The Romance of Atlantis: A Review, with Notes on Customs, Names, and Locations

Taylor Caldwell, with Jess Stearn

Edition reviewed: Fawcett Crest paperback, 1975.

The Romance of Atlantis is a political romance dressed as a lost-world epic. Empress Salustra tries to keep a brilliant, rotting empire out of the hands of the younger northern power of Althrustri, falls in love with the man she meant to use, and watches the sea take the continent anyway. The customs, the name-system, and the map are the real subject. The love story is what the map is for.

Jess Stearn’s foreword says Janet Taylor Caldwell wrote the tale at twelve, that a grandfather wanted the manuscript destroyed, and that it sat for about sixty years before Stearn expanded scenes from the childhood draft. Caldwell’s 1974 postscript treats the book as memory: she says she “knew” Atlantis from infancy, records later dreams of being the empress, and leaves open whether that is reincarnation. An epigraph from Hebrews 11:16 (“they desire a better country”) tells you the ending in advance. Read it as a sermon about decadence that happens to contain a flood, a court, and a marriage plot.

The story, briefly

The emperor Lazar dies at about two hundred, after two trips through the rejuvenation rays, and leaves Atlantis to his elder daughter Salustra. Her half-sister Tyrhia, daughter of a slave, is beautiful and useless. A mist then kills the solar and nuclear grid: ships, airships, hovercraft, and the atmospheric communications net all stop. Lazar’s deathbed advice is the novel’s thesis. Keep the national religion, because a tired people need it. Trust nobody. Fear Signar, the new emperor of Althrustri. Refuse another rejuvenation. A natural life is about seventy-five years, and a soul grows by thought, not by conquered cities.

Better to appreciate a sunset than to be lord of a thousand conquered cities. … The soul grows not by material things, but only by thought.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 19

This is Lazar speaking to Salustra, in the advice summarised above.

The virus of democracy infects the very lifeblood of an imperial people. … Discourage democracy; it is thy foe.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 17

Lazar again, this time on democracy.

Salustra’s solution is dynastic and cold. She will not marry, because a queen who marries stops reigning. She will give Tyrhia to Signar. Their son will inherit Atlantis, the two empires will stay separate while she lives, and the slogan of the book is hers: while she lives, Atlantis is hers. Signar arrives with a small fleet still armed with explosives Atlantis abandoned centuries ago. The engagement is celebrated as if the empire were healthy. He and Salustra recognize each other as the only two competent people in the room. She gets a poison from the high priestess and plans to use it on him. Tyrhia, who loves someone else, warns him. Salustra does not go through with it. The city forces her abdication, she has the high priestess killed on her last day of power, the sea rises, and Signar’s general carries her off. Tyrhia, the poet Erato, the guard Creto, the minister Mahius, and the chaste Brittulia die with the continent. Salustra and Signar reach an empty tropical shore with a handful of survivors and a party of monotheists who had already put animals aboard a ship. She refuses to call the landing a new empire.

While I live, Atlantis is mine.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 69

This is Salustra’s policy in her own words. It is also on the back cover.

Had it not been prophesied that one day Atlantis would be swallowed by the sea, and life would know her name no more?

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 198

This comes right after the first great waves.

The map

The whole continent is called Atlantis. The nation of Atlantis is only the middle of it. That distinction matters, because almost every threat in the book walks in from a place the capital considers peripheral.

Althrustri lies north and west, as large as Atlantis and nothing like it: pine forest, frozen lakes, bleak mountains, precipices, snow and ice on the upper fringe for most of the year. Life there is hard, the laws are harsh, and philosophers are set to work. Its people have been filtering into Atlantis for years, drawn by wages and comfort, and Lazar treats that seep as an advance invasion. The old emperor Notar was cruel. His son Signar is the danger. Althrustrian ambassadors in Lamora wear their defiance openly and insist the two countries are equals. Their flagship is the Postia.

Atlantis proper runs from a livable cold north, through a temperate center, to a hot south. It is divided into the Twelve Provinces. The novel never gives most of them names, which is the tell. They are a fiscal and moral diagram, not a traveled country.

