Atlantis: One Name, Many Locations

Ask ten people where Atlantis was and you get ten answers. I have collected many of them on this site. The more I read, the more I think the name covers more than one place.

This is my master page for the question. First I list the ten places people name most often. Then I go through the channeled sources. After that I go through the researchers.

The 10 most popular locations for Atlantis

1. The mid-Atlantic and the Azores. This is the classic reading of Plato, an island beyond the Strait of Gibraltar. See vitreous lava found north of the Azores.
2. Bimini and the Bahamas. Edgar Cayce said parts of Atlantis would be found near Bimini. See the Bimini Road.
3. Santorini and Minoan Crete. Many scholars link the Thera eruption to the Atlantis story. See the Minoan civilization as a colony of Atlantis.
4. Antarctica. Charles Hapgood and Rand Flem-Ath argued that a crust shift moved Atlantis under the ice. See Where Was Atlantis.
5. Spain and Andalusia. Some researchers place Atlantis in the Doñana marshes near Cádiz. See the Iberian colonies of Atlantis.
6. The Richat Structure in Mauritania. This ring-shaped formation in the Sahara looks like Plato’s concentric city. See Atlantis in North Africa.
7. The North Sea and Heligoland. Jürgen Spanuth placed the royal island near Heligoland. See my notes on Spanuth’s book.
8. The Caribbean and Cuba. Several authors point to sunken structures off Cuba and the Yucatán.
9. Sundaland in the South China Sea. Arysio Santos placed Atlantis on the drowned Ice Age shelf of Indonesia.
10. The Americas and the Bolivian Altiplano. Some writers see Plato’s rectangular plain in the high Andes.

Atlantis had more than one phase

Atlantis was not one fixed place in one moment. It went through several phases over a very long time.

It expanded. Its people founded colonies on both sides of the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean.

It also contracted. After each disaster the land shrank and the survivors moved on.

So many of these “locations” may be different phases or colonies of one civilisation. Several of my sources say exactly this.

Many knew by looking at the comet that had appeared in the sky for months before the comet struck the Atlantic Ocean, creating a tsunami that was the final deluge that washed over the Atlantean islands, wiping out that civilization in the last of 3 different destructions that occurred over thousands of years to the Atlantean landmasses.

Bashar, on three distinct cycles of Atlantis

The servants of the Great Four warned their people, and many escaped. Their Kings reached them in their Vimânas (aeroplanes) and led them on to the lands of fire and metal (i.e., east and north). Explosions of gas, floods and earthquakes destroyed Ruta and Daitya, and only Poseidonis remained. This was the catastrophe of 75,025 B.C.

Lieut.-Colonel Arthur E. Powell

Part one: the channeled sources

Channeled sources rarely give one dot on a map. They describe a large land that changed shape over time.

A channeled source is information received by a medium or psychic from a non-physical intelligence.

Edgar Cayce

Edgar Cayce gave his readings in trance between 1923 and 1944. He placed Atlantis between the Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean. More on him on the Edgar Cayce page.

The position as the continent Atlantis occupied, is that as between the Gulf of Mexico on the one hand—and the Mediterranean upon the other. Evidences of this lost civilization are to be found in the Pyrenees and Morocco on the one hand, British Honduras, Yucatan and America upon the other. There are some protruding portions within this that must have at one time or another been a portion of this great continent. The British West Indies or the Bahamas, and a portion of same that may be seen in the present—if the geological survey would be made in some of these—especially, or notably, in Bimini and in the Gulf Stream through this vicinity, these may be even yet determined.

Edgar Cayce, quoted on the size of Atlantis

In another reading he described how different the map was in the first cycle.

The Nile entered into the Atlantic Ocean. What is now the Sahara was an inhabited land and very fertile. What is now the central portion of this country, or the Mississippi basin, was then all in the ocean; only the plateau was existent, or the regions that are now portions of Nevada, Utah and Arizona formed the greater part of what we know as the United States. That land along the Atlantic seaboard formed the outer portion then, or the lowlands of Atlantis.

Edgar Cayce – Reading 364-13, on the first cycle of Atlantis

Patricia Cori and the Bimini Road

Patricia Cori channels a group she calls the Sirian High Council. She names the Bimini Road as Atlantean.

Not even the discovery of submerged Atlantean archeology (the Bimini Road) in the waters of the Caribbean Sea has received acknowledgment from scientists and scholars.

