Saint Brendan the Navigator

According to the logbook of his voyage of the early sixth century AD, after passing the great islands in the west Saint Brendan and a crew of Irish monks sailed through a door at the western end of the World and downward to the Hell where they witnessed the tortures of the damned on various levels before returning all the way back to the west coast of Ireland after an eight year voyage.

The 'Navagatio' of Saint Brendan. English translations from the original Latin do exist.
http://www.amazon.com/Brendan-Celtic-Saints-Ian-MacDonald/dp/0863151418

The Navagatio may exist on the web as well, but I have been unable to find it. The wikipedia article which contains a variety of interpretations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Brendan
I considre this one less confusing and more informative than the wikipedia article on Brendan:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02758c.htm

"St. Brendan, conducted by an angel, descended to the lower world, where he witnessed the torments of the Devil and of the damned, and subsequently he came to, the Fortunate Islands, and finally he visited Paradise. At the end of the nine years he returned to Ireland, and gave an account of his adventures."
This quote is from the following link 'The Discovery of America by the Irish':
http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/nda/nda29.htm

Ikon images of Saint Brendan the Navigator:
http://www.odox.net/Icons-Brendan.htm##1

Tim Severin sailed across the Atlantic in the 1970's in a boat constructed to match the most austere sailing craft of sixth century Ireland.
http://www.timseverin.net/brendan.htm

Thank you for allowing to respond to your post of 2007.
 
Who can I contact regarding potential historical finds of ancient Ireland, namely the geographic locations of St. Brendan's Island, and the "Islands of the Blessed", both now underwater?
 
I am an amateur historian and researcher, former computer geek, now a lowly cab driver by trade, and I believe I may have located both these location East of Newfoundland and Bermuda.
 
My latest research/hobby, in a purely amateur, non scientific way, is to use Google Earth satellite imagery, and other ocean floor computer-generated topographic maps, to plausibly decipher ancient mythological locations and navigational maps.
 
Historians have always wondered, if the Greeks and Irish and other cultures were maritime cultures, where are the maps?
 
I am now theorizing (and totally believing, I must warn you), that the ancient Greek maps and Irish maps and other mythologies may in fact have been the missing navigation maps everyone wonders about.  In addition, there are the ancient maps of Zeno and Piri Reis which I have analyzed for clues.
 
On the Irish side, there is a "Brendan map" which shows a preposterous monster fish which I say displays the Atlantic Ocean, and incredibly, the Atlantic Ocean FLOOR, in times of 10 to 15 thousand years ago when much of the Atlantic was dry.
 
But specifically, I believe one portion of this map labels three specific islands as "Insulae Fortunato", which I interpret to mean, Islands of the Fortunate, or Islands of the Blessed.
 
I plausibly matched up the images with a topographic map, generated by the US National Oceanographic, NOAA, and I place these islands explicitly West of Bermuda, and they seem to line up, "hand in glove".
 
LIkewise, frm a "Zeno map", I deciphered the St. Brendan location and shape.

I also talk about several other discoveries, on several other maps, in a few internet blogs, on Architecture Week's Fireside Forum.  The first article contains references to the St. Brendan map, and the correlation of "islands" with underwater locations found via satellite imagery...
 
1. Piri Reis Map: Decoding the Ancient Treasure Graphics
 http://fireside.designcommunity.com/topic-21353.html
 
2.Ancient Underwater City-scapes, Visible with Google Earth?
 http://fireside.designcommunity.com/topic-19642.html
 
3.False Coloring in Photoshop shows subsurface Details
 http://fireside.designcommunity.com/topic-22762.html
 
Who can I send this information to, for their competent review?
 
Ed Ziomek

This is Dionysios.  My 'Dionysios' and 'Areopagite' user accounts were banned long ago.

As to the Ottoman Admiral Piri Reis, you might be interested  in a couple of sources which contain more hard facts and less speculation than the 1960's book by Charles Hapgood.  The Turkish Historical Society publishes:

The Book of Navigation
By Piri Reis
http://e-magaza.ttk.org.tr/switch.php?file=ProductInfo&cat_id=79&product_id=1993
(They may have this in English as well, but I did not yet search for it.  The first half of the book contains navigation principles, and the second half is all of Piri Reis's sea charts.  The famous chart depicting the americas with accurate dimensions across the Atlantic is contained in this book.)

The Life and Works of Piri Reis
By Afet Inan
http://e-magaza.ttk.org.tr/switch.php?file=ProductInfo&cat_id=79&product_id=1993
(This informative biography is sold in english.)

Afet Inan's book contains a key to the symbols on Piri Reis's famous Atlantic Ocean map which is reproduced by the Sacred Texts:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/piri/pirikey.htm

The wikipedia article for Piri Reis has many of the charts from the Book of Navigation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piri_Reis

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As reguards Saint Brendan, his book indicates that he visited several islands.  The small volume translated by Ian MacDonald does not contain the account of Brendan's sailing west into Hades.  I am not an authority on the manuscript tradition of the 'Navigatio,' but other less abbreviated accounts do exist.  There is an early nineteenth century (circa 1840) english translation of the voyage of Saint Brendan, and a couple of other notable translations such as the chapter on Brendan in 'The Age of Bede' published by Penguin.

