Imagining Atlantis in the Americas

Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey.

The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions.

Few myths have traveled as far or taken as many forms as the story of Atlantis. Since its appearance in Plato’s Timaeus and Critias, the legend of a vanished land has invited reflection on the beginnings and destinies of civilizations. In these dialogues, Plato presents both an allegory and a geographical description of a great island beyond the Pillars of Hercules, surrounded by smaller islands leading toward a vast continent hidden beyond. Over the centuries, antiquarians, explorers, and visionaries returned to this account to reinterpret human origins.

The endurance of the Atlantis story lies not in the search for a lost continent but in the imagination through which each age projected its anxieties and aspirations. My forthcoming book, Occult Mexico: The Imagination of Mexican Antiquity, from the Colonial Era to the Revolution (Oxford University Press), examines how thinkers from colonial scholars to modern intellectuals used esoteric ideas to interpret the pre-Columbian past. These thinkers turned to the Atlantis story and its many esoteric interpretations to defend the humanity of peoples, to imagine the origins of political entities, and to express nineteenth-century scientific and national ideals.

When the Americas entered European consciousness in the sixteenth century, the Platonic tale was absorbed into debates about the nature and antiquity of the newly discovered lands. Missionaries and chroniclers seeking to situate the New World in biblical history used Atlantis to explain the origins of its civilizations. Bartolomé de las Casas, drawing on Marsilio Ficino’s commentary on the Timaeus, treated Plato’s story as authentic history. He identified the Americas with the “great continent” of the myth and the Antilles with the remnants of the sunken island, using this to argue for the antiquity and humanity of Indigenous peoples. Others, such as Agustín de Zárate and Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, read the account as a prophetic revelation of the Americas transmitted by ancient sages long before Christianity.

In the seventeenth century, Athanasius Kircher, synthesizing natural philosophy and comparative religion, gathered these interpretations in his Mundus Subterraneus (1665). He placed the lost island between Europe and the Americas and explained its submergence as the result of cataclysmic Earth transformations following the Flood. His engraved map of the sunken island, widely reproduced, reached New Spain and inspired Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. In the 1670s, Sigüenza, the first documented explorer of Teotihuacan northeast of Mexico City, interpreted its ruins through Kircher’s theories, comparing them to those of Egypt and proposing that the Toltecs had migrated from the Old World through the Atlantean continent. For him, Mexico was not a barbarous land but heir to ancient civilizations, a center from which knowledge had once radiated toward the Old World.

The nineteenth century gave the myth new life as archaeology and geology developed alongside efforts to reconcile science and spirituality. The American writer Ignatius Donnelly popularized the idea that all civilizations derived from Atlantis, which sank beneath the Atlantic after a cataclysm. His Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882) sought to give this theory scientific credibility, becoming a reference for spiritualist and Theosophical readings. Around the same time in Yucatán, Augustus Le Plongeon and his wife, the medium Alice Dixon, conducted excavations at Chichén Itzá and Uxmal. Combining archaeological documentation with early photography and Alice’s trance visions, they claimed that the Maya were ancestors of Egyptian civilization, descended from Atlantean survivors. Although dismissed by professional archaeologists, their books circulated for decades and still appear in esoteric bookstores, shaping popular imagination.

As the wars of Independence from Spain unfolded, the Atlantean theme gained political resonance. Writers and scientists in

 Mexico and Latin America reinterpreted Atlantis in their search for national and intellectual sovereignty. The German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt mentioned Atlantis only as one among many conjectures about continental connections, favoring empirical comparison over speculation. In his Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (1808–1811) and Kosmos (1845–1862), he studied the Americas through observation and measurement, situating them within the broader history of nature and civilization. His works offered an image of the continent grounded in rational knowledge that many viewed as intellectual validation for postcolonial nations.

The myth of Atlantis continued to evolve. Some writers treated it as a metaphor for the decline of Western civilization, while others saw it as a symbol of emerging nations and utopian hopes. In the twentieth century, it resurfaced in occult and New Age movements, from Edgar Cayce’s readings on Atlantean migrations to James Churchward’s theories of the lost continent of Mu, a Pacific civilization whose descendants he believed had founded cultures across Asia and the Americas. Atlantis persisted in pulp reprints and popular esoteric circles well into the 1970s. Revisiting the myth shows that the Americas have long served as a mirror for global reflections on history and civilization, a legacy that continues to inform debates about identity, science, and the uses of the past.

My digital exhibition, Occult Mexican Art, explores how modern Mexican artists transformed speculative visions of the ancient past into new forms of expression.