I: Iamblichos to Izanagi and Izanami 147
from the gods. Later, the story was transferred to Lake Titicaca and its small island,
which was named Isla del Sol after Maco Capac’s oceanic homeland.
(See Manco Capac, Pu-Un-Runa)
Isle Royale
A Lake Superior island near Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where many
millions of pounds of copper ore were mined by Atlantean entrepreneurs from
3000 B.C. to 1200 B.C.
(See Bronze Age)
Itaba Tahuana
The divine ancestor of Haiti’s Taino natives. He married the four winds, who
bore him two sets of twins, from whom early humanity descended. Most of them
were sinful, so Itaba Tahuana destroyed them with a cataclysmic flood.
This figure is doubtless a folk recollection of the Atlantean catastrophe, complete
with his twin offspring and marriage to the four “winds,” that is to say, the four
cardinal directions, placing him at the center of the world. Even Itaba’s name is an
obvious derivation of “Atlas.”
Italus
According to Plutarch, “some say again that Roma, from whom the city was
so-called, was daughter of Italus and Leucaria.” Italus was the Latin version of
Atlas, while Leucaria was a sea-goddess, one of the Sirens, an inflection of
Leukippe, the first woman of Atlantis. Plato outlined the limits of Atlantean
influence in Europe by extending them to western Italy.
(See Atlas)
Itzamna
The Mayas’ earliest culture-bearer, the “White Man,” who preceded the
arrival of the more famous Kukulcan, or “Feathered Serpent.” The latter appears
to have represented survivors from the final destruction of Atlantis, in 1198 B.C.
Itzamna was the original founder of Mesoamerican civilization. He and his wife,
Ixchel, the “White Lady,” were among immigrants fleeing westward during the
late fourth millennium B.C., when their Atlantean homeland was beset with the first
in a series of four geologic upheavals. In the Maya cosmology, the Chilam Balam,
and Juan Darreygosa’s 16th-century Historia de Zodzil, Itzamna bears the title
“Serpent from the East” and is described as “the first after the flood.” He arrived