60 The Atlantis Encyclopedia
Atlantis. Avalon was additionally referred to as Ynys-vitrius, the “Island of Glass
Towers,” an isle of the dead, formerly the site of a great kingdom in the Atlantic
Ocean. Avalon has since been associated with Glastonbury Tor—roughly, “Hill
of the Glass Tower”—a high hill in Somerset, England. During the Bronze Age,
the site was an island intersected by watercourses, resembling the concentric lay-
out of the island of Atlantis. Underscoring this allusion is the spiral pathway that
spreads outward from the Tor, because Plato described Atlantis as having been
originally laid out in the pattern of a sacred spiral.
In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini, Avalon is called “the Fortunate Isle,”
the same title Classical Greek and Roman writers assigned to Atlantic islands
generally and to Atlantis specifically. The Welsh Ynys Avallach and English
Ynys-vitrius were known along the Normandy coast as the Isle of Ys, which
disappeared beneath the waves. Avalon is also a town in Burgundy named after
the sunken island city, because some of its survivors reached Brittany.
(See Ablach, Ys)Awun
One of the divine twins in the Chinese version of Atlantis.
(See Infoniwa)Ayar-aucca
The third and last wave of foreign immigration into prehistoric South America
comprised refugees from a natural catastrophe—the sudden obliteration of their
once mighty kingdom in fire and flood. Appropriately remembered as the “War-like
People,” they were undoubtedly veterans of failed Atlantean wars in the eastern
Mediterranean and survivors from the final destruction of Atlantis, in 1198 B.C.
Their Atlantean identity is confirmed by the Incas themselves. They described the
Ayar-aucca as four twin giants who held up the sky. But they eventually grew tired
of their exertions on behalf of an ungrateful humanity, and let it fall into the sea,
creating a worldwide deluge that destroyed most of mankind.
One of the Ayar-aucca arrived in Cuzco, where he transformed himself into a
huaca, or sacred stone, but not before mating with a local woman to sire the first
Inca. Henceforward, Cuzco, known as “the Navel of the World,” was the capital of
the Inca Empire. The Ayar-aucca is the self-evident Peruvian rendering of the Bronze
Age Atlantis catastrophe, incorporated into the Incas’ imperial foundation myth.
(See Ahson-nutl, Navel of the World)Ayar-chaki
This second wave of foreigners in South America suddenly appeared as
“Wanderers” or immigrants from earthquakes and floods that made continued