Ogma
In Celtic myth, the chief of the Tuatha da Danann, refugees from the final destruction of Atlantis, who arrived in Ireland around 1200 b.c. Ogma was known in Gaul as Ogimos and in Wales as Gwydion. He is primarily remembered for the script associated with his name, Ogham. This is a system of notches for five vowels and lines for 15 consonants. They were etched into natural stone or the walls of cut tombs to memorialize the dead and/or a visitor.
Although the earliest surviving examples of Ogham date only to the fourth century a.d., connections with runic and Etruscan alphabets imply its antiquity, whose ultimate roots as an elemental script appear to lie in the Middle-Late Bronze Age. Ogham’s identity as an import is suggested by its signs for H and Z, letters which do not appear in Irish.
Ogham may be at least one of the original written languages developed and used in Atlantis, but it is more likely a later, simplified version of Atlantean script modified to accommodate Celtic speech. An Atlantean provenance is found not only in its use by the Tuatha da Danann. “Og,” as mentioned in the following entry, is widely connected with Atlantis in Ireland (Tir-nan-Og), Homeric Greece (Ogygia), the Andean Ogllo, and the biblical Og of Noah’s ark. Ogma and his people were unquestionably Atlanteans, sufficient reason to regard his script as such.
Ogriae
In a “life-reading” by American psychic Edgar Cayce, Ogriae was an Atlantean princess at a time when Atlantis was reaching the zenith of its greatness. She “kept away from those of the opposite sex, for the love was given in one of low estate and could not bring self to the conditions necessary for the consummation of the desires in each other’s inner self.” Doubtless, those “conditions” would have entailed Ogriae’s renunciation of her high place in the royal family.
Appropriately, names comprising or deriving from “Og” are associated in Old Irish and biblical contexts with a world-class deluge, such as the former’s Tir-nan-Og, a kingdom beneath the sea, and the Old Testament Og. In Genesis, he was a giant who hitched a ride on Noah’s ark. According to Inca cosmology, after a terrible flood destroyed their homeland, Ogllo, together with her husband, Manco Capac, arrived in South America, on the shores of Lake Titicaca, Bolivia; there they founded Andean Civilization.
In Greek myth, Ogyges was the son of the divine creator of Atlantis, Poseidon, and the first king of Greece, who reigned during a Great Flood. Homer wrote of Ogygia (Odyssey, iv, v, xii), a mid-Atlantic Ocean island, where Calypso, herself an Atlantis, the daughter of Atlas, was high priestess of a magic cult that turned men into beasts, not unlike the genetically engineered “Things” Edgar Cayce said made up the unfortunate laboring classes of Atlantis. He, in fact, identified one of the three principle islands of Atlantis at the period of its final destruction as “Og.”
Okinoshima
A bay in western Japan facing the Korean Sea, where three enormous stone towers were discovered by scuba divers in 1998. Their bases stand 100 feet beneath the surface, the same depth at which a citadel-like structure was found 3 years earlier off Isseki Point, in the Ryukyu Island of Yonaguni. All of Okinoshima’s cylindrical towers are 40 feet tall, but only one is entwined with a spiral staircase. This particular structure may have been long ago described in an Australian Aboriginal account, which told of the sunken “Land of Mystery.” One of its features was a huge “crystal cone” with a “serpent” winding up its length from bottom to top.
Okipa
The outstanding ceremony of North Dakota’s Mandan Indians, whose earlier home was in the Ohio Valley. Before any significant contact with White Americans, the Mandan occasionally evidenced fairer skin, light-colored eyes, and auburn hair, with less Amerindian facial features, suggesting interracial contacts at some early period in their history. They were first brought to general attention by the American artist, George Catlin, who painted many portraits of the Mandan, and was the first white man to witness their Okipa ceremony. This was an annual event in which the whole village participated. It began with an actor covered in white clay representing a white man, a survivor of the Great Flood, approaching the village from the east, the direction in which the cataclysm was said to have occurred.
At the center of the village, occupying a circular open space 150 feet in diameter, was a barrel-like object. This was the “Okipa,” about 10 feet high, made of planks and hoops. Known as a representation of “the big canoe” that rode out the Deluge, it was a kind of tabernacle containing objects sacred to folk memory of the cataclysm. These included the Eeh-teeh-ka—four sewn-together, turtle-shaped sacks allegedly containing the original waters of the Great Flood from the four quarters of the world, signifying the catastrophe’s Earth-wide magnitude.
Families from every wigwam donated edged tools, symbols of the construction that went into the original “big canoe.” They were collected in a medicine lodge for the duration of the ceremony, but on its last day were sacrificed by throwing them into the deepest place of a nearby river to at once commemorate the Deluge and spiritually prevent another from taking place. The Okipa concluded with Bel-lohck-na-pie, a dance of 12 men painted white, black, and yellow (representing the three major races of mankind) around the “big canoe.”
