202 The Atlantis Encyclopedia
The New Atlantis
A 1629 utopian novel by Francis Bacon, it was the first written discussion of
Atlantis since the fall of classical civilization and probably sparked Athanasius
Kircher’s interest in the subject, when he published his own scientific study of
Atlantis in The Subterranean World, 36 years later. Although a work of fiction, The
New Atlantis came about through excited discussions in contemporary scholarly
circles of reports from travelers to America. They stated that the indigenous
peoples had oral accounts of a land comprising numerous points in common with
Plato’s sunken civilization. The New Atlantis actually incorporates some Atlanto-
American myths Bacon heard repeated in London.
(See Athanasius Kircher)Ngaru
The leading culture hero of Mangaia Island, he was said to have defeated
Miru, the Underworld god, by unleashing a flood so colossal it extinguished the
fires of hell.Nichant
The Gros-Ventre Indians remember Nichant as the god who sent a punishing
“fire from heaven” to burn up sinful humanity. Those who survived were mostly
killed by a global deluge he caused immediately thereafter to extinguish the
conflagration, lest it incinerate the rest of the world.Nina Stahu
In tribal myth, the name of a cavern in which the ancestors of North America’s
Blackfoot Indians sought refuge from the Great Flood. They later emerged
reborn as a new people.
The story of Nina Stahu is the mythic background for kiva rituals, wherein
participants emerge from a subterranean chamber while being doused with
water, as a symbolic reenactment of ancestral survival from the Deluge.Ninella
In Babylonian myth, the name of a mother goddess said to have been worshiped
before the World Flood, in which Ninella perished.