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In my previous two-part article titled " The Exceptional Cuban Underwater City," I argued that the existence of a city at a depth of over 2,000 feet (609 m) below sea level off the coast of Cuba could be explained by the Caribbean Basin having been dry and habitable when the city was built. Toward the end of the second part of the article, I suggested that the Taino flood myth describing "how the sea was created" was referring to not the creation of the world's oceans, but the Caribbean Sea in particular, and the land Zuania that the storytellers said was flooded, was not South America but was instead the Caribbean Basin. My theory posited that the Saint Croix

The myth of the underworld, much like the myth of the lost paradise and the worldwide deluge, is a universal one. Cultures from all across the world, past and present, widely separated and with seemingly no historical contact, believed in this mysterious realm that the spirits of the deceased went to after death. Hell, the Christian version of the myth and Sheol, the Jewish variant, are very familiar in Western society, but the Greeks, Egyptians, and Maya all believed in their own version of this myth. In Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, Ignatius Donnelly argued that the universal myth of the lost paradise was referring to a real and physical place, but he did not mention the underworld. In this article

When the first American settlers reached the shore of the Great Salt Lake in the middle of the 19th century, many of them believed that this vast inland sea was a remnant of the floodwaters that had swept across the whole Earth in the Great Deluge. At that time, the acceptance of the Biblical deluge as a real and historical event was as universal as the flood itself was believed to be, among the educated and uneducated alike. [[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"29416","attributes":{"alt":"The Great Salt Lake of Utah, USA. 1875. ","class":"media-image","height":"419","style":"width: 610px; height: 419px;","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"610"}}]] The Great Salt Lake of Utah, USA. 1875. ( CC BY 2.0 ) The currently accepted explanation of the Great Salt Lake’s formation is much more prosaic. According to geologists

( Read Part II here) In his Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization, Graham Hancock examines the numerous structures that have been discovered underwater around the world. Most of the sites that Hancock discusses lie less than 120 meters (395 feet) below sea level, which comes as no surprise since the sea level never fell below this mark during the time Homo sapiens walked the earth. Submerged over 700 meters (2300 feet) underwater, the Cuban city discovered by Paulina Zelitsky and Paul Weinzweig during a joint Cuban-Canadian expedition is the singular exception. Overturning Old Theories How can the existence of this underwater city at this great depth be reconciled with the well-established consensus that the sea level never dropped so

The Lost Continent of Lemuria or Mu, (used interchangeably) has long lived under the shadow of its more well-known relation, Atlantis. Therefore, it may come as a surprise that for a brief moment in history, Lemuria gained a greater acceptance within the scientific and scholarly community. In fact, Lemuria was not originally an idea originating from the occult world, or from lost Ancient Egyptian sources as was Plato’s Atlantis, but from the minds of leading scientific thinkers. [[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"46283","attributes":{"alt":"Ideal Landscape of Lemuria.—Drawn by Riou from Ridpath's history of the world; being an account of the ethnic origin, primitive estate, early migrations, social conditions and present promise of the principal families of men (1897) (Public Domain)","class":"media-image","height":"543","style":"width: 610px; height: 543px;","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"610"}}]] Ideal Landscape of

The famously disastrous Genesis flood was merely a local flood, argue critics of the literal interpretation of the Bible. Fundamentalists contest that the flood was indeed global. What is the truth of the flood stories? Could ancient sources have been misinterpreted? If one interprets the word raqiya to mean a terrestrial expanse of land rather than a celestial structure, Genesis 1:7 reads as follows: “And God said, ‘Let there be an expanse [of land, namely the Caribbean archipelago raised entirely above sea level] in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters [Atlantic Ocean’s waters] from the waters [Caribbean Sea’s waters]” (ESV). Then, in Genesis 1:8, God called the expanse Heaven, and in in Genesis 1:9, God

Critics of the literal interpretation of the Bible have argued that the Genesis flood was a local flood. This interpretation has been vehemently opposed by Biblical literalists and fundamentalists, who maintain that the flood was global. But the skeptics have a point; at the very least, the proponents of a global flood have failed to come up with a convincing scientific explanation for a flood truly universal in extent. The theories that have been proposed, such as the vapor canopy theory and the hydroplate theory contradict known geological theories and facts. And while the flood could be explained by the intervention of a supernatural force or deity, such explanations are unscientific and are inadmissible in the empirical sciences. There’s No

According to the Old Norse philologist Rudolf Simek and religious historian Mircea Eliade, Ragnarök marks the end of a cosmic cycle that will repeat ad infinitum. I argue that the Norsemen also preserve the account of a strange and wonderful land doomed to destruction, a land that upon closer inspection bears a striking resemblance to precisely this dry and habitable Caribbean Basin, were it to have existed. In the long run, the entire boundary of the Caribbean plate will rise above sea level, thus closing the gaps that now exist between the islands of the West Indies and resulting in the isolation of the Caribbean Basin from the Atlantic Ocean and its eventual evaporation. [Read Part I] Geological Forces Causing

Before the rise and spread of Christianity in the first millennium of the common era, paganism was the common religion of Europeans. Just as there is not a single Christian faith, but many denominations and sects, there was no single set of beliefs that one could identify as “pagan.” For example, the Greeks, Germans, and the Celts had different myths explaining their origins, and beliefs and practices were far from uniform across these peoples of Europe. Among the most colorful of these myths is Norse mythology, first written down in the Eddas during the Medieval period of Iceland. The Eddas, among other things, speak of a great world tree called Yggdrasil, a land called Midgard, a great serpent surrounding Midgard