Presentation 6 — The Bamian "Buddhas", Hand-Made by Atlantean Initiates

Dr C.A. Bartzokas · Atlantean Realities Series · 13 slides · White Lotus Day, Athens, 14 May 2006

The sixth White Lotus Day presentation, and the one with the greatest documentary value, because a good deal of what it shows no longer exists. Its subject is the colossal standing figures carved into the cliff at Bamiyan in Afghanistan — placed in quotation marks in the title because the argument is that they long predate Buddhism and were, as the subtitle has it, hand-made by Atlantean initiates.

The sequence begins with a panorama of the cliff and its honeycomb of caves, then works inward: colour and historic black-and-white photographs of both figures standing in their niches, wide views of the whole escarpment, a shepherd and his flock passing beneath for scale, close studies of the carved drapery and the worked surface, and one of the painted ceiling frescoes from the caves. A final image shows an empty niche. The presentation was given in 2006, five years after the statues were dynamited, and whatever one makes of its argument about their origin, the photographs it gathers are now records of something destroyed.

View the presentation (PDF, 1.1 MB, 13 slides)