Atlanteans

“ It is Atlantis, from which the Cro-Magnons fled in their ships, to land on the coasts of Spain and France, and become the ancestors of modern man.
"In old Atlantis, still not wholly submerged, I have made myself a god. I have mastered the savage Drilgoes whom the Atlanteans oppressed. All the spoils of their ruined cities are at my disposal. And I came back to get Lucille, whom I had never ceased to love. Together Lucille and I will rule like god and goddess.
"Join me, Dent. I'm a god in Atlantis—a god, I tell you. The lesser races fear me as a supernatural being. ”

“ Continuity in natural processes is never broken. Thus the Fourth-Race Atlanteans were developed from a nucleus of Northern Lemurian Third-Race Men, centred, roughly speaking, toward a point of land in what is now the mid-Atlantic Ocean. Their Continent was formed by the coalescence of many islands and peninsulas which were upheaved in the ordinary course of time and ultimately became the true home of the great Race known as the Atlanteans. ”

“ In fact, we of the nineteenth century, hearing of new discoveries and inventions every day, and dreaming of great advances in all arts and sciences, are the same individuals who inhabited bodies among the powerful and brilliant as well as wicked, Atlanteans, whose [Pg 21] name is forever set immortal in the Atlantic Ocean. The Europeans are also Atlantean monads ”

“ In some respects the Atlanteans exhibited conditions similar to those of the British Islands: there were the same, and even greater, race differences in the population; the same plantation of colonies in Europe, Asia, and America; the same carrying of civilization to the ends of the earth. We have seen colonies from Great Britain going out in the third and fifth centuries to settle on the shores of France, in Brittany, representing one of the nationalities and languages of the mother-country—a race Atlantean in origin. ”

“ The civilization of Atlantis was remarkable, and its people attained heights which seem almost incredible to even those who are familiar with the highest achievements of man in our own times. The Chosen Ones preserved from the cataclysm which destroyed Lemuria, and who lived to a remarkably old age, had stored up within their minds the wisdom and learning of the races that had been destroyed, and they thus gave the Atlanteans an enormous starting-advantage. They soon attained great advancement along all the lines of human endeavor. ”

“ Only among the Atlanteans in Europe and America do we find traditions preserved as to the origin of all the principal inventions which have raised man from a savage to a civilized condition. We can give in part the very names of the inventors. ”

“ Here, then, we have the backbone of the ancient continent which once occupied the whole of the Atlantic Ocean, and from whose washings Europe and America were constructed; the deepest parts of the ocean, 3500 fathoms deep, represent those portions which sunk first, to wit, the plains to the east and west of the central mountain range; some of the loftiest peaks of this range—the Azores, St. Paul's, Ascension, Tristan d'Acunha—are still above the ocean level; while the great body of Atlantis lies a few hundred fathoms beneath the sea. ”

“ We find just such a civilization as was necessary, according to Plato, and under just such a climate, in Atlantis and nowhere else. We have found it reaching, by its contiguous islands, within one hundred and fifty miles of the coast of Europe on the one side, and almost touching the West India Islands on the other, while, by its connecting ridges, it bound together Brazil and Africa. ”

“ If we look at the map, we see that the continent of America does "surround" the ocean in a great half-circle. Could Plato have guessed all this? If there had been no Atlantis, and no series of voyages from it that revealed the half-circle of the continent from Newfoundland to Cape St. Roche, how could Plato have guessed it? And how could he have known that the Mediterranean was only a harbor compared with the magnitude of the great ocean surrounding Atlantis? ”

“ They could not fly over from Europe, nor could they now cross Behring Strait, with the Arctic climate there existing. Imaginative persons have supposed a submerged Atlantic Continent, which bridged the chasm in a remote geological period. The myth of the Atlantis has been recently furbished up under the facts supplied by the deep-sea soundings of the English steamer Challenger, and the discovery of a plateau at the bottom of the ocean, between North America and Europe. But, if it ever existed, it probably did so at a time before the ancestors of our present moths came into being. ”

“ The advocates of a real Atlantis try to pile up proofs of a great land mass existing at some time in the Atlantic Ocean, a logical proceeding so far as it goes but one that falls short of its mark, for the land may have ascended and descended again ages before the reputed Atlantis period. It is of no avail to demonstrate its presence in the Miocene, Pliocene, or Pleistocene epoch, or, indeed, at any time prior to the development of a well organized civilization among men, or, as Plato apparently reasons, between 11,000 and 12,000 years ago. ”

“ It throbs with the pulse of a further shore. It speaks of a quiet tide making out to the Fortunate Islands, and tells of a way of following gales, and of a new Atlantis, somewhere on beyond. How dear this dream of a different land, this story of Atlantis, pathetically sought! Certainly, Atlantis is there, out beyond, somewhere in the sea; and truly there are those who have discovered it, and those who still may do so. ”

