Alkyone

An “Atlantis,” a daughter of Atlas and the sea-goddess Pleione; leader of her
divine sisters, the Pleiades. Alkyone may be a mythic rendering of Kleito, the woman
in Plato’s account of Atlantis, who likewise bore culture-bearers to the sea-god
Poseidon. Her title was “The Queen who wards off Storms.” To the Druids at
Boscawen-Uen, Mea-Penzance, Scotland’s Callanish, and other megalithic sites
throughout Britain, the Pleiades represented fearful powers of destruction through
the agency of water.
The same dreadful association was made by the Egyptians. The so-called
“Scored Lines” of the Great Pyramid at Giza were in alignment with the star
Alkyone of the Pleiades, in the constellation of Taurus the Bull, at noon of the
spring equinox (March 21) in 2141 B.C. Suggestion that the Alkyone alignment
was deliberately intended by the pyramid’s designer is supported by the fact that
the feature corresponding to the Scored Lines in the so-called “Trial Passages” is
a flat surface that could have been used as a pelorus for stargazing (Lemesurier, 193).
In view of the Great Pyramid’s function, at least partially, as a monument to
Atlantis, the third-millennium B.C. date may commemorate some related anniversary,
either of the Atlantis catastrophe itself or an Atlantean arrival in the Nile
Valley. Lemesurier suggests as much: “The Pleiades were firmly linked in the
Egyptian tradition with the goddess Hathor, the ‘goddess of the Foundation’, and
instigator of the primeval ‘deluge’.” Hathor, or Aether, was, after all, the Egyptian
version of Alkyone, herself the personification of Atlantis (151).
“The Egyptians observed three solemn days that ended when these stars [the
Pleiades] culminated at midnight. These days were associated with a tradition of a
deluge or other race-destroying disaster. The rites began on the seventeenth day
of Aethyr, which agrees with the Mosaic deluge account, namely, the seventeenth
day of the second month of the Jewish year” (154). Both the Egyptian Aethyr
and the second month of the Jewish year correspond to our late October/early
November. With the year provided by a proper lunar calculation of the date given
by Plato in Kritias and Egyptian records of the XX Dynasty, we arrive at a date for
the final destruction of Atlantis: November 3, 1198 B.C.