Yes, The Curse of Oak Island returned last night, but as it has dragged on, the program has become a reality show more than a documentary series, and the deaths of two cast members make it much less fun to criticize the increasingly rickety program. When and if they uncover anything worth mentioning, I might return to talking about it. The Daily Mail ran another of its stupid clickbait articles, and it has earned quite a bit of play across the fringe internet for reasons that baffle me. The new article implies, without bothering to explain, that the city of Nan Madol, in the South Pacific, had something to do with the lost continent of Atlantis. The news peg is that the Science Channel took some satellite images of the city, which the internet quickly misunderstood as meaning that Nan Madol had been “newly” discovered. This, in turn, prompted the Daily Mail to write about the online speculation as though it had substance. Technically, the article doesn’t say that Nan Madol is itself Atlantis. That would be fairly impossible since Atlantis appeared in the works of Plato nearly two millenniums before Nan Madol was built. But, the Mail writes that “New footage of an ancient city in the middle of the Pacific Ocean has sparked theories that the fictional island of Atlantis could be real.” This was the article’s only mention of Atlantis, despite the sensational headline; the body of the article contains claims recycled from previous articles about Nan Madol, because basically the Mail is a click farm masquerading as a newspaper.
It’s interesting to note that the basalt city of Nan Madol has long been seen among occultists and hipsters as an outpost of some sort of lost civilization. After its discovery, it served as an inspiration for H. P. Lovecraft’s sunken citadel of R’lyeh, and later is became identified as part of the sunken continents of Lemuria and Mu. Frank Joseph, the former American Nazi leader turned fringe historian, went so far as to note in The Lost Civilization of Lemuria (2006) that the history of Nan Madol was that of Atlantis: “Parallels may even be made between the first Saudeleur, or lord of Nan Madol, Olisihpa, and Elasippos, a king from Atlantis mentioned in Plato’s fourth-century-B.C. dialogue, Critias.” That would be a neat trick since the entire discussion of Elasippus is contained in one sentence: “Of the fourth pair of twins he called the elder Elasippus, and the younger Mestor.” Mostly Joseph means for us to see the names as looking similar, part of a long series of alleged parallels between Nan Madol terminology and Old World names. These, however, weren’t Joseph’s discovery; instead, he had taken them over from David Childress, who got them from Lemurian cultists. Joseph considered himself sophisticated by instead arguing that Nan Madol and Atlantis shared a common Ice Age ancestor in a lost civilization. More seriously, Bill Sanborn Ballinger called Nan Madol “the ‘Atlantis’ of the Pacific” in a 1978 book, but he meant it figuratively. But this is really a secondary development out of the primary fringe fantasy about Nan Madol. That one, of course, is that it was the capital of the lost continent of Mu, the brainchild of Brasseur de Bourbourg and Augustus LePlongeon and the fever dream of Col. James Churchward, who wrote in his first book on Mu that “To my mind, the various ruins on Pohnpei are ruins of one of the Motherland’s capital cities.” The irony of all of this, of course, is that Churchward’s Mu was a derivative of nothing less than Atlantis. Churchward borrowed Mu from LePlongeon and endowed it with the attributes of Theosophy’s Atlantis, but LePlongeon had taken the name and continent from Brasseur de Bourbourg, who had misunderstood Mesoamerican text to create it as the Mesoamerican name for Atlantis. Basically, he thought he figured out how to translate Mayan hieroglyphs, but he hadn’t really, so he more or less invented a fable as a translation of the Troano Codex by which Mu vanished in a single night in a volcanic eruption around 13,000 years ago. The influence from Plato’s Atlantis was unmistakable, and in a later attempt at interpreting a winged circle in the Mesoamerican Codex Borgia, he makes this quite explicit: “The wings designate the lowlands intersected by canals, compared here to the pipes of feathers of a wing, for a large part of Atlantis was composed of islands, and this is expressed beautifully in the Mexican language, where the word for wing, atlapalli, simultaneously means ‘black and moist earth’ (palli), ‘lying on the seas’ (atla)” (my trans.). In short, the Atlantis myth governed the minds of the people who came across supposed “evidence” for Atlantis and other lost continents, like an ouroboros eating its own tail.
13 Comments
Joe Scales
11/8/2017 10:45:23 am
That they would use the death of a young man to garner sympathy for the perpetrators of this heinous fraud that is the notion of treasure on Oak Island, is beyond reprehensible. they are liars. They are deceivers. They are frauds.
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Jim
11/8/2017 11:59:21 am
They are boring.
