The Atlantean Ice Sheet Theory

The Atlantean Ice Sheet Theory, first proposed by Charles Hapgood in 1958 and championed by no less than Albert Einstein, states that the collective product of mankind, it’s art, music and culture, originated from one root, a single Proto-Culture which originated on the continent of Antarctica.

Just as it is a scientifically accepted fact by linguists that the languages men speak originated from one original tongue and that all human DNA originates from a singular set of ancestors, The Atlantean Ice Sheet Theory theorizes that all seemingly separate “cultures” are merely branches from a single root of a Proto-Culture, which thereby fundamentally rejects that art and culture evolved separately in different parts of the world.

Research has identified archeological sites in places like ancient Petra and Egypt that support this theory of the origin of language and art. I have conducted on the ground research in places like the Gebel el Silsila quarry, and have uncovered historical artifacts proving the existence of the Proto-Culture that flowered into the multiplicity of cultures and styles of art around the world.

Art criticism must be radically rethought, because classifying art as “Western,” “Asian,” “African,” and the like is fundamentally unscientific. There is no evidence that art traditions around the world evolved separately from each other.

Instead, the further researchers go back in the traditions of Rome, Greece, Egypt, China and Mesoamerican, the more similarities are discovered, in color, pattern, themes and even language. Scientific research demonstrates that a Proto-Culture existed on Earth many millennia ago located where Antarctica is today, and that from that ancient “Babylon” the people of the world populated all of the continents, hence proving the Southern African origin of Egyptian civilization.

However, at the same time, humans also traveled to Mesoamerican, building pyramids, writing in hieroglyphics and creating remarkably similar art to that of the Egyptians. Further East, early humans also dispersed to the South Pacific, eventually making their way to Asia and building pyramids throughout China. There is no single origin point between Africa, South America and the South Pacific other than Antarctica. The origin point of this Proto-Culture was then covered over in more than a mile thick ice sheet, concealing humanities great progenitors.

The Atlantean Ice Sheet Theory is the single most important catalyst for a radically new view of art. It is possible now to discuss a truly shared vision, an expression of humanity that is deeper and broader than any one cultures’ experiences. The European Renaissance occurred when the ancient texts of Greece and Rome were rediscovered, thanks to the preservation of knowledge in the Arabic world. Imagine what can arise as artists, scientists and scholars piece back together the original Proto-Culture that gave rise to all of our visions of the world.

The End of The Material Mind

We once again stand on the cusp of a fundamental shift in consciousness, the end of the material mind. The world once stood in this same place, in the late 1800s, but the promised transformation was delayed by a motley band of Darwinists, Marxists and Freudians who clung on to the material world for another century.

My most recent graphic novel, “Book of Gates,” incorporates one of the real-life scientific visionaries of the 1800s, Dr. James Freeman Clarke, who sought to scientifically prove the existence of the human soul. Then, like today, mankind approached an “apocalypse,” meant in the sense of a revelation of hidden truth. The matter of Aristotle and Democritus, the literal ground beneath science, was giving way to a new truth, that energy, information, and thought itself was the true foundation of the Universe around us.

But then the 20th century happened. War, Marxism, agnosticism, clinical psychology, relativity and statistical thermodynamics pushed back mankind from the brink of ascendance, and back into a world of shadows; the cold, hard world of material dependence. Idealism would take another 100 years to re-emerge, as it has today.

Materialism Versus Idealism

Very few people today have the slightest clue what “materialism” actually means. For most it is a vaguely derogatory criticism of capitalism. Even very few scholars and art theorists understand the actual definition of materialism, much less what a true idealist believes. However, this distinction between materialism and true “idealism” is so fundamentally profound that understanding the difference will literally change the world.

The History of Materialism

The Western world has had an on-and-off love affair with materialism. The earliest articulation of the theory was by the Greek philosopher Democritus (460 – 370 BC), who postulated the simplistic notion of atomic theory, the idea that a particle could only be cut so many times, and after that point an “atom” would be discovered. These atoms would float around in void, the precursor for the incorrect modern theory of the vacuum nature of space. Aristotle championed a similar theory.

But the Yin of this theory of reality was always opposed to the Yang of the Western idealists, represented in the Greek world by Pythagoras and Empedocles (circa 500 BC) and later by Aristotle’s own teacher, Plato.  

Materialism attempts to elevate matter and the physical world above idea. Materialists believe that matter gives rise to idea, such as a biological mind creating thought or a silicon-based computer creating information.

Two responses probably come to mind for most modern readers. First, of course thoughts and information come from physical things. How could it be any other way? And second, what does this have to do with idealists? Aren’t they do-gooders and hippies?

