Worlds Before Our Own

Worlds Before Our Own

by Marco M. Vigato, author of The Empires of Atlantis

Teotihuacan, March 21, 2016. The day of the Spring Equinox. Soon after taking off from the Mexico City International Airport, 50 kilometers (31 miles) north of the sprawling Mexican capital, the airplane steers over the ruins of Teotihuacan, still shrouded in the morning mist 10,000 feet below.

Like a great mandala, the ancient city stretches over the 5-kilometer-long (3.1 miles) Avenue of the Dead, bordered by ceremonial platforms leading up to the dark, looming masses of the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. Even from this altitude, the scale of construction and the almost superhuman regularity and precision of the city’s layout are fully apparent, as if one were not looking at buildings designed around the needs of human habitation, but rather at the scattered gears of some long-forgotten machinery.

And indeed, this place was not built for ordinary people. It was a city of the gods, the embodiment of a universal order in stone, believed to have been raised out of the primordial darkness by the gods themselves.

According to the early Spanish chronicler and Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún (1500–1590), this is the place where the gods gathered after the Flood so that the sun—the fifth sun of our era—might be born again. Huge crowds convene every year at Teotihuacan to celebrate the annual recurrence of that miracle. Thousands of years before, a group of sages known as Tlamatinime, were said to have come to these same shores from a land beyond the sea to worship their father and creator, the sun. They established a new calendar, and they taught the primitive people of the Valley of Mexico the art of building in stone and the science of astronomy and agriculture. Then, they left toward the East, “taking with them their sacred books and the images of their Gods.” However, one day, they promised, they would return.

Who were these sages, and where did they come from? What mission were they trying to accomplish?

The purpose of my book, The Empires of Atlantis, is to provide an answer to these questions and to many others concerning the origin of civilization and of the many mysterious sites and traditions throughout the world that speak of strange gods and a long-lost golden age.

It is a nonconventional book that combines two radically different approaches: that of modern science and that of the Western esoteric tradition. The product is an entirely new picture of the true origins of civilization.

We find ourselves at a turning point in Western civilization, which also calls for a new understanding of our past. The conventional views of academia, which have held ground for the past two hundred years, rely on a positivistic idea of progress, according to which a linear thread of evolution can be followed from mankind’s obscure beginnings as hunter-gatherers to the diffusion of agriculture and the birth of the first Neolithic urban communities in the Near East, all the way down to the first historical empires. These views are every day being challenged by new discoveries that only appear to push further back in time the origins of civilization.

On the opposite end of the debate, the esoteric tradition denies any materialistic idea of progress and sees time as cyclical. By these canons, cycles of creation alternate with cycles of destruction. The only true progress possible is outside the boundaries of the material world.

Atlantis lives somewhere between these two worlds, that of scientific rationalism and that of the esoteric tradition. The rationalists have too often ignored the numerous esoteric and occult contributions to the subject, whereas the students of the esoteric tradition have no less frequently disregarded the testimony of science. Both approaches are equally necessary to understanding the true origins of civilization. Each one discloses different avenues of knowledge that should ultimately lead to the same fundamental truths.

The search for the physical evidence of humanity’s first great civilization will take us on a veritable journey of discovery around the world. Some of the sites discussed in my book will be certainly familiar to most readers— places like the Great Pyramid of Egypt, the ruins of Tiwanaku in Bolivia, and the citadel of Machu Picchu in Peru. Other sites perhaps less famous or only recently brought to the attention of the general public will nevertheless hold equally important clues to the true history of the human race.

What emerges from this journey is the realization of a pattern of sacred sites and places of power established thousands of years ago by people with a very peculiar mission to accomplish—to resurrect the primeval world of the gods and initiate a new golden age.

Most ancient and contemporary authors on Atlantis have tried to portray it as a relatively circumscribed episode of high civilization that ended in cataclysm around 9600 BCE. My book demonstrates that Atlantean civilization did not vanish “in a terrible day and night,” as Plato stated, but survived, albeit in different form, well into the historical period. Throughout this time, it remained remarkably loyal to the fundamental tenets of its sacred science. This is perhaps the greatest and most enduring monument left to us from our Atlantean past, for its influence is not limited by the duration of Atlantean civilization but also extends well into the present epoch.