Sacred Islands and Continents in the Classics

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Atlantean Realities Series · 32 pages

A study of what the classical writers preserved about sacred islands and lost continents, and of how that testimony came to be read as it now is. It opens on a broader complaint — how historical facts became theological dogmas — and on the ambitious scholiasts who, in Blavatsky's phrase, were men of a small sub-race born but yesterday, yet took it upon themselves to overturn the religious thought of the world and succeeded, impressing on thinking humanity for nearly two thousand years the belief in the existence of Satan.

Against that background the specific readings follow. Plato, she argues, merged a history covering several million years into a single event and located it on one small island about the size of Ireland — where the Egyptian priests had spoken of Atlantis as a continent as vast as Asia and Libya together. Herodotus's account of the Atlantes, who were vegetarian, whose sleep was never troubled by dreams, and who cursed the sun for scorching them, is treated as recording moral and psychic facts rather than physiological complaint. And Atlas himself is read as the two old continents of Lemuria and Atlantis combined into one figure — a reading the series returns to in the study of Ulysses.

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