28 The Atlantis Encyclopedia
Many, if not most, of these worldwide folk memories invariably link a heaven-
sent cataclysm with the Flood. Beginning with the first complete account of
Atlantis, Plato’s Timaeus, the fall of an extraterrestrial object foreshadows the
island’s destruction when Psonchis, the Egyptian narrator of the story, tells
Solon, the visiting Greek statesman, about “a declination of the bodies moving
around the Earth and in the heavens, and a great conflagration of things upon the
Earth recurring at long intervals of time.”
Inscriptions on the walls of Medinet Habu (Upper Nile Valley), the “Victory
Temple” of Pharaoh Ramses III, tell how the Atlantean invaders of Egypt were
destroyed: “The shooting-star was terrible in pursuit of them,” before their island
went under the sea. Ibrahim ben Ebn Wauff Shah, Abu Zeyd el Balkhy, and other
Arab historians used the story of Surid, the ruler of an antediluvian kingdom, to
explain that the Great Flood was caused when a “planet” collided with the Earth.
In North America, the Cherokee Indians remembered Unadatsug, a “group”
of stars—the Pleiades—one of whom, “creating a fiery tail, fell to Earth. Where it
landed, a palm tree grew up, and the fallen star itself transformed into an old
man, who warned of coming floods.” As the modern commentator, Jobes, has
written of Unadatsug, “The fall of one star may be connected with a Deluge story;
possibly the fall of a Taurid meteor is echoed here.”
A complimentary version occurs in the Jewish Talmud: “When the Holy One,
blessed be He, wished to bring the Deluge upon the world, He took two stars out
of the Pleiades.” Similar accounts may be found among the Quiche Maya of the
Lowland Yucatan, the Muysica of Colombia, the Arawak Indians of Venezuela,
the Aztecs at Cholula, the classical Greeks, and so on.Asterope
One of the Pleiades, an Atlantis, daughter of Atlas by Pleione.Astrology
Literally, the “language of the stars,” from the Greek logos astra, a scientific
analysis of the mathematical relationships linking human character and the
prediction of future events to positions and movements of the heavenly bodies.
In the ancient world, astrology and astronomy (the observation of celestial
events) comprised a single discipline. They finally split apart only in the early 19th
century, when astrology was banished by rationalists to the realms of metaphysics
or superstition.
Astrology undoubtedly emerged after and from astronomy, when correspon-
dences between cosmic activity and human behavior were first noticed. This inter-
relationship was embodied in the mythic personality of Atlas, the founder of both
sciences. In Greek myth, he was the first astronomer-astrologer. Indeed, his capital
city, Atlantis, was the child (“Daughter of Atlas”) of his astronomical character,
in that its layout of concentric rings was a reflection of the cosmic order.