ATLANTIS MU FAWCETT MYSTERIES OF ANCIENT SOUTH AMERICA WILKINS 1956 FINE in DJ

Description: * * * VERY FINE COPY, IN DUST JACKET * * * MYSTERIES OF ANCIENT SOUTH AMERICAAMAZING AND DOCUMENTED FACTS ON THE PLACE WHERE CIVILIZATION REALLY BEGANBy Harold T. Wilkins First American Edition, in Dust Jacket Published in New York by The Citadel Press, 1956[First Edition was published ten years earlier, in London by Rider & Co., 1946] Contents * Original blue papered boards and black cloth spine, title gilt to spine.* Original dust jacket* 216 Pages* Numerous illustrations, photos, figures and diagrams * 3 maps, including 1 of Yucatan Peninsula, 1 of Amazon Basin,and double-page map of Peru and surrounding regions. ConditionNo shelf-wear to speak of. A clean, very fine copy with vanilla-white pages; looks almost brand new! no owner signs, inner hinges fine. Dust jacket has minor signs of edge-wear,else near fine. DescriptionScarce, iconic classic of Fortean literature by Wilkins, being the forerunner to his equally scarce and iconic "Secret Cities of Old South America," published in 1950. In "Mysteries" the author sets forth his theories and ideas regarding prehistoric South America as the birthplace of civilization. He brings forth a wealth of fascinating information gathered over years of travel and research. The chapters are literally packed with obscure details and facts of ancient history, science and archaeology, about Atlantis and Rutas-Mu, or Lemuria, and the cataclysms and disasters that sank them; the ancient missionary men in black of Hy-Brazil, Quetzalcoatl, Bochica and Veracocha; the Aztec, Mayan and Incan peoples and their golden cities, the Spanish conquistadors of Terra Sanctae Crucis, the fortune-hunting Portuguese bandeiristas; Easter Island, the land of colossal stone men; Tiahaunaco, the ancient city in the sky; the Nephilim giants of long ago; the strange jungle lights, and much on Col. Percy Fawcett, the British explorer who went through the Mato Grosso in search of the ancient Brazilian city of "Z" the royal outpost of ancient Atlantis, and never returned (see paragraph 7, infra). The book is literally a Fortean gold mine, a feast of exotic arcana for students of ancient and occult lore. * * * Wilkins begins the story with the Great Catastrophe and presents evidence and traditions from aboriginal and primitive tribes, and from the temples of ancient Egypt, that 10,000 to 12,000 years ago a series of cataclysms took place with appalling earthquakes, deluges of rain and fire, a cosmic bombardment of enormous meteors and other disastrous events. The final blow was the Great Catastrophe that annihilated civilizations, including Hy-Brazil, the royal colony of the Atlantean empire. According to Wilkins these things are not myths, for they are borne out in such hoary documents as the Mexican Codex Chimalpopoca, the Quiche Maya Popul Vuh, and in the hieroglyphs of the temple of Ramesses at Karnak in Thebes, not mention the Holy Bible. Hy-Brazil is the central point, or feature---the crux of Wilkins' theory regarding where civilization began. It is in fact the name given in old Irish legends to a lost golden world. Hy-Brazil was the most ancient, civilized place on the planet, right along with Atlantis and Rutas-Mu (Lemuria). Here, in the heart of modern-day Brazil, somewhere on the plateau between Goyaz and the Rio Roosevelt, about 15,000 to 10,000 BC, perhaps earlier, lived a highly civilized white race in a city of gold with richly ornamented temples and pyramids that were lit by self-illuminating lights. Emissaries from Hy-Brazil, whom Wilkins calls the missionary men in black, went out to civilize and teach the barbaric races of prehistoric South America and Mesosamerica, and came to be known by the savages as Quetzalcoatl (the feathered serpent), Kukulcan, Bochica, and Verachoca---the great creator deities in the mythologies of the Aztec, the Maya, the Muisca, and the Inca. Then one day the Great Catastrophe struck. The sky turned black, the earth trembled and shook, fire and brimstone rained down from the skies, tidal waves of ice and water swept over the oceans, obliterating everything in their path, inundating Atlantis and Rutas-Mu, which were torn apart and sank beneath the boiling, churning seas. The other continents remained standing, but they were devastated by the destructive forces of Nature which may have been unloosed, Wilkins says, by a passing comet that came too close to the earth and had triggered a polar shift, or shift in the earth's axis. The Biblical story of the Flood and Noah's Ark is reminiscent of this catastrophic event, and it is remembered in the ancient records and mythologies of the civilized and savage races of the world. The beautiful land of Hy-Brazil, the Atlantean royal colony had vanished. The once-civilized country with its pyramids, temples and golden cities bustling with commerce, culture, and intellectual