A Journey Through Its Legendary Empires

Marco M. Vigato: Most people will be familiar with Plato’s story of Atlantis. Written in the 4th Century BCE, it is the wonderful account of a mighty and splendid empire whose island homeland sunk beneath the waves of the Atlantic Ocean 11,600 years ago. It is truly one of the foundational myths of western civilisation and one that does not cease to fascinate and prompt questions about the reality and location of the fabled lost continent.

Plato’s story, however, is also a cautionary tale about how even the most splendid civilisation that the world had ever known could fall prey to vice and corruption, eventually leading to its downfall. At its core, it is the story of the fall of a primeval, golden and divine humanity into the depths of materialism. The metaphysical idea of the “Fall” of man from an original divine state is projected against the idea of cyclical time and the myth of a lost Golden Age.

Esoteric Atlantology & the Ages of Man

Three hundred years before Plato, the Greek poet Hesiod spoke of the five Ages of Man, tracing the descent of Mankind through five different Ages or “Races.” A primeval Golden Age gave way to the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, the Age of Heroes and, finally, the dreaded Iron Age in which we now live, representing the lowest point of the cycle.

A similar worldview probably inspired the system of the Hindu Yugas and the Mesoamerican Legend of the Suns, according to which the world has already undergone four previous cycles of creation or Suns.

This is a view radically different from that of contemporary evolutionary theory, which is based on the idea of a constant progression of humanity in the arts of civilisation since the appearance of the first anatomically modern humans in East Africa about two hundred thousand years ago.

Ancient worldviews maintain the idea of a descent of Man, a process of spiritual and material degradation from an original divine state. It is to these ancient worldviews that Plato conforms himself when he describes the fall of Atlantis as the result of the “divine portion” of its inhabitants fading away and becoming “diluted too often and too much with the mortal admixture.”

According to Esoteric Tradition, this is the fate of every civilisation. However, there is hope because the end of a cycle invariably marks the beginning of a new cycle. This whole system can also be described by the idea of cosmic seasons in which the Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age follow each other in cyclical repetition. One only needs to know the starting point of the present cycle to draw a complete chronology and predict the beginning of a new Golden Age.

Ancient sources assign a fixed duration to the entire cycle and each of the cosmic seasons that together make up the Great Year. The critical number is 25,920 years, a duration all but identical to the fabled period of the revolution of the zodiac (see graphic on right), known as the Precession of the Equinoxes.

How exactly a tiny wobble in the Earth’s axis, causing its tilt to change slightly over thousands of years, could have such deep effects on the cycles of life and civilisation on our planet is a question that few in the modern scientific community will consider.

Yet it was paramount to ancient cosmologies and worldviews, as shown by the great interest that nearly every ancient civilisation on the planet placed on the movements of the sky – an interest certainly going beyond the basic needs of planting and agriculture.

It was only with the advent of Christianity that ancient worldviews based on the concept of cyclical time and multiple cycles of creation were replaced by linear time, the belief in a single revelation and a single divine incarnation leading uniformly toward salvation. In the much shorter Christian and biblical chronology, the totality of human experience was effectively limited to the span of the present Iron Age or Kali Yuga.

According to Puranic sources, this began in the year 3102 BCE, leaving no space for previous cycles of creation, least for the idea of a lost world ruled by the gods. It was based on the authority of the Bible that the Archbishop of Ireland, James Ussher, famously stated in 1650 that “the world was created at nightfall, preceding Sunday, October 3, 4004 BCE.”

Thousands of years before Ussher, the Brahmins of India had realised time computations covering the enormous period of 4.32 billion years, while the Chaldean priests could boast of keeping accurate astronomical observations dating back 720,000 years. Ancient Egyptian records similarly spoke of primeval dynasties of gods and demigods ruling for tens of thousands of years before the beginning of recorded history.

The Calendars of Atlantis

When comparing these ancient chronologies and king lists, a most interesting pattern emerges. Despite all their internal inconsistencies, gaps in information and incredibly long durations of time, these documents – some of which date back almost to the beginning of modern recorded history in ancient Mesopotamia and Sumer – appear to be in substantial agreement when it comes to portraying a sequence of world ages related to astronomical cycles and the consecutive rule of divine, semi-divine, and finally purely human dynasties.

This makes it possible to reconstruct a tentative picture of the origins of the present cycle and the succession of different world ages through the last 432,000 years.

A fascinating feature of these ancient chronologies is the reference to not just one but multiple cataclysms periodically befalling human civilisation, forcing the survivors, just like Plato’s Atlanteans, to “begin over again as children, knowing nothing of what had happened in ancient times.”

