Part 1 The Atlantis Encyclopedia .... Aalu to Atapaska

The Atlantis Encyclopedia

By  Frank Joseph

Foreword 

By Brad Steiger 

I must confess that the first thing I did when I received a manuscript copy of Frank Joseph’s The Atlantis Encyclopedia was to check for myself just how thorough the text really was. I started with Viracocha, the early Inca culture-hero, who has fascinated me since our trip to Peru, where I stood at his legendary tomb site at Machu Picchu. I thought it unlikely that many researchers would associate Viracocha’s “rising” from the great depths of Lake Titicaca with his possible arrival from Atlantis after the deluge, but there he was. Score one for Joseph. 

Next, I tried an even more obscure reference—Balor, the king of the giant Sea People in Irish folklore. Another hit for Joseph. And so it went with name after name, geographical location after geographical location, until I put the manuscript aside and agreed that there was no single reference work on Atlantis quite as complete as this unique work. The vast majority of the thousands of books and magazine articles published about the lost civilization of Atlantis present a particular researcher’s pet theory about where the place was; whether it was really a continent, an island, or a metropolis; and where we might find bits and pieces of the vanished world to prove the validity of the author’s hypothesis. 

The Atlantis Encyclopedia is by no means the first book Joseph has written about this perennial subject. His Edgar Cayce’s Atlantis and Lemuria (A.R.E. Press, 2001) showed that the Sleeping Prophet was uncanny in his correct description of these antediluvian civilizations, and Cayce reappears in this latest effort with his intriguing predictions for their future discovery. But The Atlantis Encyclopedia is unique because it is the largest and most comprehensive of its kind; the author was about its research for nearly a quarter of a century. 

In my own Atlantis Rising, first published in 1973, I examined and reevaluated the evidence for what I considered the eight most prevalent theories of what the “lost continent” was or what it represented, from ancient terrestrial sea-kings, to ancient 8 The Atlantis Encyclopedia extraterrestrial colonizers. But in this extensive encyclopedia, Joseph has no particular axe to grind or theory to postulate. These are the facts, figures, fauna, flora, figments, and fantasies that surround the mystery of Atlantis. Although I have written books on many different subjects since Atlantis Rising, researching the true origins of humankind’s sojourn on this planet remains one of my greatest passions in terms of personal research. 

While I am fascinated by our plans to explore outer space—and I do support such efforts—I truly believe that it remains one of our greatest responsibilities, as a species, to discover who we truly are, before we begin our trek to the stars. I very much believe, as I titled a subsequent book on the mysteries of humankind’s vast antiquity, that there have been “worlds before our own” on this planet. 

Yes, once the subject of Atlantis and lost civilizations seizes your imagination and invades your dreams, you will find that you, too, must join the search for establishing the reality of what the great majority of your peers will consider nonsense. But read this impressive work by Frank Joseph, and you will discover for yourself that Atlantis is far more than a metaphor for humankind’s brief glory before the dust. The subject of Atlantis can really get a hold on you. After all, Frank was kind enough to share with me that it was my Atlantis Rising that whetted his own appetite for the quest. Now make it your own in The Atlantis Encyclopedia!

Introduction: 

A Lost Civilization

The Atlantis Encyclopedia is a result of more than two decades of continuous study and international travel. It began in 1980, when I started picking up clues to the lost civilization in locations from the ruins of Troy and Egypt’s desert pyramids, to Morocco’s underground shrine and Britain’s Stonehenge, beyond to the mountaintop city of Peru and a ceremonial center in the jungles of Guatemala. My quest took me to Polynesia’s cannibal temple, the seldom seen solar monuments of Japan’s remote forests, and the golden pillar of Thailand. I sought out credible proof in my own country, traveling from coast to coast, finding telltale evidence—among the world’s most northerly pyramids, in Wisconsin; at Ohio’s Great Serpent Mound; and in the ruins of North America’s oldest city, in Louisiana. I participated in diving expeditions to the Bahamas, Yucatan, the Canary Islands, the Aegean Sea, and the Pacific Ocean. Decades of these on-site explorations was combined with research in the libraries of the world and the shared wisdom of devoted colleagues to produce this unique volume. 

Of the estimated 2,500 books and magazine articles published about the lost civilization, The Atlantis Encyclopedia is the only one of its kind. It is an attempt to bring together all the known details of this immense, continually fascinating subject, as well as to provide succinct definitions and clear explanations. It is a handbook of Atlantean information for general readers and specialists alike. Everything one wants to know about Atlantis is here in short form. It is a source for students of archaeology, myth, and prehistory. 

Unlike most other books on the subject, The Atlantis Encyclopedia offers fewer theories and more facts. Areas of interest include geology, astronomy, and oceanography, but with strong emphasis on the folk traditions of numerous peoples around the world who preserved memories of a great flood that destroyed an ancestral island of memorial splendor. These elements have never been presented together before in a single volume. In so doing, the common threads that weave European and Near Eastern The Atlantis Encyclopedia versions to North American accounts, beyond to Polynesian and Asian renditions, cumulatively build a picture in the reader’s mind of a real event encapsulated for thousands of years in the long-surviving myths and legends of mankind. 

We learn that the Egyptians told of “the Isle of Flame” in the Far Western Ocean from which their forefathers arrived after a terrible natural disaster. Meanwhile, in North America, the Apache Indians still preserve memories of their ancestral origins from the sunken “Isle of Flames” in the distant seas of the East. There is the Norse Lifthraser and Lif, husband and wife refugees of the Great Flood, just as the ancient Mexicans remembered Nata and Nena, the pair who escaped a world deluge. Balor leads his people to safety in pre-Celtic Ireland, while Manibozho survives to become the founder of all North American Indian tribes. Underpinning them all is the story of Atlantis, as given to the world 24 centuries ago by the greatest thinker of classical Greece. Plato’s Atlantis still lives in the folkish memories of virtually every people on Earth. Although fundamentally similar to all the rest, each version presents its own details, contributing to an overall panorama of the Atlantean experience, as dramatic as it is persuasive. 

The Atlantis Encyclopedia offers equally exhaustive information about a Pacific counterpart—the lost kingdom of Mu, also known as Lemuria. Although at opposite cultural and geographical poles, the two civilizations were at least partially contemporaneous and in contact with each other, produced transoceanic seafarers who founded new societies around the globe, and succumbed in the end to natural catastrophes that may have been related. Persuasive physical evidence for the sunken realm came to light in 1985 off the coast of Yonaguni, a remote Japanese island, when divers found the ruins of a large ceremonial building that sank beneath the sea perhaps as long ago as 12,000 years. Long before that dramatic discovery, accounts of Mu or Lemuria were preserved in the oral folk traditions of numerous peoples around the Pacific Basin, from America’s western coastal regions, across Polynesia and Micronesia, to Australia, and throughout Asia. As such, the story of Atlantis is incomplete without some appreciation of the complimentary role played by its Lemurian predecessor and co-ruler of the world. 

And no comprehensive investigation of this kind can ignore the “life-readings” of Edgar Cayce, America’s “Sleeping Prophet,” during the first half of the 20th century. His vision of Atlantis, still controversial, is nonetheless compelling and, if true, insightful and revealing. Cayce’s testimony is unique, because he spoke less of theories and history, than of individual human beings, and the high drama they lived as players on the stage of the Atlantean world. 

Although it does not set out to prove the sunken capital actually existed, The Atlantis Encyclopedia musters so much evidence on its behalf, even skeptics may conclude that there must be at least something factual behind such an enduring, indeed global legend. For true believers, this book is a gold mine of information to help them better understand the lost civilization. Atlantologists (serious investigators of the subject) may use it as a unique and valuable reference to spring-board their own research. Students of comparative myth have here a ready source of often rarely presented themes connecting the Bronze Age to Classical World images. For most readers, however, The Atlantis Encyclopedia offers an easily accessible introduction to this eternally enthralling enigma

A

Aalu 

Ancient Egyptian for “The Isle of Flame,” descriptive of a large, volcanic island in the Distant West (the Atlantic Ocean). It physically matches Plato’s Atlantis virtually detail for detail: mountainous, with canals, luxuriant crops, a palatial city surrounded by great walls decorated with precious metals, etc. Aalu’s earliest known reference appears in The Destruction of Mankind, a New Kingdom history (1299 B.C.) discovered in the tomb of Pharaoh Seti-I, at Abydos. His city was the site of the Osireion, a subterranean monument to the Great Flood that destroyed a former age of greatness. 

