Observations placeholder
Fawcett, Lt Colonel Percival Harrison - The City of Z as paradise
Identifier
022775
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
The City of Z appears to take on for Fawcett at this stage another role. It is a lost paradise, an escape from brutality to a less brutal place – it thus has become spiritual and physical for him.
A description of the experience
The Lost City of Z – David Grann
……..Fawcett was consumed with visions of Z, which, amid the war's horror, gathered only more luster-a glittering place seemingly immune to the rottenness of Western civilization. Or, as he told Conan Doyle, something of "The Lost World" really did exist. By all accounts, Fawcett thought about Z when he was firing howitzers, when he was being shot at in the trenches, when he was burying the dead.
…by 1924 Fawcett had filled his papers with reams of delirious writings about the end of the world and about a mystical Atlantean kingdom, which resembled the Garden of Eden. Z was transformed into "the cradle of all civilizations" and the center of one of Blavatsky's "'White Lodges,” where a group of higher spiritual beings helped to direct the fate of the universe.
Fawcett hoped to discover a white Lodge that had been there since "the time of Atlantis," and to attain transcendence. Brian wrote in his diary, "Was Daddy's whole conception of 'Z,' a spiritual objective, and the manner of reaching it a religious allegory?"
Was it possible that three lives had been lost for "an objective that had never existed"? Fawcett himself had scribbled in a letter to a friend, "Those whom the Gods intend to destroy they first make mad!"