If I’m not mistaken about the exact date, in the early 1950s a group of English newspapermen voted the “resurgence” of Atlantis as the fourth most important news story they could imagine—five places ahead of the Second Coming of Christ. Astronomers have bestowed the name “Atlantis” (along with many others from Classical mythology) upon an area on the planet Mars. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution called the little ship it explored with the Atlantis, and the name has served as title for several periodicals, a theatrical company, hotels in Miami and Bermuda, a casino in Reno, and a host of several establishments. Even Chicago was not spared, as in 1951 the Minsky’s Burlesque show at the Rialto Theatre included an aquatic strip-act called “Atlantis, The Sea-Nymph. There are many more, but too many to mention. You get the idea!
I stated “unusual,” because it is an unfinished account, and also because it has not been considered a myth by many, even today, as there are historical and scientific speculations still going on; not to mention costly field research in trying to locate and identify the remains of Atlantis.
Why so much dedication by the masses, many highly intelligent, to the legend; what is the lure? And why all this recent hype of some discoveries, claiming they are turning a myth into a reality?
The posting of personal opinions for our debate should be based on the historical and scientific sides of the question. No tale will be considered too far-fetched; let your imagination run wild, if you will participate. Your personal inferences for voting as to, myth or reality can begin with and stem from hypothesis to hypothesis, or from any combination of hypothesis and any known historical and scientific data available to anyone of us.
Well, you’re the one that appears to have the extreme claim that Atlantis was real, you’re going to have to bring far more substantial evidence than “people like the myth”.
The entire Atlantis myth derives from a short, passing comment within one of Plato’s essays. Read in context, it is quite clearly a fictional(ized) allegory about national arrogance and pride.
The entire juggernaut of “Atlantis” myths and nonsense stems from that short paragraph.
(Kinda like the entire Christian anti-homosexual position stems from two to six short, possibly mistranslated and probably misunderstood verses… out of 31,000 or so verses. It doesn’t appear to have been one of Yahweh’s big concerns.)
Real islands have been washed over or split in half by storms and earthquakes. Atlantis might not be real, but similar things have happened to real islands
I’d say that it’s fiction (with a purpose) that’s based on real things Plato knew about (the island of Thera for instance, or other cities in the region that had been lost to the sea, hit by a tsunami, etc) and not made up out of whole clothe, so to speak.
So what? Real men have jumped off of tall buildings. Does that mean we should start taking tales of Superman seriously? As far as this silly “myth becoming reality” is concerned, if I find a penny, and the tale is passed down from friend to acquaintance that I found some coins, and from acquaintance to stranger that I found a wad of cash, and so on and so on until it is “known” far and wide that I have struck it rich…myth stays myth, and I still have only a penny in my pocket. Welcome to the Wonderful World of Reality, my friend.
True, but to cross posts here, there are people who are kinda-sorta like Batman, too. Doesn’t mean you’ll find him if you look around the rooftops of NYC (or Atlantic City) hard enough.
A brief allegory based on some vague historical precepts is a very tiny oyster from which oceans of stew have been made. (ETA: How… homeopathic.)
Sometimes things just enter the public consciousness. There are all sorts of reasons Atlantis had its fifteen minutes of fame; particularly in the postwar era there was a global sense (or at least a Western one) that the Earth was much small than it had been, that the frontier was no more, that there were few mysteries of exploration left. Atlantis, the Lost World, the Hollow Earth, dinosaurs in the jungle: all of these were a part of that yearning for new frontiers on a planet made smaller daily by war, travel, and mass communication.
We go through stages in these things. We seek comfort in fantasy.
I have not a single clue what you mean by this. Kindly expand?
By coincidence, I recently noticed that the “Talk” page for the Wikipedia entry on Atlantis was surprisingly contentious, with a couple of commenters (perhaps the OP included?) objecting strenuously to Atlantis being characterized as “fictional.”
I don’t know… I saw an excellent documentary about Atlantis on The History Channel recently, so it must be true! I mean, it’s The HISTORY Channel, isn’t it?
The city of Helike was wiped out by a tsunami during Plato’s lifetime and several years before he wrote the dialogues, so it wasn’t some ‘vague historical precepts’ at all. I’m not sure if he was aware of the history of Crete or the loss of the island of Thera, though the Greeks certainly knew about both things, but I don’t think Plato was unaware that there were cities in the ancient world that had been destroyed by the sea. This isn’t anything like someone vaguely resembling Batman, unless you want to try and make the case that the entire Batman myth was based on a collection of real people, more like art imitating reality after the fact.
Certainly Plato used the history he knew, embellished it and used it to make a philosophical point, but it’s more like something from Harry Turtledove than Stan Lee.
Atlantis actually gets mentioned in two of Plato’s dialogues – Timaeos and Critias. He never calls it a “continent”, and it might as well have been an island. It’s in an allegory he gives, and he’s really our only source for Atlantis ( by that name, at least). Other people have taken it and run with it, most significantly the extremely weird and interesting Ignatius Donnelly, who’s probably the first to fix the label “continent” on it. The Theosophists got their hand on it, and started associating it with super-science. Then the pulp fiction writers grabbed it.
Although generally thought to be a big chunk of real estate sunk in the Atlantic (as in Donnelly’s work), later writers stuck Atlantis in all sorts of other places. Pierre Benoit set it in the Sahara desert (!) He book, l’Atlantide, was filmed numerous times. Some stuck it on the floor of the ocean, still with inhabitants. So Prince Namor rules/ruled it, it shows up in Uncle Scrooge Comics, and in Disney’s Atlantis, the Lost Empire, among others.
I was brought up on George Pal’s [B\]Atlantis, the Lost Continent**, a weird and fascinating flick with flashes of brilliance, a helluva lot of borrowed or stolen images or ideas, and a meandering plot that, ultimately, makes no sense. But it did have good Spectacle-on-a-Budget, and John Dall (whose trademark smarmy villain graced Spartacus and rope as Zaren, the chief Bad Guy. The film was finished in a hurry during a writer’s strike, and it shows. But I loved it.
I have yet to see or read a really good Atlantis story. Disney’s animated Atlantis was ambitious but unsatisfying. Pal’s Atlantis just didn’t cut it. Probably the best treatment, most seem to agree, was C.J. Cutcliffe-Hyne’s The Lost Continent: The Story of Atlantis. It’s been reprinted three times since its first publication 115 years ago, and it’s one of the earliest to feature a lost continent with prehistoric beasts. But even CJ’s book doesn’t do it for me. One of these days therte might be a satisfying Atlantis book or movie. But I won’t hold my breath waiting.
