58 The Atlantis Encyclopedia
Atum
Among the most ancient of Egyptian deities associated with a Sacred Mountain,
the origin of the first gods, Atum was the first divinity of creation. He created the
Celestial Waters from which arose the Primal Mound. Shu, the Egyptian Atlas,
declares in the Coffin Texts, “I am the son of Atum. Let him place me on his neck.”
In Hittite mythology, Kumarbi, a giant arising from the Western Ocean, placed
Upelluri on his mountainous neck, where he supported the sky, and is today regarded
by mythologists as the Anatolian version of Atlas.
Atum says elsewhere in the same Texts, “Let my son, Shu, be put beneath
my daughter, Nut [the starry night sky], to keep guard for me over the Heavenly
Supports, which exist in the twilight [the far west].” His position beneath Nut
indicates Shu’s identification with Atlas as the patron of astronomy. “The Heavenly
Supports” were known to Plato and his fellow Greeks as “the Pillars of Heracles,”
beyond which lay Atlantis-Atum.
The 60th Utterance of the Pyramid Texts reads, “Oh, Atum! When you came
into being you rose up as a high hill. You rose up in this your name of High Hill.”
As Clark explains:
When the deceased, impersonated by his statue, was crowned dur-
ing the final ceremony inside the pyramid, he was invested with
the Red Crown of Lower Egypt. A heap of sand was put on the
floor and the statue placed upon it while a long prayer was re-
cited, beginning, ‘Rise upon it, this land which came forth at Atum.
Rise high upon it, that your father may see you, that Ra may see
you.’ The sand represents the Primal Mound. The instruction to
the king is to ascend the mound and be greeted by the sun. This
implies that the mound can become the world mountain whereon
the king ascends to meet in his present form, the sun.
This, then, is the concept of kingship descended from the supreme sun-god,
Ra, on his holy mountain of Atum, the gods’ birthplace. It was this sacred ancestral
location, reported Egyptian tradition, that sank beneath the sea of the Distant
West, causing the migration of divinities and royalty to the Nile Delta. Atum’s
philological and mythic resemblance to Mount Atlas, wherein the Egyptian deity
is likewise synonymous for the sacred mountain and the god, defines him as a
religious representation of the original Atlantean homeland.Atur
A unit of nautical measurement used by the ancient Egyptians that meant,
literally, “river” (more probably, an archaic term for “water”) and corresponded
to one hour of navigation covering 7,862.2 meters, equal to a constant speed of
about 4.5 miles per hour. The term was a legacy from the Egyptians’ seafaring
Atlantean forefathers, as is apparent in the prefix “at” and its definition as a
nautical term.