Atlantis first appears in two dialogues by Plato, the Timaeus and the Critias, written around 360 BCE. Plato describes a great island empire beyond the Pillars of Hercules, founded by the god Poseidon, with a capital of concentric rings of land and water, walls covered in the metal orichalcum, a splendid temple, and an army that attacks the Mediterranean world before Athens defeats it. It then sinks beneath the sea in a single day and night. Most scholars think Plato invented the story as a philosophical parable, though the debate has never fully died.
How Atlantis became an esoteric idea
In 1882 the American writer Ignatius Donnelly argued in Atlantis: The Antediluvian World that Atlantis had really existed and was the source of ancient civilizations. Theosophists and later occult writers went further. Helena Blavatsky made the Atlanteans the fourth of her “root races” in The Secret Doctrine (1888), and her follower William Scott-Elliot’s The Story of Atlantis (1896) described an advanced civilization with flying machines. That is the background of the airships in this painting. In the 1930s the American psychic Edgar Cayce added hundreds of readings about the lost continent.
Searching for the real Atlantis
Serious researchers have tried to match the story to real events. A popular theory links it to the Bronze Age eruption of the volcano on Thera, now Santorini, which devastated the Minoan civilization of Crete. In 2015 divers found a shipwreck off Sicily carrying ingots of an alloy of copper and zinc identified with orichalcum, the metal Plato said sheathed Atlantis, though in real antiquity the word seems to have named an ordinary brass-like alloy.
The painting
A white pyramid and a golden-domed temple crown a red cliff above a city of towers and gardens, with small aircraft and an airship in the sky. It was painted by J. Augustus Knapp for Manly P. Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928).
Little-known facts
- Plato says the story reached Athens through the statesman Solon, who heard it from Egyptian priests at Sais, the same city as the veiled Isis statue.
- The story places the sinking of Atlantis about 9,000 years before Solon, around 9600 BCE.
- The geographer Strabo reports that Aristotle joked that the man who invented Atlantis also destroyed it.
- The plate’s caption leans on a Maya “Troano manuscript” translation by Augustus Le Plongeon, which Maya specialists reject. Le Plongeon and his wife Alice did take some of the earliest photographs of Maya ruins, in the 1870s.
- Jules Verne sent Captain Nemo to walk through the ruins of Atlantis on the sea floor in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870).
The Atlantean Temple appears on our: