And this land was the Garden of Eden of our race. This was the Olympus of the Greeks, where
“This same mild season gives the blooms to blow, The buds to harden and the fruits to grow.”
In the midst of it was a sacred and glorious eminence—the umbilicus orbis terrarum—”toward which the heathen in all parts of the world, and in all ages, turned a wistful gaze in every act of devotion, and to which they hoped to be admitted, or, rather, to be restored, at the close of this transitory scene.”
In this “glorious eminence” do we not see Plato’s mountain in the middle of Atlantis, as he describes it:
“Near the plain and in the centre of the island there was a mountain, not very high on any side. In this mountain there dwelt one of the earth-born primeval men of that country, whose name was Evenor, and he had a wife named Leucippe, and they had an only daughter, who was named Cleito. Poseidon married her. He enclosed the hill in which she dwelt all around, making alternate zones of sea and land, larger and smaller, encircling one another; there were two of land and three of water . . .
so that no man could get to the island. . . . He brought streams of water under the earth to this mountain-island, and made all manner of food to grow upon it. This island became the seat of Atlas, the over-king of the whole island; upon it they built the great temple of their nation; they continued to ornament it in successive generations, every king surpassing the one who came before him to the utmost of his power, until they made the building a marvel to behold for size and beauty. . . . And they had such an amount of wealth as was never before possessed by kings and potentates—as is not likely ever to be again.”
The gardens of Alcinous and Laertes, of which we read in Homeric song, and those of Babylon, were probably transcripts of Atlantis. “The sacred eminence in the midst of a ‘superabundant, happy region figures more or less distinctly in almost every mythology, ancient or modern. It was the Mesomphalos of the earlier Greeks, and the Omphalium of the Cretans, dominating the Elysian fields, upon whose tops, bathed in pure, brilliant, incomparable light, the gods passed their days in ceaseless joys.”
“The Buddhists and Brahmans, who together constitute nearly half the population of the world, tell us that the decussated figure (the cross), whether in a simple or a complex form, symbolizes the traditional happy abode of their primeval ancestors—that ‘Paradise of Eden toward the East,’ as we find expressed in the Hebrew. And, let us ask, what better picture, or more significant characters, in the complicated alphabet of symbolism, could have been selected for the purpose than a circle and a cross: the one to denote a region of absolute purity and perpetual felicity; the other, those four perennial streams that divided and watered the several quarters of it?” (Edinburgh Review, January, 1870.) And when we turn to the mythology of the Greeks, we find that the origin of the world was ascribed to Okeanos, the ocean. The world was at first an island surrounded by the ocean, as by a great stream: “It was a region of wonders of all kinds; Okeanos lived there with his wife Tethys: these were the Islands of the Blessed, the gardens of the gods, the sources of nectar and ambrosia, on which the gods lived.
Within this circle of water the earth lay spread out like a disk, with mountains rising from it, and the vault of heaven appearing to rest upon its outer edge all around.” (Murray’s “Manual of Mythology,” pp. 23, 24, et seq.)
On the mountains dwelt the gods; they had palaces on these mountains, with store-rooms, stabling, etc.
“The Gardens of the Hesperides, with their golden apples, were believed to exist in some island of the ocean, or, as it was sometimes thought, in the islands off the north or west coast of Africa. They were far famed in antiquity; for it was there that springs of nectar flowed by the couch of Zeus, and there that the earth displayed the rarest blessings of the gods; it was another Eden.” (Ibid., p. 156.) Homer described it in these words:
“Stern winter smiles on that auspicious clime, The fields are florid with unfading prime, From the bleak pole no winds inclement blow. Mould the round hail, or flake the fleecy snow; But from the breezy deep the blessed inhale The fragrant murmurs of the western gale.”
“It was the sacred Asgard of the Scandinavians, springing from the centre of a fruitful land, which was watered by four primeval rivers of milk, severally flowing in the direction of the cardinal points, ‘the abode of happiness, and the height of bliss.’ It is the Tien-Chan, ‘the celestial mountain-land, . . . the enchanted gardens’ of the Chinese and Tartars, watered by the four perennial fountains of Tychin, or Immortality; it is the hill-encompassed Ila of the Singhalese and Thibetians, ‘the everlasting dwelling-place of the wise and just.’ It is the Sineru of the Buddhist, on the summit of which is Tawrutisa, the habitation of Sekra, the supreme god, from which proceed the four sacred streams, running in as many contrary directions.
It is the Slavratta, ‘the celestial earth,’ of the Hindoo, the summit of his golden mountain Meru, the city of Brahma, in the centre of Jambadwipa, and from the four sides of which gush forth the four primeval rivers, reflecting in their passage the colorific glories of their source, and severally flowing northward, southward, eastward, and westward.”
It is the Garden of Eden of the Hebrews: “And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads. The name of the first is Pison; that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; and the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone. And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia. And the name of the third river is Hiddekeclass="underline" that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates. And the Lord God took the man and put him into the Garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.”
(Gen. ii., 8-1-5.)
As the four rivers named in Genesis are not branches of any one stream, and head in very different regions, it is evident that there was an attempt, on the part of the writer of the Book, to adapt an ancient tradition concerning another country to the known features of the region in which he dwelt.
Josephus tells us (chap. i., p. 41), “Now the garden (of Eden) was watered by one river, which ran round about the whole earth, and was parted into four parts.” Here in the four parts we see the origin of the Cross, while in the river running around the whole earth we have the wonderful canal of Atlantis, described by Plato, which was “carried around the whole of the plain,” and received the streams which came down from the mountains. The streams named by Josephus would seem to represent the migrations of people from Atlantis to its colonies.