Atlantis: the word conjures all sort of images – from a fabulous continent with advanced technology to a society and culture in which greed and power ruled with impunity until nature decided otherwise. A tsunami is believed to have sunk the continent.
Since Plato first wrote about Atlantis in the 4th century B.C., we’ve been fascinated with the lost continent. It’s an archetypal legend that encompasses mythic themes – catastrophic destruction of a highly advanced civilization of great wealth, staggering achievements in engineering, incredible architecture, and a moral fiber that eventually unraveled.
Even in Plato’s time, Atlantis wasn’t accepted as historical fact. He wrote that it was “an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Hercules.” The Straits of Gibraltar were one known by that name.
In Timaeus, Plato wrote that the continent disappeared “in a single day and night of misfortune.” In his incomplete Critias, Plato provided a detailed description of a thriving urban metropolis that was protected by Poseidon, the god of the sea. But apparently Zeus decided to punish Atlantis, Plato wrote, when its people began to “behave themselves unseemly…taking the infection of wicked coveting and pride of power.”
Aristotle, Plato’s student, later commented about the destruction of Atlantis: “He who created it also destroyed it.”
Its location has always been a matter of speculation. Charles Berlitz, who wrote a book about the lost continent, placed its location in the Bahamas, somewhere near Bimini, where architectural features had been discovered beneath the water. Modern scholars have placed its location in the Mediterranean. Some theorists speculate that the continent once connected Europe, South America and the part of the U.S. eastern seaboard. Over the centuries, as the legend grew and expanded, the location of Atlantis has been placed all over the globe.
Recently, a U.S research team believes it has found the location of Atlantis: just north of Cadiz, Spain. The team used satellite imagery, deep ground radar, digital mapping and underwater technology to survey the site in the Dona Ana Park in southern Spain. There, submerged in the mud flats, scientists studied what appeared to be the remains of a ringed city.
National Geographic filmed Finding Atlantis, which aired on March 13 and will probably be aired again.
One of my the most interesting books about Atlantis was written by novelist Taylor Caldwell (Captain and the Kings, 1972) when she was just twelve years old. The Romance of Atlantis was based on a series of dreams she had. Her grandfather, a book editor, considered publishing the novel, but couldn’t believe a t12-yer-old had written it. He decided she had plagiarized it and rejected the novel. For the next 60 years, it gathered dust in a drawer.
In the 1970s, author Jess Stearn was working on a biography about Caldwell and learned of the manuscript. He helped her edit it and get it published. It is supposedly her past-life memories of the final days of Atlantis. When I ran across this book in the early 1980s, I remember opening it, reading the first two pages, and goose bumps raced up my arms. She was there, I thought, and bought it.
Some years later, a psychic Rob and I met told us that he had lived on the peaceful and evolved continent of Lemuria and that I had lived on the less peaceful and less evolved (sigh) continent of Atlantis. Lemuria is supposedly older than Atlantis, but that’s a post for another day!
Re Mike Perry`s comment:-
I have recently read The other Atlantis by Robert Scrutton discussing the Oera Linda Book a 2000 yr old mss held in Nth Holland recording the history of the ancient Frisians who lived in Atland [old land] which was destroyed [presumably by an asteroid collision – the site of which is under the arctic ice!! That was approx 4000 yrs ago [said to be a time of mass migrations]
Check out the websites. Interesting prophecy from 3000 yrs ago ‘that in 2000 the enlightened ones still carrying the old valuse would rise up aginst the false priests and restore thos values around the world’ The values in essence are ‘personal freedom, egalitarian society. noone owns the world we share the fruits’ Needless to say the supporters of Capitalism etc call this a forgery. But no book has ever got me more excited and I feel impelled to draw attention to it.
Cheers
Dawntnk
Thanks for the info, Dawn. off to check our the sites.
One of my favorite subjects! Probably the best nonfiction book I’ve read about the subject is the comprehensive ‘Imagining Atlantis’ by Richard Ellis. My favorite fictional take on the legend is ‘World Without End’ by Molly Cochran and Warren Murphy, who run the gamut of Atlantean lore, neatly tying together ancient Greek mythology to the biblical story of Genesis; the catastrophic volcano at the heart of the ancient empire; pyramids; modern psychics carrying the bloodline of the Atlanteans; and the southern Florida / Bimini locale for the Lost City. The book would make an incredible film!
The National Geographic program was interesting, but at the end it was trying just a little *too* hard to be The DaVinci Code (the music was a particularly shameless rip-off as they clued in on the concentric spiral motif found on the rock). Basically the show consisted of a bunch of archaeologists dragging a radar sled across some deserted Spanish marshland, saying: “Atlantis COULD be here!” A lot of hype, punched-up with some nifty CGI destruction sequences. Notice how every cliché depiction of Atlantis inevitably has Greek architecture in deference to the source material? For once, I’d like to see a properly diverse Atlantis populated by colossal alabaster Egypto-Mayan pyramids, maybe a sphinx or two for good measure, and a Mesopotamian ziggurat-style Temple of Poseidon. After all, it WAS the fountainhead of world civilization, as many have speculated. Oh well, that’s what fiction is for!
Loved that world without end, Whip!
