90 The Atlantis Encyclopedia
The Codex Chimal-Popoca
An Aztec version of the Great Flood from which their ancestors arrived on
the eastern shores of Mexico. It reports, in part, “There suddenly arose mountains
the color of fire. The sky drew near to the Earth, and in the space of a day, all was
downed.”The Codex Chimal-Popoca reads almost identically to Plato’s Timaeus
andKritias dialogues, where he states that Atlantis was destroyed “in a single day
and night.”Collins, Andrew
British author of Gateway to Atlantis, in which he identifies the lost civiliza-
tion with Cuba. Five years after its release in 1997, mineral prospectors probing
the waters off the island’s northwest coast claimed to have picked up sonar images
of what appeared to be a sunken city more than 2,000 feet beneath the surface.Coronis
An Atlantis, one of seven daughters born to Atlas and the ocean-nymph Aethra.
Coronis was the mother of Aesculapius by the god of healing, Apollo, after whom
the modern word “scalpel” is derived. The Greeks revered Aesculapius as the
founder of modern medicine. He in turn fathered two sons, Machaon and Podaliris,
who were the earliest physicians after their father, and spread his scientific
principles throughout the world. His only daughter, Hygeia, was the goddess of
health.
This lineage demonstrates an important theme common to all the daughters
of Atlas; namely, that their offspring were the first in their fields of high endeavor
and the progenitors of civilization. Through poetic metaphor, these founding-
father myths preserve national memories of culture-bearers who escaped the
destruction of Atlantis to reestablish civilization in new lands. As such, the story
of Coronis reminded the Greeks that they received the tenets of their medical
science from an Atlantean immigrant.Cosmas
A sixth-century Alexandrian monk who endeavored to prevent his fellow
Christian theologians from anathematizing Plato’s account of Atlantis by drawing
parallels between the Atlantean catastrophe and the biblical flood. Cosmas failed,
and anything about the sunken city was condemned as “demonically inspired,”
along with the rest of classical civilization.