Phaethon
In Greek myth, the Deluge survived by Deucalion and Pyrrha was supposedly triggered by Phaethon, mentioned in Plato’s account of Atlantis. Phaethon was the illegitimate son of Helios, the god who drove the chariot of the sun across the heavens each day. Phaethon forced his reluctant father to hand over the reigns of this solar vehicle. Before long, however, he lost control of the powerful team of fiery horses, and they set much of the world ablaze. Hearing the commotion, Zeus hurled a thunderbolt, and Phaethon fell to Earth, his long hair in flames. The chariot crashed into the sea, causing a terrific flood that extinguished the conflagration.
As early as 1821, the German genius Wolfgang von Goethe expressed his opinion that Phaethon symbolized a natural catastrophe. Long before and since, many scholars have concluded that the myth describes a cometary collision with the Earth. In Timaeus, Plato quotes the Egyptian high priest, who explains that the myth was actually a metaphor for a real, natural event:
There have been and will be many different calamities to destroy mankind, the greatest of them by fire and water, lesser ones by countless other means. There is a story which even you have preserved, that once upon a time, Phaethon, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds of his father’s chariot, burnt up all that was upon the Earth, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. Now, this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a deviation in their courses of the bodies moving around the Earth and the heavens, and a great conflagration recurring at long intervals of time. This inclusion of the Phaethon story early in the narrative can only mean Plato intended to posit a celestial cause in his unfinished description of the Atlantis catastrophe. That Phaethon was in fact a mythic representation of an actual cosmic event appears certain. In numerous ancient accounts, comets are almost invariably referred to as “hairy,” or “long-haired,” recalling the tragic hero’s flaming tresses, as he fell to Earth. Phaethon means “Shining One,” or “Blazing Star,” no less descriptive of an extraordinary comet. It has a similar meaning in Egyptian: Pha-aton, or “House of (or inheritable property belonging to) Aton,” the sun-disk. This shared significance implies that both the Greeks and Egyptians, whose languages were otherwise unrelated to each other, received the name independently from an outside source—namely, Atlantean survivors who sought refuge in both lands.
Kritias ends with Zeus, master of all celestial fires, contemplating the destruction of Atlantis.
Philo Judaeus
Important first-century Alexandrine theologian, who taught that Plato based his allegorical story of Atlantis on historical reality.
Phorcys
“He Who Was Borne Away” by the Great Flood in Greek myth, son of Inachus (“Rapid Current”) and Melia (“Ash”), from which was made Phorcys’ ark. After the Deluge, it settled on a mountain top, and its crew, the Pelasgian “Sea People,” disembarked to repopulate the world. Phorcys himself became the first king of Argos.
In his myth are the leading themes of Atlantis, including its destruction by a flood and the culture-founding destinies of its survivors.
Phoroneus
Plato mentions him at the beginning of the Atlantis account. Phoroneus was the great-grandson of Atlas by Niobe, also included in Timaeus. In Greek myth, she perished following the Great Flood, having been turned to stone and perpetually covered by water. Phoroneus survived the catastrophe, and fathered Pelasgus, leader of the Pelasgians, the first civilizers of Greece. His other son, Car, became the eponymous founder of another “sea people,” the Carians. Their name is intimately connected with Atlantis: Caryatid, the architectural feature of a human figure supporting a lintel usually representing the sky, derives from “Caria,” just as Atlas was conceived of as a man upholding the heavens. After the Great Flood, Car sailed with his followers to the shores of Asia Minor, where they established the kingdom of Caria.
Phoroneus and his sons represented a large-scale migration of Atlanteans into the eastern Mediterranean during the late third millennium b.c. geologic violence that beset the Atlantic island.
Pillars of Heracles
In Plato’s Dialogues, we learn that Atlantis was located “beyond the Pillars of Heracles,” known today as the Strait of Gibraltar. The “pillars” were twin columns of enormous dimensions flanking a massive cauldron of perpetual flame that not only burned in homage to the demigod Heracles, but marked the western limits of the Classical World. This monumental sacred site stood on a high cliff and could be seen for many miles out at sea by sailors aboard approaching ships, and therefore served as a kind of lighthouse beacon. Its exact location is unknown, but it must have been built in either coastal Spain, near Tarifa; or in Morocco, around Cetua or perhaps even Tangier.