On the other side of the world from Egypt, the Apache Indians of the American Southwest claim their ancestors arrived after the Great Flood destroyed their homeland, still remembered as the “Isle of Flames,” in the Atlantic Ocean. 

Ablach 

In Celtic and pre-Celtic myth, an Atlantic island whose name meant “rich in apple trees.” It was ruled by the Irish version of Poseidon—the sea-god, Manannan. Ablach is paralleled by the Garden of the Hesperides, a sacred grove of apple trees at the center of Atlas’s island, tended by the Hesperides, who were Atlantises—“daughters of Atlas.” 

(See Garden of the Hesperides)

Abnakis 

Algonquian tradition tells how the eponymous founding father, from whom this North American tribe derived its name, came “from the rising sun,” the direction of the Abnakis (“our white ancestors”), after he was forewarned in a dream that the gods would sink their land beneath the sea. In haste, he built “a great reed raft” on which he sailed away with his family. Aboard were a number of animals that, in those days, could speak. The beasts grew impatient with the long voyage, ridiculed the Father of the Tribes, and were about to mutiny, when land was finally sighted. Everyone disembarked safely, but the formerly rebellious animals, as punishment for their onboard behavior, were deprived by the gods of their ability to converse with humans. 

(See Noah) 

Aclla Cuna 

In Quechua, the language of the Incas, “The Chosen Women,” or “The Little Mothers.” They referred to the seven visible stars in the constellation of the Pleiades, associated with a great deluge, from which Con-Tiki-Viracocha (“White Man of the Sea Foam”) arrived in South America to found Andean Civilization. 

Aclla Cuna was also the name of the Incas’ most sacred mystery cult composed exclusively of the most beautiful, virtuous, and intelligent women, who orally preserved the high wisdom and ancestral traditions of the red-haired Con-Tiki-Viracocha. They dressed in Atlantean colors (red, white, and black) and were provided magnificent estates at Cuzco, the capital of the Inca Empire, and the mountain citadel of Machu Picchu. The Chosen Women identified with the Pleiades, or “Atlantises,” as they were known similarly in Greek myth. 

Ad 

A palatial island capital punished for the wickedness of its inhabitants by a terrible flood. The story of Ad is preserved in pre-Islamic traditions and mentioned in the Holy Koran, which condemned its inhabitants for building “high places for vain uses.” The Adites were said to have “worshiped the sun from the tops of pyramids,” a singularly un-Arabic practice more evocative of life in Atlantis. Ad was known as “the City of Pillars,” or “the Land of Bronze.” Plato similarly described the pillar cult of the Atlanteans, while their city was the pre-classical world’s foremost clearinghouse for the bronze trade. 

In Arabic tradition, the Adites are portrayed as giants (the Atlantean Titans of Greek mythology), superior architects and builders who raised great stone monuments. Even today, rural tribes of Saudi Arabia refer to any ancient ruins of prodigious size as “buildings of the Adites,” and apply the expression “as old as Ad” to anything of extreme age. In the 19th century, the royal monarch of the Mussulman tribes was Shedd-Ad-Ben-Ad, or “Descendant and Son of Ad.” The progenitor of the Arab peoples was Ad, grandson of the biblical Ham.

The Adites are still regarded as the earliest inhabitants of Arabia. They were referred to as “red men,” for the light color of their hair. Several accounts of Atlantis (Egyptian, Irish, Winnebago, etc.) depict the Atlanteans, at least in part, as redheads. The Adites had 10 kings ruling various parts of the world simultaneously— the same number and disposition described by Plato in his Atlantis account, Kritias. The Adites arrived in the country after Ad was annihilated by a colossal black cloud with the ferocity of a hurricane, an obvious reference to the volcanic eruption that accompanied the destruction of Atlantis. 

“Ad” is still the name of a Semitic tribe in the province of Hadramut, Saudi Arabia, whose elders claimed descent from their eponymous ancestor, the great grandson of Noah. 

(See Adapa) 

Adad 

The Atlantean concept of Atlas imported into Sumer (after 3000 B.C.). Adad was a fire-god symbolized by an active volcano, its summit wreathed by the constellation of the Pleiades—the “Atlantises,” or daughters of Atlas. Oppenheimer writes that the Sumerian version of the flood was “catastrophic. The storm came suddenly with a loud noise and darkening the sky and a raging wind from Adad...One of the gods, Anzu, is described as tearing the sky with his talons.” According to the Sumerian version of the Deluge, “No one could see anyone else. They could not be recognized in the catastrophe. The flood roared like a bull. Like a wild ass screaming, the winds howled. The darkness was total, and there was no sun.” 

Adapa 

In Babylonian myth, Ea, the god of the seas, destroyed the great city of Ad with a catastrophic deluge, killing all its sinful inhabitants except his virtuous high priest, Adapa. This “Man from Ad” arrived in the Near East as a culture-bearer to pass on the arts and sciences, principles of government, and religion, from which all subsequent Mesopotamian civilizations traced their development. The Babylonian Ad is equivalent to the drowned capital preserved in Arabic traditions, and both are clear references to the same primeval civilization of Atlantis. 

(See Ad) 

Adena 

Named after an Ohio mound group dating from ca. 1000 B.C., Adena represents the earliest known civilization in the American Midwest and along the eastern seaboard. Its people built colossal ridge-top or linear burial mounds of stone, often longer than 100 feet, and great conical structures; the greatest, at 66 feet high, is West Virginia’s Creek Grave Mound. The Adena people also laid out sprawling enclosures oriented to various celestial phenomena. Their prodigious feats of ceremonial construction imply high levels of labor management, astronomy, and surveying. They were able metalsmiths who worked copper on a large scale, and they demonstrated carving skills in surviving stone effigy-pipes. 

Their sudden, unheralded appearance after the previous and primitive Archaic Period represented a major break with the immediate past. Such a transformation can only mean that the Adena were newcomers who brought their already evolved culture with them from outside the American Midwest. Their starting date coincides within two centuries of the final destruction of Atlantis and the abrupt closure of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula copper mines, which had been consistently worked for the previous 1,800 years. Given these parallel events, it appears the Adena were former Atlantean copper miners, who settled throughout the Middle West to the East Coast, following the loss of their distant homeland and the abandonment of copper mining in the Upper Great Lakes. 

A majority of the Adena monuments were dismantled and their stone used by early 19th-century settlers to build wells and fences. Only a few examples still survive, because they were naturally concealed by their obscure locations, such as those at the bottom of Rock Lake, in Wisconsin, and in the wooded areas of Heritage Park, Michigan.

(See Bronze Age, Rock Lake) 

An Atlantean-like engraved stone found in Illinois, provenance unknown. From the Thelma MacLaine Collection. The figure resembles the winged horses and Poseidon’s trident described in Plato’s account of Atlantis.

Ades 

Sacred mountain where the Atlantean Navel of the World mystery cult originated. Ades was later known as “Hades”—the realm of the dead in Greek myth—but associated with the death-rebirth mystery cult of Atlantis in the story of Persephone, the “Corn Maiden” daughter of the Earth Mother, Demeter. 

(See Navel of the World) 

Ad-ima 

In Indian myth, the first man to arrive in the subcontinent, with his wife (Heva), from an island overwhelmed by a natural catastrophe that forever cut off all communication with his homeland. In Sanskrit, the word for “first” is Adim, surprisingly like the biblical Adam. Later versions of the story identify the lost island with Sri Lanka, but in that the former Ceylon still exists, Atlantis was undoubtedly the location from which Ad-ima came. His name, moreover, is identifiably Atlantean, apparent in the philological relationship between “Ad-ima” and the Greek variant, “Atlas.” This association is underscored by the antediluvian setting of the Ad-ima myth. 