Neither of these could be further from the truth. First, the original philosophy of all ancient cultures outside of Greece and Rome, including of the ancient Egyptians, Vedic people and Taoists, taught that idea came first, then matter. It is hard for modern people to understand this concept, but up until the start of the 20th century, most cultures taught that matter is but a manifestation of idea.

Second, idealists have nothing to do with hippies, socialists or social engineering. Most purely, idealists believe that idea creates matter. Both capitalists and Marxists are materialists, in that both are pre-occupied with the distribution of material goods, and both believe that by controlling matter, in the form of commodities or weapons or money, that you can therefore control thought and idea.

How Materialism Survived

It has been said in physics that the material world has been rescued twice in the modern era, once by Isaac Newton (1642 to 1726 AD), and once by Ludwig Boltzmann in the late 1800s. Isaac Newton invented the idea of the photon, the atomic nature of light, and of gravity, which he famously described as an “occult force working at a distance.” These concepts perpetuated the notion of atoms and void, working over long distances of space, and thereby pushed back the realization of idea for nearly 200 years.

Ludwig Boltzmann’s determination to preserve the particle (i.e., material) nature of existence led to the sophistry of modern statistical thermodynamics at the end of the 1800s, forestalling the age of idea for yet another 100 years. Statistical thermodynamics preserved the language of matter, even in the face of all evidence demonstrating that the Universe functions as energy and waves, not as particles and bits of hard matter.

Materialism and The Arts

So, I hear young artists and writers say “so what?” What do philosophers from 2500 years ago, or physicists form 200 years ago, have to do with art theory? It turns out, quite a lot. Materialists have tricked artists into giving up their power to create, the power to make matter in their own image. Materialism leaves no place for creativity in the modern world, no place for the mind to assert itself over the dictates of the physical world.

 The “modern” or pessimist philosophy can be traced back about 250 years, to a collection of writers and philosophers beginning with Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and about 100 years later to philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer. These writers, although often thought of as the foundation of the “Enlightenment,” actually looked away from the classical sources of thought such as Pythagoras, Empedocles and Plato, and towards a world view that most contemporary people share. It is important to note that the “Enlightenment” was anything but enlightened. It was an attack on the humanism of the Renaissance and the time when Europe turned it’s back on classical Greece and Rome. This is the point where a slow slide into a new dark age began.

This dark age taught that the spirit of man was merely a collection of stimulus and response behaviors. In the 20th century, the ultimate inversion of classical thought occurred, and the basest human instincts of consumption, excretion, and sex have become the pinnacle of human expression, enshrined by Sigmund Freud and Charles Darwin as the ultimate “purpose” of life, in a materialist metaphysics that otherwise denies any higher purpose of life at all.

Today’s modernists say that we as mankind exist for the purpose of existence. Survival of the fittest replaces the concepts of spirit and manifestation of ideals, so that the only reward anyone can expect is the opportunity to eat more, take more, and reproduce more. Evidently this was not enough for Ludwig Boltzmann, because he killed himself at 62 years old, as did many of the original German pessimists.

As Dr. Mainlander, a well-respected German pessimist said in his 1887 work “Pessimism and Progress”, “This [transition] is precisely the original mistake, the primordial sin, which the whole creation has now to expiate by heavy suffering; it is just that sin, which, having launched into existence all that lives, plunged it thereby into the abysmal depths of evil and misery, to escape from which there is but one means possible, i.e., by putting an end to being itself.”

Materialism leads unavoidably to nihilism and hopelessness because there is no place for the soul in a material universe.

The Rise of Idea

It is this very materialist mind that is now crumbling all around us. Artists, philosophers and seers were duped by the materialists of the Enlightenment to voluntarily give up their power, and to submit to the lie of materialism. But fortunately, in physics, matter itself is once again dissolving away, giving way to the understanding of energy and waves as the foundation of the “real” world. Just like at the end of the 1800s, when visionaries like Ernst Mach, Lord Kelvin, and the hero of my graphic novel, Dr. James Freeman Clarke, demonstrated that the “physical” world is anything but, today nuclear physicists are demonstrating that energy, not matter, forms the foundation of reality; an energy that is intimately tied to consciousness and observation, and hence to art.

The materialist world view has robbed each of us of our birth right, as conscious beings, to build the World that we seek, not with hammers and chisels, but with words, images and thought.

Artists around the world are beginning to take back control of the financial structure of the art world. It is one small step, but through technology like the blockchain and NFTs, artists can begin to assert their will over the institutions that commodify art and trade in artist personas.

Culture can be whatever we think it can. No one can take away a conscious being’s ability to create its own World. Artists can take the torch of the physicists now and light the way to a new World of true idealism.

Lucid Dreams and Art

If you dream about building a castle, when you awaken you will have nothing. If you dream about a love affair, when you awaken you will have nothing but longing. But if you dream about painting, or writing music, or solving a riddle, when you awaken you will have the answers you need in this world. So is it true with the world above this one.