Heracles’ far western shrine may have survived until the collapse of the Classical World, when it was finally destroyed by either earthquakes or invading Visigothic barbarians in the fifth century a.d. Who constructed it has never been clear. Because the Strait of Gibraltar was known to Phoenician sailors as the “Pillars of Melkharth,” their version of the Roman Hercules, some writers believe it was set up by the Carthaginians, who were known to have venerated a pillar cult. But so did their predecessors, the Atlanteans, according to Plato. The structure may have originally been built by them, but was subsequently renamed by the Greeks and Romans after the defeat of Carthage, in 146 b.c.
Pimugnans
Original name of the southern California coast Gabrielino Indians, mixed descendants from the lost civilization of Mu.
Pipestone
A national monument located in the south west corner of Minnesota memorializing the Great Flood from which the ancestors of all Native American tribes descended. The area was carefully chosen, not only for its abundance of pipestone, but for waterfalls symbolizing the deluge and unusual rock formations resembling human heads and profiles suggesting the flood survivors.
Petroglyphs here and at nearby Jeffers confirm the version told to George Catlin, the early American artist and first white man to visit the site. It received its name after an easily quarried and malleable stone fashioned by Indian carvers into calumets, or “peace pipes,” and known as catlinite, after Catlin. Shamans, tribal spiritual leaders, told him that very long ago the ancestors of humanity lived in harmony with themselves and the immortals in “a great lodge” at the center of an island far over the Sunrise Sea to the east. For many generations, human beings were virtuous. But in time, they grew corrupt, contentious, and arrogant. To punish them, the gods threw a terrible flame from heaven onto the island of offensive men and women.
Their “great lodge” was utterly consumed, but the fire spread to other parts of the world, threatening to destroy the innocent animals, as well. They prayed for salvation; the gods heard them and extinguished the conflagration by sinking the whole island beneath the sea. Only a relatively few honest persons survived. As they floated in the ocean amidst the wreckage of the “great lodge,” they prayed for rescue. In answer, the gods commanded a horned giant to rise from the bottom of he sea. He scooped up as many people as he could, but there were more than anyone expected, and he could not carry them all.
The gods ordered a colossal turtle to assist him. It swam over to the giant, and the remaining survivors climbed upon its shell. The turtle swam to the west, the giant wading after. Eventually, they arrived on the shores of a new land, where the people found refuge. Ever since, in memory of their salvation, Native Americans continue to refer to North America as “Turtle Island.” For the next several generations, they wandered across the unfamiliar territories, until they came to what is now the south western corner of Minnesota. They were halted by the Great Spirit, who told them that they had arrived in the most sacred place in Turtle Island. Here he had transformed the flesh of their relatives, drowned during the Great Flood, into red stone.
The survivors were to fashion it into objects commemorating that calamity. Most important of these items would be a pipe. Its bowl would represent the female principle; its stem, the male; and tobacco burned in it, the passion of creation. “Whenever you smoke the pipe,” said the Great Spirit, “remember the peace that has been made between mankind and me after the Deluge. Humans once disobeyed my sacred laws, so I punished them with water. So long as you abide by my words, peace will prevail over the land. Another big trouble will come if you stray from the law. On this understanding, smoke the pipe as a reminder to live well and make peace among yourselves.”
Besides peace pipes, the images most commonly rendered in catlinite are fish and turtles. The “great lodge” and its destruction by fire and flood after the degeneracy of its inhabitants closely parallel Plato’s Atlantis account.
Plato
Together with Socrates and Aristotle, he was the most important philosopher in the Western World. Alexander Whitehead, a prominent 20th-century metaphysician, declared, “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” It is impossible to imagine a more credible source for Atlantis-as-fact.