In order of time, the last of these cataclysms would have occurred about thirteen thousand years ago, in 10,961 BCE, following an even earlier cataclysm in 35,335 BCE – the two being separated by almost precisely an entire precessional cycle. While the date of 10,961 BCE may be fixed astronomically, over half a dozen ancient chronologies point to at least one major cataclysm between 11,500 and 9,200 BCE.

It is undoubtedly a remarkable coincidence that this set of dates, derived from ancient chronologies, also remarkably agree not only with the date assigned by Plato to the final sinking and destruction of Atlantis but also with the timescale of a mysterious cold spell accompanied by megafaunal extinctions known as the Younger Dryas.

It is now widely believed that a massive cometary impact triggered the Younger Dryas about thirteen thousand years ago. A second impact was possibly responsible for its abrupt ending almost 1,500 years later. The memory of the cataclysm was preserved in hundreds of myths worldwide that describe a fiery conflagration followed by a Great Flood and a sudden cooling of the Earth’s climate.

A Lost Mid-Atlantic Continent

Unlike previous mass extinction events, the Younger Dryas cataclysm was not without witnesses, for modern humans had already been walking the planet for thousands of years by then. This cataclysm may have been responsible for destroying an advanced Ice Age society whose survivors would later spread their civilisation and culture throughout the world.

Geological and oceanographic evidence from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean confirms the possibility that a sizeable landmass may have existed above water in the region of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and near the present-day Azores until comparatively recent times, in the same approximate location suggested by Plato and the Esoteric Tradition for Atlantis.

Excluding the recent hypotheses of a polar location of Atlantis either in Greenland or Antarctica, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge has been the most frequently proposed location for the Lost Continent. Drained of the ocean’s waters, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge would appear as a continuous mountain range stretching nearly from Pole to Pole, extending for a length comparable to that of the combined Andes and Rocky Mountains and with heights similar to the Himalayas.

The present-day Azores and Madeiras represent but the highest peaks above water of this submerged mountain range. Evidence collected from the Atlantic seafloor reveals the presence of extinct riverbeds continuing underwater for over 300 kilometres off the coast of Sao Miguel Island in the Azores, at a time when this portion of the Atlantic seafloor was still dry land.

This evidence alone suggests the cataclysmic sinking of a large landmass measuring at least 450 miles across from East to West and 300 miles from North to South, by at least 3,300 meters in the recent geological past.

In his monumental tome Atlantis, Atlantology: Basic Problems, Russian scientist Nikolai Zhirov collected hundreds of pages of geological, climatological and botanical evidence pointing to the former existence above water of a sizeable Mid-Atlantic landmass, certainly as late as the end of the last Ice Age, and possibly also much later during the European Bronze Age, in the third and second millennium BCE.

The rising and subsidence of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge over tens of thousands of years may also explain the cycles of glaciation and deglaciation in the northern hemisphere, as well as the abrupt ending of the Younger Dryas in about 9,600 BCE.

According to Zhirov and other scientists, the sinking of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, an event possibly triggered by a cometary impact, effectively ended the last Ice Age by allowing the warm Gulf Current to reach the coasts of western and northern Europe.

The Neo-Atlantean Empires

If Zhirov is correct, Atlantis did not sink in a single day and night. Rather, the subsidence of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge spanned hundreds of thousands of years, alternating long periods of gradual subsidence with truly cataclysmic episodes of sinking by hundreds or even thousands of metres.

The events of the Younger Dryas and the end of the last Ice Age may have been catastrophic, but Atlantean civilisation did not vanish overnight. Evidence shows that Atlantean civilisation did, in fact, survive the cometary impacts at the beginning of the Younger Dryas.

During what I call the Neo-Atlantean period between 10,961 and 9,600 BCE, Atlantean missionaries visited virtually every corner of the world in an attempt to re-establish pre-cataclysmic civilisation.

Two main centres of Neo-Atlantean civilisation emerged around this time, in Egypt and South America. From these two primary centres and their various colonial outposts, a colossal building program was undertaken, aimed at no less than reconstructing the lost world of the gods.

This is the essence of many mythical accounts describing the arrival in various parts of the planet of seemingly divine beings, possessing a civilisation and culture far in advance of the local indigenous populations.

The Edfu Building texts, a set of cosmological records covering the walls of the Temple of Edfu in Upper Egypt, describe how after a great and terrible cataclysm that plunged the world into darkness and destroyed the primeval island-homeland of the gods, a new generation of gods sailed from the primeval island, eventually settling in Egypt, where they became known as the Shemsu-Hor, the “Companions of Horus.”

