Caer Feddwid
The “Court of Carousal,” also known as Caer Siddi and Caer Arianrhod, an opulent island kingdom featuring fountains and curative fresh water springs, but long ago lost beneath the waves of the Atlantic Ocean. Caer Feddwid is one of several Welsh versions of Atlantis.
Calypso
An Atlantis, daughter of Atlas by Thetis, a sea-goddess. Calypso’s residence was a sacred cave on the island of Ogygia, where she had the power to grant eternal life to mortal human beings. She personifies the Atlantean Navel of the World mystery cult, with its cave rituals and promises of immortality. “Ogygia” derives from Ogyges, a flood hero in Greek mythology, implying that Calypso’s island and Atlantis were one and the same.
Ca-Mu
Literally “He from Mu,” a flood hero of the Arovac Indians described as a tall, white-skinned, fair-haired and bearded “magician” who arrived on the shores of Panama after having been driven from his kingdom far across the sea by a terrible cataclysm. Ca-Mu is regarded as the man from whom all Arovac have since descended.
Cayce, Edgar
Born in 1877, in Kentucky, he was known as “the Sleeping Prophet,” because he uttered predictions and medical cures while in a deep trance. Until his death in Virginia, 68 years later, Cayce dictated thousands of “life-readings” he allegedly obtained from a kind of spiritual record he claimed to be able to read while experiencing an altered state of consciousness. Until his 47th year, he never uttered a word about Atlantis. But in 1922, he suddenly began recalling life in a place with which he was otherwise allegedly unfamiliar. Cayce’s descriptions of the doomed civilization are sometimes remarkable for their uncanny credibility. For example, his portrayal of the migration of Atlanteans into the Nile Valley following the destruction of their Empire is entirely convincing. Many otherwise obscure names of persons and places he associates with the Atlantis experience likewise seem to reflect real events.
His son, Hugh Lynn Cayce, knew his father “did not read material on Atlantis, and that he, so far as we know, had absolutely no knowledge of the subject.” The evocative, often verifiable detail of his readings in which Atlantis was described is all the more astounding when we realize he knew little about the vanished culture in his waking hours. As his son wrote:
They are the most fantastic, the most bizarre, the most impossible information in the Edgar Cayce files. If his unconscious fabricated this material or wove it together from existing legends and writings, we believe that it is the most amazing example of a telepathic-clairvoyant scanning of existing legends and stories in print or of the minds of persons dealing with the Atlantis theory. Edgar Cayce’s conscious ignorance of the sunken civilization is not surprising. His formal education was meager, and his points of reference were more spiritual than historical or academic. His grasp of the past was often biblical, rather than scholastic. It seems clear then, that the subject was outside the purview of both his background and essentially Christian view of the world. But his readings are self-evidently plausible, because they often contain information that made little or no sense at the time they were uttered, but have been since confirmed by subsequent verification.
Perhaps most impressive of all is that obscure, even fleeting, references he made to Atlantis during the early 1920s were occasionally repeated only once, but within an exact same frame of reference, after more than two decades. Persuasive elements of Cayce’s “life-readings” such as these give even skeptics pause, and encourage many investigators, regardless of their spiritual beliefs, to reconsider everything he had to say about Atlantis. His prediction of finding its first physical remains not far from the United States was a case in point described in the “Bimini” entry. Until Cayce spoke of Bimini, and even long after some of his “life-readings” were published, no researchers bothered to consider that small island as a possible remnant of Atlantean Civilization.
But how did the massive stone structure come to lie at the bottom of the sea? According to Cayce’s “life-readings,” the Atlantean lands underwent three major periods of inundation. They did not disappear altogether in a single cataclysm. The natural disaster described by Plato represented only the final destruction of Atlantis. A typical reading exemplifying these various epochs of upheaval took place in 1933, when Cayce told a client that he once dwelt “in the Atlantean land before the third destruction.” The first seismic unrest dropped much of its territory beneath sea-level, followed several millennia later by renewed geologic violence which sank the remaining dry land, save for the tops of its tallest mountains. These volcanic peaks became known in historic times as Madeira, the Azore and Canary Islands, together with Atlas, on which the city of Atlantis arose. The ultimate destruction took place when Mount Atlas detonated, scoured and hollowed itself out with ferocious eruptions, then collapsed into the sea. Present interpretation of this evidence confirms the accuracy of Cayce’s clairvoyant view of the Atlantean catastrophe. As he said, “the destruction of this continent and the peoples was far beyond any of that as has been kept as an absolute record, that record in the rocks still remains.”
