(inhabited world), an ancient map based on
Herodotus' description of the world, circa 450 BC
Ancient Some ancient writers viewed Atlantis as fictional or metaphorical myth; others believed it to be real.
Aristotle believed that Plato, his teacher, had invented the island to teach philosophy. The philosopher
Crantor, a student of Plato's student
Xenocrates, is cited often as an example of a writer who thought the story to be historical fact. His work, a commentary on
Timaeus, is lost, but
Proclus, a
Neoplatonist of the fifth century AD, reports on it. The passage in question has been represented in the modern literature either as claiming that Crantor visited Egypt, had conversations with priests, and saw hieroglyphs confirming the story, or, as claiming that he learned about them from other visitors to Egypt. Proclus wrote: The next sentence is often translated "Crantor adds, that this is testified by the prophets of the Egyptians, who assert that these particulars [which are narrated by Plato] are written on pillars which are still preserved." But in the original, the sentence starts not with the name Crantor but with the ambiguous
He; whether this referred to Crantor or to Plato is the subject of considerable debate. Proponents of both Atlantis as a metaphorical myth and Atlantis as history have argued that the pronoun refers to Crantor. Alan Cameron argues that the pronoun should be interpreted as referring to Plato, and that, when Proclus writes that "we must bear in mind concerning this whole feat of the Athenians, that it is neither a mere myth nor unadorned history, although some take it as history and others as myth", he is treating "Crantor's view as mere personal opinion, nothing more; in fact he first quotes and then dismisses it as representing one of the two unacceptable extremes". Cameron also points out that whether
he refers to Plato or to Crantor, the statement does not support conclusions such as Otto Muck's "Crantor came to Sais and saw there in the temple of
Neith the column, completely covered with hieroglyphs, on which the history of Atlantis was recorded. Scholars translated it for him, and he testified that their account fully agreed with Plato's account of Atlantis" or J. V. Luce's suggestion that Crantor sent "a special enquiry to Egypt" and that he may simply be referring to Plato's own claims. Some have theorized that, before the sixth century BC, the "Pillars of Hercules" may have applied to mountains on either side of the
Gulf of Laconia, and also may have been part of the pillar cult of the Aegean. The mountains stood at either side of the southernmost gulf in Greece, the largest in the Peloponnese, and it opens onto the Mediterranean Sea. This would have placed Atlantis in the Mediterranean, lending credence to many details in Plato's discussion. The fourth-century historian
Ammianus Marcellinus, relying on a lost work by
Timagenes, a historian writing in the first century BC, writes that the
Druids of
Gaul said that part of the inhabitants of Gaul had migrated there from distant islands. Some have understood Ammianus's testimony as a claim that at the time of Atlantis's sinking into the sea, its inhabitants fled to western Europe; but Ammianus, in fact, says that "the Drasidae (Druids) recall that a part of the population is indigenous but others also migrated in from islands and lands beyond the
Rhine" (
Res Gestae 15.9), an indication that the immigrants came to Gaul from the north (Britain, the Netherlands, or Germany), not from a theorized location in the Atlantic Ocean to the south-west. Instead, the Celts who dwelled along the ocean were reported to venerate twin gods, (
Dioscori), who appeared to them coming from that ocean.
Jewish and Christian During the early first century, the
Hellenistic Jewish philosopher
Philo wrote about the destruction of Atlantis in his
On the Eternity of the World, xxvi. 141, in a longer passage allegedly citing Aristotle's successor
Theophrastus: The theologian
Joseph Barber Lightfoot (
Apostolic Fathers, 1885, II, p. 84) noted on this passage: "Clement may possibly be referring to some known, but hardly accessible land, lying without the pillars of Hercules. But more probably he contemplated some unknown land in the far west beyond the ocean, like the fabled Atlantis of Plato ..." Other early Christian writers wrote about Atlantis, although they had mixed views on whether it once existed or was an untrustworthy myth of pagan origin.
Tertullian believed Atlantis was once real and wrote that in the Atlantic Ocean once existed "[the isle] that was equal in size to Libya or Asia" referring to Plato's geographical description of Atlantis. The early Christian apologist writer
Arnobius also believed Atlantis once existed, but blamed its destruction on pagans.
Cosmas Indicopleustes in the sixth century wrote of Atlantis in his
Christian Topography in an attempt to prove his theory that the world was flat and surrounded by water: 's
Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, 1882
Modern Aside from Plato's original account, modern interpretations regarding Atlantis are an amalgamation of diverse, speculative movements that began in the sixteenth century, when scholars began to identify Atlantis with the
New World.
Francisco Lopez de Gomara was the first to state that Plato was referring to America, as did
Francis Bacon and
Alexander von Humboldt; Janus Joannes Bircherod said in 1663
orbe novo non-novo ("the New World is not new").
Athanasius Kircher accepted Plato's account as literally true, describing Atlantis as a small continent in the Atlantic Ocean. Contemporary perceptions of Atlantis share roots with
Mayanism, which can be traced to the beginning of the
Modern Age, when European imaginations were fueled by their initial encounters with the indigenous peoples of the Americas. From this era sprang
apocalyptic and
utopian visions that would inspire many subsequent generations of theorists.