These semi-divine beings were responsible for the rise of the first Egyptian civilisation of the prehistoric period and may have been the original builders of the Great Pyramid and many other colossal megalithic structures of unknown date whose ruins are found throughout Egypt and the Middle East. Very similar accounts can be gathered throughout Mexico, Central and South America to explain the origin of sacred sites and other mysterious structures.

The immense surge of construction and accelerated technological evolution that characterised the Neo-Atlantean period was short-lived. Within a few centuries, the grand edifice of Neo-Atlantean civilisation lay in ruins, plunging the world again into the depths of a new Dark Age. The causes of the collapse are unclear.

Whether a result of climatic and environmental factors, the pressures of an expanding population against a small, albeit technologically advanced elite, or a second cometary impact at the end of the Younger-Dryas, the main centres of Neo-Atlantean civilisation were abandoned. In many cases, it is as if the builders simply dropped their tools and left, leaving behind only the shells of their unfinished structures, like a great Tower of Babel.

Over the following centuries, global sea levels rose by an estimated 120 metres, submerging an area of land roughly equivalent to the combined extent of Europe and the continental United States. The consequence of this rise in global sea levels would have been particularly severe for any coastal maritime civilisation, submerging its major cities and trade centres under rising waters within the span of just a few generations.

The Atlantean Diaspora

The events of the end of the last Ice Age would have caused a massive diaspora and exodus of people from the now doomed islands of Atlantis and the coastal centres of Neo-Atlantean civilisation towards higher ground and the interior of continents. But it was the disintegration and fragmentation of Neo-Atlantean civilisation that triggered one of the most remarkable stages of accelerated cultural and technological evolution in the whole of human history.

As Atlantean survivors scattered through vast areas of the Middle East, western Europe, central and South America, they brought an extensive knowledge of agriculture, architecture, and astronomy, which effectively gave rise to the Neolithic Revolution. At this time, we witness the sudden emergence of agriculture and sophisticated lithic technology in places like Göbekli Tepe, Jericho and Çatal Höyük, as well as in the highlands of Mexico, Bolivia and Peru.

At the same time, the sinking of the last islands of Atlantis, a process that extended well into the European Bronze Age, sent wave after wave of “Sea Peoples” to the coasts of Europe and Africa. These peoples were the originators of what has since become known as the Atlantic megalithic culture, through at least three different waves of migration in approximately 5,000 BCE, 3,500 BCE and 1,200 BCE.

These post-Atlantean “Sea Peoples,” or Pelasgians, as they would be known to the classical authors, penetrated as far as the western and eastern Mediterranean, where they remained a powerful force until at least the second millennium BCE, leaving evidence of their distinctive megalithic architecture over a very large area extending from the Orkney Islands in the north to western France, southern Spain, Italy and Greece in the south and east. The last of the “Sea Peoples” invasions in the 12th century BCE became memorialised in contemporaneous Egyptian records from the Temple of Medinet Habu.

The Legacy

Despite their decadence and the loss of much of their civilisation and culture, Atlantean survivors were nevertheless able to preserve the principles of a specific type of sacred knowledge that still forms the basis of many esoteric and religious traditions throughout the world.

Monuments as far away as the great Egyptian temples of the Pharaonic period, the mountain temples of Angkor in Cambodia and the Gothic cathedrals of medieval Europe all testify to the survival of a Sacred Science of Atlantean origin through countless millennia.

It is difficult to speak of fortuitous coincidences when, throughout the millennia and on entirely separate continents, one finds the same images and symbols used repeatedly to convey the same esoteric truths and designate the same abstractions.

Moreover, this vast body of knowledge appears complete and fully-formed since the earliest dynasties, knowing no period of development or evolution. It must have thus existed at some point as a preconceived plan, directed by powerful masterminds whose only purpose seems to have been the unadulterated transmission of knowledge through the ages that separate us from the fall of the last Atlantean Empire.

Ultimately, this very long chain of transmission appears to be the continuation of the Neo-Atlantean project, which was left interrupted by the events of the end of the last Ice Age and the Atlantean diaspora. This project calls for no less than the resurrection of the lost world of the gods, which alone will bring forth a new Golden Age for Mankind.

The author Marco M. Vigato has written a book that establishes the historical and geological reality of Atlantis and reveals its continuing influence worldwide. Readers can obtain The Empires of Atlantis: The Origins of Ancient Civilizations and Mystery Traditions throughout the Ages from all good bookstores.

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