(See Heva)

Adityas 

Also known as the Daityas, offspring of Vishnu. Water-giants somewhat equivalent to the Titans of Greek myth (like Atlas and the other kings of Atlantis), the Adityas are mentioned in Vishnu Purana and Mahabharata, two of the oldest and most revered ancient Indian literary traditions. The latter work describes them as the inhabitants of Tripura, the Triple City in the Western Ocean, doubtless the Atlantic island of Poseidon (of the trident). The Adityas were destroyed after they engaged in a war that culminated in the sinking of Tripura, the same story retold by Plato in his account of Atlantis. 

Aditi 

In Indian myth, the mother of Vishnu, who conquered the Earth for the gods and became the first Aditya, or “Upholder” of the sky (the moral order of the cosmos), and is therefore identified with Atlas. His offspring were the Adityas (or Daityas), who supported the heavens. 

(See Adityas, Atlas) 

Aegle 

An Atlantis, or “Daughter of Atlas,” one of the Hesperides, a trio of divine sisters who guarded the golden apples of eternal life in a sacred grove on Atlas’s island. 

(See Garden of the Hesperides) 

Aegeon 

In Greek myth, a Titan who carried civilization into the eastern Mediterranean, which he named after himself: the Aegean Sea. Aegeon is associated with Atlantean culture-bearers during the 12th century B.C. He was also known as Briareus. 

(See Hecatoncheires) 

Aegyptus 

In Greek myth, an early king of Egypt, from whom the country derived its name. He was the grandson of Poseidon and Libya, which is to say his lineage was Atlanto-African. Aegyptus was descended from Atlantean royalty who, on their passage through the Nile Valley, married native North Africans. 

Aelian 

Roman biologist (third century A.D.) and author of The Nature of Animals, in which he reported, “The inhabitants of the shores of the Ocean tell that in former times the kings of Atlantis, descendants of Poseidon, wore on their heads, as a mark of power, the fillet of the male sea-ram [a dolphin], and that their wives, the queens, wore, as a sign of their power, fillets of the female sea-rams [perhaps narwhals].”

Aethyr 

The Egyptian month corresponding to our late October/early November, during which a world deluge associated with the final destruction of Atlantis was caused by the goddess Hathor. 

Agadir 

A city on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Its name may have been derived from the Atlantean king mentioned in Plato’s Kritias, Gadeiros. 

Queen Hatshepsut’s funerary temple at Deir el-Bahri, West Thebes, was patterned after similar monumental construction in contemporary Atlantis, circa 1470 B.C.

Ah-Auab 

Literally “white men,” or “foreigners to the land,” a term by which the Mayas of the Lowland Yucatan distinguished themselves from native Indian populations, because they claimed descent from fair-skinned survivors of the Great Flood. 

(See Halach-Unicob, Tutulxiu) 

Ahson-nutli 

Among the Navajo Indians in the American Southwest, Ahson-nutli was a god who, in the days before the Great Flood, created a quartet of twin giants to support the four corners of the sky. In Plato’s account of Atlantis, supreme leadership of the antediluvian civilization belonged to twin brothers, likewise Titans, or giants. Atlas, the first of these, was mythically perceived as supporting the sky on his shoulders. His name derives from the Sanskrit atl, “to support or uphold.” 

(See Atlas, Ayar-aucca) 

Aiken, Conrad 

Renowned 20th-century American author and master poet who wrote of Atlantis in his 1929 works, Priapus and the Fool and Senlin.

Aintzine-Koak 

Literally “those who came before,” the forefathers of the Basque. The ancestral Aintzine-Koak are still remembered as former inhabitants of “the Green Isle,” a powerful maritime nation that sank into the Atlantic Ocean after a terrible cataclysm and from which the few survivors sailed into the Bay of Biscay, eventually bringing the holy relics of their mystery religion into the Pyrenees Mountains. (See Atlaintika) 

Ainu Deluge Myth 

The Ainu are mixed descendants of a Caucasian population that inhabited Japan before Asian immigrants from Korea. They may have belonged to the same white population that inhabited the kingdom of Mu and dispersed across the Pacific Ocean after it was overwhelmed by a great flood. Remnants of this lost race also appear among 9,000-year-old skeletal remains found in Washington State (the so-called “Kennewick Man”), the untypically bearded Haida of coastal British Columbia, and in parts of Polynesia. 

The Ainu recall a time when the sea suddenly rose over the land, drowning most humans. Only a few survived by climbing to mountaintops. 

(See Mu) 

Alalu 

The Hurrians were a people who occupied Anatolia (Turkey) from the early third millennium B.C. Many of their religious and mythic concepts were absorbed by their Hittite conquerors, beginning after 2000 B.C. Among these traditions was the story of Alalu, the first king of heaven, a giant god who made his home on a mountainous island in the sea of the setting sun. His son, Kumarbi, was synonymous for the Greek Kronos, a mythic personification of the Atlantic Ocean through Roman times. In Alalu survives a Hurrian memory of the mountainous island of Atlantis. 

(See Arallu, Arallu, Kronos) 

Alas, 

That Great City Francis Ashton’s popular 1948 novel about Atlantis, influenced by Hanns Hoerbiger Cosmic Ice Theory. 

(See Hoerbiger) 

Alatuir 

A magic stone, the source of ultimate power, at the very center of Bouyan, the sunken island-kingdom from which the ancestors of the Slavic peoples migrated to the European Continent from the Western Ocean. Alatuir was a sacred omphalos, a large, egg-shaped stone symbol of the primeval mystery cult in Atlantis. 

(See Navel of the World) 

Albion 

The ancient name for Britain, “The White Island,” derived from the twin brother of Atlas. Albion was said to have introduced the arts of shipbuilding and astrology, the leading material features of Atlantis. “The White Island” concept associated with Atlantis is also found in Aztec Mexico, North Africa, and India. The spiritual arts Albion brought to Britain were believed to have formed the basis for Druidism. 

(See Atala, Aztlan, Blake) 

Algonquian Flood Myth 

Native tribes of the American Northeast preserved a tribal memory of their ancestral origins on a large island in the Atlantic Ocean. After many generations, signs and portents warned the inhabitants of impending disaster. Some magnitude of the evacuation that took place is suggested in the 138 boats said to have been prepared for the emergency. According to Algonquian elder Sam D. Gill, it began when “the Earth rocked to and fro, as a ship at sea.” The quakes became so powerful the island “was cut loose from its fastenings, and fires of the Earth came forth in flames and clouds and loud roarings.” As the flotilla of refugees made good their escape, “the land sank down beneath the waters to rise no more.” The survivors eventually landed along the eastern seaboard of North America, and married among the indigenous peoples to become the forefathers of the Algonquian tribes. There is no more succinct and credible version of the Atlantis catastrophe and its aftermath. 

Alkynous 

The king of Phaeacia (Atlantis) in Homer’s Odyssey. The monarch’s name is a derivative of the leading Pleiade most directly associated with Atlantis, 

Alkyone. 

Alkyone An “Atlantis,” a daughter of Atlas and the sea-goddess Pleione; leader of her divine sisters, the Pleiades. Alkyone may be a mythic rendering of Kleito, the woman in Plato’s account of Atlantis, who likewise bore culture-bearers to the sea-god Poseidon. Her title was “The Queen who wards off Storms.” To the Druids at Boscawen-Uen, Mea-Penzance, Scotland’s Callanish, and other megalithic sites throughout Britain, the Pleiades represented fearful powers of destruction through the agency of water. 

The same dreadful association was made by the Egyptians. The so-called “Scored Lines” of the Great Pyramid at Giza were in alignment with the star Alkyone of the Pleiades, in the constellation of Taurus the Bull, at noon of the spring equinox (March 21) in 2141 B.C. Suggestion that the Alkyone alignment was deliberately intended by the pyramid’s designer is supported by the fact that the feature corresponding to the Scored Lines in the so-called “Trial Passages” is a flat surface that could have been used as a pelorus for stargazing (Lemesurier, 193). 

In view of the Great Pyramid’s function, at least partially, as a monument to Atlantis, the third-millennium B.C. date may commemorate some related anniversary, either of the Atlantis catastrophe itself or an Atlantean arrival in the Nile Valley. Lemesurier suggests as much: “The Pleiades were firmly linked in the Egyptian tradition with the goddess Hathor, the ‘goddess of the Foundation’, and instigator of the primeval ‘deluge’.” Hathor, or Aether, was, after all, the Egyptian version of Alkyone, herself the personification of Atlantis (151). 