• The First Province, in the south, holds Lamora, the capital, seven million people. The other provinces call it the sewer. Lamorans call it the center of the earth. Poets, scientists, courtesans, and frauds all peak there.
• The Fifth Province is Lazar’s home. He was a warrior noble from there, later adopted by the childless emperor Clito. It also produces an arena champion.
• The Eighth Province, under the noble Lustri, is the violent one: two large cities, a poor population close to revolt, taxes collected by force, more violent crime than the other provinces together.
• The Ninth Province is the industrious counterpart. Its noble is Gatus, Lustri’s kinsman. Its commoner is Publius, who objects to the industrious paying for the idle.

Of the twelve, seven are said to be industrious, with cities, factories, or farmland. Two are indolent and live off the rest. Two are thinly peopled, all dense forest, rock, and bad soil. A swamp and jungle covers large parts of three provinces, loud at night with baboons, monkeys, lions, crocodiles, and elephants, which the book says returned after the dinosaurs vanished. Another province is a gray desert occupied only by sand creatures. Those categories overlap, and they do not add neatly to twelve. The geography is felt most strongly as climate and as a tax argument.

South of the continent, under Lazar’s indulgent protection, lie six small island principalities: Mantius, Dimitri (also spelled Dimtri), Nahi, Letus, Antilla, and Madura. Letus is the warm tropical water the capital brags toward. Mantius is where Lazar took the slave Lahia as the price of leaving the island independent. Dimitri’s king is Cicio. Nahi’s king is Patus. Their sons and daughters appear at Tyrhia’s birthday as marriageable decorations. Salustra notes that a marriage into any of these houses would put foreign grandchildren on the Atlantean throne. She will not do it.

Inside Lamora the places that actually get furnished are few and repeated. The Palace stands on a rise in a park of hanging gardens, statues, fountains, and artificial lakes fed by the city’s canals. A road more than a mile long runs from the south colonnade to an ocean moat, with a clear view of the sea. Salustra added a private gallery above. The Council Chamber has the colored relief map of the continent on a marble wall. The bay below the palace holds ordinary ships and vessels that dive to mine copper, uranium, nickel, cobalt, magnesium, gold, silver, and rare alloys. Mount Atla rises behind the haze, with a seismograph on it that has been quiet since the ancestors gave up the atom-splitter. The city itself climbs in white pillars, towers, and domes. The Temple of Sati is a circular vastness under a giant dome, pillars said to be two hundred feet high and carved with history, an eternal fire at the center, and two lion statues large enough that six men could sit across each head. The high priestess lives in a dark house in that shadow, reached through cypresses. Her house is described as A-shaped. Temple Beautiful is a different place entirely: not a church, but the clinic where the elite are rayed back to youth. The Senate, the Chamber of Law, and the arena complete the civic set. Outside the city, power is gathered by a network of solar reflectors and relayed to ships, hovercraft, wagons, and the rapid-transit system.

The altar fire gave off a spiral of thin blue smoke that heightened the senses.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 112

This is the inside of the Temple of Sati, at the altar of the eternal fire.

The last location is the one the epigraph promised. After the flood, the survivors sight a silent tropical coast: blue-white mountains, a wall of forest, the smell of flowers, no inhabitants. Signar calls it a new empire. Salustra calls it a new world.

A new empire, beloved.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 263

Nay, a new world, my lord … For this we have been brought from the other side of the flood.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 263

How the names work

The names are a costume, and the costume is consistent. Atlantean court speech uses thou, thee, hath, and dost. The narrator speaks modern English. Rank is announced by address: Majesty, Sire, my lord, and the foot-to-forehead touch that keeps a gap between the empress and everyone who advises her.

The personal names mix three habits. Latin endings and Roman echoes: Lazar, Clito, Maxima, Publius, Divona, Gatus, Creto, Siton. A few real Greek words dropped in whole: Zeno, and Erato, who is a poet, which is almost a pun on the muse. And a large invented family of soft -a and -ia names that sound like romance-novel classical: Salustra, Tyrhia, Brittulia, Jupia, Lamora, Lahia, Zutlia, Ludia. Place names do the same work. Mount Atla is Atlas with the ending sanded off. Antilla recalls Antillia, the phantom island of old Atlantic charts. Lamora is close to amor. Letus sits next to Lethe. Althrustri is the one name that sounds northern and harsh, which is the point.