citizens from Atlantis and Lemuria was no more. The seas had swallowed up the motherland, and so there was nothing left. The survivors of the Great Catastrophe who had fled to the mountain-tops, into caves, or in their arks, regrouped and over the millennia managed to re-establish civilization at chosen sites around the world, but not in Hy-Brazil. The jungle had reclaimed the whole territory. Not long after the discovery of the New World in 1492 by Christopher Columbus---the "Christ-bearer" who brought Christianity across the ocean---came the Conquistadores, Cortez, Alvarado, Pizarro, Quesada, Ojeda, Orellano, and the Portuguese Pedro Alvarez Cabral. Not too many of them were good Christians. They conquered and bled Mexico, Columbia, Peru, and went up and down the Amazon River, but they did not penetrate the Brazilian interior, or sertao, the Mato Grosso, the green hell, swarming with snakes, hideous tarantulas, pumas, jaguars, fierce oncas, saber-toothed insects, demon ticks and barber-surgeon beetles, malignant fevers, and the anthropophagous head-hunting Indios malos of the Xingu River and the unexplored Caupolican region on the faraway headwaters of the Amazon River. During the Age of Discovery Cabral explored the coast of Brazil and claimed it for Portugal. Settlements were planted along the coast, in Bahia, Natal, Pernambuco, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Geraes. In due time, in the 16th and 17th centuries, local land-pirates, the Portuguese bandereistas, made forays into the surrounding wilderness, the chapada, in search of silver and gold. It was dangerous going past man-eating anacondas and piranha-infested streams, but these bandereistas were hardy, devil-may-care souls, and after a long journey they returned alive, some of them. One, Roberio Dias, aka "Moribeca," discovered a fabulous silver mine, the location of which he kept to himself. The Portuguese government learned of it and sent out the rabid Governor Dom Francisco de Souza who threw Dias into the dungeon hoping to loosen his tongue. But Dias died rather than reveal the secret of the "Lost Silver Mines of the Moribeca," as they came to be called. Then in 1743 a group of bandereistas with an army of 300 trustworthy natives set off, well-armed, from Minas Geraes in search of Moribeca's silver mines. They headed straight into the dreaded, snake-infested sertao and never looked back. Ten years later an emaciated remnant of the band staggered in from the hinterland, reduced to rags, and settled in an obscure village in western Bahia, from whence they had neither the strength nor the will to move another inch. But one of them took it upon himself to pen a narrative of their adventures in the unknown inferno verde. The manuscript eventually found its way to Rio de Janeiro and wound up in the hands of the Portuguese viceroy, who, having read it, and found something in it worth preserving, buried it in the official archives, where it remained hidden from sight until 1841, when a Brazilian historian and archivist Senhor Lagos, came across the old document in the old royal public library in Rio. The pages of the manuscript were riddled with wormholes, like slices of Swiss cheese, but there was enough left to show the startling discoveries made by the daring bandereistas of Minas Geraes. Wilkins says he saw the manuscript with his own eyes in 1938-39 and obtained a transcript through the courtesy of Mr. W. G. Burdett of the American Consul-General in Rio. Wilkins studied the old manuscipt entitled Relacao historica, and made a translation which he gives in Chapter Two on the Dead Cities of Ancient Brazil. In this curious document, the anonymous author tells of the wanderings of the bandereistas in the Brazilian wilds, inspired by the lust for silver and gold. In the midst of the sertao, a high, glittering mountain range appeared suddenly to their eyes. At the foot of the mountains the men found a man-made road leading up between two high peaks. In following the road through the pass, they marveled at the crystals that blazed in flashing colors from the rocks. At the summit of the pass they halted to catch their breath and gasped at what they saw. Below them lay a vast open plain, with a river running through it, and a great city with buildings and houses with facades of sculptured stone. They descended the road and entered the city through an arch of great height and proceeded down a wide street lined with strange buildings. Bats fluttered about in swarms whenever the men set foot inside the buildings. It was obvious the place was uninhabited except for one man---a statue of stone standing on a monolithic black pedestal with his left hand on his hip and the right arm outstretched with the index finger of his hand pointing to the North. The sculpture was set in the middle of a grand plaza at each corner of which stood an obelisk. The plaza was bordered by fine structures, mostly