hands glow at these moments."

Everywhere he went - according to some sources, fuse boxes ignited, newspapers burst into flames and non-specific 'small objects' would smoke and burn. Obviously the boy's parents worried. They sent him to physicians and scientists who apparently found no reason for the strangeness. He was also sent to an Archbishop with the same result - nothing. The burden taxed the boy - he himself can be quoted as saying:

"I don't want things to catch fire, but what can I do?"

It seems though, that with some help he was finally able to learn control. According to Prediction Magazine:

"When an entire army of doctors were unable to help him, he turned to parapsychologist Dr. Demetrio Croce, who taught him to control and hone his abilities."

Now we haven't found any specifics as to what exactly is meant by the word 'hone' in this case. We don't know whether Supin's just managed to turn it off completely, or just to burn things he wants to burn.

-----

Then there is the case of Lily White, a West Indian woman from Liberta, Antigua. It was reported in the New York Times issue of August 25, 1929, that her clothes would burst into flames. Fire attacked her garments when she was at home and also in the streets, leaving her naked. Lily had become dependent on her neighbors for things to wear. Even as she slept, her sheets would burn up around her yet she was never harmed by the flames themselves.

In an interview in the March 14, 1976 issue of Sunday People, Parapsychologist Dr. Genady Sergeyev referred to the powerful telekinetic medium Nina Kulagina, quoted as: "She can draw energy somehow from all around her; electrical instruments can prove it. On several occasions, the force rushing into her body left four-inch-long burn-marks on her arms and hands...I was with her once when her clothing caught fire from this energy flow. It literally flamed up. I helped put out the flames and saved some of the burned clothing as an exhibit."

The ability to control fire with the mind or mental resistance to handling flaming objects is scientifically inconclusive. One belief is that Pyrokinesis works by exciting the atoms of an object to heat it up and have it catch fire. Since all matter, on a nuclear psychics level, is simply different forms or levels of energy, this notion makes basic sense. People who display such ability are believed to visualize the particles of a flame to slow down or to speed up and move very fast, thus heating up or going out. Being that a Pyrokinetic individual can control heat, it is also considered the most unstable and dangerous of kinetic ability. These phenomena leave a great many questions about the power of the human mind, the laws of psychics and the power of faith.

Sources:
mysteriouspeople.com
ourstrangeworld.net
paranormal.about.com
weird-people.com
torontoghosts.org
unsolvedmysteries.com
x-fileslexicon.com

The Big Book of Canadian Hauntings

Manual of Pyrokinesis: The Psychical Influence of Particle Acceleration and Heat Flow - Applications, Experimentation, and Measurement

Quantum Psychics - Scientifically Understand, Control and Enhance Your Psychic Ability

From Pulse of the Paranormal @ http://www.phantomsandmonsters.com/2013/08/east-indian-baby-suffers-continued.html

This is a ‘not for profit’ site -

But if you like what we do please buy

Donate any amount and receive at least one New Illuminati eBook!

Please click in the jar -

 

For further enlightening information enter a word or phrase into the random synchronistic search box @ http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com

And see

 New Illuminati – http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com

 New Illuminati on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/the.new.illuminati

New Illuminati Youtube Channel - http://www.youtube.com/user/newilluminati/feed

The Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com

The Prince of Centraxis - http://centraxis.blogspot.com (Be Aware! This link leads to implicate & xplicit concepts & images!)

DISGRUNTLED SITE ADMINS PLEASE NOTE –

We provide a live link to your original material on your site - which raises your ranking on search engines and helps spread your info further! This site is published under Creative Commons Fair Use Copyright (unless an individual article or other item is declared otherwise by copyright holder) – reproduction for non-profit use is permitted & encouraged, if you give attribution to the work & author - and please include a (preferably active) link to the original (along with this or a similar notice).

Feel free to make non-commercial hard (printed) or software copies or mirror sites - you never know how long something will stay glued to the web – but remember attribution! If you like what you see, please send a donation (no amount is too small or too large) or leave a comment – and thanks for reading this far…

Live long and prosper!

From the New Illuminati – http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com

The Internal Clitoris

The Internal Clitoris

 

  by melodiousmsm

Consider this: In over five million years of human evolution, only one organ has come to exist for the sole purpose of providing pleasure – the clitoris.  It is not required for reproduction.  It doesn’t have a urethra running through it like the penis, and thus, does not urinate.  Its sole function – its singular, wonderful purpose – is to make a woman feel good!!