Yeah, I came across it while browsing the library for nonfiction Atlantis books back in 1998 (a big Atlantis study year for me). The title was intriguing, along with the double-pyramid illustration, but initially I had no interest in a fictional story about Atlantis until I read the first couple of pages, at which point I was hooked enough to take it home with me. Boy was I glad that I did! It was quite a page-turner, and I found that Enya’s ‘Caribbean Blue’ makes the perfect theme to read with, as its melody perfectly captures the ‘music of the sea’ that lures sam onward to his destiny. The song literally moved me to tears during the ‘Genesis’ chapter. Not trying to turn this into a book review thread, but I *highly* recommend the story to anyone who is fascinated by Atlantis.
I often go to a Selenite city in meditation. That is, when I am not in class with Trish in the wooden building. *wink*
The wooden building: hmmm.
Waving to other Lemurians! 😀
I like the Atlantis is Antarctica theory as postulated by Graham Hancock in his Fingerprints of the Gods book which opens with the Piri Reis map.
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piri_Reis_map ]
This theory also appeals to me because a polar shift or crust displacement could put it into a warmer zone and the ice melt away. Atlantis would still be beneath the sea but that would comply with the theory that Lemuria disappeared as the sea levels rose and all that’s left are the highest peaks, now known as the Hawaiian Islands.
This whole field of lost continents fascinates me. If things shift, well, hey, we may all be seeing lemuria or atlantis or both.
Vicki, I have also lived in just such an underground city, and it was deep, deep beneath the Pyramid at Giza. From what I have been able to determine, it still exists and has portals to other dimensions. I have a strange conviction that when I permanently transition from this body in this lifetime, I will be returning to that magnificent “city” beneath Giza. Crazy? Maybe. But it comforts me and totally prevenjts me from fearing death. Once in a great while I go there in my sleeping dreams, and don’t want to wake up.
Connie, I recall Ruth Montgomery saying the same, that many alive now lived in Atlantis at the time of the destruction and we are here again facing the same scenario…or preventing it. R
Such a timely and informative post, guys! At the risk of sounding even crazier than I always sound…..when I was a very little girl I had vivid dreams, and just as vivid memories, of living “somewhere” that was close to an ocean whose water was the most exquisite clear blue, so transparent that, like looking through the glass-bottomed boats at Silver Springs, one could see far into its depths. This “place” where I remembered living appeared to have structures made from crystal, some of which with “spires” reaching high into the sky. It wasn’t glass. It was crystal, and it reflected prisms of colors. In these vivid dreams and memories, (they began when I was only 4 years old so I had had no contact with anything to have precipitated them), I was a young woman who wore white robes, and sometimes bright colorful robes, as clothing, and I lived in a structure of crystal that looked like a temple. (I didn’t know what a temple was when I was little; the recognition of it being a temple came when I was about 12.) In the center of this strange city there was a massive “crystal”, shaped like a pyramid; my Mom said I told her the big crystal “throbbed and pulsed”, but those weren’t the words I used because I didn’t know those words as a little child, and that there there were “flying things” (I told my Mom) hovering in the air around this massive crystal. When I was older and she and I talked about it, I asked her how I described the “throbbing and pulsing”, and she said I would put my hand over my heart and tell her it “felt like this”, when describing the movement of the pyramid. Just for the record, when I was very young I did know what crystal was because my Mom collected genuine crystal and our home was always filled with crystal stemware, vases, candlelabra, etc., and Mom was forever finding me holding one of her precious crystal pieces and stroking it. (My mother recalled all these dreams and memories that began when I was just out of infancy and was old enough to tell her about them, and it wasn’t until I was much older that she told me about them, although I had continued to have them well into adulthood). There was a downside to the memories and dreams, and as a very young child I would awaken screaming and crying because the place where I lived was crumbling apart (later I realized it was earthquakes) and the ocean was swallowing everything. My son Kenny also has these very same dreams and memories, but I never told him about mine until he told me about his. Both Kenny and I are deathly afraid of bridges and always have been. Both of us recall trying to stumble across a bridge as the earth was shattering under us and we were tossed into the water and drowned. In my twenties I began to read about Atlantis, although then there wasn’t nearly as much available as there is now, and initially I couldn’t finish reading because I recognized the destruction of my former home and would break down and sob. I believe with all my heart that many Atlanteans are alive today; those souls who experienced its demise and probably contributed to it, and I hope we are here now to try to somehow prevent humanity from once again destroying itself through technology and greed. We must have HOPE.
When I was very young I used to visit a crystal city in my dreams.
I used to try to get back there but could not figure out how.
I loved being in that city where everything was made of crystals, I remember the prismatic effects on the stairs leading to a beautiful building.
My family just thought I had a great imagination although I knew it was not imaginary.
I’ve been to that crystal city in dreams, too.
I find all of these lost continents believable. Before Lemuria there was, seemingly, Mount Muro or the Land of the Gods – supposedly in the area we now call the North Pole. When we see what has happened in Japan it’s easier to understand how continents or land masses could have been submerged and others created. There might be more to Noah than an ark.
This is fascinating, I will have to find this book.
I have often felt ,and was told, that I was in Lemuria.
I know that I was also somewhere where there were lots of tunnels, and we lived in these tunnels and rooms. I thought I was kind of crazy when I saw this during a regression but recently I saw that they found a place in Turkey where the entire city was underground and the people lived in these beautiful underground rooms, churches, stables, streets etc. And as I watched it I was speechless!
My memories were like this place. We were happy and safe as long as we stayed mainly in this underground city only venturing out carefully and never alone. We wore beautiful white gowns of flowing materials. It wasn’t scary at all. The people were well educated.
Ooh, I just stepped back there for a moment.