in ruins, including a classical-style temple with colonnades as in those of ancient Greece and Rome, but with strange characters like an odd mix of ancient Greek, Phoenician, Babylonian, and Sanskrit carved on the pediment over the portico. The halls inside were filled with rubble from the roof, toppled statues, and varied works of beauty and art. Beyond this building a great part of the city lay in ruins with mountainous heaps of stone; but here and there stood a building that was not completely damaged, including another large temple with colonnades, fountains, and a great inner chamber communicating with fifteen smaller rooms, or naves. Like the other temple, mysterious characters and glyphs covered the facade above the portico. As far as anyone knows, this dead city may have been the capital of Hy-Brazil, the long-lost, antediluvian Atlantean colony The bandereistas built wooden rafts with the timber brought down in floods and embarked on the river that flowed past the city. After three days they reached a foaming cataract, like the ones on the Nile, and put ashore. While scouting around they stumbled upon a place with seemingly bottomless pits, and great caves whose entrances were blocked by huge boulders that were carved with characters similarly strange but different than those seen in the city. Silver bars were strewn all over the place, as though an earthquake had forced the miners to leave them behind. Quite possibly this place was the Lost Silver Mines of the Moribeca, but the manuscript did not mention it. The bandereistas took whatever silver they could safely carry and returned to Bahia via the river and its tributaries. Besides silver, one of the company found a large gold coin in the temple of the dead city engraved with a kneeling boy on one side, and on the reverse a bow, an arrow, and a crown. Wilkins goes on to describe several other lost cities of mystery said to lie undiscovered in the Brazilian jungles suggesting that the interior was once heavily populated, perhaps by colonists from Atlantis and Rutas-MU, quien sabe. Wilkins says that several other dead cities were discovered by travelers in South America, one in the Rio Pequery region in Brazil, and another in the Rio Negro in northwestern Brazil with towering temples and pyramids. In association with these ancient cities, Jesuit missionaries such as Father Juan Lucero, and other travelers, claimed to have seen white pygmy Indians with red eyes, who were completely nude, and their nude women with long hair down to their feet. It seems only natural that there should be ancient cities, temples and pyramids in the jungles of South America. The Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon in the ancient city of Tetotihaucan in central Mexico were big hints that similar structures existed to the southward. In 1549 the Spanish Conquistador Pedro Cieza de Leon discovered the lost city of Tiahuanaco (Tiwanaku) , the city in the sky, in the Bolivian Andes. In the mid-nineteenth century John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood discovered the Mayan civilization in Yucatan with their splendid pyramids and temples spread throughout the peninsula. In 1911 the explorer Hiram Bingham discovered Machu Picchu, the ancient Inca citadel-stronghold in the Peruvian Andes. These ancient Pre-Columbian archaeological sites were drawn, photographed, filmed, recorded in the literature, and visited by tourists. But no one was able to find ancient ruins in the inferno verde of Brazil's interior sertao and bring back images and definite proof that civilization existed, once upon a time, in the Brazilian green hell, though many had tried, including British Col. Percy H. Fawcett, an officer in the Royal Artillery, of whom Wilkins writes in Chapter 3, The Jungle Light That Shines by Itself. Fawcett was an experienced jungle traveler. He had served in Trincomalee, Ceylon, and in 1901 joined the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) as surveyor and mapmaker and worked for the British Secret Service in North Africa. In 1906 he set off for South America to delimit the borders between Brazil and Bolivia at the behest of the RGS and was captivated by the primeval jungles of the Amazon Basin. From 1906 to 1924 he made eight expeditions in Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, exploring and surveying, and tracing the courses of various rivers. Fawcett was a well-read student of the occult and was familiar with the history and mysteries of prehistoric civilizations, Atlantis, MU, Antillia, Hy-Brazil, etc., and was convinced that Brazil had been colonized by the Atlanteans, and therefore there were ancient cities waiting to be discovered deep in the Brazilian wilds, as the Portuguese bandereistas had shown. On one of his expeditions, in 1921, he claimed to have found the dead city of the bandereistas and saw the statue of the man on the black monolith