Shen Chou
In Chinese myth, a very ancient kingdom, preceding the creation of China itself. Before Shen Chou disappeared beneath the Pacific Ocean, the goddess of mercy, Hsi Wang Mu, carried away the Tree of Immortality to her fabulous palace in the remote peaks of the K’un-lun Mountains. There she tends it for gods and only the most virtuous human beings. At a periodical banquet, the P’an-t’ao Hui, or “Feast of the Peaches,” these select individuals achieve immortality by eating the blessed fruit.
Shen Cho is an apparent Chinese reference to the lost Pacific civilization, as underscored by the goddesses’ name, Hsi Wang Mu, and the Tree of Life, with its sacred peaches, the same fruit mentioned in Japanese myth describing Lemuria.
Shikiemona
Sky-god of Venezuela’s Orinoco Indians. They believed Shikiemona unloosed “The Great Water,” a worldwide flood, to drown the first humans, who transgressed his sacred laws.
Shinobazu
A large pond fringed with rushes and inhabited by varieties of water fowl, formerly an inlet of Tokyo Bay, until its creation in imitation of the Chikubujima Shrine on Lake Biwa, near Kyoto. At the center of the pond is a small island with a temple dedicated to the sea-goddess, Benten, the mythical culture-bearer who brought civilization to Japan from the sunken Motherland of Mu. Her arrival is symbolized at Shinobazu by statues of fish and emblems of a pyramid surrounded by threateningly high waves of the sea. With the political and cultural shift to Tokyo in the 17th century a.d., the new capital declared its Lemurian legacy by creating its own version of Chikubujima at Shinobazu. Its artificial island, connected by causeways to the shore, is a symbolic representation of the lost Pacific Motherland.
Shoshone Deluge Story
In the Great Flood that drowned the world, the ancestors of this North American tribe found refuge in an enormous cave called the Sipapu. After the Deluge abated, they emerged to regenerate mankind. Today, the Sipapu is the Shoshone “Navel of the World,” a hole at the center of their sacred precinct, the kiva, and the most important feature of their religion. The Navel of the World, with its cavernous ceremonies, was the primeval mystery cult of Atlantis.
Shu
The Egyptian Atlas, he was portrayed in temple art as a bearded man supporting the heavens while guarding the Four Pillars of the Sky. These were comparable to the Pillars of Heracles, or the Strait of Gibraltar, which defined the Mediterranean limits of Atlantean influence, and a concept that placed Shu at the center of the world. In ancient Egypt, obelisks were known as “Pillars of Shu.” As Atlas meant “the Upholder,” so Shu was known as “He Who Holds Up.” He shared the title, “God of the Air,” with Ehecatl, his Aztec counterpart. According to the renowned Egyptologist Schwaller de Lubicz, Pharaonic prehistory was dominated by the twins, Shu and Tefnut” (211).
Sigu
The flood hero of Arawak myth, he saved all of Earth’s animals from a planet-wide deluge by sealing them up in a huge cave. Sigu then climbed to the top of the tallest tree at the center of the world. After the waters abated, he descended and freed the animals. The same myth was known to the Mayas, who venerated the Ceibra above all others, because it was the sole tree to have survived the Flood at the center of the world. Repeatedly signified in both the Arawak and Maya accounts is the Atlantean Navel of the World mystery cult, with its central Tree of Life.
Interestingly, Sigu appears in the Melanasian rendition of the flood that destroyed Lemuria. It recounts that he was a prince, who, together with his father, the king, escaped the inundation of Burotu.
Sillapadakaram
A Tamil religious text that describes Kumari Nadu, also known as the Pandyan Kingdom. Before it disappeared under the Indian Ocean during a natural catastrophe, the “Land of the Kumara” was the birthplace of Shiva-worship in pre-Hindu times. A teacher, Agastyr, escaped to establish the cult in the south of India, where he built an ashram in the Pothigai Hills, from which it spread throughout the subcontinent. “Kumara” is a title, “The Forever-Young Boy,” referring to the androgynous Murrugan, another god whose spiritual principles Agastyr brought from Kumari Nadu.