Dreams have been an alternative way to understand consciousness since the earliest philosophies, playing major part in Vedic, Hindu and Taoist religions. In a dream we are faced with consciousness that is unaware of any other world, but on waking, we understand how our experience of consciousness was limited during the dream, fully functioning, with the ability to reason and act, yet unaware of the dream state.

Even more surprising is the lucid dream. Anyone who has experienced a lucid dream has an entirely different dream experience, because in a lucid dream the dreamer becomes conscious of the fact that he or she is dreaming, and is fully capable of reasoning and acting in the dream world, with memories of the waking world being as accessible as during waking hours.

What better analogy for enlightenment or higher consciousness is there than a lucid dream? In one particular lucid dream, I became conscious during the dream as I looked for an exit from the dream. When I had finally made my way back to my bedroom (in the dream), I was able to consciously open my eyes, maintaining consciousness continuously from inside the dream world into the waking world. It is said that likewise, a Taoist master can ascend to a higher realm through the top of his head, during meditation.

During a dream, especially a lucid dream, we are aware of a physical existence in the dream. We can act just as in the waking world, and often seek to protect our dream bodies from harm.

But what is inside our dream head? It seems like a funny question, yet when we dream we are fully formed beings, with arms and heads, and I have seen myself in the mirror in dreams, thus confirming that all of the normal appendages do exist in the dream world.

Yet we are taught that inside of our heads are our “real” place of consciousness. Our brains, although unseen, materially create our consciousness, and this consciousness is therefore a product of the material world.

But in a dream, is our dream head the source of our consciousness? Clearly not, and the most hardened materialist would admit that in a dream, our head, like the rest of our dream body, is only an illusion, created to give us a correspondence to the waking world, and a way to understand the dream that would not be possible without this illusion of anatomy.

So then if our dream body dies, we know that our waking bodies do not die, as any number of long dream falls have proven to me. And what is inside of our dream heads? Apparently nothing that is really critical to existence, as it is given up on waking.

So then how do we know that our waking brains and bodies really are a seat to consciousness, and not once again a correspondence to some higher level of life? We cannot differentiate this waking world from our dreaming world in any rational way. Our anatomy in this waking world is not a proof of reality, any more than our dream heads are a proof of the reality of a dream.

So why do we dream? Perhaps a better question is why do you dream? For entertainment, to pass the night time hours, or to do something more profound?

Correspondence in Art – A New Art Theory

Traditional Art

For all recorded history before the last 150 years, art did not concern itself principally with matter. Historically, art dealt not with the material, but with the spiritual. Religion and art in all traditional cultures are inseparable. When Samuel A. B. Mercer first translated the Egyptian Pyramid Texts, the oldest known literature in the world, he found the texts not to contain histories or epic poems, but a collection of magical spells for protecting the Pharaoh’s soul!

But 150 years ago, Western art turned its back on the Pharaohs, sibyls, and Renaissance geniuses and began to measure art by the foot and pound, not by beauty or inspiration. In a material sense the painted wall of a house has not much physical difference from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  Both are wall coverings, both function to conceal dirt and mildew, both are produced by craftsman who are paid for their product. This is the modernist theory Clement Greenberg perpetuated regarding painting in the 1950s and 1960s. Modern art, abstract expressionism and minimalism were purely and aggressively reductionist materialist theories.

Where We Went Wrong

Modern art, like most of modern life, has been governed by two equally unsuccessful theories, capitalism and Marxism. On the one side is the market-oriented critique, where value is ascribed in dollars and markets are allowed to set the price of art, and thus those same markets control the broader distribution and promotion of any art piece. The predominance of the auction/ gallery system for the distribution of art and compensation of artists makes this theory of art the predominant functional rational for the production and distribution of art objects (including performances and other “intellectual properties”).

On the other side, Marxism dominates all academic art theories. This is still a materialist theory, meaning that it is principally concerned with the production of physical objects (and “intellectual property”), the distribution of said property, and the maximum social effect of that property. This is the dominant scholarly theory of art and can be found in all art that attempts to affect a change in society, provide a means of expression for disadvantaged or “underrepresented” groups of people, and that attempts to use art for a materialistic end.

Both the market theory and the Marxist theory of art are two parts of the same materialist rationale for art. Whether a means of storing wealth and rewarding “great” artists, or as a tool to better society through the production and distribution of art, each treats art as a physical phenomenon. And by physical I do not mean just with mass and dimension. Even intangible conceptual art seeks to make changes to the physical world, the world of experience. Striking a nail with a hammer is an action, and thus not a physical object, and yet it is also materialist in the sense that the action is entirely directed toward changing the physical world, the world of experience.

