26 The Atlantis Encyclopedia
destroyed by a cataclysm of nature in their corresponding month of Aethyr (late
October/early November).
(See Plato, Solon, Timaeus)Arallu
In Babylonian tradition (circa 2100 B.C.), a great, mountainous island in the
Distant West, where freshwater springs and a year-round temperate climate were
enjoyed by the spiritually enlightened inhabitants. Arallu was the Babylonian ver-
sion of Atlantis.Arianrhod
Or Caer Arianrhod, the Celtic “Fortress of the Silver Wheel,” referring to
the concentric walls of Atlantis decorated, according to Plato, with precious
metals. In some versions of her myth, Arianrhod was a woman who was respon-
sible for the sinking of Caer Arianrhod, a Brythonic legend common along the
Carnarvon coast, where a reef out at sea is associated with the remains of her
sunken castle. According to Book I of Taliesin, a medieval collection of Welsh
traditions with deeply prehistoric roots, “There is a caerof defense (a fortified
city) under the ocean’s wave.” Artists and magicians went to Caer Arianrhod for
the most advanced instruction, a Welsh recollection of the sophisticated civiliza-
tion universally associated with Atlantis.Arnobious Afer
A Christian rhetorician and early Church founder famous for dramatizing the
fate of Atlantis in his sermons as a warning against the moral corruption of society.
His use of the sunken civilization as an historic object lesson illuminates late third-
century Roman thought, because it demonstrates the general acceptance of
Atlantis as a real place.Asteroid Theory
G.R. Corli, a French astronomer in 1785, was the first researcher to conclude
that the fragment of a passing comet collided with the Earth to destroy Atlantis.
The earliest thorough investigation of the Atlantis Problem was begun nearly 100
years later by the father of Atlantology, Ignatius Donnelly. His second book on
the subject, Ragnarok: Age of Fire and Gravel (1884), proposed that the island
civilization had been annihilated by a comet’s collision with the Earth. At a time
when established scientists did not even recognize the existence of meteorites, his
speculation was roundly dismissed as untenable fantasy. He was supported by only
a few contemporary thinkers, such as the Russian physicist Sergi Basinsky, who