The imperial house

Lazar. Emperor, about 200. Warrior noble of the Fifth Province, adopted by the childless emperor Clito. Twice rejuvenated, at 75 and again at 140. Melancholy, and sorry he lived so long.

Maxima. Salustra’s mother, from an older family than Lazar’s.

Salustra. Empress. Dark-eyed, pale, arrogant, sexually experienced and publicly treated as a virgin by the people who need her to be one. She judges law herself and thinks of herself as not a woman when she governs.

Tyrhia. Younger half-sister. Fair, curly-haired, still treated as a child. Loves the poet, resents the state betrothal, and warns Signar about the poison.

Lahia. Tyrhia’s mother. A beautiful slave from Mantius, taken as tribute. Salustra considers the daughter a copy of the mother.

Althrustri

Signar, emperor, son of Notar. The book’s other mind: blunt, sexual, politically literate, and the only person Salustra can talk to. Siton is his general and the man who carries Salustra out of the mob. Ganto is his minister, already calculating that he may one day have to kneel to her. Tellan is ambassador-in-chief at Lamora, with the aide Zoni. Pellanius is Atlantis’s ambassador-in-chief to Althrustri. The fleet’s flagship is the Postia.

Lamora’s government

Mahius, Lazar’s first minister and the only person Salustra trusts, refuses a second rejuvenation because he already has too many memories. Creto, prefect of the Palace Guard, is the rumored night-companion and the hand that carries out her last orders. He dies for them.

The provincial voices that matter are Lustri (Eighth, noble, rich, dissolute, briefly her lover), Gatus (Ninth, noble, Lustri’s kinsman), and Publius (Ninth, commoner). The Senate is a chorus of types: Divona the cynic, a rejected suitor who plots with the priestess and is killed by Creto; Toliti, narrow and pious; Patios, the youngest; and a dinner list of Contani, Tilus, Vilio, Contalio, and Sicilo.

The crisis cabinet is named by function more than by personality: Timeus, transport; Sabian, national preservation; Hammu, atmosphere; Zeno and Minotaur, managers of the power system; Fribian, a young scientist; Goleta, the physicist who invented the health ray and is a candidate for Temple Beautiful; Molanti, who ties the quake to the mist; Cino, the imperial physician; Nulah, the physician wealthy women use to avoid maternity. Fresto appears only as someone being asked when a technical fix will arrive.

Religion, philosophy, and the islands

The pantheon is a designed theology, so the names are the doctrine. Sati, daughter of Chaos and Strife, is wisdom, fertility, and once agriculture. Her palace is the sun. Her children are Loti (queen of the unrepentant dead), Mayhita (chaste women and children), Detria (harvest), Parenalia (earthly love), Denia (arts and sciences, and the only deity without a lover), and Iberia (war and virility). Every god is female. Maleness is never deified. The pontiff is always a woman. That woman is Jupia, high priestess, veiled, feared, and eventually poisoned on Salustra’s order.

The philosophers are a faculty the empress enjoys and Signar would put to labor. Zahti, logician, is Brittulia’s unaffectionate father. Zetan teaches a pantheism in which God, the universe, and man are one. Lodiso keeps designing an ideal state. Morti laughs at everything, including himself. Talius holds that too much virtue enervates, and that the average man has no reason. Yonis writes philosophic fables and thinks people are born good. Everus stands with them when they come to Salustra after the city has turned on her. Brittulia, Zahti’s daughter, is the novel’s professional virgin: devoted to the goddess, physically unable to bear the court, and loyal to Salustra at the end.

From the islands: Cicio, king of Dimitri; Patus, king of Nahi; Erato, poet and Cicio’s cousin, loved by Tyrhia and seated by Salustra as a mind she wants near her. The social small-fry who show how marriage actually works are Zutlia, sold to the fat jeweler Seneco because her father is ruined; Ludia and her mother, who fawn and flinch; and the little chain of Licon and Utanlia, in which nobody’s desire matches anyone else’s.

