The legend of Atlantis, which has always remained alive in the popular imagination, also spoke very closely to numerous authors, having generated a specific literature, in which hypotheses were formulated to relate their civilization to the original settlement of America.
Seat of an ancient civilization that supposedly existed in the Atlantic Ocean, west of Europe and Africa, this island of the legendary continent would have submerged, thousands of years ago, as a result of a geological cataclysm.
Plato's Atlantis
The legend first appears in the dialogues Timaeus and Critias by the Greek philosopher Plato. On a trip to Egypt, the Athenian legislator Solon would have heard from the priests of Sais the tradition about Atlantis. His grandson Critias, in turn, had narrated it to Socrates.
Plato's Atlantis would be a vast island, close to the columns of Hercules (strait of Gibraltar), and was inhabited by the Atlanteans, descendants of Atlas, son of Poseidon (god of the sea). The Atlanteans, governed by just laws and very wealthy, had undertaken the conquest of the Mediterranean world, but Athens had repelled them. Finally, the degeneration of their ways had provoked the wrath of the gods, and a tidal wave had swallowed up Atlantis in a day and a night. The outcropping cliffs and the silt that accumulated in the shallows made its stops, then, unnavigable.
Evolution of Myth
The Neoplatonists themselves considered that account a myth. The Christian West, in the Middle Ages, received versions of Atlantis transmitted by Arab geographers. As it is a submerged island, it did not appear in medieval cartography, which however recorded other legendary islands to the west of Europe, whose supposed existence originated from Greek and Celtic traditions. It is possible that the location of some of these islands corresponded to confusing reports of real voyages, as in the case of the Fortunate Islands, later identified with the Canaries.
In the wake of the Platonic tradition, the English Renaissance artist Francis Bacon described in his work Nova Atlantis (New Atlantis) the ideal city of the sages. In the 17th century, the Swede Olof Rudfec used the old myth to extol Nordic patriotism. During the Catalan Renaissance, in the 19th century, Jacinto Verdaguer related three facts in La Atlántida:the submersion of the continent, the foundation of several Hispanic cities by Hercules and the illusions that these accounts created in Christopher Columbus.
Atlantis origin of the Indians
After Columbus' voyages, when it was proved that he had not discovered the Indies, but a new continent, different hypotheses emerged to explain the origin of its inhabitants, improperly called Indians. Several European authors claimed that they had come from Atlantis, before it was submerged. However, already in the 16th century there were those who ridiculed this origin, such as the Jesuit chronicler José de Acosta in his Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1580).
Although with little acceptance in scientific circles, theories about the Atlantis origin of American man continue to appear. Geologists, in general, reject the existence of Atlantis as a continent, at the time of the appearance of man on Earth. To explain certain correspondences in relief, fauna and flora between Africa and South America, they prefer other hypotheses, such as Wegener's theory, of the drift of continents.
Atlantis, despite this, remains the subject of esoteric doctrines that describe in detail the history of its supposed inhabitants. The renewed interest in Atlantis after the discovery of America motivated the publication of many books and articles. In Paris, the Société d'Études Atlantéennes (Society for Atlantian Studies) was created, which in 1927 started the publication of the specialized magazine Atlantis.
Greek Civilization