For someone of no formal education, Cayce’s grasp of archaeology and geology was extraordinary, even prophetic. When he said in the 1930s that the Nile River flowed across the Sahara Desert to the ocean in early Atlantean times, no scientist in the world would have considered such an apparently outlandish possibility. Yet, in 1994, nearly half a century after his death, a satellite survey of North Africa discovered traces of a former tributary of the Nile that connected Egypt with the Atlantic Ocean at Morocco in prehistory. Persuasive elements of Cayce’s “life-readings” encourage many investigators to reconsider his documented statements about Atlantis. But they are troubled by his characterization of the Atlanteans as the builders of a technology superior to 20th-century accomplishments. Because Cayce has been verified in at least some important details, other researchers believe he was telling the whole truth, however difficult it may be for some to grasp, about the sunken civilization.
Regardless of the response he elicits, an important part of Edgar Cayce’s legacy is the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) he founded and which continues to prosper in his home at Virginia Beach. It contains the largest library of its kind in the world, featuring not only all of his “life-readings,” but many hundreds of topics, papers, feature articles, and reference materials about Atlantis. The A.R.E. is also deeply involved in scientific investigation and study on behalf of the lost realm, including lectures and expeditions to various parts of the world, particularly at Andros and Bimini.
Ce-calli
Described in the Aztec Anales de Quahititlan as “the Great Water,” the world-class deluge that destroyed a former age of greatness and wickedness.
Celaeno
In Greek myth, daughter of the sea-goddess Pleione hence, one of the Pleiades, or “Atlantises.” Celaeno taught occult science to mortals. From her name derive all words pertaining to things “celestial,” not only because she herself became a star in the night sky, but through her knowledge of astrology invented by her father, Atlas. Celaeno’s myth tells of arcane spirituality and practices invented in Atlantis, as carried by survivors of its destruction to the reestablishment of civilization in new lands. She married Lycus, a king of the Blessed Isles, whose name was a term in circulation throughout classical times referring to any unspecified group of Atlantis islands, such as the Canaries or Madeira.
Recreation of a Bronze Age stevedore carrying a typical “oxhide” ingot of copper, the basis of Atlantean wealth.
Chatwin, C.P.
A leading 20th-century naturalist, who stated in 1940 that the migratory behavior of certain butterflies and birds in the North and South Atlantic strongly suggested the former existence of the island civilization described by Plato.
Cellarius, Christophe
A prominent late 18th-century French geographer who made a public statement supporting the historical credibility of Plato’s Atlantis based on evidence he found in the fragments of ancient maps.
Cerne
A name by which Atlantis was once known, according to the 1st-century b.c. geographer Diodorus Siculus. “Cerne” is also the name of a prehistoric hill-figure in Dorset, England. The 180-foot image of a naked man wielding a club in his right hand probably was made to represent Gogmagog, a giant said to have been armed with an immense war club. If so, then the bioglyph’s Atlantean identity comes into focus. In Celtic myth, Gogmagog was a leader of Britain’s first inhabitants, descendants from the Titan Albion, brother of Atlas, like the giant Fomors, the earliest residents of Ireland. Culture-bearers from Atlantis arriving in several other parts of the world, as far away as the shores of Peru, were often described in local folk memory as “gigantic.”
Chac
A rain-god, or more appropriately, the sky-god worshiped by the Mayas. They portrayed him in temple art as a bearded man with a long nose and supporting the heavens on his shoulders, like the eponymous and sacred mountain from which the island of Atlantis derived its name: Atlas. Chac sometimes appears Christ-like in wall paintings, as he bears a cross on his back. But it was actually a symbol for the four cardinal directions, defining Chac’s origin at the center of the world, just as Atlantis was located between of the Old and New Worlds. Chac is perhaps identical to Bacab, because he also was four divine persons in one, each “chac” representing a particular point of the compass. They appeared in symbolic red for east, black for west, white for north, and yellow for south. These colors corresponded to the directions personified by the chacs. White seems associated with the snow and ice far above the Rio Grande River. Yellow perhaps signified the intense heat of the sun toward the Equator. If these interpretations are correct, then the Mayas possessed far wider knowledge of the world beyond their home in the Lowland Yucatan than credited by conventional archaeologists.
The West is universally regarded as a place of death (the dying sun, etc.), hence its black characterization. Red is a color often associated with Atlantis, where Plato wrote that its public and even some of its private buildings were made of red stone, or volcanic tufa. The Atlanteans themselves were said to have been red-haired. But the color more probably refers to sunrise.