One name is a parable rather than a person. Ionto is the righteous man in a priestly story: a god tells him the city will be destroyed, and the price of mercy is his daughter on an altar. Salustra’s world is full of that bargain. The state, the goddess, and the suitor all want somebody’s daughter.

Customs

Rank

Government is an empress who can judge a case in the morning and a council that exists to be managed. Four times a year she sits with the Twelve Provinces. Each province makes local law under national statute, raises taxes for the national treasury, and owes a quota of soldiers. The assembly mixes Nobles and Commoners. The dramatic scene is a tax fight: the Eighth wants its burden shifted onto the prosperous Ninth, and Salustra refuses. Obeisance is physical. Advisers touch her foot with their foreheads. Young nobles wear ceremonial swords. Her crown has twelve points, one for each province. Lazar’s necklace, a gold chain closed by a seven-colored crystal, is worn as an energizer. When she takes it off, she has stopped being the state.

There is also a Senate and a Chamber of Law in the capital, so Lamora has a second, older political class sitting on top of the provincial system. Senators open the games, arbitrate disputes, and plot. The mob is a third estate with no seat and a long memory for blasphemy. Killing a high priestess is the one crime the city will not forgive even an empress.

Body, marriage, and birth

Marriage is policy. Salustra’s rule is that a queen reigns alone. A princess marries where the empire needs a son. Tyrhia is informed of this as if it were weather. Among nobles who are not imperial, marriage is a sale: Zutlia is tired of having only one slave-girl, her father has lost his money in wrecks and gambling, and Seneco drips jewels. Love is treated as a private accident and often as bad manners. At Tyrhia’s feast, older men in purple togas fondle the daughters of nobles as an impersonal compliment, while the young men in white tunics and gold girdles are the ones who get bored.

Sex is public and classed. Courtesans are one of Lamora’s exports. Lustri can be assumed to be the empress’s lover without anyone finding it scandalous, only a little dull. What her friends defend is her virginity, because the inarticulate majority wants the ruler set apart from ordinary women. Chastity, in Brittulia, is so rare that people diagnose it. She begs off the feasts. The wits decide she must be afraid of her own appetite. The priesthood is the mirror image: a woman pontiff, virgin attendants, and a celibate male clergy who do the lesser work of managing the faithful, while the narrator insists the priesthood as a class is corrupt.

Birth is a state emergency. A six-month injection sterilizes a man or a woman, so the capable have almost stopped having children, and the people the novel calls inferior have not. Extra children bring welfare. Salustra answers with grants to able families and with the claim that exceptional children belong to Atlantis, “their father and mother.” Her enemies ask why she does not set the example herself. She takes the hatred as proof the law is working. This is the most revealing custom in the book, and the ugliest. The empire’s decline is written as a breeding problem.

Slavery and strangers

About a quarter of Lamora, a million people, are slaves. They descend from islanders taken when Atlantis was empty and needed labor to clear forest, tame rivers, and plant plains. Later emperors wanted to free them and pay the owners. The owners refused, because prestige is counted in slaves. The slaves, after centuries, also refused to leave: they tell Salustra they have never provided for themselves and dread having to. Another million residents are Althrustrians who never gave up the old allegiance. Service is intimate and decorative. At supper, beautiful slaves, nude from the waist, carry pheasant, nightingale tongues, northern sturgeon, olives, cakes, and scented sweetmeats. Other slaves wave fronds when the palace cooling fails, massage guests in perfumed baths, and lay a simple private supper of fruit, cheese, honey, wheaten cakes, a roasted bird, and wine.

Immigration is argued in the same language. Manufacturers want bodies, because Atlantean wages are high and a profit of two hundred percent is, to them, too thin. Lazar wanted a screen at the border. Salustra never got the votes. The book calls the newcomers biologically inferior. That is the novel speaking, not a neutral chronicle. It is of a piece with the birth policy.

Religion, and the rival religion

Public religion is loyalty theater. People laugh at the gods and would tear apart anyone who proposed abolishing them. Temples are decorated, altars are large, and the holidays are kept, including the birth of Sati. Salustra pours wine on a brazier in Sati’s honor and does not believe a word of it. Her father’s advice, which she follows, is that a young nation can survive a new idea and an old bloated one cannot.

