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The View over Atlantis – John Michell

…… it was with drums, songs and the clash of cymbals that magical flight was achieved according to legend. Stone levitated by sound could become a flying chariot, moving along the line of a certain magnetic intensity, whose course was marked out on the ground by alignments of stones and earthworks, linked by raised causeways and rides through the forest. With the earth's magnetic field regulated and the streams that run through it diverted to conform to straight lines, the stone craft and its navigator could float from centre to centre, picking their way through a canal network of alternating currents and choosing the level of intensity to which their vibrations were attuned.

There was one danger to which the aviator on magnetic currents would always be susceptible: that of a sudden and unexpected drop in the level of magnetic activity.

Sunset or the moon sinking below the horizon would produce such an effect, but these events can easily be foreseen. Much more dangerous would be an eclipse. This is why people of the ancient world had such fear of eclipses and attached such importance to their prediction.

With the loss of the old power this importance waned together with the whole art of astronomy. The accuracy of the Chaldean astronomers' eclipse predictions was never regained until modern times, and in England even the memory of the former astronomical achievements became lost.

The learned Chinese at the beginning of the Christian era acknowledged that the science of calculating eclipses had degenerated since the time five hundred years earlier when it had been exact. An unpredicted eclipse has been the event most dreaded by the Chinese throughout history and when it took place they shouted, beat gongs and let off fireworks to maintain the power of the dragon current.