“The Egyptians observed three solemn days that ended when these stars [the Pleiades] culminated at midnight. These days were associated with a tradition of a deluge or other race-destroying disaster. The rites began on the seventeenth day of Aethyr, which agrees with the Mosaic deluge account, namely, the seventeenth day of the second month of the Jewish year” (154). Both the Egyptian Aethyr and the second month of the Jewish year correspond to our late October/early November. With the year provided by a proper lunar calculation of the date given by Plato in Kritias and Egyptian records of the XX Dynasty, we arrive at a date for the final destruction of Atlantis: November 3, 1198 B.C. 

Ama 

A Japanese tribe, of numerical insignificance, with genetic links to populations directly descended from the Jomon Culture of the ninth millennium B.C. Today, the Ama live around the Saheki Gulf (Ohita prefecture). Their oldest known settlements were at Minami Amabe-gun (Ohita prefecture), Amabe-cho (Tokushima prefecture), Kaishi-cho in Sado (Niigata prefecture) and Itomancho (Okinawa prefecture). These areas coincide with some of the country’s oldest habitation sites. The Ama believe they are direct descendants of foreigners from a high civilization across the sea in the deeply ancient past. The visitors, remembered as the Sobata, preached a solar religion, and its symbol, a rising sun, became the national emblem of Japan. It also signified the direction from which the Sobata came; namely, the eastern Pacific Ocean. Their island kingdom, Nirai-Kanai, was eventually overwhelmed by a great flood and now lays at the bottom of the sea. 

To commemorate these events, the Ama still conduct an annual ceremony at the eastern shores of Japan, held in early April or October. At dawn, the celebrants gather on the beach to face the dawn and pray for the souls of their ancestors, the Sobata. Following purification with seawater, a designated leader walks into the ocean, up to his neck, bearing a small tree branch in his hand. After a pause, he turns to face the shore. Emerging from the water, he is greeted with the wild beating of drums and joyful chanting, as though he had survived some catastrophe. 

In The Lost Continent of Mu, James Churchward stated that the sunken civilization of the Pacific was symbolized by the Tree of Life. The word for “timber” in Chinese is mu. In Japanese and Korean, mu signifies that which does not exist, referring perhaps to the vanished Nirai-Kanai signified by the tree branch carried through the water by the Ama celebrant. 

(See Mu, Nirai-Kanai, Sobata)

Amadis 

This opera by the French composer Jules Massenet premiered in Monte Carlo, in 1927, and was based on the Breton folk legend of King Perion who, with his family, barely escaped before his island kingdom was swallowed up by the sea with its wicked inhabitants. The story of Amadis belongs to “the Green Isle” oral traditions of a sunken island city still preserved among various western coastal populations in Belgium, the Netherlands, Brittany, Biscay (among the Basque), Spain, and Portugal.

Amaicaca 

Remembered by the Carib Indians of Venezuela as a deluge hero who escaped some natural catastrophe in “a big canoe” that settled at the top of Mount Tamancu after the flood waters receded. Amaicaca resembles Edgar Cayce’s Amaki and the Colombian Amuraca. 

Amaiur 

The legendary first king of the Basque is equated with biblical parallels of Tubalcain, a grandson of the flood hero in Genesis, Noah. Amaiur means, “Monarch of Maya,” a kingdom referred to as the Green Isle, swallowed by the Atlantic Ocean. In Greek myth, Maya was one of the seven Pleiades, daughters of the goddess Pleione and the Titan Atlas, and hence, an “Atlantis.” 

(See Maia, Pleiades)

Ambrosia 

As a daughter of Atlas, she was an Atlantis, one of the five Hyades. Her name means “immortality.” 

(See Hyades) 

Ami 

A tribal people of Taiwan, whose flood story shares details in common with deluge accounts in other parts of the world. As explained by John Canon MacCullow: “They say at that time [in the remote past] the mountains crumbled down, the Earth gaped, and from the fissure a hot spring gushed forth, which flooded the whole face of the Earth. Few living things survived the inundation.” The Tsuwo version describes birds dropping many thousands of stones into the cataclysm, suggesting a meteor bombardment. The only persons to survive were a brother and sister, whose responsibility it was to repopulate the planet. 

Their first offspring were living abortions, which became fish and crabs, because the pair committed the sin of incest without asking dispensation from the sun-god. Having angered him, they applied to the moon-goddess. She forgave them, and the woman gave birth to a stone, from which sprang new generations of mankind. In this final detail of the Ami deluge myth is the rebirth of humanity from a stone, the same theme encountered in Greek myth and numerous other flood accounts around the world. 

(See Asteroid Theory, Deucalion)

Amimitl 

“The Harpoon” or “Harpooner,” a title applied to the Aztec god of the sea, Atlahua. His name is an apparent derivative of Atlas. He was also known as “He Who Divides the Waters” and “Inventor of the Trident,” both of which clearly define Atlantean associations. Plato told how the sea-god Poseidon “divided the waters from the land” to create Atlantis. Moreover, the trident was Poseidon’s emblem of maritime power. Brundage reports that Atlahua was “venerated in a temple on the legendary island of Aztlan,” Atlantis, obviously enough (93). Remarkably, the ancient Egyptians remembered the Mesentiu, “The Harpooners,” a culture-bearing people who arrived by sea from the Distant West to establish dynastic civilization at the Nile Delta. 

Amma 

In Yoruba and Benin traditions, she was among the few royal survivors of a great flood when the Atlantic Ocean overflowed very long ago. Amma arrived safely on the shores of West Africa, where she became the first ruler.

Ammianus Marcellinus 

A fourth-century Roman historian who classified the destruction of Atlantis as a chasmatiae, a natural disaster in which seismic violence breaks open great fissures in the Earth to swallow large tracts of territory during a single event. 

Ampheres 

One of the 10 original Atlantean kings listed by Plato (in Kritias). His name means “he who encompasses,” or “fitted or joined on both sides,” suggestive of a power center located midway between Western Europe and the Outer Continent of the Americas, such as the Azore Islands, where possible Atlantean remains have been found. Ampheres might be linked to the amphora, or drinking vessel of King Gradlon, king of Ys, in Brittany’s pre-Christian tradition of a sunken island. 

(See Azores, Outer Continent)

Amphictyonies 

Term for political confederations of sometimes large kingdoms in classical Greece, derived from “Amphictyon,” son of Deucalion and Pyrrha, the couple who survived the Great Flood. Deucalion was a nephew of Atlas and, therefore, an Atlantean. Amphictyon helped reestablish civilization by reading omens, particularly in dreams. He was also the first post-deluge survivor to mix water and wine, which means he preserved the antediluvian Dionysiac mystery religion in Greece. The amphictyonies reflect not only his name, but the political organization of Atlantean civilization, which was a confederation of kingdoms, as described by Plato in Timaeus and Kritias.

A-Mu-Ra-Ca 

In the early 16th century, when they first walked ashore at what is now Colombia, the Spaniards were informed by their Indian hosts that they had appeared in “the Land of A-Mu-Ra-Ca.” Bearing the royal title, “Serpent,” A-Mu-Ra-Ca, they said, was a bearded white man not unlike the Conquistadors themselves. He had long ago arrived after a terrible flood out at sea forced him and his followers to seek refuge. He afterward taught the natives the benefits of agriculture, medicine, and religion, then built the first of several stone cities. A-Mu-Ra-Ca’s resemblance to the “Plumed Serpent,” known by the identical name to the northerly Mayas and Aztecs, means that the same set of Old World culture-bearers arrived throughout the Americas. 