But they perform their religious duties tongue in cheek. Not believing, yet they are intolerant of those honest enough to confess they do not believe.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 17

This is Lazar describing the Atlanteans’ own religion to Salustra.

The afterlife has three countries. Drulla is fire and ice under Loti, helped by Hatred, Fear, Debauchery, and Crime. Cowards and traitors go there and do not come out. Crystu is the waiting place for unfinished lives and for the worthy preparing to rise. Litia is the sunlit hall of Sati. Almost nobody goes straight there: men who die in war, chaste virgins, the high priestess, women who die in childbirth, and the imperial family. Jupia travels veiled in a litter, priests in black and crimson walking ahead. Looking into the litter is a mortal offense. Overhearing the chant is the worst luck.

Against this stands a small foreign community nobody can place. They are described, in the book’s own stereotyping, as dark, aquiline, black-bearded, and conspicuously impious. They will not pay tribute to Sati, will not keep her holidays, and preach one God. He is not Sati. He hates idols, intemperance, and pleasure. He is later named Jehovah. Atlantis allows foreign cults that do not touch the state, blaspheme Sati, or start riots. Salustra still dislikes the idea of an all-powerful God, because a new religion splits an old country. Haled into her court, their leader distinguishes happiness from pleasure: happiness is peace in someone who has done no evil, pleasure is the drug of someone who has fled. She is more struck than she admits. At the end these same people have already left, in a ship stocked with animals and birds in pairs and sevens, on a day they say was shown to them. The survivors hear, as Salustra is lifted aboard, the language of Genesis: fountains of the deep, windows of heaven, forty days and forty nights, fifteen cubits above the mountains. The custom the novel finally endorses is not Sati’s. It is a joyless, jealous monotheism that had the sense to build an ark. The physical description of its preachers is a stain on the book.

New religions are poison in the bloodstream of an old nation.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 51

This is Salustra’s reaction to the new religion.

They declare that their God, whom they name Jehovah, is weary of the sins of the world and intends to submerge all creation in a vast flood and wipe mankind from the face of the earth.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 206

This is said to Signar, and it is what the monotheists declare about the flood.

I gather that He is old and bearded and ugly. … Man has a tendency to create His god in his own image.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 207

Signar has asked whether Jehovah is young and beautiful. This is the answer.

Happiness and pleasure are not one and the same. Happiness is the deep peace in the heart of him who knoweth God's will. … Pleasure is the lethal drug of the man who hath fled God.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 208

This is the leader of the monotheists, drawing the distinction I summarise above.

We did not like Him, He was too angry.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 260

Siton says this after the flood.

Rejuvenation is the elite’s real sacrament. Temple Beautiful’s rays restore glands, skin, hair, and muscle, and leave memory alone. No woman had ever been admitted before Salustra. Lazar begs her to refuse it. Mahius, offered another turn, is horrified. A crystal at the throat can stimulate the body for an afternoon. Nothing in the religion stimulates a tired will.

It is enough for man to live the natural span of seventy-five years. There are too many memories to live with when life is prolonged beyond what nature intended.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 18

These are Lazar’s words against the rejuvenation chamber.

Wrinkles disappeared, hair was restored, muscles and circulation renewed, and the years miraculously shorn away, except for what remained in the heart and mind.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 20

This is how the novel describes what the rays do at Temple Beautiful.

The day, the feast, the games

Ordinary grandeur is repetitive, which is how custom works. Young men wear white tunics and gold belts. Young women wear robes thin enough to show the body. Older men wear purple togas and wreaths when they drink. The empress wears gold brocade that barely covers her, pearls braided into the hair, and the twelve-point crown. Signar, in Lamora, looks barbaric on purpose: heavier gems, a different cut of clothing, a body that has not been softened by the capital.

A private meal is plain. A state meal is a list: weak wine cooled with ice, pheasant in wine sauce, tongues of nightingales, northern sturgeon, olives, tiny fish in their own oil, golden cakes, exotic fruit, scented sweetmeats. The wine is weak because the decadence is supposed to be moral, not drunken. After the young guests leave, the women change character and the evening becomes frankly sexual. Mahius asks, before he agrees to stay, whether there will be women later.