Born in Athens around 428 b.c., he inherited the story from Solon, the influential Greek legislator, who heard it narrated during a visit to the Nile Delta, early in the fifth century b.c. However, many historians believe Plato traveled to Sais himself, perhaps specifically to verify the Egyptian account. The existence of this temple record was documented by two other highly influential thinkers. The last major Greek philosopher, Proclus, wrote 800 years after Plato, but in his Platonis theologiam (Platonic Theology), he cited the veracity of Atlantis by pointing out that Egyptian columns inscribed with the story were visited and identically translated more than half a century after Plato’s death. They were examined by yet another influential thinker, Krantor of Soluntum, described by Proclus as amicus Plato, sed magis amicus Veritas: “Plato’s friend and a powerful friend of truth.” He went to Sais as part of his research for Plato’s first biography, near the end of the fourth century b.c., and reported that Krantor found the Atlantis story preserved exactly as described in the Dialogues.
There may be no other account supported by men of such stellar credentials. Yet, modern skeptics, particularly archaeologists, dismiss Atlantis as entirely legendary. They fail to consider that beyond his position as the seminal philosopher of Western Civilization, Plato based his whole body of thought on ruthless pursuit of the truth. Timaeus and Kritias cannot comprise a fictional allegory for his notion of the ideal state, as some critics insist, because the Atlantis he portrays is far from his utopian conception, as developed in The Republic. It seems likely, however, that Plato, had he completed the Dialogue, would have used the rise and fall of Atlantis as an historical example illustrating the fatal consequences of civil degeneracy. In the Kritias, he did not inexplicably change from philosopher to historian, and his intended use of the lost civilization to provide factual basis for his political ideas appears probable.
Some of Plato’s critics accuse him of inventing the Atlantis story out of whole cloth. Yet Greeks knew about the lost civilization before he described it. At the annual Panathenea Festival in Athens, women participants wore apeplum, a broad skirt embroidered with scenes depicting Athena’s victory over the forces of Atlantis—not a particularly remarkable fact in itself, except that the Panathenea was celebrated 125 years before Plato was born. He was about 2 years old when “a major earthquake caused widespread destruction and tsunami inundation around the Gulf of Evvia” (Childress, 19). A nearby island partially submerged and separated from the mainland by the same geologic upheavals was renamed Atalanti, together with its equally devastated gulf, after Atlantis, whose fate it suggested.
Plato appears to have been supported in his account of Atlantis by most scholars of the ancient world, if not all, including the noted histriographer, Theopompus, and the more famous naturalist, Pliny the Elder. His Atlantis Dialogues were seconded by the renowned Greek writers Diodorus Siculus, Plutarch, and Poseidonus of Rhodes, of whom the Roman historian, Strabo, wrote, “he did well in citing the opinion of Plato that the tradition concerning the island of Atlantis was something more than fiction.” Only Aristotle, Plato’s adversary, was more ambiguous: “He that created Atlantis also destroyed it.” Critics have interpreted this statement to mean that Plato invented the tale. But the ambiguous “he” mentioned by Aristotle might just as well have referred to Poseidon, the sea-god attributed in Timaeus and Kritias with the creation and destruction of Atlantis.
In 1956, Albert Rivand, Professor of Classical History at the Sorbonne, declared that both dialogues embodied ancient, historic traditions and contained results of the latest contemporary research carried out in Plato’s day. As Ivan Lissner wrote, “That a distinguished French scholar who had spent decades studying the Platonic texts should reach this conclusion is most significant, because it invests the geographical and ontological allusions in the two topics with greater weight.” R. Catesby Taliaferro writes in the foreword to the authoritative Thomas Taylor translation of Timaeus and Kritias:
It appears to me to be at least as well attested as any other narration in any ancient historian. Indeed, he (Plato) who proclaims that ‘truth is the source of every good both to gods and men’, and the whole of whose works consists in detecting error and exploring certainty, can never be supposed to have willfully deceived mankind by publishing an extravagant romance as matter of fact, with all the precision of historical narrative. (See Dionysus of Miletus, Kritias, Timaeus)
