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south of Egypt, but another name for Atlantis, according to the Roman scholar,
Pliny the Elder. Memnon said of his own early childhood, “the lily-like Hesperides
raised me far away by the stream of Ocean.” The Hesperides were Atlantises,
daughters of Atlas, who attended the sacred, golden apple tree at the center of
his island kingdom. Having been “raised” by them indicates that Memnon was
indeed a king, a member of the royal house of Atlantis.
At his death, he was mourned by another set of Atlantises, the Pleiades,
daughters of the sea-goddess Pleione, by Atlas. His mother, Eos, or “Dawn,” bore
him in Atlantis, and his father, Tithonus, belonged to the royal house of Troy;
hence, his defense of that doomed kingdom. His followers, the Memnonides, wore
distinctive chest armor emblazoned with the image of a black crow, the animal of
Kronos, a Titan synonymous for the Atlantic Ocean. Even during the Roman era,
the Atlantic was known as “Chronos maris,” the Sea of Kronos.
(See Atlantean War, Hesperides, Kronos, Pleiades)Men Like Gods
A novel about Atlantis by the early 20th-century British author of the better
knownWar of the Worlds and The Time Machine, H.G. Wells.Gerardus Mercator
The 16th-century cartographer and inventor of the modern globe with its
“Mercator lines,” who compared the abundant native flood traditions he heard
firsthand in Mexico with Plato’s account of Atlantis to conclude that the lost
civilization was fact, not fable. Like many of his contemporaries, he identified
America with Atlantis itself.Merlin
Famous as King Arthur’s magician, his Atlantean, or at any rate, Celtic (even
pre-Celtic), origins are widely suspected. The legendary character was probably
modeled on a real-life bard who went mad after the Battle of Ardderyd, in 574 A.D.,
and spent the rest of his life as a hermit in the woods, known for his eccentric genius.
“Merlin” was likely derived from Mabon, the all-powerful Lord of the Animals
known on the Continent as Cernunnos. He is depicted on Denmark’s second-
century Gundestrup Cauldron as a horned stag holding a serpent in one hand and a
golden torc (neck ornament) in the other. These symbols appear to signify mastery
over the forces of death and regeneration: the horns and snake shed their skins to
rejuvenate themselves, while the torc is associated with the eternal light of the sun.
According to Anna Franklin, in her encyclopedic work on world myth, “Some
say Merlin came out of Atlantis, and that he and the other survivors became the
Druid priests of ancient Britain.” Indeed, he was said to have disassembled
Stonehenge and rebuilt it on the Salisbury Plain. His earliest known name,
Myrddin, Celtic for “from the sea,” certainly suggests an Atlantean pedigree.