The National Games open with the high priestess, by custom. The arena runs wrestling, foot races, horse races, weights, singers, magicians, comedians, pugilists, and lion-tamers, with betting. Noti, beloved of the Lamorans, wrestles the Fifth Province’s champion. Salustra watches and explains the games as anesthesia. The city is frightened of the mist and the waves, and gratitude for a distraction looks like love.

Technology has become a custom of its own. Abundance made a leisure society that, in the novel’s phrase, knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. When the grid fails, the civil servants cannot imagine moving grain by wind, muscle, or tide. Salustra gives Timeus twelve hours to restore supply by pre-nuclear means. The Althrustrians, backward on purpose, still know how to make a ship go with explosives. The scientific priesthood (Goleta, Molanti, Fribian, Hammu) explains every omen as strata and static, and is always a day late.

Althrustrian custom is the negative image. Grim law, no leisure for metaphysics, a young population, gold spent on other people’s senators, and an emperor who would rather act than be melancholy. Signar’s joke in the philosophers’ hall is the cultural comparison in one line: in Althrustri they set philosophers to work. Salustra’s answer is that thought kills action and action kills thought. The marriage plot is an attempt to weld those two customs before the sea makes the argument moot.

What holds up

The best of the book is the first movement: Lazar’s death, the map, the tax session, the birth laws, and the theology of Sati. Those pages have a point of view. Salustra is not a generic queen. She is bored, intelligent, cruel in the name of fairness, and honest about using religion as glue. The customs follow from that mind. A twelve-point crown, a slave at one in four, a goddess with no husband, a rejuvenation clinic reserved for men, a princess informed of her husband as state business: each one is an argument you can see.

The names and places thin out as soon as they leave Lamora. Althrustri is a climate and a sermon, not a city you could walk through. The Twelve Provinces are numbers plus two moral examples, the idle Eighth and the industrious Ninth. The island kingdoms exist to supply a slave mother, a poet-cousin, and a list of marriages Salustra will not make. Dimitri’s two spellings are typical. The world was invented to be looked at from a throne, not traveled.

The last third trades that specificity for opera and then for scripture. Poison, a sister’s betrayal, a forced abdication, a priestess made to drink, a mob, a ship, forty days of rain, and an empty shore are vivid, and they are also the Noah story with the names changed. The monotheists are given the only customs the novel thinks might survive, and they are drawn with a physical stereotype the rest of the book does not need. Caldwell’s postscript, in which the empress is herself and Signar is someone she will not name, explains the intensity and also the blur. The customs are remembered as feelings. The map is remembered as a moral picture. The people in between are types with beautiful names.

If you want to stay inside the world rather than the allegory, stay with Lamora: the canal palace, the twelve-point crown, Sati and her six daughters, Drulla and Litia, Temple Beautiful against the Temple of Sati, the Eighth against the Ninth, and the rule that a queen may take a lover and may not take a husband. That is the book’s real invented country.

Where to read it

The book is still under copyright, so the full text is not on this site. The United States term runs to the end of 2070. In the European Union it runs for seventy years after the death of the last surviving author, which is to the end of 2072.

The quotes in this review are short excerpts for review and study, each with its printed page in the Fawcett Crest edition.

You can read it legally in three places:

• The ebook from Open Road Media.
• The 1975 Morrow edition on the Internet Archive, through controlled lending, where one reader borrows a digital copy at a time.
• The Open Library record, which links to borrowable copies.

Related on this site

1. Edgar Cayce: the seer whose biographer, Jess Stearn, co-wrote the novel.
2. Atlantis’ Readings: what Cayce said about Atlantis.
3. Past life readings for reincarnated Atlanteans: readings on souls who lived in Atlantis.
4. The Fall of Atlantis: misuse of power and abuse of advanced technologies.
5. Atlantis in the Holy Bible: Genesis and the Flood.
6. Temple Beautiful: Cayce’s temple in Egypt, and the clinic of the same name in this novel.
7. Cultural Characteristics of Atlantis: the names of the novel, listed with other Atlantean names.
8. Mount Atla: the volcano above Lamora, followed through the book with page references.
9. Jehovah and the flood warners in The Romance of Atlantis: the foreigners who preach one God, warn of a flood and have a ship ready.