Korridorium

♫ House­boat Lounge ♫

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I enter the cor­ri­dor. My friend Norbu seems not to be on board, but as I stand some­what per­plexed in his liv­ing room, I sud­denly hear the sound of ham­mer­ing. Bur­glars? No, it dawns on me, prob­a­bly Norbu, who is seal­ing a leak and mak­ing sure that his house­boat does­n’t sink.

And there he comes, tool­box in hand, and we set­tle in with a glass of red wine. “I found ancient records of myself,” I tell him. As a teenager, I was fas­ci­nated by Atlantis and, like a lit­tle pri­vate scholar, combed the city library for archae­o­log­i­cal clues about the inhab­i­tants of this sunken con­ti­nent. I show Norbu cave draw­ings, metic­u­lously copied from var­i­ous books and adorned with schol­arly com­ments. They come from both the Old and the New World. “Atlantis lay in between,” I explain, “and that’s why there are such pecu­liar sim­i­lar­i­ties in sym­bols and depic­tions, long before Colum­bus came or the Vikings dis­cov­ered Amer­ica: sur­viv­ing Atlanteans who fled to the sur­round­ing con­ti­nents.” The the­sis still con­vinces me today.

My friend Norbu rubs his chin. “Has it never occurred to you that these sim­i­lar­i­ties may not have required any con­tacts by sea?”

“You mean it’s all just a coin­ci­dence?” Dis­ap­pointed, I take back my yel­lowed and slowly dis­in­te­grat­ing note­book.

“No, by no means. But haven’t you also delved into shaman­ism…”

Yes, right, there were shamans in almost all cul­tures world­wide, heal­ers in con­tact with the spirit world and ances­tors.

“And pos­si­bly,” my friend Norbu says, “in con­tact with each other.”

It takes a moment for the real­iza­tion to sink in. “You mean, across the oceans, from peo­ple to peo­ple? And that—telepathically?” Norbu points affir­ma­tively to my note­book. “Hm. Shamans of the Euro­pean mega­lithic cul­ture exchang­ing thoughts with those of the Proto-Amer­i­cans,” I imag­ine. And of course, that could also explain the sim­i­lar­ity of the pyra­mids or the fact that not only the Egyp­tians mum­mi­fied their dead but also some Native Amer­i­can tribes. Besides the under­world of the dead and the upper world with help­ful spir­its, the shamans also know the mid­dle world—the astral coun­ter­part to our every­day real­ity and its reflec­tion in the spir­i­tual world. On jour­neys to the mid­dle world, the shamans of ear­lier times, detached from space and time, could have vis­ited for­eign con­ti­nents and civilizations—and thus their respec­tive col­leagues.

“But maybe not,” Norbu inter­rupts my thoughts. “There are indi­ca­tions that even before the Vikings, there were con­tacts between Europe and both Amer­i­cas. The Chi­nese, Romans, Greeks, Egyp­tians, and Phoenicians—all are said to have been there and traded with the cul­tures there. Per­haps even the mega­lithic peo­ples. And all of this with­out the need for Atlantis as a bridge.”

I prob­a­bly look some­what dis­ap­pointed because Norbu adds con­sol­ingly, “But of course, your early research hon­ors you. Who knows, they might become impor­tant again and pro­vide new answers? Or raise new ques­tions?”

I know my friend Norbu isn’t entirely seri­ous, but I feel strangely affirmed nonethe­less. The young, curi­ous four­teen-year-old still within me is pleased to receive a late acknowl­edg­ment for con­duct­ing sig­nif­i­cant foun­da­tional research.

I clutch my note­book as I cycle away, decid­ing not to stash it back in a dusty drawer but to give it a place of honor on my shelf with the early works of great minds.