Early influential literature The term "
utopia" (from "no place") was coined by
Sir Thomas More in his sixteenth-century work of
fiction Utopia. Inspired by
Plato's Atlantis and travelers' accounts of the
Americas, More described an imaginary land set in the
New World. His idealistic vision established a connection between the Americas and utopian societies, a theme that Bacon discussed in
The New Atlantis (). His work combined with the skillful, romantic illustrations of
Jean Frederic Waldeck, which visually alluded to
Egypt and other aspects of the
Old World, created an authoritative
fantasy that excited much interest in the connections between worlds. Inspired by Brasseur de Bourbourg's diffusion theories, the pseudoarchaeologist Augustus Le Plongeon traveled to Mesoamerica and performed some of the first
excavations of many famous Mayan ruins. Le Plongeon invented narratives, such as the kingdom of
Mu saga, which romantically drew connections to him, his wife Alice, and
Egyptian deities
Osiris and
Isis, as well as to
Heinrich Schliemann, who had just discovered the ancient city of
Troy from
Homer's
epic poetry (that had been described as merely mythical). He also believed that he had found connections between the
Greek and
Mayan languages, which produced a
narrative of the destruction of Atlantis.
Ignatius Donnelly The 1882 publication of
Atlantis: the Antediluvian World by
Ignatius L. Donnelly stimulated much popular interest in Atlantis. He was greatly inspired by early works in
Mayanism, and like them, attempted to establish that all known
ancient civilizations were descended from Atlantis, which he saw as a technologically sophisticated, more advanced
culture. Donnelly drew parallels between creation stories in the Old and New Worlds, attributing the connections to Atlantis, where he believed the Biblical
Garden of Eden existed. As implied by the title of his book, he also believed that Atlantis was destroyed by the
Great Flood mentioned in the Bible. Donnelly is credited as the "father of the nineteenth century Atlantis revival" and is the reason the
myth endures today. He unintentionally promoted an alternative method of inquiry to history and science, and the idea that myths contain hidden information that opens them to "ingenious" interpretation by people who believe they have new or special insight.
Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophists Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the founder of the
Theosophists, took up
Donnelly's interpretations when she wrote
The Secret Doctrine (1888), which she claimed was originally dictated in Atlantis. She maintained that the Atlanteans were cultural heroes (contrary to
Plato, who describes them mainly as a military threat). She believed in a form of racial
evolution (as opposed to primate evolution). In her process of evolution the Atlanteans were the fourth "
root race", which were succeeded by the fifth, the "
Aryan race", which she identified with the modern human race. Drawing on the ideas of Rudolf Steiner and
Hanns Hörbiger,
Egon Friedell started his book '''', and thus his historical analysis of antiquity, with the ancient culture of Atlantis. The book was published in 1940.
Nazism and occultism Blavatsky was also inspired by the work of the 18th-century
astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly, who had "Orientalized" the Atlantis
myth in his mythical continent of
Hyperborea, a reference to
Greek myths featuring a Northern European region of the same name, home to a giant, godlike race. Dan Edelstein claims that her reshaping of this theory in
The Secret Doctrine provided the
Nazis with a mythological precedent and a pretext for their ideological platform and
their subsequent genocide. The idea that the Atlanteans were
Hyperborean,
Nordic supermen who originated in the Northern Atlantic or even in the far North, was popular in the German
ariosophic movement around 1900, propagated by
Guido von List and others. It gave its name to the
Thule Gesellschaft, an antisemite Münich lodge, which preceded the German
Nazi Party (see
Thule). The scholars (1920) and
Herman Wirth (1928) were the first to speak of a "Nordic-Atlantean" or "Aryan-Nordic" master race that spread from Atlantis over the Northern Hemisphere and beyond. The Hyperboreans were contrasted with the Jewish people. Party ideologist
Alfred Rosenberg (in
The Myth of the Twentieth Century, 1930) and SS-leader
Heinrich Himmler made it part of the official doctrine. The idea was followed up by the adherents of
Esoteric Nazism such as
Julius Evola (1934) and, more recently,
Miguel Serrano (1978). The idea of Atlantis as the homeland of the Caucasian race would contradict the beliefs of older Esoteric and Theosophic groups, which taught that the Atlanteans were non-Caucasian brown-skinned peoples. Modern Esoteric groups, including the Theosophic Society, do not consider Atlantean society to have been superior or Utopian—they rather consider it a lower stage of evolution.
Edgar Cayce The clairvoyant
Edgar Cayce spoke frequently of Atlantis. During his "life readings", he claimed that many of his subjects were
reincarnations of people who had lived there. By tapping into their
collective consciousness, the "
Akashic Records" (a term borrowed from
Theosophy), Cayce declared that he was able to give detailed descriptions of the lost continent. He also asserted that Atlantis would "rise" again in the 1960s (sparking much popularity of the myth in that decade) and that there is a "
Hall of Records" beneath the
Egyptian Sphinx which holds the historical texts of Atlantis.
Recent times As
continental drift became widely accepted during the 1960s, and the increased understanding of
plate tectonics demonstrated the impossibility of a lost continent in the geologically recent past, most "Lost Continent" theories of Atlantis began to wane in popularity. Plato scholar
Julia Annas,
Regents Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Arizona, had this to say on the matter: One of the proposed explanations for the historical context of the Atlantis story is that it serves as Plato's warning to his fellow citizens against their striving for naval power. ==Location hypotheses==