An A-Z Guide To The Search For Plato's Atlantis

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    October 2024 Hi to everyone I’m taking a break during the first two weeks of October, so there will be minimal activity on the site apart from the ongoing project of replacing broken links. Back Soon, Tony     September 2023. Hi Atlantipedes, At present I am in Sardinia for a short visit. Later we […]Read More »
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    Joining The Dots

    I have now published my new book, Joining The Dots, which offers a fresh look at the Atlantis mystery. I have addressed the critical questions of when, where and who, using Plato’s own words, tempered with some critical thinking and a modicum of common sense.Read More »
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Annie Besant

Toltecs, The

The Toltecs were the predecessors of the Aztecs in central Mexico. It is generally accepted that they ruled between the 10th and 12th centuries AD. Some rather pathetic attempts by Theosophists and New Agers have been made to link the Toltecs with Atlantis. Annie Besant,  the theosophist, informed us that the Toltecs were 27 feet tall!

William Scott-Elliot, also a theosophist, described the Toltecs as “averaging about eight feet during the period of their ascendency, but of course dwindling, as all races did, to the dimensions that are common today.”(a)

In the Toltec city of Tula, in the Mexican state of Hidalgo are 15-foot high statues known as Atlantes, which is also an architectural term used to describe supporting columns carved in the shape of a man.(b)

Nevertheless, Dominique Görlitz has written two-part article for Atlantisforschung in which he offers the suggestion that the Toltecs had been influenced by Basque visitors(c). “In addition to the well-known cultural parallels between the peoples of the Old and New Worlds, many Native American cultures have old myths about foreign culture bringers that relate to the beginnings of their culture and agriculture.”

John B. Newman, writing [0488.31] decades before Ignatius Donnelly and drawing on comments by Marco Polo, speculated that what became known as Toltecs had originally been part of a Chinese fleet intent on invading Japan that had been blown off course and ended up on the western shores of what is now Mexico. The settled there although in regular conflict with the native Aztecs. Unfortunately, Newman and Marco Polo have their chronologies mixed up as the the fleet in question was dispatched by Kublai Khan, long after the Toltecs arrived in Mexico.

 

(a) https://www.sacred-texts.com/atl/soa/soa17.htm

(b) Tula – Mysterious City of the Toltecs – The Maritime Explorer (archive.org)

(c) Sind die ‘weißen Götter’ der Guanchen mit jenen der Tolteken identisch? – Atlantisforschung.de (atlantisforschung-de.translate.goog) 

 

Lemuria

Lemuria was a name invented in 1864 by the English zoologist Philip Lutley Sclater (1829-1913) to describe a hypothetical landmass in the Indian Ocean that was used to explain the isolation of lemurs on Madagascar while related fossils were spread across Africa and South-East Asia. The name has also been credited to the English geologist, William Thomas Blanford (1832-1905).  It is further claimed that Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (1834-1919), the German professor of zoology and ardent supporter of Darwin, had made a similar suggestion regarding a sunken continent before Sclater without attributing a particular name to it.

Sir John Murray (1841-1914), a renowned British oceanographer, claimed(d) to have identified traces of this lost continent in the Indian Ocean.

Mu on the other hand is the name given to a fictional continent that was supposed to have existed in the Mid-to-Southern Pacific Ocean and was given popular recognition by the writings of James Churchward who promoted it as the Atlantis of the Pacific. However, many writers continue to use the two words interchangeably. Frank Joseph links the destruction of ‘Lemuria’ with the Plagues of Egypt[106][107].

Paul Heinrich described the reincarnation of Lemuria in the following terms –

“Lemuria was reincarnated as a lost continent by Madame Blavatsky, the greatest of the modern occultists. Madame Blavatsky incorporated this concept of Lemuria, in a confused form, together with Atlantis and a bizarre mixture of scientific, occult, and Hindu religious material, including the Rig-Veda in her book, The Secret Doctrine. In this book, Lemuria became a lost continent, although still in the Indian Ocean, populated by ape-like hermaphroditic egg-laying creatures. Later writers of the occult, lost-continent tales, e.g. Annie Besant, and W. Scott-Elliot added their own detail and embellishment to the story of Lemuria, including dinosaurs and 12 to 15-foot bronze humanoids. The final event in the reincarnation of Lemuria occurred when writers of occult books moved the location of Lemuria from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific Ocean (de Camp 1954). Since then, mystics and psychics have written innumerable books about Lemuria and either tuned into the spiritual essence and vibrations or channelled for the spirits of long-departed Lemurians who never existed to begin with.” (a)(f).

It is disturbing that presumably intelligent people such as Egerton Sykes could have dared to describe the inhabitants of a non-existent country in the following terms – “The Lemurians were short, squat, with square faces and large ears, relatively ugly to Western eyes”(e).