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Joe Scales
11/8/2017 01:18:14 pm
I hate watch it, and add to the commentary when they outright lie. Heck, in the flashback tribute to the deceased, they had him repeat the notion that if they can find one of the finger drains, that "proves" the existence of flood tunnels. Well, what they don't tell you is that flood tunnels were ruled out as a matter of geology at least a hundred and fifty years ago. They also withhold the fact that Robert Dunfield dug up the finger drains about fifty years ago, proving that they did in fact exist. However, they did not go past the beach and modern theories better describe them as part of a past salt works operation common for the time. Marty Lagina, an engineer, lawyer and millionaire has to know this. Yet, he permits the deception to continue. Just another fraudulent promoter for this hoax.
orang
11/8/2017 01:59:58 pm
I can't NOT watch it, but from now on, I'll call it the "fast forward show." Been waiting over 65 years for more info on Oak Island and 11/8/2017 02:49:18 pm
If you want more info in regard to the Oak Island Mystery/Scam/Hoax, best to start with Richard Joltes' site and not Prometheus Entertainment's Curse of Oak Island:
Americanegro
11/8/2017 12:43:52 pm
The Daily Mail got it right when they referred to "the fictional island of Atlantis" but how a "fictional island... could be real" escapes me.
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nigga
11/9/2017 06:28:34 am
oh white folks like it when niggar talk like them
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Americanegro
11/9/2017 07:52:00 pm
On no inhabited planet is that the correct spelling. You're not good at this.
The less intelligent it is, the more likely an Atlantis hypothesis is presented in the media. This is only about gaining clicks, it has nothing to do with reason. I am pretty sure, most of the journalists writing about the subject know that it only can be nonsense.
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Frank
11/15/2017 11:26:26 am
I'll agree that this latest Daily Mail article's scope at implying, without bothering to explain, as Jason points out, that Nan Madol had something to do with the lost continent of Atlantis, is not very intelligent. But then it's not just what gets to be presented in the media that is unintelligent, when it comes to Plato's Atlantis. Yours, I suppose, is more intelligent, since no one but yourself is promoting it? And by media I include all those books and articles that have ever been written of Plato's Atlantis. And Herr Franke, your explanations of Plato's Atlantis are not more intelligent than any other hypotheses out there, but only of a different variety, and further still, not original nonsense at that. Because that is what you are implying; that yours, which has no notable media coverage, is more intelligent, right? Not so fast! Yours can only be worse, since, besides being nonsense, it is plagiarized nonsense. Your so called, "reasonable" approach, is just as far on the fringe as any other. Your approach to Plato's Atlantis, a plagiarized one, is not at all in accord and in tune with all of Plato's details and descriptions; hardly any, is more like it. And as Jason and his "Argonauts" have pointed out, you and any other Atlantis "buff" are mere cherry-pickers. Jason and reason asks for all of Plato's Atlantis, and not just some freshly picked cherries; and your cherries are not fresh, as they were picked long before you were born. Jason wants, especially, the elephants; where are the elephants?
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William M Smith
11/12/2017 10:57:42 am
Oak Island has nothing to do with Atlantis, If you look at all the 200 years of research and address only the reported facts of find, you will see the most likely un-proven use of the Island. The natural sink hole was a likely site to allow the smoking fire to process cod fish by building a smoldering fire on a log platform sealed with clay to prevent the logs from burning. The salt brine was brought from the man made salt pond called the swamp where many items found can be linked to its function, (spoon handle, broach, branding iron, ax, spike, lap board and the man made dike between the swamp and Atlantic. The brine water was taken to the sink hole and placed over the fire where it boiled and produced potable water on the tin collector of which parts have been recovered. This sink hole also made pine tar when needed for ship repair like what was done to Sir Humphry Gilberts ship after it went aground when he was placing a tax for the Queen by marking the process with the G stone. (Note: His ship was repaired or was it at the south shore near the location where the bully was reported in a tree and the deep water hole that still exist for dry docking a ship in need of repair. This ship repair area had a washer, spike and other ship needed information needed to make a return trip to the Azores including the the declination of 7 degrees to adjust your compass in a stone formation on the shore. Back at the money pit (natural sink hole,) When the brine was near the percentage needed to drop its salt it was poured into drying tables which connected to the filtered drains into Smiths cove. The dry salt was bagged and put in bags for market as well as fish and fresh water packed in wooden barrels for market. This activity is supported by the artifacts found at Smiths cove loading dock area. (sizers, boatsman whistle, pulls, barrel woods, and the absence of large stones in the boat beaching area as well as anchor drag marks). The only money related to the Oak Island money pit in the days of early commercial fishing was the cabbage farmer Sam Ball who sold cabbage to the returning ships to Europe in order to decrease scurvy. Pirates gold, Templars, Atlantis is nothing more than FAKE NEWS.
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Americanegro
11/12/2017 02:48:39 pm
First, no one said Oak Island was connected to Atlantis. Do you even words bro?
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