Murrugan was a savior-deity some investigators (Mark Pinkham, Kersey Graves, etc.) believe was a model upon which the myth of Christ was fashioned. As a sage of Murrugan, Agastyr was referred to as “the Son of Mitra”; mitra means “contract” or “friendship” with God. As such, Murrugan’s influence on Mithraism, phonetically and philosophically, is apparent. No less so is Murrugan’s philological relationship with Mu, where his concept originated. His Kumari Nadu, or “Land of the Kumara,” is an Indian version of Lemuria.
Silustani
A pre-Inca ceremonial area located not far from the shores of Bolivia’s Lake Titicaca. It features a skillfully laid-out circle of standing stones unlike anything comparable in South America, but strongly reminiscent of megalithic sites common in Western Europe. More famous are the Chulpas of Silustani. These are enormous, well-made towers archaeologists believe, on paltry evidence, were used exclusively for funerary purposes. The Chulpas bear an uncanny resemblance to equally massive stone towers standing under 100 feet of water in the Sea of Korea, off Japan’s western coast, approximating the island of Okinoshima. Connections between the Okinoshima structures and those on land, near water at Silustani, are suggested through the lost, intermediary civilization of Mu, although early Atlantean influences may also be present, as evidenced in the anomalous stone circle.
Sing Bonga
Sky-god of the Mundaris, a tribe from Chota Nagpur, West Bengal, in central India. He covered the Earth with streams of “fire water” to wipe out a sinful mankind. Only a brother and sister were saved when Sing Bonga put a serpent in the sky, which, puffing itself up, turned into a rainbow and shielded the children from the last drops of the deluge.
The Inca and pre-Inca peoples of South America likewise associated a rainbow “sky-serpent” with the great deluge which brought successive waves of culture-bearers from over the sea after the destruction of their island kingdom. So too, the biblical account of Noah’s Flood has Yahweh put a rainbow into the sky as a sign that the deluge was ended.
Siriadic Columns
Thaut, or Thoth, set up two columns—one of brick, the other of stone—on which were inscribed a pre-deluge history. They were meant to survive both fire and flood, and erected “in the Siriadic land,” a reference to Egypt, where the rising of Sirius coincided with the annual inundation of the Nile Delta. In Egyptian myth, Thaut arrived at the Delta after cataclysmic flooding destroyed a former age, the Tep Zepi, or “First Time.” Doubtless, that ancient deluge symbolically correlated with the yearly rising of the Nile, because the results of both were abundance. With Thaut’s arrival, pharaonic civilization bloomed again following an excess of nature, just as the yearly overflowing of the river brings fertile, alluvial soil.
He carried “emerald tablets” on which were engraved the documented wisdom of the First Time. The word “emerald” may not be literally understood, but intended to imply a precious stone of some kind, or, more probably, it meant that the information preserved on the stones was precious. Thaut is credited in both Egyptian and Arab myth as the builder of the Great Pyramid. The story of his Siriadic Columns was told by two leading historians of classical times: Manetho, a third-century b.c. Egyptian priest commissioned to write a chronicle of Dynastic Civilization by the Ptolemies, and Flavius, prominent Jewish scholar of the first century a.d. ascribed the twin columns to Seth, who he described, not as a god, but a “patriarch.” Although worshiped from pre-dynastic and early dynastic times in Upper Egypt, Seth was thereafter demonized by the Followers of Horus, so little of his original cult may be inferred. Unique to the rest of the gods, however, he was a redhead, like many Atlanteans.
The memorial pillars may have been the same stele inscribed with the history of Atlantis that were seen by Solon and Krantor, the Greek visitors to Neith’s temple at Sais in the Nile Delta, and upon which Plato’s Atlantean account was based. Kritias describes a sacred column inscribed with ancestral laws at the center of the Temple of Poseidon in Atlantis. It seems related to Thaut’s “Siriadic Columns” and those mentioned by Plato.
