52 The Atlantis Encyclopedia
oceanic identity, contrary to some scholars who confine him to Morocco and the
Atlas Mountains.
Plato’s version of Atlas’s descent makes Poseidon, the sea-god, his father,
and Kleito, the native girl of the ocean isle, his mother. These discrepancies are
unimportant, because the significance of myth does not lie in its consistency, but
in its power to describe. The Titan’s transformation into a mountain took place
after he fetched the Golden Apples for Heracles, who temporarily took Atlas’s
place in supporting the sky. He had been condemned to this singular position as
punishment for his leading role in the Titanomachy, an antediluvian struggle
between gods and giants for mastery of the world. But Perseus, Heracles’ com-
panion, took pity on Atlas and turned him into a mountain of stone by showing
him the Gorgon Medusa’s severed head.
This largely Hellenistic myth from early classic or late pre-classic times
added peculiarly Greek elements, which clouded a far older tradition. Even so,
certain details of the original survive in the Titanomachy, the Atlanteans’ bid for
world conquest, of which the depredations of the so-called “Sea Peoples” against
Pharaoh Ramses III’s Egypt, Homer’s Iliad, and Plato’s Atlanto-Athenian War
were but various campaigns of the same conflict.
According to Sumerian scholar Neil Zimmerer, Atlas was indigenously known
in West Africa, where he was remembered as “the king of Atlantis, and fled when
the island sank into the sea. He established a new kingdom in Mauretania.”Atlatonan
The “Daughter of Tlaloc,” a blue-robed virgin ritually drowned as a sacrifice
to the Aztec rain-god. Her fate and philological resemblance to Atlantis, literally,
“Daughter of Atlas,” are too remarkable for coincidence.
(See Tlaloc)A first-century A.D. mosaic at Ostia, the port city of ancient Rome, depicts four Atlases,
representing the cardinal directions, as they support Atlantis, signifying its central
importance in maritime history.