Table of Contents
Ignatius Donnelly opens this chapter of Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882) with a line he credits to Lord Bacon. Bacon held that the Greek myths came from an older people.
Bacon on where the Greek myths came from
The mythology of the Greeks, which their oldest writers do not pretend to have invented, was no more than a light air, which had passed from a more ancient people into the flutes of the Greeks…
Lord Bacon, quoted in Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, 1882, p. 282
Ignatius Donnelly believed that older people was Atlantis.
The Debate on Greek Mythology
Donnelly notes that W. E. Gladstone had “quite a debate of late with Mr. Cox” over whether a nature worship or a planetary or solar worship lay under the Greek myths.
Sun Worship in Ancient Civilizations
Donnelly claims that Peru, “worshipping the sun and moon and planets,” with “its sacrifices of fruits and flowers,” keeps the old religion of Atlantis most closely. In his account the same faith passed to Egypt, where in early ages people worshipped the sun and planets. He writes that Ptah “was the object of their highest adoration” and was “the father of the god of the sun.” That sun god was Ra, whom Donnelly calls the supreme divinity at On, or Heliopolis, near Memphis.
Donnelly gives the Babylonian trinity as Hea, Anu and Bel, with Bel as the sun and the favourite god, and Sin as the goddess of the moon. The Phoenicians, he says, honoured the sun as Baal-Samin, “the great god, the god of light and the heavens, the creator and rejuvenator.” See also Baal.
The Greeks and Atlantis
Donnelly claims the Greeks were too young to have shared the religion of Atlantis but kept a memory of it, and so “proceeded to convert its kings into gods, and to depict Atlantis itself as the heaven of the human race.” He supports this with Murray’s “Mythology.”
Murray on gods who could die
These deities, to whom the affairs of the world were intrusted, were, it is believed, immortal, though not eternal in their existence. In Crete there was even a story of the death of Zeus, his tomb being pointed out.
Murray's Mythology, p. 2, quoted in Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, 1882, p. 284
Murray also writes that the gods were thought to have human form and to be, like men, “subject to love and pain.” Donnelly reads this as a sign that the gods of Greece were deified kings.
Olympus and Atlantis
According to Donnelly, Greek tradition placed the island of Olympus “in the far west,” “in the ocean beyond Africa,” and “on the western boundary of the known world.” He adds that Plato puts the land where Poseidon and Atlas ruled in Atlantis.
Donnelly lists the twelve gods of Olympus, after Murray, as Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, Apollo, Artemis, Hephæstos, Pallas Athena, Ares, Aphrodite, Hermes and Hestia. He calls these “doubtless the twelve gods from whom the Egyptians derived their kings.”
Influence of Atlantis on Greek Mythology
In Plato’s account Poseidon was the god of Atlantis, and in Greek myth he was the god of the sea. Murray, as Donnelly quotes him, describes Atlas as a giant on “the western confines of the earth” who “supported the heavens on his shoulders.”
The Decline and Destruction of Atlantis
Donnelly writes that the land of the gods passed through a Golden Age and a Silver Age of peace, then a Bronze Age and an Iron Age, and was finally lost to a flood that Zeus sent as punishment.
Murray on the flood of Deucalion
Zeus determined to destroy the human race by a great flood. The whole of Greece lay under water, and none but Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha were saved.
Murray's Mythology, p. 44, quoted in Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, 1882, p. 290
Donnelly takes up the gods of Phoenicia in the next chapter.
