14 The Atlantis Encyclopedia
feats of ceremonial construction imply high levels of labor management, astronomy,
and surveying. They were able metalsmiths who worked copper on a large scale,
and they demonstrated carving skills in surviving stone effigy-pipes.
Their sudden, unheralded appearance after the previous and primitive Archaic
Period represented a major break with the immediate past. Such a transformation
can only mean that the Adena were newcomers who brought their already
evolved culture with them from outside the American Midwest. Their starting
date coincides within two centuries of the final destruction of Atlantis and the
abrupt closure of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula copper mines, which had been
consistently worked for the previous 1,800 years. Given these parallel events, it
appears the Adena were former Atlantean copper miners, who settled throughout
the Middle West to the East Coast, following the loss of their distant homeland
and the abandonment of copper mining in the Upper Great Lakes.
A majority of the Adena monuments were dismantled and their stone used
by early 19th-century settlers to build wells and fences. Only a few examples still
survive, because they were naturally concealed by their obscure locations, such
as those at the bottom of Rock Lake, in Wisconsin, and in the wooded areas of
Heritage Park, Michigan.
(See Bronze Age, Rock Lake)Ades
Sacred mountain where the
Atlantean Navel of the World mystery
cult originated. Ades was later known as
“Hades”—the realm of the dead in
Greek myth—but associated with the
death-rebirth mystery cult of Atlantis in
the story of Persephone, the “Corn
Maiden” daughter of the Earth Mother,
Demeter.
(See Navel of the World)Ad-ima
In Indian myth, the first man to arrive in the subcontinent, with his wife (Heva),
from an island overwhelmed by a natural catastrophe that forever cut off all commu-
nication with his homeland. In Sanskrit, the word for “first” is Adim, surprisingly like
the biblical Adam. Later versions of the story identify the lost island with Sri Lanka,
but in that the former Ceylon still exists, Atlantis was undoubtedly the location from
which Ad-ima came. His name, moreover, is identifiably Atlantean, apparent in the
philological relationship between “Ad-ima” and the Greek variant, “Atlas.” This
association is underscored by the antediluvian setting of the Ad-ima myth.
(See Heva)An Atlantean-like engraved stone found in
Illinois, provenance unknown. From the Thelma
MacLaine Collection. The figure resembles the
winged horses and Poseidon’s trident described
in Plato’s account of Atlantis.