Tuesday, February 1, 2011

[Sol] The Place Where Men Become Gods

There came the night, when the ruler of darkness sent down a terrible rain.
I looked at the weather, it was frightful to look at... 
At day break clouds as black as the night appeared in the sky! 
All the evil spirits raged and all light was transformed into darkness. 
For days a constant torrent of rain mixed with ash and mud rained down on the Earth!


Cultural enigmas.
On the other side of the Atlantic there is a similar enigma. Cultures like the Olmecs seem to emerge as if from nowhere, displaying great mastery of stone and architecture. In Mexico, the ruins of Teotihuacan close to Mexico City provide an even greater sense of mystery. Here in a magnificent sprawling complex of pyramid mounds and broad open avenues we find ourselves confronted with a seemingly unanswerable dilemma: Just who built the place?

Remarkably there is no obvious answer. It was certainly not the Aztecs, nor was it the Olmecs or the Maya. In fact all we know is that the architects of this exceptional site seem to arrive out of nowhere and then with their work complete disappear almost as quickly.

People of Aztlan.
Remarkably the name Teotihuacan, when translated from the Nahua language means "The place where men become gods." The belief was that Teotihuacan was where the great gods held council after the destruction of the island known to them as Nahuatl Aztlatlan. Aztec belief like that of so many other Indian tribes was that their origins lay in this halcyon island of plenty, eastwards across the Atlantic. Aztlatlan was its name, and it's inhabitants were known as the people of Aztlan! Of course the similarity between this name and that of Atlas - reputed to be the first king of Atlantis is obvious, so too the comparison between the name Aztlatlan and Atlantis.

Further intrigue comes from the word Atl. In the Nahuatl language it means water, a word it shares with the Berber people on the opposite shores of the Atlantic, in far away Africa.

The ancients.
Another enigma hinges around the very word ancients. According to the dictionary ancient means "of times long past !" The word is of Latin origin. In its latinised form it becomes "antiants", and the shade of it's meaning alters slightly to become those, or that which went before! Thus the word ancients becomes antiants . But this word antiants is not too far removed from the name Atlantis! Antiants -Atl-antiants.
Could then the word ancients really mean, "they that came from Atlantis" - the inhabitants of this long lost island? A name, and a word, that gave its meaning to the world that once existed?

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