Slaying of the Labu
A Babylonian description of the Atlantean flood predating Plato’s account by 1,000 years, it reads in part: “the mighty Irra seized away the beams [of the dams], and Ninurta coming caused the locks to burst. The Annunaki bore torches, making the land to glow with their gleaming. The noise of Adad [a volcanic mountain] came unto heaven, and a great water-spout reached to the sky. Everything light turned to darkness. For in one day, the hurricane swiftly blew like the shock of battle over the people.” Ishtar wailed, “Like a brood of fish, they [the people] now fill the sea!” After six days, “the sea became calm, the cyclone died away, the Deluge ceased. I [Xiusthros] looked upon the sea, and the sound of voices
Sobata
Seafarers who covered great distances in small wooden vessels known in Okinawan dialect as Sabani, or Sa-bune, after which the sailors are still remembered in Japanese oral traditions. These Sabani are remarkably similar to craft used by Polynesians, and may still be seen occasionally plying the waters between the Hawaiian Islands. Sobata dwelling sites have been radio-carbon dated to the mid-fifth millennium b.c. from Hokkaido in the north to the Ryukyu Islands in the south. Their prodigious feats of navigation almost perfectly parallel the distribution of Jomon earthenware finds made along the East China Sea and the Sea of Japan, and may account for Jomon pottery shards found on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, in Ecuador.
Professor Nobuhiro Yoshida, President of The Japan Petroglyph Society, states, “If they (the Sobata) were not after all navigators from Mu itself—spreading its cultural influences to both sides of the Pacific—then they may have been the direct inheritors of a thallasocratic tradition from the Motherland after its geologic demise.”
Solon
One of the “Seven Wise Men of Greece,” he introduced social reforms and a legal code which formed the political basis of classical civilization. Solon was also the first great poet of Athens. In the late sixth century b.c., he traveled to Sais, the Nile Delta capital of the XXVI Dynasty, where the Temple of Neith was located. Here a history of Etelenty was preserved in hieroglyphs inscribed or painted on columns, which were translated for him by the high priest, Psonchis. Returning to Greece, Solon worked all the details of the account into an epic poem, Atlantikos, but was distracted by political problems from completing the project before his death in 560 b.c. About 150 years later, the unfinished manuscript was given to Plato, who formed two dialogues, Timaeus and Kritias, from it. As one of the very greatest historical figures in classical Greek history, Solon’s early connection with the story of Atlantis lends it formidable credibility.
Sotuknang
In Hopi Indian myth, a god who long ago drowned the world, sending all human treasures to the bottom of the sea.
Spence, Lewis
Born James Lewis Thomas Chalmbers Spence, on November 25, 1874, in Forfarshire, Scotland, he was a prominent mythologist, who inherited Ignatius Donnelly’s position as the world’s leading Atlantologist of the early 20th century. An alumnus of Edinburgh University, Spence was made a fellow of the Royal Anthropology Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, and elected Vice President of the Scottish Anthropology and Folklore Society. Awarded a Royal Pension “for services to culture,” he published more than 40 topics. Many of them, such as his Dictionary of Mythology, are still in print and sought after for their incomparable source materials.
Spence’s interpretation of the Mayas’ Popol Vuh won international acclaim, but he is best remembered for The Problem of Atlantis (1924), Atlantis in America (1925), The History of Atlantis (1926), Will Europe Follow Atlantis? (1942), and The Occult Sciences in Atlantis (1943). During the early 1930s, he edited a prestigious journal, The Atlantis Quarterly. The Problem of Lemuria (1932) is still probably the best topic on the subject. Lewis Spence died on March 3, 1955, and was succeeded as the leading Atlantologist by the British scholar, Edgerton Sykes.
Statius Sebosus
A Greek geographer and contemporary of Plato mentioned by the Roman scientist Pliny the Elder, for his detailed description of Atlantis. All works of Statius Sebosus were lost with the fall of classical civilization.
Steiner, Rudolf
Born in Kraljevic, Austria, on February 27, 1861, he was a scientist, artist, and editor, who founded a gnostic movement based on comprehension of the spiritual world through pure thought and the highest faculties of mental knowledge. Steiner’s views on Atlantis and Lemuria are important if only because the educational Waldorf movement that he founded still operates about 100 schools attended by tens of thousands of students in Europe and the United States.