It suggests, too, that the name given to the New World did not derive from a contemporary Italian mapmaker, but rather the Atlantean flood hero. The Europeans did not use native names for lands they conquered, because they sought to lend greater legitimacy to their New World holdings by rechristening them with Old World names. Thus, the Atlanto-Colombian “A-Mu-Ra-Ca” was changed to the “America” of Amerigo Vespucci for political reasons. It does indeed seem strange that the New World would have been christened after the first name of the cartographer. Supporting the indigenous provenance of “America,” Columbus himself, on his third voyage to the New World, met Indian natives who introduced themselves as “Americos” (Jimenez and Graeber, 67). The same tribe was identified by Alonso de Ojeda on his second voyage to Hispaniola. Moreover, the “land of perpetual wind,” reference to a mountain range in the province of Chantoles, between Juigalpa and Liberdad, in Nicaragua, was known to the Mayas as “Amerisque,” and so recorded in the sailing logs of Columbus, as well as the writings of Vespucci. 

Intriguingly, A-Mu-Ra-Ca appears to mean “Ra’s Serpent from Mu.” Ca (“Serpent”) describes a powerful wise man, most likely a priest-king. The appearance of Ra, the Egyptian sun-god, is hardly less amazing than that of Mu, the Pacific Ocean land said to have perished in a natural catastrophe before the destruction of Atlantis. 

(See Mu)

A-Mu-ru 

In Colombian native traditions, the great oceanic kingdom destroyed by a natural catastrophe from which the culture hero, A-Mu-Ra-Ca, led his followers to South America. In Akkadian, the language of Sumer’s Semitic conquerors at the close of the third millennium B.C., A-Mu-ru means “Western Lands.” The name, in both Colombian Muysica and Akkadian, refers to the lost Pacific Ocean civilization of Mu. (See Mu) 

An 

In Sumerian tradition (circa 3500 to 2500 B.C.), a capital city on the island of Atu, which was overwhelmed by a cataclysmic deluge.

Andros Platform 

Andros is the largest of the Bahama Islands, south of Bimini, where an underwater feature discovered in 1969 has been associated with Atlantean civilization ever since. Floridians Dr. Gregory Little and his wife, Lora, found a sunken site in Nicholls Town Bay, near the extreme northeast end of Andros 34 years later. They learned of its general position from a former dive operator, Dino Keller, who claimed to have navigated his boat inside a coral reef usually approached on the outside. There, in 1992, Keller observed a large structure similar to the so-called “Bimini Wall,” under some 10 feet of water. 

Following Keller’s directions, in March, 2003, Dr. Little snorkeled about 600 yards from shore to find a 1,375-foot long, 150-foot wide arrangement of cyclopean blocks in three well-ordered sloping tiers interspersed by two bands of smaller stones. Although standing 15 feet beneath the surface, its top section is 10 feet deep, as described by Keller. The large stones comprising the tiers average 25 × 30 feet, and 2 feet thick. Each of the three tiers is 50 feet wide. Some suggestion of a ramp was discerned leading from the floor of the harbor lagoon to the top of the platform. 

The feature’s regular appearance and almost uniformly square-cut blocks, given its location at a natural harbor in the North Atlantic Current, suggest it may have been a quay, breakwater, or port facility of some kind. Underscoring this characterization, together with the ramp, are a number of 5-inch wide and deep rectangles resembling post-holes cut into some of the cyclopean stones just below the uppermost tier. These holes may have held mooring pylons used to tie up docked ships. Most if not all of the blocks themselves appear to have been quarried from local beach rock and deliberately set in place, a marine construction practice common in the ancient Old World. 

Dr. Little believes the formation could only have been built 10,000 years ago, when sea levels were low enough for its creation. But archaeologists are certain that nothing of the kind existed in the post glacial epoch. Sea levels would have dropped sufficiently, however, between 1600 and 1500 B.C., during the middle to late Bronze Age—a far more likely period for construction, if only because similar harbor works were already in use throughout the eastern Mediterranean by that time. Moreover, Lake Superior copper mining was simultaneously nearing the zenith of its output. A port located off the North American coast, situated in the heart of the North Atlantic Current, would have been a valuable asset for freighters carrying cargos of mined copper back to their headquarters in Atlantis. 

An Atlantean connection is, after all, suggested in the Andros platform’s six alternating bands of stone: 6 was the sacred numeral of Atlantis, whose city planners incorporated the holy number in the capital’s alternating stone walls, according to Plato’s description of the sunken civilization. 

(See Bimini Road, Kritias)

Annals of Cuauhtitlan 

An Aztec chronicle of earliest Mesoamerican beginnings, from when the first civilizers arrived on the eastern shores of Mexico after a destructive flood. “For fifty two years the waters lasted,” it reports. “Thus, they [an ancestral people] perished. They were swallowed by the waters, and their souls became fish. The heavens collapsed upon them, and in a single day they perished. All the mountains perished under the sea.”

These “Annals” compare with the Babylonian deluge story of Ishtar (the Sumerian Inanna), wherein the goddess laments how her people were “changed into fish” by a great flood that overwhelmed a former kingdom. So too, the Aztecs choose virtually the same words Plato used to describe the destruction of Atlantis “in a single day and night.” That “the heavens collapsed upon them” also suggests a celestial event as part of the Deluge. 

(See Asteroid Theory, Berosus, Inanna)

Annwn 

From the Brythonic an (“abyss”) and dwfn (“world”), known throughout Celtic myth as “Land Under Wave,” or the “Revolving Castle” (Caer Sidi); formerly a fortified island of great natural beauty with freshwater streams and a circular shaped city, at the center of which was a magic cauldron of immortality. These details clearly point to Atlantis, while Annwn’s cauldron is a pre-Christian reference to the Holy Grail—another legendary link with the sunken civilization

Antaeus 

Possibly a pre-Platonic mythological rendering of Greek victory over the forces of Atlantis. Like Atlas, Antaeus was a Titan, the son of Poseidon and Gaia (Kleito, described as the mother of Atlas in Kritias, was likewise an Earth Mother goddess). Similar to the imperialist Atlanteans, he was everywhere invincible, until Heracles overcame him on the Atlantic shores of North Africa, fronting the position of Atlantis, “beyond the Pillars of Heracles,” according to Plato. Archaeological finds throughout Atlantic coastal Morocco reveal consistent themes related to Heracles. Also, a similarity appears to exist between the names Antaeus and Atlas. 

(See Atlas, Kleito)

Anubis 

Greek for a funeral-god known to the Egyptians as Anpu. Although most Egyptologists describe him as jackal-headed, his title, “The Great Dog,” demonstrates he was canine cephalic. And, like the seeing-eye dog, Anubis loyally guided the recently deceased through the darkness of death. He was a spirit-guide, who comforted the ba, or soul, leading it to the Otherworld. Prayed to as “The Westerner,” Anubis was said to have “written annals from before the flood” which destroyed his island-home in the Distant West, from whence he arrived to reestablish his worship in Egypt. He was also known as the “Great Five,” the sacred numeral of Atlantis, according to Plato. Hence, the funeral rites associated with his divinity became Egyptian mortuary practices after their importation from the sunken civilization. 

(See Plato)

Apaturia 

“The Gathering of the Clans,” an ancient Greek religious festival lasting three days and staged every year, during which the phratria, or various clans of Attica, met to discuss national affairs, celebrate their common culture, and publicly present children born since the previous Apaturia. The name means “shared relationship,” underscoring the Greek heritage shared with all the tribal groups of Ionia. In his account of Atlantis (Timaeus), Plato wrote, “Now, the day was that day, the third of the festival of Apaturia, which is called the Registration of Youth (the Koureotis), at which, according to custom, our parents gave prizes for recitations, and the poems of several poets were recited by us boys.” One youth, Amynander, makes a speech in praise of Solon, which begins the story of Atlantis, as it was brought to Greece from Egypt by the great Athenian law-giver. 

Whether the tale was, in fact, recounted at each Koureotis (“Shearing Day,” a ceremonial haircut; the last day of the festival and its climax) or Plato merely used the occasion as a related backdrop for his narrative, the Apaturia made an altogether appropriate setting for celebrating victory over the invading Atlanteans. It was an annual affair of national patriotism, in which the common greatness of the Greeks was honored. Interestingly, the previous day was known as Anarrhysis, or “the Day of Rescue.” Nothing beyond its provocative name survives, but it may have been a commemoration of survivors from the Atlantean disaster. Moreover, the Apaturia was held in honor of Dionysus, whose myth portrays the god of rebirth as a culture-bearer following some catastrophic flood. Each Apaturia took place during the harvest time of Pyanepsion (the “Bean Month”), in late October/early November; according to the Egyptians, Atlantis was defeated by the Greeks and destroyed by a cataclysm of nature in their corresponding month of Aethyr (late October/early November). 