pointing to the North. He did not disclose the location. However, the bandereistas returned to the province of Bahia and settled by the Parag-oacu River, which flows into the inlet at Salvador. Assuming the band came from the westward, then the dead city lay either in the Serra do Espinhaco, about 200 miles from the Atlantic coast, or in the Serra Geral de Golias, where the modern city of Brasilia is situated, about 500 miles from the coast. In any case, Fawcett was obsessed with finding the royal capital of Hy-Brazil, which he called "Z", and which he believed was the cradle of the world's civilizations. He had reason to believe it was located somewhere in the Serra do Roncador, the "Snorer's Mountains," a remote mountain chain lying between the upper reaches of the Xingu River and the Rio das Mortes---the "River of Death." Thing was, the region was inhabited by Indios malos, the head-hunting Tapanhonas, the fierce Suyas, the Tapirape Indians, who shot poisoned darts that killed on contact, and a little-known tribe of subterranean troglodyte pygmy-cannibals called the Morcegos, or "Bats." Nevertheless, in 1925, Fawcett was determined to get there. He knew how to deal with the Indians, the good ones and the bad ones, and he was an expert jungle traveler, and had the backing of the Royal Geographical Society. He started off on horseback says Wilkins from the frontier town of Cuyaba (Cuiaba), Rondonia province, in southern Brazil, accompanied by his son, Jack, and his son's friend, Raleigh Rimel, and two native runners. The party traveled north-northwest, traversed the chapada dos Parecis, crossed the Cumba and Sao Manuel rivers, and continued north-northwest following a tributary stream of the Xingu River with the eastern versant of the Serra Formosa on their left. At this point, in 1926, the party was in the heart of the Mato Grosso, about 275 miles northwest of Cuyaba and 500 miles south of the Amazon. Their last known position was at "Dead Horse Camp," on the headwaters of the Xingu River, in lat. 11 deg., 43 min. S, long. 54 deg., 35 min. W., from where the last native runner was sent back. The party was about 200 miles west of the Snorer's Mountains where Fawcett was headed and hoped to find the legendary Jungle Light that would lead him to the royal capital of Hy-Brazil, the great lost city of Z. After the runner returned, no further word was received from the Fawcett party. The expedition vanished. Several years later rumors and stories began drifting out of the Brazilian wilds. In 1933 says Wilkins, a Dominican friar told the embassy in Rio that the Fawcett party was being held prisoner by the Aruvudu Indians on the Kuluene River, and that Fawcett's son had been forced to marry the chief's daughter. In 1934 an American missionary said the Kuikuru Indians told him that Fawcett had stayed with them for a year and then left in the direction of the Rio das Mortes. About this time, 1933 or 34, the deputy of the State of Mato Grosso, Col. Botelho, found Fawcett's theodolite compass near the camp of the Baikiri Indians, and that it was in fine condition, in perfect working order, suggesting that Fawcett was alive as of 1933. This discovery caused Fawcett's wife, Nina, to fly to Peru in case news of Fawcett's whereabouts was received, upon which she was prepared to go out and meet him, wherever he was. In fact, they had already planned to meet in the jungle after Fawcett had successfully reached Z and made friends with the natives who lived there. He was confident he could win them over. His intentions were noble. He was not looking to enrich himself at their expense, or to loot the gold of the dead city. Disillusioned with Western civilization and the horrors of World War One, he wanted to establish a native commune in the wilderness, away from the civilized world, with himself as the benevolent dictator. Wilkins wondered whether he had achieved his goal. Who knows? Quien sabe? But as of today, the ultimate fate of the Fawcett expedition remains a mystery. * * * In the rest of the book Wilkins goes off on a tangent with chapters loaded with ancient, arcane legends and lore on The Missionary Men in Black from Hy-Brazil, whom Wilkins says are to be identified with Quetzalcoatl, Verachoca, and other "gods" who set off to instruct the people of South and Mesoamerica on how to live, and how to survive the coming great disasters of the world; The Sign of the Sun, and the strange letters and inscriptions of the dead cities of South America, el Gran Paytiti or El Dorado; Sign Post to the Shadow of Atlantis; The Atlantean Subterraneans, and the tunnels where the Inca fled from Pizarro; Tiahaunacu and the Giants. The book includes an extensive Bibliography and an Index. Payment and Shipping Info Payment: Payment must be received 3 days after auction closes, or sooner. Shipping: $8 Priority mail in the U.S.

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