In his 1904 topic, Cosmic Memory: Prehistory of Earth and Man, he maintained that before Atlantis gradually sank in 7227 b.c., its earliest inhabitants formed one of mankind’s “root races,” a people who did not require speech, but communicated telepathically in images, not words, as part of their immediate experience with God. According to Steiner, the story of Atlantis was dramatically revealed in Germanic myth, wherein fiery Muspelheim corresponded to the southern, volcanic area of the Atlantic land, while frosty Nifelheim was located in the north. Steiner wrote that the Atlanteans first developed the concept of good versus evil, and laid the groundwork for all ethical and legal systems. Their leaders were spiritual initiates able to manipulate the forces of nature through “control of the life-force” and development of “etheric technology.” Seven “epochs” comprise the Post Atlantis Period, of which ours, the Euro-American Epoch, will end in 3573 a.d.
Cosmic Memory went on to describe the earlier and contemporary Pacific civilization of Lemuria, with stress on the highly evolved clairvoyant powers of its people. But Steiner defined Atlantis as the turning-point in an ongoing struggle between the human search for community and our experience of individuality. The former, with its growing emphasis on materialism, dragged down the spiritual needs of the latter, culminating eventually in the Atlantean cataclysm. In this interpretation of the past, he opposed Marxism. To him, spirit, not economics, drives history.
Steiner died on March 30, 1925, in Dornach, Switzerland, where his “school of spiritual science” had been founded 12 years earlier.
Sterope
The third Pleiade, an Atlantis (“daughter of Atlas”), she was synonymous for the Atlantean occupation of Etruria, in west-central Italy, through her son’s foundation of Pisa, the Etruscan Pisae.
Stonehenge
The world’s most famous megalithic site, located on England’s Salisbury Plain, evidences several important Atlantean features. For example, the sacred numerals, 5 and 6, incorporated in Atlantean architecture, according to Plato, recur throughout Stonehenge. The structure even resembles the concentric city-plan of Atlantis itself.
Stonehenge was first laid out by 3000 b.c., began to reach the apex of its construction 1,500 years later, and was suddenly discontinued around 1200 b.c. Its development, use, and abandonment parallel Atlantean immigration at the close of the fourth millennium b.c., the zenith of Atlantis as the foremost Bronze Age civilization, and the final destruction in 1198 b.c. (See Mestor)
Stonehenge’s most significant periods and physical features closely coincide with the rise and fall of Atlantis.
Strath-Gordon, Alexander Edmund Ronald
Internationally renowned speaker and founder of a society for the investigation of Atlantis, which both influenced and networked important, early 20th-century Atlantologists.
Dr. Strath-Gordon was born in 1873, in Aberdeen-Huntly, Scotland, and educated at Rugby school. Following graduation with highest honors from the Edinburgh University medical school, he entered the British Army which stationed him with the Cree Indians of northwest Canada. During his seven years in the Yukon, tribal elders told him about their folk memories of a great flood that long ago engulfed a large island, their ancestral birthplace. The Cree account sparked Strath-Gordon’s life-long interest in Atlantis, and, throughout the course of his world-travels, he collected similar traditions among various other peoples.
With the onset of the Boer War, he was transferred as a medical officer with the rank of major to South Africa. There, he was surprised to learn native versions of the same flood described by Canadian Indians. He concluded that these different, though similar accounts were nothing more than cultural inflections on the same Atlantean theme. A few years later, Strath-Gordon made colonel in the British Army’s medical corps, in France, where he was stationed from 1914 to 1918. During lulls in the carnage, he kept his ears open for local French deluge legends, and learned of several sunken realms, such as Ys.
After the war, he headed up the British passport control service in New York, where, following his retirement, he became a U.S. citizen. By then, he possessed a worldwide collection of folk materials, and was proficient in 32 languages, including Sanskrit. Such multiple fluency served him well in penetrating the core meaning of numerous flood traditions. During the early 1920s, he met at least several times with Edgar Cayce, the famous “Sleeping Prophet.” During 1928, Strath-Gordon formed the Atlantean Research Society, in Orange, New Jersey, which served as a base for his lectures across the United States and Canada. His eloquent talks acquainted audiences with a credible rendition of Atlantis. At the onset of another international conflict, he was a medical instructor at Portland, Oregon’s Hill Military academy. Following World War II, he resumed his lecture tours until his death in 1952.
