10 The Atlantis Encyclopedia
versions to North American accounts, beyond to Polynesian and Asian renditions,
accumulatively 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 contempo-
raneous 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 coruler 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, insight-
ful 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 con-
clude 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.