Today’s post explores a theme of perennial interest to me  –
and perhaps a topic of  ridicule for those outside the submarine circle,
ATLANTIS: the Lost Continent.

Why does the legend of the sunken civilization resonate so strongly with some of us?
For me, it has a powerful subconscious undertow.

It must be because at a subliminal level we know it speaks about our current civilization. We read portents of our impending doom into the connections (actual as well as delusional) that we trace throughout previous epochs and civilizations. It is an eternal parable of edenic perfection and good government in an idyllic golden age which, through hubris, degenerated into a corrupt and fallen civilization that was destroyed in a sudden well-deserved cataclysm.

Other nut-cases and archeo-illogical dreamers have lit the watery way for us, beginning with Plato,  from Ignatius Donnelly and the French madman Antonin Artaud, to Edgar Cayce and H.P. Lovecraft.

Atlantis has fascinated me since I was young—but I became especially obsessed with the legend during my time immersed (submerged?) in the New Age/Occult. I was first made aware of its disturbing psychic implications in The Peyote Dance: A Voyage to the Land of the Tarahumaras by Artaud.

There are cases to be made for Thera/Santorini as the center of the maritime empire (Gavin Menzies even puts forth a theory of Minoan  interaction with bronze-age Meso-American cultures) but I am particularly interested in the Yucatan/Caribbean strands of Atlantis lore (as was Lovecraft, who placed the sunken city off the Yucatan in his epic tale The Temple), which seems to be corroborated by topographical anomalies off the southern Cuban coast.
The Bermuda Triangle hypothesis is likewise presented in this fantastic book for the chosen few: The Bible and the Bermuda Triangle.

Here is a poem I wrote in the late 1980’s about the subject.
It was inspired by an illustration from a 1950’s Time/Life history book by Alton Tobey

Aztlan

The Aztecs also claimed to have come originally from Aztlan…
Their very name, Aztecs, was derived from Aztlan.
[Bancroft’s Native Races, vol. V]

 Atlantis is rising, the sin unforgiven
by blood from the hearts which the idols were given.
Aquarian nexus of mystic tradition:
pre-Maya, pre-Toltec, Aztlan: the Origin.

Their temples were glimpsed in infernal damnation
The images carved in symmetrical vision
Where evil, unbounded, uncovers its visage
and flows down the axis of false revelation.

Copal on the steps of the temples was wafting
their censers were smoking, the mirrors were flashing
The crystalline rites of a land in submergence
remembered in priestly obsidian slashing.

But even as life was subsiding from victims
whose blood caught the sunlight with crimson reflection
the vengeance awaited in green vegetation
to swiftly re-conquer an ossified nation.

The sea has her secret Sargassoes of culture,
her tides and abysses of suction and quaking.
Volcanic displacements cause sudden reversals
where continents vanish with new lands awaking.

Thus history finally disposes of those
who refuse to attune to the warning instruction.
They sink in a fit of deluded ambition
denying their part in divine evolution.

Now current-borne memories glide through the temples
where cruelty flourished, oppressing the blameless.
When submarine fable turns modern example
all powers, all titles, prove hollow and nameless.

Atlantis is rising, the debt unforgiven
And straight to the throne of the judgement is driven.
Aquarian idol of mystic tradition:
pre-Olmec, pre-Toltec, Aztlan:  the revision –

revealed in the end as the Israelite’s error
when Baal was enshrined and the rule was by terror.

THIS JUST IN:  Atlantis in the Andes !!!