Patricia Cori, on the Bimini Road

Stewart Pearce

Stewart Pearce gives Atlantis the widest reach of all. In his account the Azores, Santorini and Crete were mountain peaks of one land.

Atlantis was much, much bigger than you anticipate. It stretched from the present eastern coastal waters of North and Mesoamerica, including the islands of the Caribbean, and stretched over what you call the Atlantic Ocean, through the Mediterranean Sea. And the islands that you know today — the Azores, Santorini, Sardinia, Majorca, Crete, etc. — were all high peaks of the mountain range that contained the Temple of Poseidon at the very spiritual heart of Atlantis.

Stewart Pearce, on the size of Atlantis

Tom and the Altean colony (Holroyd, 1977)

In the 1970s the medium Phyllis Schlemmer channelled a voice called Tom. Stuart Holroyd wrote the sessions up in Briefing for the Landing on Planet Earth (1977). When Andrija Puharich asked about Atlantis, Tom gave a location, a date and a name.

Atlantis, Tom explained in reply to Andrija's question, was a civilisation originated by a migrant group from Aksu. It had flourished for thousands of years and had come to a sudden cataclysmic end about 11000 BC. It had stretched from Greece to the Americas.

Stuart Holroyd, Briefing for the Landing on Planet Earth (1977), p. 234

Aksu, in Tom’s account, is the first civilisation on Earth, founded in 32,400 BC. So Atlantis was not one island. It was a colony that spread across the Atlantic world.

Tom also said the name Atlantis is wrong.

The name Atlantis was in fact a corruption, and it should be known as the Altean civilisation, for its people 'were of the civilisation of Altea'.

Stuart Holroyd, Briefing for the Landing on Planet Earth (1977), p. 234

Later in the sessions Tom made the link again.

'Yes,' Tom said. 'And have you known that those from Altea are those of what you call Atlantis?'

Stuart Holroyd, Briefing for the Landing on Planet Earth (1977), p. 278

Holroyd notes that the date fits the wider record.

Now as regards Atlantis: all the theories about the nature, location and dating of this prediluvian civilisation are highly speculative, but Tom's dating corresponds with the general view that a cataclysmic event, the origin of world-wide flood legends, took place between 10000 and 12000 BC.

Stuart Holroyd, Briefing for the Landing on Planet Earth (1977), p. 239

Dolores Cannon

Dolores Cannon worked with clients under deep hypnosis. Her conclusion is close to Tom’s. More on her on the Dolores Cannon page.

I have found that Atlantis was not a single continent, city, or place. It was a name given to the world as a whole at that time.

Dolores Cannon, The Convoluted Universe, Book One (Ozark Mountain Publishing, 2001), p. 140

One of her clients still gave a clear location.

It was in the Atlantic Ocean.

P, as printed by Dolores Cannon, The Convoluted Universe, Book One (Ozark Mountain Publishing, 2001), p. 155

My notes on the book are at The Convoluted Universe, Book One.

Bashar

Bashar is channeled by Darryl Anka. He says Atlantis began with a migration through the Americas. In his account the Minoans were a later colony. More on him on the Bashar page.

Atlantis was created by a migration from Lemuria across the North, Central, and South American continents, creating what you now refer to as the American Indian civilizations that ultimately reached Atlantean shores.

Bashar, on the Minoan colony

Later colonies, such as the Minoan civilization, became far removed from the original early Atlantean style and took on some European styles.

Bashar

Helena Blavatsky

Helena Blavatsky said she received her teachings from the Masters. She placed the Atlantean root race in the mid-Atlantic.

A root race is one of the great stages of human evolution in Theosophy. The Atlanteans were the fourth.

Thus the Fourth Race Atlanteans were developed from a nucleus of Northern Lemurian Third Race Men, centred, roughly speaking, toward a point of land in what is now the mid-Atlantic Ocean

Helena Blavatsky, on her root races

Part two: the researchers

The researchers start from texts, maps and the seabed. They argue about the place, but most agree that something real stood behind the story.

Plato

Plato is the source of the name. In the Timaeus an Egyptian priest tells Solon where Atlantis lay. The full texts are on my Timaeus and Critias page.

This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Herakles (Heracles) [i.e. the Strait of Gibraltar]; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean

Plato, Timaeus

Plato already gives Atlantis an empire beyond its island. That fits the colonies idea above.

