INTRODUCTION: A LOST CIVILIZATION

The Atlantis is a result of more than two decades of continuous study and international travel. It began in 1980, when I started picking up clues to the lost civilization in locations from the ruins of Troy and Egypt’s desert pyramids, to Morocco’s underground shrine and Britain’s Stonehenge, beyond to the mountaintop city of Peru and a ceremonial center in the jungles of Guatemala. My quest took me to Polynesia’s cannibal temple, the seldom seen solar monuments of Japan’s remote forests, and the golden pillar of Thailand. I sought out credible proof in my own country, traveling from coast to coast, finding telltale evidence—among the world’s most northerly pyramids, in Wisconsin; at Ohio’s Great Serpent Mound; and in the ruins of North America’s oldest city, in Louisiana. I participated in diving expeditions to the Bahamas, Yucatan, the Canary Islands, the Aegean Sea, and the Pacific Ocean. Decades of these on-site explorations was combined with research in the libraries of the world and the shared wisdom of devoted colleagues to produce this unique volume.
Of the estimated 2,500 topics and magazine articles published about the lost civilization, The Atlantis is the only one of its kind. It is an attempt to bring together all the known details of this immense, continually fascinating subject, as well as to provide succinct definitions and clear explanations. It is a handbook of Atlantean information for general readers and specialists alike. Everything one wants to know about Atlantis is here in short form. It is a source for students of archaeology, myth, and prehistory.
Unlike most other topics on the subject, The Atlantis offers fewer theories and more facts. Areas of interest include geology, astronomy, and oceanography, but with strong emphasis on the folk traditions of numerous peoples around the world who preserved memories of a great flood that destroyed an ancestral island of memorial splendor. These elements have never been presented together before in a single volume. In so doing, the common threads that weave European and Near Eastern versions to North American accounts, beyond to Polynesian and Asian renditions, accumulatively build a picture in the reader’s mind of a real event encapsulated for thousands of years in the long-surviving myths and legends of mankind.
We learn that the Egyptians told of “the Isle of Flame” in the Far Western Ocean from which their forefathers arrived after a terrible natural disaster. Meanwhile, in North America, the Apache Indians still preserve memories of their ancestral origins from the sunken “Isle of Flames” in the distant seas of the East. There is the Norse Lifthraser and Lif, husband and wife refugees of the Great Flood, just as the ancient Mexicans remembered Nata and Nena, the pair who escaped a world deluge. Balor leads his people to safety in pre-Celtic Ireland, while Manibozho survives to become the founder of all North American Indian tribes. Underpinning them all is the story of Atlantis, as given to the world 24 centuries ago by the greatest thinker of classical Greece. Plato’s Atlantis still lives in the folkish memories of virtually every people on Earth. Although fundamentally similar to all the rest, each version presents its own details, contributing to an overall panorama of the Atlantean experience, as dramatic as it is persuasive.
The Atlantis offers equally exhaustive information about a Pacific counterpart—the lost kingdom of Mu, also known as Lemuria. Although at opposite cultural and geographical poles, the two civilizations were at least partially contemporaneous and in contact with each other, produced transoceanic seafarers who founded new societies around the globe, and succumbed in the end to natural catastrophes that may have been related. Persuasive physical evidence for the sunken realm came to light in 1985 off the coast of Yonaguni, a remote Japanese island, when divers found the ruins of a large ceremonial building that sank beneath the sea perhaps as long ago as 12,000 years. Long before that dramatic discovery, accounts of Mu or Lemuria were preserved in the oral folk traditions of numerous peoples around the Pacific Basin, from America’s western coastal regions, across Polynesia and Micronesia, to Australia, and throughout Asia. As such, the story of Atlantis is incomplete without some appreciation of the complimentary role played by its Lemurian predecessor and coruler of the world.
And no comprehensive investigation of this kind can ignore the “life-readings” of Edgar Cayce, America’s “Sleeping Prophet,” during the first half of the 20th century. His vision of Atlantis, still controversial, is nonetheless compelling and, if true, insightful and revealing. Cayce’s testimony is unique, because he spoke less of theories and history, than of individual human beings, and the high drama they lived as players on the stage of the Atlantean world.
Although it does not set out to prove the sunken capital actually existed, The Atlantis musters so much evidence on its behalf, even skeptics may conclude that there must be at least something factual behind such an enduring, indeed global legend. For true believers, this topic is a gold mine of information to help them better understand the lost civilization. Atlantologists (serious investigators of the subject) may use it as a unique and valuable reference to spring-board their own research. Students of comparative myth have here a ready source of often rarely presented themes connecting the Bronze Age to Classical World images. For most readers, however, The Atlantis offers an easily accessible introduction to this eternally enthralling enigma.