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

Latest News

  • NEWS October 2024

    NEWS October 2024

    OCTOBER 2024 The recent cyber attack on the Internet Archive is deplorable and can be reasonably compared with the repeated burning of the Great Library of Alexandria. I have used the Wayback Machine extensively, but, until the full extent of the permanent damage is clear, I am unable to assess its effect on Atlantipedia. At […]Read More »
  • Joining The Dots

    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 »
Search

Recent Updates

Ronan Coghlan

Irish Atlantology

Irish Atlantology, with a couple of notable exceptions, has not been overly productive. The man responsible for kick-starting ‘modern’ interest in Atlantis, Ignatius Donnelly (1831-1901), was the son of an Irish emigrant to the United States and so, although he might have qualified for the Ireland Soccer Team, I must exclude him as a contributor to Irish Atlantology. Another excludee is Henry O’Brien (1807-1835) who, although unquestionably Irish, has been associated with the study of Atlantis by publishers who cynically retitled his The Round Towers of Ireland [124] as The Round Towers of Atlantis [125] although it does not contain a single reference to either Atlantis or Plato!

Edward Hull (1829-1917) was a noted geologist and like Donnelly supported the idea of the Azores as remnants of Atlantis.

Marion McMurrough Mulhall published a number of books including Beginnings or Glimpses of Vanished Civilizations [1343]. In this interesting, if rather dated work of 136 pages, she suggests that “The gods and goddesses of the ancient Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Hindoos, and the Scandinavians were simply the kings, queens, and heroes of Atlantis, and the acts attributed to them in mythology are a confused recollection of real historical events.

Helen O’Cleary in her book, Atlantis [1248], aimed at younger readers, expressed the opinion that the early inhabitants of Ireland may have been refugees, rather than colonisers from Atlantis. She sees the gods of Egypt as having more in common with the Celts than with the pantheons of ancient Greece and Rome.

The most famous Irish Atlantologist was unquestionably the late J. V.Luce (1920-2011). He was a respected classicist and a leading proponent of the Minoan Hypothesis although he considered Plato’s Atlantis story to be a mixture of fact and fiction [120].

P. A. Ó Síocháin (1905-1995), a barrister, sought to link Atlantis with the Irish legend of Hy-Brasil [498].

The filmmaker Bob Quinn, in his book Atlantean [534], links the Irish megalith builders with the culture of North Africa and the maritime heritage which connected both.

Herbie Brennan in The Atlantis Enigma [030] offered a fairly general overview of ancient mysteries but does little to solve the when? where? or who? associated with Atlantis.

Dubliner, Ronan Coghlan produced his Companion to Atlantis and Other Mystery Lands [727] as an A-Z guide to Atlantis, Mu and Lemuria, which unfortunately includes a lot of dubious material which has emanated from ‘psychics’ and psychotics.

A 2010 contribution to Irish Atlantology was my own offering, Atlantipedia [1668]which was intended not only to inform but also encourage and hopefully assist others to take up Atlantean research. I wish all well in such an endeavour, irrespective of nationality. Truth does not recognise borders. It was a 500-page volume compared to the 2,100 pages that would be required to print the contents of this website now (May 2022).

>Ronnie Gallagher, an admirer of Reginald Fessenden, also located Atlantis in the Caucasus region and believes that was inundated as a consequence of the creation of a vast ‘flooded Eurasia’ that resulted from the collapse of glacial ice-dams(b), comparable with the Lake Missoula Floods in America.<

In November 2018, I published an ebook, Joining the Dots [1590]which reflected the results of my own fifteen years of research. The book had the self-explanatory subtitle of Plato’s Atlantis in the Central Mediterranean.

>In 2021, Anthony Woods, CEO of the unaccredited Keystone University(a)  published Atlantis Ireland, which is a pathetic attempt to identify Stone Age Ireland as a global hyperdiffusionist centre. He claims that megalith building, language and religion, all spread globally from Ireland, also known as Atlantis!<

(a) https://www.keystone.ie *

(b)  https://grahamhancock.com/gallagherr1/ *

Coghlan, Ronan

Ronan Coghlan (1948- ) was born in Dublin and now lives in Bangor, Northern Ireland. He has been a teacher at a number of schools and has published books on a variety of Ronan Coghlan2subjects ranging from Fairies to King Arthur to Atlantis. His best-selling Illustrated Encyclopedia of Arthurian Legends[0793]  is reported to have sold 120,000 copies!

