96 The Atlantis Encyclopedia
the name of this event was among the most popular public occasions throughout
the Nile Valley, and held for several days around November 1. She was herself
sometimes depicted in sacred art as a cow walking away from a funeral mountain.
The earliest name by which she was known appears to have been At-Hor, or
At-Hr, “Mountain of Horus,” an apparent philological relation with things
Atlantean. Her funeral mountain is similarly suggestive of death-dealing Mount
Atlas and November associations with days of the dead. The lioness-headed
goddess, Sekhmet, was used by the Egyptians to describe the fiery comet that
brought about the destruction of Atlantis. She was actually Hathor in her vengeful
guise. Both deities were aspects of the same goddess.
The Pleiades are associated with Hathor, too. Writing about the worldwide
day of the dead festivals in the 19th century, R.G. Haliburton, wondered:
It is now, as was formerly, observed at or near the beginning of
November by the Peruvians, the Hindoos, the Pacific Islanders, the
people of the Tonga Islands, the Australians, the ancient Persians,
the ancient Egyptians, and the northern nations of Europe, and
continued for three days among the Japanese and the ancient
Romans. This startling fact at once drew my attention to the
question, How was this uniformity in the time of observance pre-
served, not only in far distant quarters of the globe, but also
through that vast lapse of time since the Peruvian and the Indo-
European first inherited this primeval festival from a common
source?
Haliburton’s question is answered by internal evidence of the festivals them-
selves. Together they describe in common a natural cataclysm that killed huge
numbers of their ancestors. Some of them survived to replant civilization in
other lands. The only event that measures up to this universal Festival of the
Dead is the destruction of Atlantis. Indeed, astronomy combines with historical
myth to provide the precise day of the catastrophe. Comet Encke’s autumnal
meteor shower very closely, if not exactly corresponds to such festivals. Most of
them were and are concentrated in the first days of November, just when the
Taurid meteor stream in the wake of Comet Encke, associated with the early
12th-century destruction of Atlantis, reaches its intensity.de Acosta, José
A 16th-century Spanish missionary. After learning numerous oral traditions
firsthand from native Mexicans, he was convinced that their rich body of
Mesoamerican myth preserved the unmistakable folk memory of culture-bearers
from Atlantis.