The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries by Colin Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

hunting or good harvests. Celtic druids belonged to this tradition. Druidism was a form of nature worship; it came to Britain around 600 BC with the Celts, but many older forms of nature religion had existed long before that: Stonehenge, for example, was a temple for such worship and is precisely aligned to the stars.
    Nicolai Tolstoy is convinced that Merlin was “the last of the druids”. Druidism was driven into Wales with the Celts and survived there long after Christianity had stamped it out in the rest of the British Isles. Tolstoy points out that the Myrddin stories – particularly those of bards like Taliesin – are full of clues that link the magician with druidism. He invokes sacred apple trees (the druids worshiped in sacred groves) and has as familiars a pig and a wolf. He takes on many of the characteristics of the horned god of pagan mythology. Tolstoy places the “wood of Calidon”, to which Merlin fled after going mad, in Scotland, near Hart Fell, where the rivers Annan and Clyde both have their source. And, according to Tolstoy, Merlin fulfilled his own prophecy that he would meet a “threefold death”, clubbed, speared, and drowned. After being beaten for days by shepherds, he slipped into the river Tweed and was impaled on a stake before he drowned.
    Professor Goodrich prefers the traditional story, in which Merlin is murdered by a maiden named Ninian or Nimue, the Lady of the Lake (also called Vivian), of whom he becomes enamored and to whom he offers to teach magic. She refuses to become his mistress and finally uses one of his own spells to bind him and entomb him in a cave under an enormous rock. Another commentator has argued that the maiden Nimue is actually the Christian Saint Nimue and that the story of her final triumph over Merlin is really the triumph of Christianity over paganism.
    The books by Nicolai Tolstoy and Norma Lorre Goodrich are rich and complex detective stories that will leave most readers in a state of “enlightened confusion”. The final picture that emerges is of a real King Arthur, who was one of the greatest generals of the Dark Ages, and of a real Merlin, a shaman and druid, who was Arthur’s counselor and adviser. Both were men of such remarkable stature that, even within a few decades of their deaths, they became the subject of endless legends. The legends have blurred the reality to such an extent that it is now virtually impossible to discern the outline of the real men who lived sometime between AD 450 and 550. But the outcome of all the detective work is at least a certainty that they actually existed.

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    Atlantis
    The Submerged Continent
    Atlantis has been described as the greatest of all historical mysteries. Plato, writing about 350 BC , was the first to speak of the great island in the Atlantic Ocean which had vanished “in a day and a night”, and been submerged beneath the waves of the Atlantic.
    Plato’s account in the two late dialogues of Timaeus and Critias has the absorbing quality of good science fiction. The story is put into the mouth of the poet and historian Critias, who tells how Solon, the famous Athenian lawgiver, went to Saïs in Egypt about 590 BC , and heard the story of Atlantis from an Egyptian priest. According to the priest, Atlantis was already a great civilization when Athens had been founded about 9600 BC . It was then “a mighty power that was aggressing wantonly against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city [Athens] put an end”. Atlantis, said the priest, was “beyond the pillars of Hercules” (the Straits of Gibraltar), and was larger than Libya and Asia put together. It was “a great and wonderful empire” which had conquered Libya and Europe as far as Tyrrhenia (Etruria in central Italy). Deserted by their allies, the Athenians fought alone against Atlantis, and finally conquered them. But at this point violent floods and earthquakes destroyed both the Athenians and the Atlantians, and Atlantis sank