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Paria
Braghine, Col. Alexander Pavlovitch *
Col. Alexander Pavlovitch Braghine (1878-1942) is well known for his book[156]+ on Atlantis, which he considers to have been the original homeland of many of the tribes of South America. He attributes the destruction of Atlantis to the consequences of at least one close encounter between Earth and Halley’s Comet, during the Holocene period, on 7th June 4015 BC. He maintains that this intrusion upset the orbits of Earth and Venus causing worldwide destruction. Many of Braghine’s catastrophist ideas are to be found in Immanuel Velikovsky’s later books without any reference to him. Braghine on the other hand was quite willing to acknowledge any use by him of other writers’ work. Some have explained Velikovsky’s omission as being the result of perceived racism on the part of Braghine.
Braghine in his The Shadow of Atlantis mentions a tribe of white-skinned ‘Indians’ called Paria in a region of Venezuela called Atlan. He claims that their legends refer to them having an original homeland beyond the ocean that had been destroyed in a terrible cataclysm. However, I have been unable to find any other reference to this tribe apart from that of Frank Joseph[104] who locates it in the Apure region between the Orinoco River and its tributary, the Apure. Braghine’s work was also published in French[157]. A few years earlier Richard O. Marsh published White Indians of Darien [1551]+ in which he recounted his meeting with ‘white Indians’ in the remote jungles of Panama. However, claims of encounters with white Indians in Amazonia go back as far as the 16th century(a). When I saw some old photos(b) of these ‘white’ children, I was immediately struck by the fact that many were squinting and appeared to be suffering from albinism, although this has been denied(c).
Sprague de Camp lists[194] a series of errors in Braghine’s book, finishing with the ominous remark that ‘you believe Colonel Braghine at your peril.’
However, David Hatcher Childress does not shrink from correcting[620.270] the mistakes made by deCamp in his critical attack.
Your compiler found Braghine’s book interesting and informative, although rather dated as it is now (2022) over eighty years old. I could find no justification for deCamp’s condemnation of Braghine’s work.
[156]+ https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015002694399;view=1up;seq=12
[1551]+ https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015010699448&view=1up&seq=7&skin=2021
(a) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Amazonian_Indians
(c) https://fdocuments.net/document/white-indians-of-darien.html?page=2 (link broken) *