Like the Ludites of bygone eras, the modern-day zealots of materialist dogmas cannot see anything but the material. It is as if an entire world has become invisible, and so this new millennium’s art is as empty as 20th century art. Good and bad, to the extent those words have not been banished by Marxist artspeak, are judged by the physical effect of the art produced. Did it help a group of people overcome some problem or, for the market theorists, did it produce a “new” style, or reward the most “creative” and “brilliant” artists. These are all materialist concerns.

Only the surrealists permitted themselves to address the spirit as a psychic state, as was done by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Surrealism then, with its pre-occupation with psychological states and the dream world is an in between realm, both something to be physically studied and also something that cannot be entirely explained away in materialist terms.

It is convenient then to view surrealism as the theoretical bridge back to the spiritual roots of art. Only surrealists in the past 100 years contributed anything lasting to the art world. All the rest of modernism will be viewed by future generations as a kind of corporate feudalist art. To escape the new dark age that we find ourselves, this millennium’s art must rediscover the soul, whether that is viewed as a psychic state or in its quintessence as pure idea.

Correspondence As Art Theory

Correspondence is the theory that the material nature of an object is a manifestation of its core idea or form. The idea or spirit of the object is the true essence of existence. This is not a new concept. Around 500 BC, both Pythagoras and then Empedocles taught that the true nature of things lay not in their physical appearance or corporeal form, but instead in the mathematical and symbolic meaning of the objects. Pythagoras said the true nature of the world was “mathematical”, although the ancient Greeks had a broader definition of the word mathematics, which meant something closer to the word “idea.”

Plato’s teachings a century later still very much conformed to this ancient Greek concept of the mathematical or spiritual nature of the world, when he provided the famous analogy of the cave, where mortal men are only capable of seeing the shadows on the wall of the cave, and not the true forms of things. From this analogy came the concept of a physical thing being but a shadow of its true self. And from these teachings the Neo-Platonists and early Christians borrowed to create the traditional notions of the “soul” or spirit of a man being separate from his physical body.

Pythagoras seems to have learned about the mathematical or spiritual nature of the world from the Chaldeans, who were considered to be the greatest mathematicians and astrologers of the ancient world, and also from the Egyptians, whose studies of metaphysics influenced the Western world broadly. Vedic influences may have been the earliest prototypes for each of these cultures, where the visible world was but one small part of consciousness.

So, the concept of correspondence in art has ancient roots, going back into lost ages perhaps 12,000 years if we are to trust the chronology of the ancient Vedic writers, or even 30,000 years if the Histories of Herodotus can be relied upon. Yet the existence of correspondence has been fully banished from art theory, as the radical reductionists attempted to root out any concept from Western art not grounded in materialist phenomenon.

What Is Correspondence Then?

Correspondence teaches that if an object’s true nature is mathematical or spiritual, then, to use Plato’s language, the “form” of the object is broader than any particular expression. So for example, one particular apple is an expression of “appleness”, but is not in and of itself a complete and perfect representation of the form, or spirit, of the apple. An individual apple may be blemished, may be unusually marked, perhaps picked too green, or worm eaten, too large or too small to fully convey the essence of the perfect or ideal apple.

So then no one physical manifestation of the apple is a complete statement on that apple, and men, philosophers, artists, writers, etc., can seek to learn more about the apple by studying not just one, but many different apples, in order to gain an understanding of the proportion and ideal, or truth, of an apple. The student of the apple may go beyond simply looking at the apple, but may also study the tree, its leaves, roots, the ground it grows in, and the air and climate around it, so as to more perfectly understand what it is that creates the essence of an apple.

“Correspondence” means that the many different physical manifestations of a form or spirit all share a relationship together. They each correspond to the ideal or the perfect form of the thing they represent. The apple you hold in your hand is but a reflection of the true apple. The apple you hold in your hand “corresponds” in many ways to the ideal, but also is missing things.

Just as the particular apple you hold corresponds to the idea, so does a painting of an apple, or a poem about the apple, or a play or photography, or scientific analysis. Each of these corresponds to the ideal, and hence contains part of, but not all of, the spirit of the apple.

So, then a painting of fire contains fire. A painting of water contains water. A painting of a man contains a portion of that man’s spirit. Now the true magic of art becomes visible through art theory. Art is both a way to more fully understand the beauty and perfection of the spirit of things, and also a way to create and change those things.

A New Purpose for Art

Art is not just the producing and distributing of beautiful objects, and not just the mobilization of men to beneficial action. Art allows the artist to explore the very essence of reality, and then change it. Art gives men a window into the spirit world, a view into the perfect world of Gods and heroes.

When the artist fully comprehends the power of correspondence, it will radically transform his art. What can an artist paint, what does the artist dare to paint, knowing that in his hands he is not making mere likenesses or illusions, but is handling true spirit? Certainly, the artist will begin to respect his own talents more fully and will respect his subject matter and his art more too.