Sadly, it is precisely because the clitoris has no function apart from female pleasure that science has neglected to study it as intricately as the penis.  In my last post I wrote about Princess Marie Boneparte and her revolutionary work on the female orgasm.  There was however, one piece of pertinent information she was lacking that science had not yet discovered: the true size and scope of the clitoris.

Try asking the next person you encounter to tell you where the clitoris is located.  Having posed this question to others many times myself, I’ll guess that the majority of answers you receive will sound something like, “It’s that small bulb at the top of my lips,” or, “That’s the button up under the hood.”  Although these responses aren’t exactly wrong, the interesting truth is that the majority of the clitoris is actually within the pelvis – that is, it’s far more internal than external. Even most of the women I coach, women who are generally worldly and well-informed about their own bodies, react with a combination of fascination and confusion when I explain that their clitoris extends deep within them.

The scientific name for the external “little button” or “bulb” is glans.  Not to be confused with glands, glans simply refers to a small circular mass.  This little structure contains approximately 8,000 sensory nerve fibers; more than anywhere else in the human body and nearly twice the amount found on the head of a penis!  From reading her work, it’s clear that Marie Bonepart mistakenly thought that the clitoris was completely comprised of the glans; and because it is super sensitive and all anyone can see of the organ, her confusion is mirrored by most women today.  The fact is, though, that most of the clitoris is subterranean, consisting of two corpora cavernosa (corpus cavernosum when referring to the structure as a whole), two crura (crus when referring to the structure as a whole), and the clitoral vestibules or bulbs.

The glans is connected to the body or shaft of the internal clitoris, which is made up of two corpora cavernosa.  When erect, the corpora cavernosa encompass the vagina on either side, as if they were wrapping around it giving it a big hug!

Sketch of an erect clitoris

The corpus cavernosum also extends further, bifurcating again to form the two crura.  These two legs extend up to 9cm, pointing toward the thighs when at rest, and stretching back toward the spine when erect.  To picture them at rest, imagine the crura as a wishbone, coming together at the body of the clitoris where they attach to the pubic symphysis.

Near each of the crura on either side of the vaginal opening are the clitoral vestibules.  These are internally under the labia majora.  When they become engorged with blood they actually cuff the vaginal opening causing the vulva to expand outward.  Get these puppies excited, and you’ve got a hungrier, tighter-feeling vaginal opening in which to explore!

What does all this mean?  Well, for starters, we can finally end that age-old debate of vaginal vs. clitoral orgasms.

In 1953, Kinsey wrote: “The vagina walls are quite insensitive in the great majority of females … There is no evidence that the vagina is ever the sole source of arousal, or even the primary source of erotic arousal in any female.”

Then in 1970, Germaine Greer published The Female Eunuch, which scoffed at Kinsey’s theory.  She wrote, “It is nonsense to say that a woman feels nothing when a man is moving his penis inside her vagina.  The orgasm is qualitatively different when the vagina can undulate around the penis instead of a vacancy.”

Interestingly, they’re both right.  The vagina is not the sole source of arousal, though to stimulate the inner clitoris you can greatly do so by manipulating, displacing, and exploring the vagina with a penis or other apparatus.

Sketch of an erect clitoris

Many women can bring themselves to orgasm without ever inserting anything inside of themselves.  They are causing their internal clitoris to become erect and likely stimulating their glans, bulbs, and crura by rubbing themselves on the outside.  The corpus cavernousum is the additional erectile tissue encompassing the vagina, and greatly erogenous when stimulated internally.

Let’s also remember, female orgasm is not solely about the clitoris and vagina either.  It is far more complex and also involves the workings of multiple nerves, tissues, muscles, reflexes, and mental effort.  Some women can think themselves to orgasm.  Others can orgasm simply by flexing their pelvic muscles.  Considering all the components involved plus the variability of human beings and their anatomies, it’s extremely important to remember no two people are the same. What works for one woman may not work for another.  In other words, it’s all custom under the hood.

