L: Ladon to Lyonesse 173
Lyonesse
In British myth, the “City of Lions” was the capital of a powerful kingdom that
long ago dominated the ocean. Like Plato’s description of Atlantis, Lyonesse was a
high-walled city built on a hill which sank beneath the sea in a single night. Only a
man riding a white horse escaped to the coast at Cornwall. Two families still claim
descent from this lone survivor. The Trevelyan coat-of-arms depicts a white horse
emerging from the waves, just as the Vyvyan version shows a white horse saddled and
ready for her master’s flight. While both families may in fact be direct descendants
of an Atlantean catastrophe, Lyonesse’s white horse connects Leukippe, “White
Mare,” mentioned in Plato’s account as an early inhabitant of Atlantis, with the
White Horse of Uffington, a Bronze Age hill-figure found near Oxford. Tennyson
believed Camelot was synonymous for “the Lost Land of Lyonesse.” Indeed, the
concentric configuration of Atlantis suggests the round-table of Camelot.
In another version of the Cornish story, Lyonesse’s royal refugees sailed
away to reestablish themselves in the Sacred Kingdom of Logres. While the
medieval Saxon Chronicle impossibly dates the sinking of Lyonesse to the late 11th
centuryA.D., its anonymous author nonetheless records that the event occurred
on November 11, a period generally associated with the destruction of Atlantis.
Traditionally, the vanished kingdom is supposed to have sunk between the Isles
of Scilly and the Cornish mainland, about 28 miles of open sea. A dangerous reef,
known as the Seven Stones, traditionally marks the exact position of the capital.
These suggestive formations appear to have helped transfer the story of Atlantis,
recounted by survivors in Britain, to Cornwall.
(See Leukippe)The ruins of Lixus, coastal Morocco, associated with Atlantean king, Autochthones.