(See Plato, Solon, Timaeus)

Arallu 

In Babylonian tradition (circa 2100 B.C.), a great, mountainous island in the Distant West, where freshwater springs and a year-round temperate climate were enjoyed by the spiritually enlightened inhabitants. Arallu was the Babylonian version of Atlantis. 

Arianrhod 

Or Caer Arianrhod, the Celtic “Fortress of the Silver Wheel,” referring to the concentric walls of Atlantis decorated, according to Plato, with precious metals. In some versions of her myth, Arianrhod was a woman who was responsible for the sinking of Caer Arianrhod, a Brythonic legend common along the Carnarvon coast, where a reef out at sea is associated with the remains of her sunken castle. According to Book I of Taliesin, a medieval collection of Welsh traditions with deeply prehistoric roots, “There is a caer of defense (a fortified city) under the ocean’s wave.” Artists and magicians went to Caer Arianrhod for the most advanced instruction, a Welsh recollection of the sophisticated civilization universally associated with Atlantis.

Arnobious Afer 

A Christian rhetorician and early Church founder famous for dramatizing the fate of Atlantis in his sermons as a warning against the moral corruption of society. His use of the sunken civilization as an historic object lesson illuminates late third century Roman thought, because it demonstrates the general acceptance of Atlantis as a real place. 

Asteroid Theory 

G.R. Corli, a French astronomer in 1785, was the first researcher to conclude that the fragment of a passing comet collided with the Earth to destroy Atlantis. The earliest thorough investigation of the Atlantis Problem was begun nearly 100 years later by the father of Atlantology, Ignatius Donnelly. His second book on the subject, Ragnarok: Age of Fire and Gravel (1884), proposed that the island civilization had been annihilated by a comet’s collision with the Earth. At a time when established scientists did not even recognize the existence of meteorites, his speculation was roundly dismissed as untenable fantasy. He was supported by only a few contemporary thinkers, such as the Russian physicist Sergi Basinsky, who argued that a meteor impact with the Earth had been great enough for the simultaneous destruction of Atlantis and rise of Australia. 

But in the 1920s and 30s, Donnelly’s theory was revived and supported by the German physicist, Hanns Hoerbiger, whose controversial “Cosmic Ice” paradigm included the Atlantean catastrophe as the result of Earth’s impact with a cometary fragment of frozen debris. His British contemporary, the influential publisher, Comyns Beaumont, had already come to the same conclusion independently. During the post-World War II era, Hoerbiger was championed by another well known Austrian researcher, H.S. Bellamy. Meanwhile, Beaumont’s work was taken over entirely by Immanuel Velikovsky in his famous Worlds in Collision (1950), which elaborated on the possibility of a celestial impact as responsible for the sudden extinction of a pre-Flood civilization.

As intriguingly or even as plausibly as these catastrophists argued, their proofs were largely inferential. But the extraterrestrial theory began to find persuasive material evidence in 1964, when a German rocket-engineer, Otto Muck, announced his findings of twin, deep-sea holes in the ocean floor. They were caused by a small asteroid that split in half and set off a chain reaction of geologic violence along the length of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a series of subsurface volcanoes, to which the island of Atlantis was connected.

Athanasius Kircher’s 17th-century map of Atlantis. Photograph by Wayne May

In the late 1980s and early 90s, astronomers Victor Clube and Bill Napier affirmed an asteroidal or meteoric explanation for the destruction of Atlantis. They demonstrated, however, the greater likelihood of a virtual Earth bombardment, or “fire from heaven,” as our planet passed through or near a cloud of large debris that showered down dozens or even hundreds of meteoritic materials, as opposed to Muck’s single collision.

Particularly since the publication of Muck’s convincing evidence, leading scholars—such as the world’s foremost authority on Halley’ Comet, Dr. M.M. Kamiensky (member of the Polish Academy of Sciences); Professor N. Bonev (Bulgarian astronomer at the University of Sofia); and Edgerton Sykes (the most important Atlantologist of the post-World War II era)—believed the final destruction of Atlantis was caused by an extraterrestrial impact or series of impacts. Preceding these scientific investigations by thousands of years are the numerous traditions of a great deluge caused by some celestial event, recounted in societies on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Many, if not most, of these worldwide folk memories invariably link a heaven sent cataclysm with the Flood. Beginning with the first complete account of Atlantis, Plato’s Timaeus, the fall of an extraterrestrial object foreshadows the island’s destruction when Ponchis, the Egyptian narrator of the story, tells Solon, the visiting Greek statesman, about “a declination of the bodies moving around the Earth and in the heavens, and a great conflagration of things upon the Earth recurring at long intervals of time.”

Inscriptions on the walls of Medinet Habu (Upper Nile Valley), the “Victory Temple” of Pharaoh Ramses III, tell how the Atlantean invaders of Egypt were destroyed: “The shooting-star was terrible in pursuit of them,” before their island went under the sea. Ibrahim ben Ebn Wauff Shah, Abu Zeyd el Balkhy, and other Arab historians used the story of Surid, the ruler of an antediluvian kingdom, to explain that the Great Flood was caused when a “planet” collided with the Earth. 

In North America, the Cherokee Indians remembered Unadatsug, a “group” of stars—the Pleiades—one of whom, “creating a fiery tail, fell to Earth. Where it landed, a palm tree grew up, and the fallen star itself transformed into an old man, who warned of coming floods.” As the modern commentator, Jobes, has written of Unadatsug, “The fall of one star may be connected with a Deluge story; possibly the fall of a Taurid meteor is echoed here.”

A complimentary version occurs in the Jewish Talmud: “When the Holy One, blessed be He, wished to bring the Deluge upon the world, He took two stars out of the Pleiades.” Similar accounts may be found among the Quiche Maya of the Lowland Yucatan, the Muysica of Colombia, the Arawak Indians of Venezuela, the Aztecs at Cholula, the classical Greeks, and so on.

Asterope 

One of the Pleiades, an Atlantis, daughter of Atlas by Pleione. 

Astrology 

Literally, the “language of the stars,” from the Greek logos astra, a scientific analysis of the mathematical relationships linking human character and the prediction of future events to positions and movements of the heavenly bodies. In the ancient world, astrology and astronomy (the observation of celestial events) comprised a single discipline. They finally split apart only in the early 19th century, when astrology was banished by rationalists to the realms of metaphysics or superstition. 

Astrology undoubtedly emerged after and from astronomy, when correspondences between cosmic activity and human behavior were first noticed. This interrelationship was embodied in the mythic personality of Atlas, the founder of both sciences. In Greek myth, he was the first astronomer-astrologer. Indeed, his capital city, Atlantis, was the child (“Daughter of Atlas”) of his astronomical character, in that its layout of concentric rings was a reflection of the cosmic order.

The city and the Titan were architectural and mythic expressions, respectively, of the Atlanteans’ own founding of and excellence in astronomy-astrology, as evidenced by the numerous stone structures that still survive in what was once the Atlantean sphere of influence. Many of these monuments (Britain’s Stonehenge, Ireland’s New Grange, America’s Poverty Point, etc.) not only conform to the era and construction styles of the Atlanteans, but were skillfully aligned with significant cosmic orientations and built to compute often sophisticated celestial data.

At 

Found in cultures around the world where traditions of Atlantis-like experiences have been preserved in folk memory, and usually denoting a sacred mountain (from the Mount Atlas of Atlantis), often volcanic and sometimes symbolized by a holy altar, such as the Samoan Atua. Throughout the prehistoric New World of the Americas,At invariably defines an eastern location (Aztlan, etc.), while, in Old World traditions, it is associated with western places (Atum, etc.)—appropriately enough, because mid-ocean culture-bearers sailed from Atlantis to both east and west. As such, in numerous cultures around the world, At is a prefix, a word, or a name in itself, defining a sacred mountain associated with ancestral origins, commonly after a world-class deluge.