What really blows my mind is the plethora of misinformation that exists in textbooks, professional medical guides, and on the internet.  Take for example, in one of my undergraduate textbooks titled Understanding Human Sexuality, the clitoris is depicted merely as just the glans.  The sad fact is it wasn’t until the 1990’s that researchers began using MRI to study the internal structure of the clitoris.  By then, the intricate details of the penis were already well known.

Urologist Helen O’Connell of the Royal Melbourne Hospital set out to better understand the microscopic nerve supply to the clitoris using MRI, something that had already been done for men with regard to their sexual function in the 70s.  In 1998 she published her findings, informing the medical world of the true scope and size of the clitoris.  Yet ironically that same year, men in America began popping Viagra to cure erectile dysfunction.

Sketch of a clitoris at rest

In 2005 The American Urological Association published one of Dr. O’Connell’s reports on clitoral anatomy.  The report itself even states, “The anatomy of the clitoris has not been stable with time as would be expected.  To a major extent its study has been dominated by social factors … Some recent anatomy textbooks omit a description of the clitoris.  By comparison, pages are devoted to penile anatomy.”  The report also mentions how seemingly impossible it is to understand the internal structure of the clitoris with just one diagram.  Several are required to truly get a comprehensive understanding of it.

Alas it wasn’t until as recent as 2009, French researchers Dr. Odile Buisson and Dr. Pierre Foldès gave the medical world it’s first complete 3-D sonography of the stimulated clitoris.  They did this work for three years without any proper funding.  Thanks to them, we now understand how the erectile tissue of the clitoris engorges and surrounds the vagina – a complete breakthrough that explains how what we once considered to be a vaginal orgasm is actually an internal clitoral orgasm.

The internal erect clitoris

Dr. Foldès has been performing surgery on women who have suffered from clitoral mutilation, restoring pleasure to over 3,000 circumcised patients.  He also gets passionate about the lack of study with regards to the clitoris:

“When I returned to France to treat genital mutilation, I was amazed that they were never tried. The medical literature tells us the truth about our contempt for women. For three centuries, there are thousands of references to penile surgery, nothing on the clitoris, except for some cancers or dermatology -and nothing to restore its sensitivity. The very existence of an organ of pleasure is denied, medically. Today, if you look at the anatomy books that all surgeons have, you will find two pages above. There is a real intellectual excision. “

The internal erect clitoris

So there you have it.  As if all the repression, cultural influences, guilt, childhood imprints, and fear of being our true selves center stage in society weren’t enough, we also have the politics of medicine keeping us in the dark.  The great news is that researchers like Dr. Buisson, Dr. Foldès, and Dr. O’Connell are paving the way for greater knowledge … and greater pleasure!

Hope springs … internal!

Now for something a little less serious and more fun!  Here is a video of artist and sex educator, Betty Dodson, drawing the internal clitoris.  Note: the glans are accidentally labeled “glands” in the video, but remember the proper term is glans!!  Enjoy!

-Ms. M


From The Museum of Sex @ http://blog.museumofsex.com/the-internal-clitoris/

For more information about sex see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/sex  
- See ‘Older Posts’ at the end of each section

This is a ‘not for profit’ site -

But if you like what we do please buy us a meal if you can

Donate any amount and receive at least one New Illuminati eBook!

Please -

For further enlightening information enter a word or phrase into the random synchronistic search box @ http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com

And see

 New Illuminati – http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com

 New Illuminati on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/the.new.illuminati

New Illuminati Youtube Channel - http://www.youtube.com/user/newilluminati/feed

The Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com

The Prince of Centraxis - http://centraxis.blogspot.com (Be Aware! This link leads to implicate & xplicit concepts & images!)

DISGRUNTLED SITE ADMINS PLEASE NOTE –

We provide a live link to your original material on your site - which raises your ranking on search engines and helps spread your info further! This site is published under Creative Commons Fair Use Copyright (unless an individual article or other item is declared otherwise by copyright holder) – reproduction for non-profit use is permitted & encouraged, if you give attribution to the work & author - and please include a (preferably active) link to the original (along with this or a similar notice).

Feel free to make non-commercial hard (printed) or software copies or mirror sites - you never know how long something will stay glued to the web – but remember attribution! If you like what you see, please send a donation (no amount is too small or too large) or leave a comment – and thanks for reading this far…

Live long and prosper!

