Atlantis of Ignatius Donnelly

Ignatius Donelly: The "New Testament" of Atlantis

When we analyze the esoteric legend about Atlantis as a whole, we find that a great deal in it smacks of an acquaintanceship with I. Donnelly's book "Atlantis, the Antediluvian World" (1882), which was published some fifteen years before Scott-Elliot's work.  Much has simply been borrowed not only from that book but also from Bulwer-Lytton's (1803-1875) Utopian novels.

Ο Ignatius Donnelly with his writing work is considered the pioneer of Atlantean thought and "father" of all occult Atlantologists of the last three centuries. He added many baroque elements to the whole spectrum of Plato's Atlantis. It rightly became the New Testament of Atlantism, as long as we definitely consider Plato to be the Old Testament.

Now Atlantis becomes the source of civilization for the whole world, forming colonies everywhere. The gods of the ancient peoples arose from the Atlantean kings and heroes, the language of the Atlanteans gave birth to the rest of the languages. It was the cradle of the Aryan and Indo-European race, while its main colony was Egypt. THE MYTHOLOGY OF EGYPT and PERU REPRESENT the original religion-faith of the Atlanteans which was sun-worshipping. Atlantis was the first nation in which humans developed from the stage of barbarism to civilization.

Donnelly agrees with its location in the Atlantic opposite the mouth of Gibraltar as Plato said. But, by giving completely new characteristics to the Atlantis of Plato and other ancient authors, he completely escapes from them and creates the modern myth.

In his work there are collected testimonies from all fields of science that confirm the existence of a sunken continent in the exact place that Plato placed it: in the Atlantic Ocean.
For example, in works of botany and zoology, concerning the distribution of plants and animals on the planet, it is stated that this cannot be explained by the present arrangement of the continents, and the hypothesis is expressed that some land zone must have existed in the place of the Atlantic Ocean.

But the most important arguments Donnelly found in the existence of great similarities between cultures that are too distant from each other geographically and chronologically and which similarities cannot be explained as mere coincidence. The Flood myths of, for example, the peoples of the Far East, the American Indians, and the ancient civilizations of the Middle East show similarities that cannot be considered coincidental. The only possible interpretation is that they had a common source, the lost continent of Atlantis from which the myth of the flood sprang and spread to the world through the survivors of the disaster. 
He claims that Noah's Great Flood described in the Hebrew Bible was the same flood that sank Atlantis (described in Plato's Critias and Timaeus dialogues), because they agree on many important details with each other.

Such similarities are everywhere in legends, traditions, symbols, architectural structures - such as the pyramids of Egypt and Teotihuacan in Mexico, even in language. The Chinese word for brick for example was ku and the Chaldean was ke. For the word fabric, both used the word chic.

Discovering that variants of a single language are found from Iceland to Ceylon, Donnelly writes:

"There is ample evidence that could fill whole pages that there was a still more ancient mother tongue...the language of Noah, the language of Atlantis, the language of the great empire mentioned by Plato".

The world has made such comet-like advance
Lately on science, we may almost hope,
Before we die of sheer decay, to learn
Something about our infancy; when lived
That great, original, broad-eyed, sunken race,
Whose knowledge, like the sea-sustaining rocks,
Hath formed the base of this world’s fluctuous lore.
By FESTUS

Ignatius Donelly' s map of Atlantis

The Empire of Atlantis: Donnelly' s map