Ata 

An extinct volcanic mountain of the Tongatapu group in the southwest Pacific, and revered by the Tonga islanders as a natural memorial to red-haired, fair skinned gods who arrived long ago to somehow “bless” the natives.

At-ach-u-chu 

The premiere founding father of Andean civilization, revered from deeply prehistoric times to the Spanish Conquest of the 16th century. He was consistently described as the tall, red-haired, bearded, fair-skinned culture-bearer from a distant land in the East who arrived on the shores of Lake Titicaca after surviving some terrible deluge. The Peruvian natives called him “The Teacher of all Things,” and knew him as the man who established the arts of civilization in South America, including agriculture, religion, astronomy, weights and measures, social organization, and government. 

He was the elder of five brothers, known collectively as Viracochas, or “white men.” At-ach-u-chu is better remembered by his title, Kontiki-Viracocha, or “White Man of the Sea Foam”; in other words, he was a foreigner who arrived by ship, “sea foam” being a poetic description of its bow wave. All features of this supremely important figure in Andean tradition, beginning with the At in the head of his name, clearly define him as the leader of survivors from the final destruction of Atlantis, who reestablished themselves by creating a hybrid civilization, a mix of local cultures with Atlantean technology, in Peru and Bolivia.

At-ach-u-chu was said to have moved on after a few years, traveling to the west. A curious variation of this folk memory from Nazca, site of the great lines and effigies seen properly only from altitude, has him rising into the air and flying toward the setting sun. Other than this last suggestion of prehistoric aviation, At-ach-u-chu’s resemblance to similarly fair-faced culture-bearers appearing after a great natural disaster in the Atlantic Ocean are common throughout the Americas, from the Menominee Indians of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, to the Aztecs’ Quetzalcoatl and the Mayas’ Kukulcan. These related founding heroes from over the sea apparently represent the impact native peoples experienced from the large-scale arrival of Atlantis refugees. 

The South American At-ach-u-chu bears a striking resemblance to Atcha, remembered by the ancient Egyptians as a far-off, splendid, but vanished city echoing lost Atlantis. Here At-ach-u-chu could mean “The Man from Atcha (Atlantis).”

Ataentsik 

The ancestor-hero of the Algonquian Passamaquoddy Indians, Ataentsik arrived on the eastern shores of Turtle Island (North America) from “the first island in the sea.” His name, function as a founding father, and origin define him as an Atlantean visitor. Among the Hurons, however, Ataensik is the name of “Sky Woman,” who, perishing, gave life to all creatures. 

Atagi 

Members of a tiny group of highly select and enigmatic Shinto priests, said to preserve the most deeply ancient wisdom from Japanese prehistory, as embodied in their ceremonial robes, which are primitively cut to deliberately suggest profound age. Their arcane rituals open with the members of the priesthood blowing conch-shell trumpets, the only such example in all Japan. The Atagi philological resemblance to “Atlantis,” their emphasis on the great antiquity of their cult, and its unique sea-oriented symbolism bespeak the continuing survival of early Atlantean religious influences in Japan.

Atago 

A hill lying at the center of Tokyo is described in myth as the place where the gods brought civilization to Japan. 

(See Atagi, Atami) 

Ataka 

Described in the Harris Papyrus, a 133-foot long document dated April 14 (Epiphi 6), circa 1180 B.C., summarizing in detail the political, cultural, religious, and military accomplishments of Ramses III, Pharaoh of the XX Dynasty, who defended his kingdom from invading “Sea Peoples” identified with Plato’s Atlanteans. After their defeat, he declares in the Harris Papyrus, “I sent out an expedition to the land of Ataka for the great foundries of copper which are in that place. Our transport ships were loaded. Having located the foundries loaded with metal, loaded as myriads upon our ships, they sailed back to Egypt, arriving safely. The cargo was piled in stores as hundreds of thousands of the color of gold. I let the people see them like marvels.”

Ataka appears to be an Egyptian linguistic inflection of the Atlanteans’ original name (the prefix “At” often designated Atlantean holdings) for Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, in North America, where they engaged in extensive copper mining. Plato describes them as preeminent miners of the world’s highest-grade copper (orichalcum). Ramses mentions “foundries,” implying the large-scale mining operations that went on in Ataka, and which certainly existed throughout the Upper Great Lakes area up until his time, when they were abruptly and coincidentally shut down. The great quantities of copper his expedition took from Ataka required transport ships sailing a great, hazardous distance (they returned “safely”), while their “color of gold” suggests Plato’s gold-like orichalcum and Michigan’s high-grade copper. Only from the Upper Peninsula could Ramses have obtained such large amounts of exceptional copper. The Egyptians were well accustomed to seeing riches of all kinds, but the prodigious stores of the world’s best copper made even them “marvel.”

It would appear that, after the Atlanteans’ defeat and capture by Ramses, they divulged the location of their copper sources in North America. His transports ventured a transatlantic crossing, “located the foundries loaded with metal, loaded as myriads upon our ships, they sailed back to Egypt.” He does not indicate any trade negotiations or military operations in Ataka, but simple seizure of the vast amounts of copper, as though there was no one there with whom to barter or fight. Historians know that at this time, the early 12th century B.C., the Michigan mines were likewise abandoned. With the sudden, simultaneous collapse of Atlantean Civilization, their copper treasure was easy pickings for the victorious Egyptians. 

In the name Ataka may survive the closest reference to the Atlanteans’ copper mining region in the Upper Great Lakes.

Atala 

“The White Island” described in the great Indian epic Mahabharata and in the epic poems, the Puranas, as the mountainous homeland of a powerful and highly civilized race located in “the Western Sea” on the other side of the world from India. Vishnu Purana located Atala “on the seventh zone” of heat, which corresponds to 24 to 28 degrees latitude, on a line with the Canary Islands. Mahabharata likewise locates Atala, “an island of great splendor,” in the North Atlantic, where its inhabitants worshiped Narayana. This was the “Son of the Waters”and “the blessed supporter” (Atlas, “the supporter”), who was later responsible for a world-flood. Atala itself sank in a violent storm. All this unquestionably bespeaks Atlantis and its destruction. In Hindu myth, Atala was the center of seven realms. “They are embellished with the magnificent palaces in which dwell great snake-gods [compare with Valum, “Kingdom of Serpents,” from which Votan, the Quiche Mayas’ founding father, arrived in Middle America]—and where the sons of Danu are happy. There are beautiful groves and streams and lakes.” This description mirrors Plato’s description of Atlantis in Kritias.

The six regions surrounding Atala correspond to another Atlantean allegory, the Tower of Babel, which “was built after the model city in the sphere of Saturn.” Saturn, or Kronos, was synonymous for the Atlantic Ocean in Greek and Roman myth. Moreover, the fifth-century Greek poet Nonnus described “Atlas, in the enclosure of the Seven Zones.” Among the sacred numerals of Atlantis, Seven signified the completion of cycles, while Six stood for the perfection of human forms. “The sons of Danu” recur in other parts of the world directly affected by the Atlantis experience, such as the Irish Tuatha da Danann (“the Followers of Danu”) and the Dananns (the sons of Danaus, himself a son of Poseidon, brother of Atlas, and the founder of civilized Greece). Berber traditions likewise describe Atala as an island of miners, wealthy in gold, silver, copper, and tin. Not content with these riches, they launched a military invasion that swept eastward across North Africa, a conquest cut short by a flood that drowned their homeland, the same Atlantean War and inundation described by Plato. The Berbers predicted that Atala will one day rise to the surface of the sea that long ago overwhelmed it. Berber tribesmen of the Shott el Hameina, in Tunisia, still refer to themselves as the “Sons of the Source, Atala.” A Norse version of Atala was Landvidi, similarly known as the “White Land.”

On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, in the American South, Atala is the word for “mountain” among the Cherokee Indians, who may have used it to describe a 40-foot high pyramid found in Georgia. Etowah Mounds is today an archaeological park including a prehistoric ceremonial center of large earthen temple-mounds built around 900 A.D., and abandoned in the early part of the 14th century, but whose earliest origins are still undetermined. The Cherokee also preserve a deluge legend that tells of survivors arriving on the shores of Turtle Island (North America) from “a great lodge” drowned in the Eastern Sea. The survival of this term, Atala, and its undeniably Atlantean details among peoples as widely separated as India, Morocco, and Georgia comprise persuasive evidence on behalf of a historic Atlantis.