Lemuria_4_600_393

Katherine Folliot in her Atlantis Revisited [054] has an interesting passage on Lemuria which I shall quote in full;

“Several Atlantologists have claimed that Lemuria was none other than the lost island of Atlantis, and although their theory has generally been considered to be fanciful, it may well be based on true facts. The word Lemuria is a bastardization of the Arab word ‘al amur’ which means ‘the West’, or ‘the western land’, and one may surmise that this was the name given by medieval Arab scholars to the ‘western land’ mentioned in the surviving Egyptian archives in Alexandria, which was stated to have disappeared under the sea. When Arabia lost its cultural predominance at the end of the Middle Ages, ‘al Amur’ became distorted into ‘Lemur’, and later into ‘Lemuria’, but the land this inaccurate name designated was in all probability the same as that described by the Egyptian priest of Sais to Solon, the ‘western land’ of Atlantis.”

Even more bizarre was a report in the 30th October 1955 edition of the San Francisco Examiner, which linked the American ‘Bigfoot’ or Sasquatch with a sunken Lemuria, suggesting that he was a highly developed survivor of that lost continent!

On a more serious note, February 2013 saw a report(b) of the discovery of an ancient continent in the Indian Ocean. At first sight fans of the Mu/Lemuria concept must have been quite excited until it was realised that this sunken landmass was dated as being many hundreds of millions of years old.

In a September 2014 interview(c) Graham Hancock echoed my views regarding Lemuria and Mu when he responded to a question on the subject with, “Well, let’s get Lemuria out of the way first. Lemuria is actually a 19th-century idea and there is no ancient text that refers to Lemuria. Lemuria is about the fact that fossils of a species of animal, the lemur, are found on both sides of the Indian Ocean. The suggestion was that there must have been some joining continent at one point between Madagascar and India. At any rate, I repeat, and this is my point –  there’s no ancient testimony for the existence of a place called “Lemuria”. The ancient testimony from Mu is also extremely dubious since it rests on a 19th-century mistranslation of a Mayan text popularized by Augustus Le Plongeon and then subsequently elaborated by James Churchward in the 1920s and 1930s. But never mind the names, the fact is that we do have genuinely ancient traditions of lost civilisations and lost lands all around the world. That’s why I find Lemuria and Mu a bit of a distraction because Mu rests on a mistranslation of an ancient text and Lemuria is entirely a 19th-century idea.

>Jaime T. Licauco has written a number of papers about psychic surgery in the Philippines, including the question “Why are our faith healers and psychic surgeons concentrated in Pangasinan, the Ilocos region and Central Luzon?” He explains that “some people have advanced the theory that is is because Pangasinan and the Ilicos region were once centres of Lemurian civilization, referring to the ancient, lost, advanced civilization believed to have sunk in the Pacific Ocean 150,000 years ago!” (g)<

(a) http://www.lemuria.net/

(b) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21551149

(c) https://realitysandwich.com/223168/ancient-aliens-atlantis-ayahuasca/

(d) https://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/71147253?searchTerm=Plato Atlantis&searchLimits=sortby=dateDesc

(e) Atlantis, Vol.16. No.2, April 1963

(f) https://www.hallofmaat.com/atlantis/lemuria-here-we-go-again/

(g) https://lifestyle.inquirer.net/305657/sumeria-origins-man/ *

 

Wingate, Richard

Richard Wingate (1933-2011) was described by Andrew Collins as a ‘maverick mineral richard wingateprospector and explorer’(a). His search for Atlantis brought him to Ecuador where he was enchanted by the so-called Crespi Collection leading him to speculate on a possible link between it and lost Atlantis. He subsequently shifted his attention to the Bahamas where he claimed to have discovered Atlantean structures in shallow waters. He detailed his discoveries in his first book[059].

Wingate published his second book, Atlantis in the Amazon[771] in June 2011. In it he returned to a further consideration of the Crespi Collection and its place in the theory of a South American/Caribbean Atlantis. In support of his view of Atlantis he invoked the controversial Oera Linda Book, Annie Besant, the English theosophist and of course Edgar Cayce.

He also discussed ‘ancient technologies’, including his most startling claim, that Atlantis was destroyed by a prehistoric nuclear war between the Aryans and the Atlanteans.  He speculates that the Athenian army was destroyed when a Gibraltar landbridge was shattered by earthquakes allowing the Atlantic to flow in, swamping the Hellenes!  Minor details overlooked by Plato!

Wingate originally put Atlantis in the Bahamas, but now he entitled his second book as Atlantis in the Amazon and ends up with Atlanteans being involved in nuclear war in ancient India. Along the way we have metallic glue, Easter Island, Indian wooden flying machines and ancient lasers. All very confusing, to say the least.

Wingate’s ancient atomic weapons claim is just a rehash of  the wild speculation from the 1940’s(e) followed by that of Pauwels and Bergier in the 1960’s and regularly regurgitated ever since(b). Contrast the last link and Wingate’s remarks with the more forensic analysis of Jason Colavito(c) together with Dale Drinnon’s account(d).>The late Philip Coppens also wrote a fairly balanced article(f) on the subject ancient nuclear weaponry.<

(a) https://www.andrewcollins.com/page/articles/stones.htm

(b) https://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/5923291-atlantis-destroyed-from-atomic-bombing-by-rama-a-deep-study (offline July 2015)

(c) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/the-case-of-the-false-quotes.html

(d) See: Archive 2324

(e) https://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/147538214?searchTerm=Atlantis discovered&searchLimits=sortby=dateAsc

>(f) https://web.archive.org/web/20200225034114/https://www.eyeofthepsychic.com/bestevidence/<