Coghlan has also produced a Companion to Atlantis and Other Mystery Lands, which is an A-Z guide to Plato’s island as well as the more contentious Mu and Lemuria. My principal objection to this work is the inclusion of too many references to the ramblings of so many self-proclaimed psychics, obvious psychotics and downright fraudsters. It would be nitpicking to go any further but on the positive side I found this book more informative than the A-Z Guide published by Simon Cox[0251] and free of the ancient America bias of Frank Joseph’s offering[0104].  .

Formorians

The Formorians are reputed to have been the earliest occupiers of Ireland after the last Ice Age, according to the Book of Invasions(e). Although the etymology of their name is uncertain a commonly accepted theory is that the term Formorian is supposed to be derived from ‘Firmorrichi’ meaning ‘men of Morocco’ conforming to a tradition that they came from North Africa. Thomas Dietrich is happy to accept[0217] the Moroccan connection as he considers early Morocco to have been a colony of Atlantis and so by extension to have brought Atlantean culture to Ireland.

Ignatius Donnelly in Part V, chapter 7(f) of his now rather dated 1882 book, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World also designates Ireland as a former colony of Atlantis. He also disputes the generally accepted etymology for the name ‘Formorian’, preferring to adopt the views of Col. Francis Wilford[0114] to support his contention that it means ‘from the west’, which according to Donnelly could only be a reference to Atlantis in the Atlantic.

However, the Irish Annals of Clonmacnoise(g) claim that the Formorians were descended from Noah’s youngest son Cham who according to the Bible was born 100 years before the Flood (Genesis 7).

The Ancient Pages.com website had an article in July 2017 with the misleading headline of “Formorians: Supernatural Race Of Giants Who Came From Atlantis”, without a single mention of Atlantis in the body of the text(h). Readers can draw their own conclusions about the reliability of A. Sutherland, the author.

Ronan Coghlan has suggested that “the CHAM referred to in the Annals of Clonmacnoise is not SHEM but HAM, noting that in the Vulgate translation of the Bible, Ham is CHAM”!

Robert Stacy-Judd[0607.237] followed Donnelly and accepted that the ancient Irish annals(b) describe the Formorians coming to Ireland ‘before the Deluge’ and having a fleet of sixty ships and a strong army. He also quotes the Annals of Clonmacnois which records that the Formorians ‘were descended from Cham, the son of Noeh and lived by piracy and spoil of other nations and were in those days very troublesome to the whole world.’ Stacy-Judd also speculates that Noah and his sons were Atlanteans!

The reliability of the Irish annals as historical documents is highly questionable, particularly when dealing with very early events.

James I. Nienhuis seems to have adapted some of Dietrich’s ideas for his Dancing from Genesis blog (Nov. 2007)(a) , although he does not seem to be clear on the difference between Ireland and Britain, as he places Newgrange in the United Kingdom and has the Formorians settling in Britain rather than Ireland!

The excellent Migration and Diffusion website(c) has a paper by Stuart L. Harris who puts more flesh on the bones of the idea of the Formorian invasion of Ireland from Galicia in Spain, which he dates at 2186 BC. However, Harris’ claims that “the Formorians spoke and wrote in Finnish” and that “until about 1200 BC, Ireland spoke Finnish, not Gaelic”, reflecting his obsession with the ancient Finns. Such a claim would be guaranteed the raise the eyebrows, if not the hackles, of many Irish academics.

Dale Drinnon has an extensive article on the Formorians in his Frontiers of Anthropology website(d).

(a) https://dancingfromgenesis.wordpress.com/

(b) https://www.scss.tcd.ie/misc/kronos/chronology/synchronisms/Edition_4/K_trad/K_synch.htm

(c) https://www.migration-diffusion.info/article.php?year=2012&id=333

(d)  See: Archive 3570

(e)  See: Archive 3628

(f) https://www.sacred-texts.com/atl/ataw/ataw507.htm

(g) https://archive.org/stream/annalsofclonmacn00mage/annalsofclonmacn00mage_djvu.txt

(h) https://www.ancientpages.com/2017/07/18/fomorians-supernatural-race-giants-came-atlantis/