Foreword 7
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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 pub-
lished 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