Oklatabashih
Choctaw for “Survivor from the Great Flood,” the tribe’s forefather.
Olle
North America’s Tuleyone Indians preserve the oral account of a time, long ago, in the days of their ancestors, when a fiery demon remembered as Sahte appeared in the sky, and incinerated most of the world. Its terrified inhabitants prayed for salvation from the gods, one of whom, Olle, came to their rescue. He was a colossal giant wearing a horned helmet. Olle saw at once that only the most radical measures could prevent Earth from being completely consumed by the conflagration, so he caused a sudden flood that submerged all land, except for the tallest mountain at the center of the world. On its summit he placed some human survivors, who later became the ancestors of a new humanity.
Among the Ho Chunk, Olle is remembered as Wakseksi. The so-called “Man Mound” near Baraboo, Wisconsin, the 90-foot-long effigy mound of a man wearing a horned helmet, represents Olle-Wakseksi. He is also portrayed in petroglyphs at Jeffers and Pipestone, both sites in southwestern Minnesota. At Jeffers, he is depicted walking away from a circle, signifying the all-encompassing flood that ravaged the world.
Omphalos
The “navel stone,” shaped like an egg, at the sacred center of Delphi, the most influential oracle in the ancient world. The Omphalos was the symbolic centerpiece of the Atlanteans’ “Navel of the World” reincarnation cult. With the destruction of their homeland, its principles were reinstated wherever the survivors landed. Omphalli were almost identically revered in Egypt (the Ben-Ben, or “Phoenix,” of Heliopolis); Troy (the Palladium, of Mount Ida); Rome (the Temple of Saturn’s navel-stone); Ireland (County Galway’s Turoe Stone); the Canary Islands (Tenerife’s zonzonas, or “sacred precinct” ["zone"]); North America (the Mandan Indians’ Nat-com-pa-sa-ha, “Center of the World,” at Heart River, North Dakota); and even as far away as Easter Island (known to the natives as Te-Pito-te-Henua, “the Navel of the World”) where, in fact, an egg-shaped stone was worshiped.
Ora Martima
A world history with longer, more thorough descriptions of Atlantis than Plato recorded in his account. Sections detailing the sunken capital were lost with the fall of Classical civilization, although a few references survived. Ora Martima’s author, the first-century b.c. encyclopedist Avienus, composed his history based on original documents salvaged from the Great Library of Carthage before its incineration during the Second Punic War.
Orichalcum
A term Plato cites in Kritias to describe a precious metal, second only in value to gold, manufactured in Atlantis. A strict translation of orichalcum renders something approximating “gleaming copper,” or “superior copper.” At the height of their cultural extravagance and material prosperity, the Atlanteans decorated whole sections of their exterior walls with broad sheets of orichalcum as flamboyant displays of wealth.
It is an important addition to Plato’s account, because orichalcum links Atlantis to the Upper Great Lakes copper mines, which were operated until their abrupt shut-down around 1200 b.c., the same historical moment when the island capital was finally destroyed. Orichalcum, Plato wrote, “survives today only in name, but was then mined in quantities in a number of places throughout the island.” It was an alloy invented by Atlantean metalsmiths through combining the world’s richest grade of copper ore with gold.
The same precious metal was described in Old Irish accounts of Atlantis; the Celtic authors referred to it as bath and findrine. Long after Atlantis perished, orichalcum was still being manufactured by the descendants of Musaeus, an Atlantean kingdom in Colombia. There the Muysica Indians produced tumbaga, gold-alloy vessels outstanding for their buttery sheen of “gleaming copper.”
Out of the Silent Planet
A novel about Atlantis by the early 20th-century British author, C.S. Lewis.
Outer Continent
Mentioned by Plato in his Atlantis dialogues as a large territory on the opposite side of the Atlantic Ocean, otherwise unknown to his fellow third-century b.c. Greeks, and an apparent reference to America—18 centuries before it was “discovered” by Christopher Columbus. Plato stated that its eastern shores were colonized by Atlantean imperialists.
Ova-herero
A Bantu people named after their chief culture heroes, a pair of white men who arrived in southwest Africa following a terrific deluge, from which the ancestors of the Ova-herero took refuge on mountain tops.
Cairo Museum diorama of an early dynastic pharaoh impersonating Osiris, as he blesses the soil, in preparation for planting. The Egyptians believed the principles of scientific agriculture were brought to the Nile Delta by the god of resurrestion after he arrived from his sunken homeland in the Distant West.