  As to the Isle of the Blessed, which was the principle island which Brendan sought (the major quest of his life), I must say that after reading Ian MacDonald's translation I myself have no doubt whatsoever that this refers to Paradise (the Garden of Eden) which is located in the far East.  Brendan did meet an elder there who showed him a river which divided the island in two.  He said that it was forbidden to Brendan to cross to the other side of the river for now, but an ancient Irish prophecy states that seven years before the return of Jesus Christ, Saint Brendan will sail again to the isle of the blessed and bring with him all the saints of Ireland, and Ireland itself will sink into the sea.

  As to the other islands which Saint Brendan visited, Tim Severin seemed to have concentrated his research near Virginia.

  A mysterious ancient earth covered stone cave exists in Groton, Connecticut built with an eastern window positioned to let sunlight shine directly inside exclusively on the equinoxes each year.  A number of people believe that this stone cave has the same style of construction as the beehive huts used by the ancient monks of western Ireland.  Finally, an XR symbol inscribed into stone (the widespread early Christian symbol composed of the first two greek letters in the word "Christ") has been found in the near vicinity (within a 150 yards).  Many years ago, Dave Barron founded the Gungywamp Society which held the view that the cave was constructed by Irish monks in the sixth century AD.  After he died about the year 2000, the society was taken over by persons holding very much the opposite belief.  At any rate, their website has back issues of their informative newsletters (albeit with a very strong degree of bias as the views of Dave Barron are now actually excluded.)

http://www.gungywamp.com/newsletters.html

This is a familiar sequence of events.  The same unfortunate thing occurs in archaeology in Palestine and the Arab world.  There exist certain archaeologists with a heavily prejudiced interpretation deliberately designed to exclude some of the most important and intriguing significances of the archaeological finds such as the digs at Ebla in Syria in which a veteran and honest archaeologist was ostracized for pointing out certain biblical connections.

The Gungywamp Society in the days of Dave Barron may have been interested in your research or at least surely known people who were.  I will let you know if I come across anyone.

Excellent read and references, 17Nov.

Let me offer some amateur guesswork on the name "Garden of Eden".  I say it may be related to "Aten" of the Egyptian sun disk fame; and even "Hades" of Classical Greek times; Teoti-huacan, aka Tehoti, aka Thoth, aka Djeheuty of pre-Aztecan culture, and Egyptian culture.

Even earlier renditions of the "Eden" I believe were connected to "Ahhh-teee" of Osirian era, which as the symbolic letters A and T are the beginning and ends of about 7 known alphabets, which I believe also mean "beginning and end", possibly "male and female", and reflect the perfect sun disk Aten circle, no beginning, and no end, (life death rebirth cirlce of life.)

As the rising waters destroyed the habitats in and around the center of the Atlantic, this was the land of Osiris, Ahhh-tee-land, and his empire of  theology was ridiculed... everywhere he touched was lost in cataclysms.

And for this reason, I believe the Olympians replaced the Titans in mythology stories, the Te-ahh-tans, the Totonakas, the Teutonics, because who can believe in a God if mother nature destroys you over and over and over.

Net, net, Garden of Eden I believe was "Garden of Aten"

one thing I like about Ireland is that no political group or faction tries to lay claim to Irish identity to the exclusion of any other. Even the murder-gang at Sinn Fein don't try and pretend that Fine Fail/Gael supportes are somehow 'un-Irish'.

Speaking of Ireland, I don't know what part of Munster that Wilmore is from, but he is in any case not far from the Dingle peninsula in Kerry County from where Saint Brendon in the sixth century sailed first westwards all the way to the border of hell before sailing eastwards all the way to the border of the Garden of Eden.

"The Border of Hell"

"For seven days now they were going on through that clear water, and there came a south wind that drove them on and they did not know where were they going. And at the end of eight days they saw far away in the north a dark country full of stench and of smoke; and as the ship drew near it they heard great blowing and blasting of bellows, and a noise of blows and a noise like thunder, the way they were all afeared and blessed themselves. And soon after there came one starting out all burning, and he turned away again and gave out a cry that could be heard a long way off. And with that there came demons thick about them on every side, with tongs and with fiery hammers, and followed after them till it seemed all the sea to be one fire; but by the will of God they had no power to hurt them. And then the demons began to roar and cry, and threw their tongs at them and their hammers, and then they turned from the ship with a sorrowful cry and went back to the place they came from. "What are you thinking?" said Brendan "was this a merry happening? And we will come here no more" he said "for that was a border of hell, and the devil had great hopes of us but he was hindered by Jesus Christ." Then the south wind drove them farther again into the north, and they saw a hill all on fire and like as ii walled in with fire, and clouds upon it, and if there was much smoke in that other place, there was more again in this. Then one of the brothers began to cry and to moan and to say his time was come and that he could stay in the ship no longer, and with that he made a leap out of the ship into the sea and he cried and moaned so dolefully that it was a pity to hear him. "My grief" he said "my wretched life; for now I see my end and I have been with you in happiness and I may go with you no more forever!"

http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/saw/saw06.htm

http://www.earlychristianireland.org/kerry/kerry_brandoncreek.shtml

Hello,
I know this topic is so outdated, but I wanted to share some nice source about St Brendan!
He made such an epic Voyage, and some consider he could be the first european in the new world.
Saint Brendan the Navigator