Books on Atlantis – and I’ve read quite a few, staring with Charles Berlitz as a child¹ – tend to follow a certain pattern. At some point, they quote Plato. They pull out key points that they say define Atlantis (the concentric rings and the flat plain, the way the location is described), their mineral wealth. Then the books quickly bring up and dismiss each of the other major theories. And then they bring up the Bimini Road or whatever, draw very shaky lines between the key points they identified earlier, with sentences like, “Well, Plato said the plain was this big but what measurement did he mean? Obviously what he says he meant wasn’t what he really meant. What he really meant was…” or “he said beyond the Pillars of Hercules which everyone says meant the Strait of Gibraltar but is that what Plato meant was the Pillars of Hercules?” and then changes the facts and links it to their pet theory.

So, when I saw that Richard Ellis had written about Atlantis, I was excited and curious – what was his pet theory? Was this a flaw in his otherwise scientific approach to the oceans?

You will be happy to hear that my man, Richard, does not fall off his pedestal in this book by coming up with some kooky theory. This is, instead, a survey of the history of the Atlantis story.

Ellis starts by sharing the full Plato story – not cherry-picked facts to support a theory. Plato, we learn, is the only one of his contemporaries to talk about Atlantis. No one else tells the story the way that Plato did – not even Herodotus, who is not the most reliable of reporters, and who talked directly to the same Egyptian priests that Plato said had told Solon the story and surely would have written about it if the priests had mentioned it even slightly. That said, bits and pieces of Plato’s tale show up in other stories – for example, one describes an island beyond the pillars of Hercules (not that it sank, just that an island existed), and there were certainly remnants of Cretan palaces nearby and Santorini’s eruption wasn’t that long ago. Plato, however, said that Atlantis was at its peak as a civilization – with great palaces and golden statues and huge armadas – 9,000 years before Solon spoke to Sais which is long before civilization existed anywhere on earth.² So you’ve got Plato, who is saying he got the story from Solon, who got it from Sais, who said it had existed 9,000 years before that – and then Plato himself was transcribed and translated and so on. That’s a pretty good game of telephone. And Plato was using the story to make a point in a book about something else entirely. When you use a story to make a point about something else, you sometimes take liberties³ – especially if the story originated so long ago that there’s no one around to ask you why you distorted it.

Then Ellis looks at different writers who have written about their pursuits of Atlantis throughout the ages, starting with Aristotle, Pliny, Didorus, Plutarch, Aelian (the first guy in the common era, 170-230 a.d.), Sir Francis Bacon⁴ (17th C), T. Henry Martin (19th C), James Bramwell (1930s), and so so many more. Each of these writers had their own theories of the veracity of Plato’s story and where Atlantis really was.

The next chapter covers the mystical Atlantis, Edgar Cayce dreaming about it, Murry Hope leveraging her psychic abilities, Madame Blatovsky’s obsession with Lemuria and claiming that, when Plato said 9000 years – which most scholars assume should have been 900 years – he should have said 900,000 years. Right. Rand and Rose Flem-Ath (Antarctica, which slipped to the south pole when the earth’s mantle slipped like the skin on an orange). Charles Berlitz (the Sahara – no wait, the Bermuda Triangle – no, wait…). David Zine (the Bimini Road).

Ellis quickly moves on to scientific theories. These tend to look at areas of the earth where land had been proved to have been subsumed into waters throughout history, whether it corresponds to Plato’s description of Atlantis or not. Rachel Carson, for example, muses about the Dogger Bank (in the North Atlantic, though how the ancient Egyptians would have heard about this, I don’t know). Angelos Galanopoulos introduces a theory about Mediterranean tsunamis. James Mavor initially voted for Thera/Santorini then later switched to the Azores (flooded by a comet-induced tsunami). Then back to Galanopoulos who is now saying perhaps eels migrate to the Sargasso Sea because there used to be land there, and they have never forgotten (that is quite a genetically inherited memory). Zannager then declares that Atlantis is a metaphor for the Trojan War and is actually located in… Troy!

Next Ellis unpacks one of the more plausible theories: Crete. Crete had a short and glorious life, with a rich, sea-going people who “mysteriously appeared” about 2500 BC and disappeared 1000 years later. Well, actually, people had been living on Crete for a really long time. What appeared in 2500 BC, were palaces and art and frescos and gold, and tales of their trading armada. All this wealth and proof of a higher civilization (as compared to the prior settlements that consisted of mud-brick farms). And it is close enough to Santorini to have been wiped out by tsunamis produced by the volcanic eruption.

Then, following a chapter about the nature of volcanic eruptions on islands, Ellis moves on to the current theory: that Plato’s story made use of the recent eruption of Santorini, and he goes into that, followed by a chapter about tsunamis and what they do to coastal civilizations.

Ellis concludes with how Atlantis is portrayed in “fiction and film.” Journey to the Center of the Earth (movie not book), which I watched recently. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Verne again). Maracot Deep (Doyle). Indiana Jones (Comic Book). L’Atlantide (silent film). Lost Continent / Siren of Atlantis (L. Sprague de Camp.) Undersea Kingdom (1930s movie with the hero “Crash” Corrigan). George Pal’s “worst film” (per Maltin). Warlords of Atlantis with Cyd Charisse. In each of these, he describes the movie and links it back to earlier writings about Atlantis.⁵

I like this book because it is so balanced. Ellis not only describes all the theories about Atlantis, he tells us about volcanos and tsunamis, about ancient civilizations. And he doesn’t force a theory down our throats.

There are things in this world that we will never know. Ancient mysteries – what was Noah’s flood, Atlantis, King Arthur? More recent mysteries – who was Jack the Ripper, who killed Jon Benet Ramsey, or what people are seeing when they report, in good faith, UFOs that cannot be proven to have other, more mundane explanations⁶?

There are just some things that we will never know.

And that scares a lot of people. They don’t like not knowing. And so they put their trust in people who tell them that they have all the answers.

And so, back to my favorite saying: If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.

Don’t let people tell you that they have all the answers and will save you. Remain cynical. If you find yourself believing that someone is the Buddha (or anyone else), kill that idea, turn your back on them, and go back to the road.

This book does not have the answers. It is just a really good book about a mystery that we’re all curious about and all the answers that people have made up for themselves since Plato first mentioned it, so long ago.

1. Not now in the collection. ↩︎
2. Leaving aliens out of this. ↩︎
3. Just look at George Washington’s wooden teeth. ↩︎
4. Bacon thought Atlantis was in America. Let that sink in a little. ↩︎
5. He does not mention the use of Atlantis in the book, Good Omens, which is a heck of a lot of fun. ↩︎
6. A friend of mine lived in the south-eastern Brooklyn. One evening, we were sitting in her kitchen, drinking wine, while she was making dinner. Gazing out at the twilight, I noticed a light that seemed to descend straight down, hover, and then disappear. My mind froze for a minute and, if that was all I had seen, I might have wondered what I was seeing. Then another light appeared out of nowhere, descended, hovered, and disappeared. And then my brain woke up and I realized how close JFK was and that, in fact, one of the runways pointed directly at her kitchen window from several miles away. I was seeing planes turn off their holding pattern to line up with that runway. And they weren’t descending straight down like an elevator; they were descending along the runway, and disappearing behind the buildings between her apartment and the airport. But if I had only seen one of them, and I had been somewhere without frame of reference like buildings, someplace in the desert perhaps or near an open field, I might have been convinced that I had seen something that I couldn’t explain. ↩︎