Atalanta 

Modern Talanto, a rocky islet west of the entrance to the Greek port city of Piraeus. Also the name of another Greek island in the fjord of Euboea, whose name was changed to Talandonisi. 

In Greek myth, Atalanta was a virgin huntress, who vowed to marry the man able to beat her in a foot race. There were many suitors, but she outran them all, save Hippomenes, who cunningly dropped three golden apples, one by one, which, in her desire for the fruit, she stopped to pick up, thereby forfeiting her victory and virginity. Almost immediately after this contest, however, she and Hippomenes incurred the wrath of Zeus by copulating in the god’s sacred precinct. He turned the couple into a lioness and a lion. Their son, Parthenopaeus, grew up to become a leader of the Argives (one of the Seven Against Thebes). 

While outwardly the story of Atalanta appears to have nothing to do with Atlantis, Rene Guenon wrote that the three golden apples dropped by Hippomenes were from the Hesperides, the three daughters of Atlas (that is, Atlantids or “Atlantises”). Guenon also concludes that Atalanta’s role as heroine of the Caledonian bear hunt signified change from a solstitial to an equinoctial method of measuring time; from reckoning the starting point of the annual cycle with the appearance of the Pleiades (Hesperides), instead of the Great Bear, thus implying the ascendancy of Atlantean civilization over a former culture.

The Atlantean character of Atalanta’s name and her punishment at the hands of Zeus (who likewise condemned the Atlanteans in Plato’s version for their immorality) parallel Atlantis in a garbled mythic tradition. Her husband, Hippomenes, is likely Atlantean as well, because at least some names in Plato’s account are similarly equine: Elasippos (“Knightly Horse-Rider,” one of the original 10 Atlantean kings), Leukippe (“White Mare,” the first lady of Atlantis), and so on. Like all the other daughters of Atlas, Atalanta gave birth to a foremost culture bearer, signifying the Atlanteans who voyaged to other lands, where they became the progenitors of new societies.

Atalanta: A Story of Atlantis 

A 1940s musical by British composer Sir Gerald Hargreaves, who also wrote the libretto and designed its lavish sets. The story is set in the Atlantean court, where two factions of aristocrats argue for and against war. At the height of their debate, the Greek hero, Achilles, fresh from his triumph over the Trojans, arrives to plea for peace. But a warlike faction carries the day, and he flees with his lover, the princess Atalanta, as Atlantis sinks beneath the sea, as punishment by the gods. 

Atali 

In Cherokee tradition, the place from which their ancestors disbursed throughout the world immediately after the Great Flood that brought a former age to a close.

Atalya 

An important proof for Atlantis found in various parts of the world, specifically and appropriately, within the Atlantean sphere of influence. “Italy” is a derivation of its more ancient name, used even in late Roman times, “Italia”—a corruption of “Atalya,” or “Land of Atlas,” the eponymous king of Atlantis, who likewise brought civilization to the Italian peninsula. An alternative but closely related Roman myth describes the origin of “Italy” from the country’s earliest ruler, Italus, a brother of Atlas. In Kritias, Plato mentions that the Atlanteans occupied Etruria, the homeland of the Etruscans in western Italy. 

Atalya is also the name of an ancient, ceremonial mound in Biarritz. The Basque still revere this mound as symbolic of the Great Ancestral Mountain in the sea, from which their seafaring forebears traveled into the Bay of Biscay after the sinking of “the Green Isle.”

Atalya appears on the “Opposite Continent” among the Aztecs, who similarly venerated a holy mountain in the Valley of Mexico by the same name. Atalaia is the name of a small Quechua Indian town in the High Andes about one day’s journey from Cuzco, formerly the capital of the Inca Empire. A pre-Inca civilization was the Chavin de Huantar, and in the ruins of Atalya, one of its early cities, archaeologists found important collections of ancient ceramics. Chavin de Huantar began suddenly after 1200 B.C., coinciding with the final destruction of Atlantis. Some survivors apparently migrated to Peru, where they established this ceremonial center of Atalya.

Near Lake Atitlan, in Guatemala, stands a round, Atlantean-style tower in a ruined fortress known as Atalaya. Similarly, the nuraghe stone towers of the Balearic Isles in the western Mediterranean are talayots, “a diminutive of Atalaya, meaning ‘Giant’s Burrow’” (Tyndale, quoted in Blackett). Southern Portugal was the Atlantean kingdom of Elasippos, featuring Bronze Age tumuli, or domed tombs, dating to the height of Atlantean civilization (1500 to 1200 B.C.). Atalya is a Kritias-like mountainous valley found at Gran Canaria, one of the Canary Islands, anciently the Atlantean kingdom of Diaprepes.

Bolivia’s Silustani, with its enigmatic stone circle and tower. 

Photograph by William Donato.

Atami-san 

Mt. Atami, on the northeastern coast of Japan’s Izu-hanto, the Izu Peninsula (Shizuoka prefecture ken, Honshu), facing Sagami-nada (the Gulf of Sagami), an enormous but extinct volcano, the ancient source from which the city of Atami, built within the crater, derives its name. Almost half sunk into the sea, Atami-san presents an Atlantean appearance.

Atami was an important resort as early as the fifth century A.D., although Neolithic finds in the crater prove the site has been occupied from much earlier times, when the name originated. “Atami,” an Atlantean linguistic survivor, has no meaning in the Japanese language.

Atana 

Meaning a “cultic center” or “sacred site” in Linear B, Atana is a linguistic term archaeologists use to describe a Greek language spoken on the island of Crete after 1500 to about 1200 B.C. “Atana” is comparable to sacred places around the world identified with variants of “Atlantis.” 

Atanua 

The Marquesans’ memory of Atlantis, described in their oral epic “Te Vanana na Tanaoa”: “Atanua was beautiful and good, adorned with riches very great. Atanua was fair, very rich and soft. Atanua produced abundantly of living things. Atea [and his brothers] dwelt as kings in the most beautiful palaces supported on thrones. They ruled the space of heaven and the large, entire sky and all the powers thereof [astrology]. The first lords dwelling on high. Oh, throne placed in the middle of the upper heavens! The great lord Atea established in love to love the fair Atanua. A woman of great wealth is Atanua. From within Atea came forth Ono [a terrible sound, the explosion of Mt. Atlas erupting]. Atea produces the very hot fire.”

These lines from “Te Vanana na Tanaoa” vividly compare with Plato’s description of Atlantis and its destruction. Atea’s, like that of Atlas’s association with a volcanic mountain, was recognized by the early 20th-century anthropologist Abraham Fornander: “In this sense, it would appropriately convey the idea of the lurid light which accompanies an eruption of the volcano.”

Atanum 

The Indian name for a river in Washington State. It means “water by the long mountain.” Here, as elsewhere throughout the world, a name appears among a native people, combining the “At” prefix to describe a mountain bounded by water. In this instance, “Atanum” suggests the ancient Egyptian Atum (god of the Primal Mound) and/or Nun (the sea-god who sank it), both intimately connected with the Egyptian version of the Atlantis story. 

Atao 

According to archaeo-linguists, a masculine name in Linear A,the language spoken by the Minoans, who raised a great civilization on Crete from 3000 to 1500 B.C. “Atao” may be the Minoan version of the Greek “Atlas,” the eponymous Titan of Atlantis.

Atapaska 

The Ascohimi Indians’ flood-hero, who arrived on the shores of North America after some oceanic catastrophe. They relate that the world was deluged as the result of a powerful earthquake, during which the air became extremely hot, followed by a prolonged period of intense cold. Their tribal memory accurately describes a celestial collision of a comet or associated meteoric debris with the Earth, preceding the after effect of a so-called “dust veil event,” wherein thousands of cubic kilometers of ash are extruded into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight and drastically lowering world temperatures. Just such a catastrophe connected with the final destruction of Atlantis and simultaneous close of the Bronze Age did indeed take place around the start of the 13th century B.C. The Athabascan Indians of Alaska derived their tribal name from their Atlantean ancestor, Atapaska.

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Atara 

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