From the New Illuminati – http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com

Lost Civilisations Out of the Deep

Lost Civilisations Out of the Deep

From Atlantis to Noah’s Ark, we have long been drawn to stories of submerged lands. What lies beneath the flood myths?

by Edward Platt

 

'Location of the sunken island Atlantis according to the Egyptians and Platon's description.' Athanasius Kircher, 1601-1680. Note that the map is oriented with south at the top. Photo by AKG

In 1931, a trawler called the Colinda sank its nets into the North Sea, 25 miles off the coast of Norfolk, and dredged up an unlikely artefact — a handworked antler, 21cm long, with a set of barbs running along one side. Archeologists identified it as a prehistoric harpoon and dated it to the Mesolithic age, when sea levels around Britain were more than 100 metres lower than they are today, and the island’s sunken rim, at least according to some, was a fertile plain.

As long ago as the 10th century, astute observers noted that Britain’s coastlines were fringed with trees, visible only at low tide. Traditionally, the ‘drowned forests’ were regarded as evidence of Noah’s flood — relics of an antediluvian world whose destruction is recorded in the most enduring of all the stories of great floods that sweep the earth and drown its people. At the beginning of the 20th century, another explanation was proposed by the geologist Clement Reid.

In his book Submerged Forests (1913), Reid argued that ‘nothing but a change in sea level will account’ for the position of trees stretching from the high water mark ‘to the level of the lowest spring tide’. Observations on the east coast of England led him to conclude that the Thames and Humber estuaries were once ‘flanked by a plain, lying some 40-60 feet below the modern marsh surface’.

Turning his attention to a substance known as ‘moorlog’, dredged up from the bed of the North Sea at Dogger Bank, Reid identified nothing less than a time capsule. Moorlog consists of the compacted remains of animal bones, shells, wood, and lumps of peat, and Reid’s sample contained a variety of bones, including bear, wolf, hyena, bison, mammoth, beaver, walrus, elk and deer. He concluded that ‘Noah’s woods’ once stretched far beyond the shore, with Dogger Bank forming the ‘edge of a great alluvial plain, occupying what is now the southern half of the North Sea, and stretching across to Holland and Denmark’.

The Colinda antler appeared to confirm Reid’s theory, for it came from a freshwater deposit, meaning that it had not been dropped by a sea voyager, but by someone living in the landscape. According to Vincent Gaffney, Simon Fitch and David Smith — the trio of archaeologists at the University of Birmingham who have made the most sustained attempts to build on Reid’s research — this was ‘the first real evidence that the North Sea had been part of a great plain inhabited by the last hunter-gatherers in Europe’.

mankind’s wickedness upset the sun-god Nákúset so much that he wept a global deluge

The area, now called Doggerland, was gradually submerged as the last Ice Age came to an end, and the melting glaciers raised sea levels. Only around 5,500 BCE did Britain finally become an island. The rediscovery of the great plain that formerly connected it to mainland Europe is one of the most remarkable scientific stories of the past decade, yet there is a sense in which it should not come as a surprise at all. Doggerland addresses one of our oldest preoccupations; for we have always told stories about lost civilisations, hidden beneath the waves.

Tales of great deluges evolved for obvious reasons: the earliest human civilisations appeared in Mesopotamia (‘the land between the rivers’), and the deltas of the Yellow River, Indus and Nile. The Egyptian year — the basis of our calendar — divided the seasons by the pattern of rainfall, the season of inundation being when the Nile rose, flooding the surrounding fields. Water was the source of life but also destruction and, as such, it inspired the earliest recorded version of the most famous ‘flood myth’ of all.

The story of a Utnapishtim, a just man who is instructed by a god to build an ark so as to survive a flood, appeared in The Epic of Gilgamish. In the Bible Utnapishtim is Noah, and in Greek mythology he is Deucalion, a son of Prometheus who recreates the human race by throwing his mother’s bones over his shoulder. There is a Hindu Noah, an Incan Noah, and a Polynesian Noah. A First Nation version of the legend maintains that mankind’s wickedness so upset the sun-god Nákúset that he wept a global deluge.

Some creation myths — Genesis, for example — depict God creating land from a primeval waste of water, but another frequently recurring story reverses the process. In Plato’s dialogue Critias we have the oldest surviving account of a land that sinks beneath the waves: the lost continent of Atlantis. In Plato’s original rendering, Athens is said to have ‘checked a great power that arrogantly advanced from its base in the Atlantic Ocean to attack the cities of Europe and Asia’. That power was Atlantis — an empire ruled by descendants of Poseidon, ‘a powerful and remarkable dynasty of kings’. Athens rose up and subdued Atlantis, but her triumph was overtaken by natural disaster: in ‘a single dreadful day and night, all [Athens’s] fighting men were swallowed up by the earth, and the island of Atlantis was similarly swallowed up by the sea and vanished’.

Scholars often insist that we’re not meant to take accounts of Atlantis literally. ‘The idea is that we should use the story to examine our ideas of government and power,’ says the philosopher Julia Annas in Plato: A Very Short Introduction (2003). ‘We have missed the point if instead of thinking about these issues we go off exploring the sea bed.’

The exact location of Atlantis aroused little interest in antiquity, and early modern writers such as Thomas More and Francis Bacon explored Platonic ideals of the good society, in Utopia (1516) and New Atlantis (1624) respectively, without becoming bogged down in questions of geography. Yet recently we have renounced the challenging task of interpreting Plato’s layered inquiry into the nature of the good society in favour of millennial fantasies about drowned worlds.

 

 

In the children’s novel The Water-Babies (1863) by Charles Kingsley, Atlantis is merged with the legend of Tír na nÓg or ‘St Brandan’s fairy isle’, a ‘great land’ that sank beneath the waves to the west of Ireland. Kingsley’s story suggests that the surviving traces of Atlantis are not the sunken trees of ‘Noah’s woods’ but the ‘strange flowers, which linger still about this land’, such as ‘the Cornish heath, and Cornish moneywort’. He described the flowers as ‘fairy tokens left for wise men and good children’. Other writers have imagined the survival of more substantial remains of the sunken world.

In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), Jules Verne describes the occupants of the submarine Nautilus climbing through a sunken forest on the slopes of an erupting volcano on the bottom of the Atlantic until they find themselves looking down on a ruined town — ‘its roofs open to the sky, its temples fallen, its arches dislocated, its columns lying on the ground’. For the benefit of the submariners, Captain Nemo chalks a single word onto a rock of black basalt: ‘ATLANTIS’. Aronnax, the marine-biologist who narrates the book, is transfixed by the thought that he’s standing ‘on the very spot where the contemporaries of the first man had walked’.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle offered another version of the legend, though his Atlantis was not, like Verne’s, a ‘perfect Pompeii escaped beneath the waters’ but a miraculously preserved and inhabited world. The underwater explorers of his short novel The Maracot Deep (1929) are assailed by a giant crustacean that snips the cable of their ‘bathysphere’, plunging it to the bottom of the sea. They are rescued by the surviving Atlantans and taken — as curiosities — to their submarine city.

The occultists were right in one respect: we live on the edge of drowned worlds and are descended from their inhabitants

Conan Doyle threaded his spiritualist beliefs throughout the tale in a way that illustrates how lost worlds might allow us to improve upon the real one, if only in imagination. But the Atlantis myth also allows us to rehearse our fears and fantasies of collapse and decay. In his novel After London (1885), the Victorian naturalist Richard Jefferies portrayed Britain as a kind of Atlantis, its capital reduced to a putrid swamp, its interior covered by an inland sea. Similarly, J G Ballard’s early novel, The Drowned World (1962), pictures futuristic London as a tropical lagoon. Ballard’s characters welcome the re-emergence of a primeval world: we fear the flood, his book implies — and yet embrace it too.

In 1954, the American science fiction writer L Sprague de Camp said that the number of novels and stories about lost continents was ‘beyond count’. Yet the treatment of the subject was not confined to books that advertised themselves as fiction.