“ With a good harbor, it is now reduced to an unimportant pueblo named Acla." (Baldwin's "Ancient America," p. 179.)
Plato tells us that Atlantis and the Atlantic Ocean were named after Atlas, the eldest son of Poseidon, the founder of the kingdom.
3. Upon that part of the African continent nearest to the site of Atlantis we find a chain of mountains, known from the most ancient times as the Atlas Mountains. Whence this name Atlas, if it be not from the name of the great king of Atlantis? And if this be not its origin, how comes it that we find it in the most north-western corner of Africa? ”

“ The fact that domestic cattle and the great cereals, wheat, oats, barley, and rye, are found in Europe and not in America, would imply that after population moved to Atlantis from America civilization was developed in Atlantis, and that in the later ages communication was closer and more constant between Atlantis and Europe than between Atlantis and America. ”

“ In the case of the bulky domestic animals, it would be more difficult to transport them, in the open vessels of that day, from Atlantis across the wider expanse of sea to America, than it would be to carry them by way of the now submerged islands in front of the Mediterranean Sea to the coast of Spain. ”

“ If it be true that the first branch originating from Atlantis was the Turanian, which includes the Chinese and Japanese, then we have derived from Atlantis all the building and metal-working races of men who have proved themselves capable of civilization; and we may, therefore, divide mankind into two great classes: those capable of civilization, derived from Atlantis, and those essentially and at all times barbarian, who hold no blood relationship with the people of Atlantis. ”

“ Midsummer was upon this Atlantis, upon the islands attendant that served as stepping-stones to the continents beyond. Under the soft sensuousness, the morn was taking richer glow, the streams brightening to gold, the gardens and vineyards glorifying in green; whilst hill and mountain grew alluring in shadow and color, the palaces lustrous in their tri-tinted stones, and the temples’ syenite a gleaming red that rivaled the flashing orichalcum studding domes and pinnacles. The great island was a gorgeous mosaic: and its setting, sapphire, that royal stone emblematic of calm and truth ”

“ The course of race development is chaos and confusion without the key furnished by the character of Atlantean civilization and the configuration of the earth at Atlantean periods. Geologists know that land and ocean surfaces must have repeatedly changed places during the period at which they also know—from the situation of human remains in the various strata—that the lands were inhabited. ”

“ We find the barbarians of the coast of the Mediterranean regarding the civilized people of Atlantis with awe and wonder: "Their physical strength was extraordinary, the earth shaking sometimes under their tread. ”

“ It is not fabulous; and the land it refers to is not Europe, Asia, Africa, or Australia—but Atlantis. No other land is known to history or tradition that was overthrown in a great catastrophe by the agency of water ”

“ In connection with all this we must not forget that Plato described Atlantis as "that sacred island lying beneath the sun." Everywhere in the ancient world we find the minds of men looking to the west for the land of the dead. ”

“ I may, even now, tell that we found none of these, yet there still exists the tale of an ancient country beyond the westward strait between the sea and the ocean, and which tells of how the ancient land, Atlantis, was swallowed by the waves. Of all this I know nothing, and doubt if it is known of any man.
So we skirted the many islands west of Yatnan and the mainland reaching down among them, and laid our course more straightly northward, soon to find ourselves in a long and narrow sea branching far upward from our own beside a long peninsula shaped like a boot. ”

“ The ancients, as we have seen, had recognised the rotundity of the earth, and Eratosthenes had even recognised the possibility of reaching India by sailing westward. Certain traditions of the Greeks and the Irish had placed mysterious islands far out to the west in the Atlantic, and the great philosopher Plato had ined a country named Atlantis, far out in the Indian Ocean, where men were provided with all the gifts of nature. ”

“ The New Atlantis is a kind of scientific novel describing another Utopia as seen by Bacon. The inhabitants of Atlantis have banished Philosophy and applied Bacon's method of investigating Nature, using the results to better their own condition. They have a wonderful civilization, in which many of our later discoveries--academies of the sciences, observatories, balloons, submarines, the modification of species, and several others--were foreshadowed with a strange mixture of cold reason and poetic intuition. ”

“ We are justified, therefore, in giving the same provisional name to both, and calling them Atlantean, from their evident origin not far from Atlas, and their everywhere clinging to the Atlantic coast. We can find traces of no other race which at all closely fulfills the necessary conditions of uniform and undisputed extension, through a long epoch, over the whole cromlech region--the only conditions under which we can conceive of the erection of these gigantic monuments, or of the long established and universally extended spiritual conditions which make possible such vast ideal enterprises. ”

“ It may be asked what we are to say in regard to the storied Atlantis, and especially, what shall we say to the fancies of Ignatius Donnelly, who has written such a beautiful romance in regard to that island supposed by him to have existed, and have [31] been the actual birthplace of man. Our reply is that Central America was the only true Atlantis; and that Atlantis sunk in the ocean only when its discoverers became weakened in the face of the barbarous people who surrounded them and lost their supremacy in the commercial world among the nations. ”

“ When the barriers of Atlantis sunk sufficiently to permit the natural expansion of the heated water of the tropics to the north, the ice and snow which covered Europe gradually disappeared; the Gulf Stream flowed around Atlantis, and it still retains the circular motion first imparted to it by the presence of that island. ”