Ignatius Donnelly

Ignatius Donnelly wrote Atlantis: The Antediluvian World in 1882. He put Atlantis in the Atlantic and saw Egypt and the Maya as its offspring. See Ignatius Donnelly.

He also said Egypt was the oldest colony of Atlantis and its civilization, which along with that of the Mayans of Central America represented a primitive reproduction of the Atlantean culture.

Jim Marrs, Our Occulted History (2013), on Where Was Atlantis

Augustus Le Plongeon

Augustus Le Plongeon excavated in Yucatán in the 1870s and 1880s. He linked the Maya to the lost “Lands of the West”.

We must not forget that Plato informs us that the priests of Egypt assured Solon, when he visited them 600 years before the Christian era, that all communications between their people and the inhabitants of the "Lands of the West" had been interrupted for 9,000 years, in consequence of the great cataclysms, during which, in one night, the large island of Atlantis disappeared, submerged under the waves of the ocean.

Augustus Le Plongeon. Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 Years Ago (1886), p. 41

My notes are at Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches.

James Churchward

James Churchward wrote about Mu, a lost land in the Pacific. The passage on his page uses the name Mu for a land in the Atlantic. See Churchward’s Mu.

In our journey westward across the Atlantic we shall pass in sight of that spot where once existed the pride and life of the ocean, the Land of Mu, which, at the epoch that we have been considering, had not yet been visited by the wrath of Human, that lord of volcanic fires to whose fury it afterward fell a victim.

James Churchward

The Oera Linda Book and Jürgen Spanuth

The Oera Linda Book is a Frisian manuscript. It speaks of a land called Atland that sank in 2193 BC. Its Dutch editor placed that land in the North Sea. See The Oera Linda Book.

From this writing it appears that it was land stretching far out to the west of Jutland, of which Heligoland and the islands of North Friesland are the last barren remnants.

Introduction to The Oera Linda Book

Jürgen Spanuth took the North Sea idea further in 1953. He placed the royal island off Heligoland.

"On July 31st, 1952, this great wall was discovered at the stated spot, six miles (9.66 kilometers) from Heligoland towards the mainland."

Spanuth, p. 108, on Atlantis: The Mystery Unravelled

Charles Hapgood, Rand Flem-Ath and Antarctica

Charles Hapgood studied old maps such as the Piri Reis map. He proposed that the Earth’s crust had shifted.

Earth crust displacement is the idea that the whole outer shell of the planet can slide over the layer below it.

Rand and Rose Flem-Ath built on this to place Atlantis in Antarctica. Hapgood himself drew a wider conclusion.

The evidence presented by ancient maps appears to suggest the existence in remote times, before the rise of any known cultures, of a true civilization, of an advanced kind, which either was localized in one area but had worldwide commerce, or was, in a real sense, a worldwide culture. This culture, at least in some respects, was more advanced than the civilizations of Greece and Rome.

Charles Hapgood, quoted by Jim Marrs on Where Was Atlantis

Gavin Menzies and Santorini

Gavin Menzies wrote The Lost Empire of Atlantis in 2011. He equated Atlantis with the Minoan empire and its end with the Santorini eruption. Jim Marrs covers his case on Where Was Atlantis.

Arysio Santos and Sundaland

Arysio Nunes dos Santos wrote Atlantis: The Lost Continent Finally Found. He placed Atlantis in Indonesia, on land that drowned at the end of the Ice Age.

Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock looks for a lost Ice Age civilisation rather than one island. He links it to sunken coastlines around the world. See Graham Hancock.

Jim Marrs

Jim Marrs surveyed all of these theories in Our Occulted History. His summary of Cayce is a good bridge between my two parts.

In the 1920s, the “sleeping prophet,” Edgar Cayce, saw Atlantis as a continent-size region extending from the Azores to the Bahamas, with ships and aircraft powered by a mysterious form of energy crystal. Cayce predicted that portions of Atlantis would be found in modern times.

Jim Marrs, Our Occulted History (2013), on Where Was Atlantis

What I take from this

The channeled sources and the researchers point to the same pattern. Atlantis was large, it lasted a long time, and it left colonies behind.

This matches what I collected on the Altea region page. The full review is at Briefing for the Landing on Planet Earth. For more books on the subject, see Books about Atlantis.