Prologue: Quest for Atlantis
The legend of Atlantis has its antecedents in beliefs about a lost Eden of unparalleled purity, an Earthly Paradise long vanished, a glory eclipsed, in which an unfallen humanity was once better,happier and wiser. The enduring nature of Atlantis as a focus for this yearning is that its ancient peoples were never actually known, only conceived of and imagined to suit individual whims for a magnificent Something Else of long ago, which, once recognized, would put all the past in a new light.
Our knowledge of this vestigial land begins with the imaginings and purposes of Plato, whose rendering was so convincing that people wanted it to exist even if it never had. Hence over the centuries Atlantis has taken on a life of its own. With its splendor and enlightenment, its decay through the corruption of power or loss of vision, and its apocalyptic collapse, Atlantis has become the grandest of imagined contexts for the archetypes of human imagination.
What follows will indicate some of the ways in which the Atlantis of modern conception reflects a desire to draw threads together, to unravel mysteries, to fill what is felt to be a historical gap with a key to the puzzle--a spectacular Something Else that should have existed, and corresponds to a perennial wistfulness and yearning for a deeper, richer, more cohesive human legacy.