Fantastic Metropolis

Emen and Emenet were the forefathers of the Egyptians. They were born at sunrise. Among the offspring of the eight primordials was Tehuty, who carried the divine intelligence within him. Tehuty brought language and divine speech into existence, and his words explained and foretold the future of mankind. His words and knowledge became commands, and the commands became reality through the efforts of Ptah, the first craftsman on earth, who instructed artists in all forms of art, and Khnemu, the first master builder, who developed the life of mankind through his divine work of architecture. Ptah and Khnemu brought Tehuty’s commands to fruition, and we marvel at the remnants of their work still to be seen today in the land of Egypt. There was no evil in Etelenty, and the men and women who lived there followed the laws of nature. Since the creation process was not yet complete, the inhabitants of Etelenty saw the creation of the moon out of the soil of the Atlantic Ocean, and the creation of plants, animals, birds and creeping things. The earth, however, was unstable and so Tehuty, knowing that Etelenty would be submerged by the ocean, ordered the emigration of the four families that formed the population of Etelenty.

—Dr. Ramses Seleem, The Illustrated Egyptian Book of the Dead

When one considers ancient drug cults and cross-continental contagion, it’s easy to remember Graham Hancock and Robert Temple, both of whom borrow the concept of Charles H. Hapgood’s Ancient Sea Kings. It’s so hoary and familiar a concept that one often finds a reason to discard it by this point, but let us not do that. Let us instead imagine that the ancient Egyptian concept of the lands of the dead lying “beyond the Western Gate” and the similarity between the cult of Quetzalcoatl/Kukulcan and Osiris as being more than coincidence. It really doesn’t matter which ancient culture you imagine and which direction they crossed… was it De Plongeon’s Queen Moo taking her armies across the Atlantic, or a diaspora of families out of ancient Atlantis/Etelenty on the orders of Thoth/Tehuty or what have you, it’s the same for our purposes. We need only imagine that there was ancient lore in both lands about what lay beyond the Atlantic. Combine this lore with the vegetative nature of Osirian rite, the plant lore possibly derived from the Muvian/Atlantean/Etelenty colony… did the exiles bring the coca and tobacco plants with them? Were they rivals to the beer god Ra (who used his magical intoxicant to enrage and sooth dire Sekhmet, the Lion Goddess who raged across the world slaying all until a river of beer distracted her ire) and others? While in time these alien plant gods seem to have died out (whether through a gradual ebbing of transatlantic contact… did the cults of the plant gods attempt to send Carthaginian sailors around Africa and to the Americas, to reassert the ancient ties with the cult of Kukulcan?) or were supplanted by the mushroom and the vine, they spread all the way to what is today Germany and were mired in the tissues of corpses left behind before the coming of the Germans themselves. Terence McKenna and the Centaurs would approve, one supposes.