Atlantis and the Cycles of Time

[shijing]

Atlantis and the Cycles of Time by Joscelyn Godwin

Amazon description:

A comprehensive study of the major occult writings on Atlantis

• Fully examines the many occult teachings on Atlantis, including those from G. I. Gurdjieff, Madame Blavatsky, Julius Evola, Edgar Cayce, Fabre d’Olivet, and Dion Fortune

• Shows how these writings correlate with the concept of cyclical history, such as the Mayan calendar and 2012, the Age of Aquarius, and the four Yugas

• By a renowned scholar, author, editor, and translator of more than 30 books

Atlantis has held a perennial place in the collective imagination of humanity from ancient Greece onward. Many of the great minds of the occult and esoteric world wrote at length on their theories of Atlantis--about its high culture, its possible location, its ultimate demise, and their predictions of a return to Atlantean enlightenment or the downfall of modern society.

Beginning with a review of the rationalist writings on Atlantis--those that use geographic and geologic data to validate their theories--renowned scholar Joscelyn Godwin then analyzes and compares writings on Atlantis from many of the great occultists and esotericists of the 19th and 20th centuries, including Fabre d’Olivet, G. I. Gurdjieff, Guido von List, Julius Evola, Edgar Cayce, Dion Fortune, and René Guénon, whose writings often stem from deeper, metaphysical sources, such as sacred texts, prophecy, or paranormal communication. Seeking to unravel and explain the histories and interpretations of Atlantis and its kindred myths of Lemuria and Mu, the author shows how these different views go hand-in-hand with the concept of cyclical history, such as the Vedic system of the four Yugas, the Mayan calendar with its 2012 end-date, the theosophical system of root races, and the precession of the equinoxes. Venturing broader and deeper than any other book on Atlantis, this study also covers reincarnation, human evolution or devolution, the origins of race, and catastrophe theory.

This book (the title of which appears to be inspired by the second section of Wm. R. Fix's Pyramid Odyssey, although this is not listed in the bibliography) is set up in two parts -- the first, which includes most of the book, is a historical review of information and speculation on Atlantis by various schools. Godwin begins with the rationalists -- scholars who have speculated about Atlantis based purely on physical evidence -- and then proceeds to review the French esoteric tradition, the Theosophists, Germanic Atlantology, Guénon and Evola, The Britons, some independents including Gurdjieff, New World channeling including Cayce, and finally selected New Age channels including Jane Roberts/Seth. The second, much shorter, part of the book is a discussion on cyclical history and it's connection to the Atlantis tradition.

In general, this is a quite useful book from a historical perspective -- Godwin does an excellent job of tracing the origin of various themes such as axial tilt and polar wandering, polar/far northern origin of civilization, the late birth/arrival of the moon, and various aspects about Atlantean society. It can be seen what a large impact that Theosophy had on Atlantean scholarship, and Godwin mentions that Cayce may have been influenced by this since many of the people he read for were Theosophists, and this may have influenced the information he received while in trance. He also gives a very nice, concise summary of Beelzebub's Tales, inasmuch as it bears on the topic of Atlantis. The only fly in the ointment is toward the end of the book, when he briefly praises <cough cough> the "ingenious research of Jay Weidner and Vincent Bridges" on Fulcanelli. A chart at the end chooses thirty themes and shows the crossover between seventy different figures/schools discussed in the book.