The great champion of Atlantis as ‘veritable history’ was an American politician called Ignatius Donnelly, who served as a congressman and state senator for Minnesota at various times in the late 19th century. Donnelly was also a land speculator, farmer and fantasist, who proposed three equally striking and implausible theories — that Bacon had not only written Shakespeare’s plays but embedded a cipher within them; that great events in the Earth’s history, such as the Ice Age, were brought on by ‘extraterrestrial catastrophism’; and that Atlantis was a fragment of a once vast oceanic continent.
In Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), Donnelly identified Plato’s Atlantis as source of all humanity’s lost paradises: ‘the Garden of Eden; the Gardens of the Hesperides; the Elysian Fields’. It represented ‘a universal memory of a great land, where early mankind dwelt for ages in peace and happiness’. Donnelly believed that a few lucky survivors of Atlantis’s drowning had escaped ‘in ships and on rafts’ to populate surrounding continents, citing, as proof, resemblances between European and American plants and animals, culture and language. Sprague de Camp notes that ‘most of Donnelly’s statements of fact… either were wrong when he made them, or have been disproved by subsequent discoveries’. And even if they hadn’t been wrong, he would still have drawn the wrong conclusions from them: the fact that people on both sides of the Atlantic used spears and sails, customarily married and divorced, and believed in ghosts and flood legends ‘proves nothing about sunken continents’.

 
 Of course, being wrong is rarely a bar to success, especially in the realms of fantasy and conspiracy. Donnelly’s book was reprinted 22 times in the eight years after publication, becoming ‘the New Testament of Atlantism’. And Donnelly attracted a curious following among 19th-century occultists such as Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who founded the Theosophical Society. Blavatsky believed that Atlantis was one of several lost continents on which humanity had evolved. She claimed that her esoteric magnum opus The Secret Doctrine (1888) was originally dictated on Atlantis, and that part of humanity was descended from another ‘root-race’ who lived on the vanished continent of Lemuria.

Blavatsky did not invent the name ‘Lemuria’: it was proposed in 1864 by the English zoologist Philip Sclater as a way of explaining the presence of Lemur fossils in Madagascar and India, but not in Africa or the Middle-East. Lost land bridges were often invoked to explain how species had travelled across continents separated by water, and Sclater believed that India and Madagascar had been conjoined on a continent that broke apart into islands or sank beneath the waves.

For Blavatsky, Lemuria was ‘the cradle of mankind, of the physical sexual creature who materialised through long aeons out of the ethereal hermaphrodites’. In The Lost Lemuria (1904), her fellow theosophist William Scott-Elliott offered a vivid description of this ‘creature’:
His stature was gigantic, somewhere between 12 and 15 feet… His skin was very dark, being of a yellowish brown colour. He had a long lower jaw, a strangely flattened face, eyes small but piercing and set curiously far apart, so that he could see sideways as well as in front, while the eye at the back of the head… enabled him to see in that direction also.

The theory of continental drift, accepted in the early 20th century, obviated the need to conjure a Lemuria that explained the spread of fossils, but the idea has continued to fascinate occult writers. The American writer Frederick S Oliver pulled Lemuria into a orbit of spiritualist ideas, including spirit guides, astral travel and channelling. His 1905 novel A Dweller on Two Planets (1905), supposedly written under ‘spirit guidance’, tells the story of a community of sages who escaped from Lemuria and settled on Mount Shasta, near Oliver’s home in northern California.

Oliver’s book has been surprisingly influential. The idea of a Lemurian community living on Mount Shasta was frequently reported during the 1920s and ‘30s, and acquired a surprising degree of detail. There were said to be 1,000 magi, living in a ‘mystic village’ built around a Mayan-style temple. Occasionally, they appeared in neighbouring towns, clad in long white robes, ‘polite but taciturn’. They paid for supplies with gold nuggets and, every midnight, they rejoiced in their escape from Lemuria in ceremonies that bathed the mountains in red and green light. Various Californian luminaries, such as the actress Shirley MacLaine — who recalled a past life as an androgynous Lemurian in her memoir I’m Over All That (2012) — and Guy Warren Ballard, founder of the flamboyant religious movement I AM, were both inspired by Oliver’s novel. It still informs the philosophy of a New Age organisation called the Lemurian Fellowship, which maintains that ‘the continents of Atlantis and Mu [often synonymous with Lemuria] did exist, and still do, sunken beneath the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans’.


  


The British occult writer James Churchward claimed to have learnt about Mu from ancient tablets discovered in temples in India. His book The Lost Continent of Mu: Motherland of Man (1926) was one of the last great manifestations of our preoccupation with lost worlds. It was published just five years before Pilgrim E Lockwood, skipper of the Colina, hauled up his handworked antler. The wild imaginings of the 19th-century cult of Atlantis were starting to be displaced by a picture of a lost world that was scarcely less astonishing, and which had the advantage of being true.

