A GREAT island in the Atlantic opposite the Mediterranean; the remnant of a mighty continent which once reached from the west coast of Africa and Europe to the shores of Central America. The ancient world had a clear tradition of it.
It was utterly destroyed in a day and a nigh by cataclysmic volcanic outbursts and sank beneath the sea with all except a few of its millions of inhabitants.
It was the region where mankind first rose from barbarism to a civilization more advanced than that of ours today.
It became in the course of hundreds of thousands of years a world-conquering nation. It colonized Egypt, the west coast of Africa and Europe, Central America, the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi Valley, the Pacific Coast of South America, the Mediterranean, the Baltic, the Black Sea and the Caspian. It was the cradle of civilization, and the civilization of the ancient world and our civilization today are direct shoots of the Atlantic culture.
The racial memory of Atlantis is found in the legends of the Garden of Eden of the Bible, the Garden of the Hesperides of the Greeks, the Asgard of the Scandinavians, the Tir n'Og of the Celts and in all the legends of a wonderful, mysterious land in which dwelt gods or godlike mortals.
The stories of the Deluge, versions of which are found in the traditions of almost every ancient and modern race, are simply the memory of the stupendous catastrophe which wiped out Atlantis, the tale of which was carried by those who escaped to all the lost land's colonies--and these represented all the civilization of the world at that time.
In the same way the escape of some of the Atlanteans over a narrow land bridge, which connected Atlantis with what is now Brittany, survives in the legends of the Rainbow Bridge Perilous with the razor edge which the Scandinavians believed was the only road to Asgard, the dwelling place of the gods, in the famous Hell's Causway of the religious books of the Middle Ages and in similar legends of the Hindoos, the Mayans and the Turanians.
The gods and goddesses of the ancient Greeks, the Phoenicians, Hindoos and 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.
The religions of Egypt, Peru and that of the Mayans, the vanished race that built the buried cities of Central America, and upon the wrecks of whose civilization the Aztecs built their empire, were the original religion of Atlantis.
The oldest colony formed by Atlantis was Egypt, whose civilization was a provincial reproduction of that of the mother country. The next oldest were those of Peru and Central America.
The Phoenician alphabet, parent of all the European alphabets, was derived from and Atlantis alphabet, which was also conveyed from Atlantis to the Mayans. The symbols and hieroglyphics of both Egypt and the Mayans came from the same source, and so is explained their similarity, to great to be accidental.
Atlantis was the original site of the Indo-European family of nations, as well as the Semitic and possibly the Turanian.
The Atlanteans had full knowledge of electricity, steam and other natural forces. They had also aeroplanes, power ships and explosives. They were prodigious engineers and the first workers of iron. They used gold and silver and a vanished precious metal known as orichalcum in enormous quantities for ornamentation.