The Atlantis Blueprint

Non-fiction. It is speculative history. The authors argue for a lost civilization. They do not report a dig I can check on this page.

I have not read the book. This is not a chapter-by-chapter reading. The outline below comes from the jacket, from Booklist, and from Publishers Weekly.

What the book is

The US title is The Atlantis Blueprint: Unlocking the Ancient Mysteries of a Long-Lost Civilization.

Colin Wilson and Rand Flem-Ath are the authors named on the US edition.

Little, Brown published a London edition in 2000. The Open British National Bibliography lists that book as xxv plus 415 pages, with eight pages of plates. It gives the ISBN-10 as 0316853135. That record lists Flem-Ath as the main author and Wilson as a contributor.

Delacorte Press published the US hardcover. Amazon lists it as 6 March 2001, 448 pages, ISBN-13 9780385334792. Publishers Weekly reviews that same ISBN. It gives 448 pages and a price of $25.95.

Wilson was already known for The Outsider, The Occult, and From Atlantis to the Sphinx. Flem-Ath is a Canadian librarian. With Rose Flem-Ath he had already published When the Sky Fell: In Search of Atlantis.

The Atlantis idea

The jacket uses the title for a network of links among sacred sites. The authors trace that network to Atlantis.

In this account Atlantis was a sea society with its home in Antarctica. It sailed the oceans. It built monuments to keep its knowledge. Later changes to the planet destroyed it.

The jacket says the society may reach back as much as 100,000 years. It speaks of shifting poles and of changing latitudes.

Publishers Weekly puts the same claim in shorter form. Sailors from an Antarctic Atlantis crossed the globe more than 100,000 years ago. They founded more than 60 sacred sites, including Byblos and Jericho, before geological disasters ended them. Later civilizations, the review says, received templates from Atlantis. Those templates held geodesic, geological, and geometric information. The review names pyramids in Egypt, China, and South America among the linked places.

This is not the island in Plato’s Timaeus and Critias. Plato’s Atlantis lies beyond the Pillars of Heracles. It is a power that sinks after a war with Athens. Wilson and Flem-Ath move the homeland to Antarctica. They tie the end of it to a shift of the poles or of the earth’s crust.

The argument as the reviews describe it

I am not following the chapters. These are the points the public reviews pick out.

Ilene Cooper’s Booklist review, for the American Library Association, calls the book an expanded form of an older theory. An intelligent society lived in an Antarctica without snow. She does not read the authors as claiming visitors from outer space. That society left sacred sites across the world.

Cooper says the evidence is tangled. It is full of measurements, mathematics, geometry, and geography. She also says the book takes on many side topics. She names the Knights Templar, the pyramids, and the Shroud of Turin.

Publishers Weekly calls the book a pseudoscientific account. It says the authors rest on Charles Hapgood, who died in 1982. Hapgood had argued for civilizations older than ordinary archaeology allows. The same review says the book also touches Freemasonry, the Ark of the Covenant, ancient Japanese pottery in America, and angels in the Book of Enoch.

The jacket names particular sites. They include the Great Pyramid, Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, and the Temple of Luxor. It also claims likenesses among the Hebrew, Greek, and Mayan alphabets and the Chinese lunar zodiac. It claims a high level of Egyptian mathematics.

My view

I file this as speculative history. That means a reconstruction that goes past the evidence most historians accept.

An Antarctic Atlantis is a claim. It is not a ruin I can point to from these reviews. A snow-free Antarctica in the human past needs a large change of climate, or a movement of the crust, or both. Hapgood’s crust displacement is the tool this tradition uses. Geologists explain the drift of continents by plate tectonics, and they picture that drift as slow. A sudden slide of the whole outer shell is a different proposal. I do not treat it as settled.

A worldwide grid of sacred sites is a claim about measurement. Cooper’s caution is the one I share before I have the book in hand. If the case is a pile of angles and old maps, I need those figures. A jacket list of famous monuments is not that case.

The figure of 100,000 years is far older than the cities we can date. I would need the authors’ own chain, from a map or a site to that number, before I repeat it as a result.

What I can use now is the shape of the theory. Atlantis here is Antarctica. The ruins are a planned network. The destruction is a shift of the poles or of the crust. That is a clear claim. It is not yet a demonstration.

Graham Hancock’s The Fingerprints of the Gods is a related book already on this site. I am not folding his evidence into this page. Readers who compare lost-civilization claims can start there.

Sources

I used these public sources. I did not use the text of the book.

• Amazon listing for ISBN 9780385334792. Product details, jacket copy, the note on the authors, and Ilene Cooper’s Booklist review.
• Publishers Weekly review.
• Open British National Bibliography record for the Little, Brown edition of 2000.