As early as 1936, only a handful of archaeologists went against the grain of thinking that Dogger Bank was a mere ‘land bridge’ to speculate that its ancient plains would have been ‘especially favourable for settlement’. Over the last decade, however, their ideas have gained credence. In 2001, researchers at the University of Birmingham decided to investigate further. Using seismic data collected by Norwegian oil companies, the archeologists Vincent Gaffney, Simon Fitch and David Smith constructed 3D rendering of ‘shallow deposits’ lying only metres beneath the seabed. They revealed the course of a river, large as the Rhine, that once ran across Dogger Bank. The scale of the lost territory has astonished the three researchers. They do not exaggerate when they write in Europe’s Lost World: The Rediscovery of Doggerland (2009) that they’re exploring ‘an entire, preserved, European hunter-gatherer country’ — a lost land that, at its most extensive, was as large as the UK. The team has now mapped the contours of Doggerland and identified 1,600km of river channels and 24 lakes or marshes. The emerging picture is that of ‘a massive plain dominated by water’. To the modern eye, this environment might appear featureless, even unattractive, yet to Mesolithic communities, it offered rich living.

Gaffney, Fitch and Smith understand that, with or without the science, Doggerland remains one of the most ‘enigmatic’ archaeological landscapes in the world, and that our lack of historic knowledge about the people who inhabited it will prove attractive to fantasists and conspiracy theorists alike. Besides, Doggerland is not the only lost continent to be rediscovered. There’s Sundaland, the coastal shelf in the south China Sea, and Beringia, the land bridge that joined Asia to Alaska. Although yet to be explored in any detail, their existence confirms that the occultists were right in one respect, at least: we live on the edge of drowned worlds and are descended from their inhabitants.

Yet one thing has changed: archaeologists now believe that Doggerland’s hunter-gatherers didn’t settle the British Isles until they were forced to abandon their traditional homes on the low-lying plain. Humanity, of course, has always lived with the threat of great floods; but as water levels begin rising once again, we should remind ourselves that our densely inhabited world contains no comparable havens to which we might retreat.


Edward Platt is a contributing writer for the New Statesman. His latest book is The City of Abraham: History, Myth and Memory, a Journey Through Hebron (2012).


From Aeon @ http://www.aeonmagazine.com/living-together/lost-civilisations-under-the-waves-still-fascinate-us/


For more information about Atlantis see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/atlantis  
For more information about the antediluvian world see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/antediluvian%20world  
- See ‘Older Posts’ at the end of each section

This is a ‘not for profit’ site -

But if you like what we do please buy us a meal if you can

Donate any amount and receive at least one New Illuminati eBook!

Please click in the jar -

Xtra Images – http://www.blog.dolorescannon.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/AtlantisTheMyth.jpg
http://www.crystalinks.com/atlantis705.jpg
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-aTnwAlKXcbs/TWesAJEbCcI/AAAAAAAAAJc/sSGZDN4SVzI/s760/Atlantis-deluge.jpg

For further enlightening information enter a word or phrase into the random synchronistic search box @ http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com

And see

 New Illuminati – http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com

 New Illuminati on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/the.new.illuminati

New Illuminati Youtube Channel - http://www.youtube.com/user/newilluminati/feed

The Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com

The Prince of Centraxis - http://centraxis.blogspot.com (Be Aware! This link leads to implicate & xplicit concepts & images!)

DISGRUNTLED SITE ADMINS PLEASE NOTE –

We provide a live link to your original material on your site - which raises your ranking on search engines and helps spread your info further! This site is published under Creative Commons Fair Use Copyright (unless an individual article or other item is declared otherwise by copyright holder) – reproduction for non-profit use is permitted & encouraged, if you give attribution to the work & author - and please include a (preferably active) link to the original (along with this or a similar notice).

Feel free to make non-commercial hard (printed) or software copies or mirror sites - you never know how long something will stay glued to the web – but remember attribution! If you like what you see, please send a donation (no amount is too small or too large) or leave a comment – and thanks for reading this far…

Live long and prosper!

From the New Illuminati – http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com