Although little more is known about Dr. Strath-Gordon, researchers speculate his scholarly prestige may have at least helped to form Cayce’s conception of Atlantis, and even influenced James Churchward’s views on its Pacific counterpart, Mu.
Sueka
Flood hero of the Native American Pima peoples, who escaped a mountainous tsunami that arose to destroy the world when a colossal “lightning bolt” struck the sea. (See Asteroid Theory)
The Sunken World
A 1928 novel about Atlantis by Stanton A. Coblentz, who has its inhabitants surviving the ancient destruction of their homeland under a glass dome on the sea bottom.
Sura and Nakao
Flood heroes of the Ami tribe, dwellers of central Taiwan. They alone survived a world-class deluge in a wooden vessel, which landed them safely atop Mount Ragasan after the waters abated. From Sura and Nakao descended modern mankind.
The catastrophe from which they escaped was said to have begun during a full moon accompanied by the sound of loud explosions coming from the sea, suggesting volcanic and/or meteoric origins for the flood, which had been brought about by the gods to destroy human beings for their impiety. This moral imperative, together with the landing of Sura and Nakao on a mountaintop, is likewise found in the distant deluge traditions of the biblical Noah and the Greek Deucalion. The Ami myth is underscored by the discovery of underwater ruins off the western shores of Taiwan.
Surid
In Arab histories, the pre-deluge king of Egypt, who built the pyramids of Giza specifically to preserve the written knowledge of his time. This information included texts on astronomy, a history of the world, and prophecies for the future. Surid foresaw that the Earth was about to be incinerated by “a fiery planet” with resulting universal destruction by water. He appears in several Arab accounts of the Flood, in Masoudi (1000 a.d.), and the Akbar Ezjeman Collection, at Oxford. Surid may be the same as the Atlanto-Egyptian Thaut.
Susa-no-wo
Japan’s god of the ocean and natural destruction. Susa-no-wo battled a gigantic sky-dragon, who had devoured seven sisters and was about to dine on an eighth, when he was slain by the hero. In so doing, the dragon’s blood gushed over the Earth, but the souls of the consumed maidens were freed to rise among the heavens, where they became a constellation known in the West as the Pleiades.
Even here, on the other side of the world from Ancient Greece, the stars were regarded as sisters connected with a cosmic-induced deluge after it has done its worst. The great antiquity of such historical myth is emphasized by its appearance among the Ainu, an aboriginal people, originally Caucasoids, whose presence on the islands goes back beyond the fourth millennium b.c.
Sykes, Edgerton
Trained as an engineer, he was an invaluable foreign correspondent for the British press because of his quadrilingual fluency. During his long life in the diplomatic service and as a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, he published an estimated three million words in numerous topics and magazine articles, many of them devoted to a rational understanding of the Atlantis controversy. Sykes’s erudite journals and topics of comparative myth went far to sustain and expand interest in Atlantis throughout the mid-20th century. As such, he succeeded his predecessors, Lewis Spence and Ignatius Donnelly, as one of the three greatest Atlantologist scholars of modern times. He died in 1983, just before his 90th birthday, but a legacy in the form of his large library of Atlantis-related material is preserved in its own room at Edgar Cayce’s Association for Research and Enlightenment, in Virginia Beach, Virginia. (See Donnelly, Spence)
Szeu-Kha
The Pima Indians’ flood hero, he led their ancestors to North America after a flaming serpent fell from the sky with its fiery brood to burn up the original homeland of all mankind, located in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Fearing that the conflagration would spread throughout the Earth, Szeu-Kha pushed the burning island beneath the sea, creating a world-wide deluge. He led the early Pima away from this catastrophe before too many were drowned.
First Dynasty stone representation of Horus, the divine patron of kings, wearing the Red Crown of Lower Egypt. Atlantean culture-bearers arriving at the Nile Delta were known as “Followers of Horus.”
