All that which precedes was known to Plato, and to many others. But as no Initiate had the right to divulge and declare all he knew, posterity got only hints. Aiming more to instruct as a moralist than as a geographer and ethnologist or historian, the Greek philosopher merged the history of Atlantis, which covered several million years, into one event which he located on one comparatively small island 3000 stadia long by 2000 wide; (or about 350 miles by 200, which is about the size of Ireland), whereas the priests spoke of Atlantis as a continent vast as “all Asia and Lybia” put together. But, however altered in its general aspect, Plato’s narrative bears the impress of truth upon it.¹ It was not he who invented it, at any rate, since Homer, who preceded him by many centuries, also speaks of the Atlantes (who are our Atlanteans) and of their island in his Odyssey. Therefore the tradition was older than the bard of Ulysses. The Atlantes and the Atlantides of mythology are based upon the Atlantes and the Atlantides of history. Both Sanchoniathon and Diodorus have preserved the histories of those heroes and heroines, however much these accounts may have become mixed up with the mythical element.

In our own day we witness the stupendous fact that such comparatively recent personages as Shakespeare and William Tell are all but denied, an attempt being made to show one to be a nom de plume, and the other a person who never existed. What wonder then, that the two powerful races — the Lemurians and the Atlanteans — have been merged into and identified, in time, with a few half mythical peoples, who all bore the same patronymic?

Herodotus speaks of the Atlantes — a people of Western Africa which gave its name to Mount Atlas; who were vegetarians, and “whose sleep was never disturbed by dreams”; and who, moreover, “daily cursed the sun at his rising and at his setting because his excessive heat scorched and tormented them.”

These statements are based upon moral and psychic facts and not on physiological disturbance. The story of Atlas (Vide supra) gives the key to it. If the Atlanteans never had their sleep disturbed by dreams, it is because that particular tradition is concerned with the earliest Atlanteans, whose physical frame and brain were not yet sufficiently consolidated, in the physiological sense, to permit the nervous centres to act during sleep. With regard to that other statement — namely, that they daily “cursed the Sun” — this again has nothing to do with the heat, but with the moral degeneration that grew with the race. It is explained in our Commentaries. “They (the sixth sub-race of the Atlanteans) used magic incantations even against the Sun” — failing in which, they cursed it. The sorcerers of Thessaly were credited with the power of calling down the moon, as Greek history assures us. The Atlanteans of the later period were renowned for their magic powers and wickedness, their ambition and defiance of the gods. Thence the same traditions taking form in the Bible about the antediluvian giants and the Tower of Babel, found also in the “Book of Enoch.”

Diodorus records another fact or two: the Atlanteans boasted of possessing the land in which all the gods had received their birth; as also of having had Uranus for their first King, he being also the first to teach them astronomy. Very little more than this has come down to us from Antiquity.

The myth of Atlas is an allegory easily understood. Atlas is the old continents of Lemuria and Atlantis, combined and personified in one symbol. The poets attribute to Atlas, as to Proteus, a superior wisdom and an universal knowledge, and especially a thorough acquaintance with the depths of the ocean:because both continents bore races instructed by divine masters, and because both were transferred to the bottom of the seas, where they now slumber until their next reappearance above the waters. Atlas is the son of an ocean nymph, and his daughter is Calypso — “the watery deep,” (See Hesiod’s Theogony, 507-509, and Odyssey 1, 51): Atlantis has been submerged beneath the waters of the ocean, and its progeny is now sleeping its eternal sleep on the ocean floors. The Odyssey makes of him the guardian and the “sustainer” of the huge pillars that separate the heavens from the earth (1, 52-53). He is their “supporter.” And as both Lemuria, destroyed by submarine fires, and Atlantis, submerged by the waves, perished in the ocean deeps, ² Atlas is said to have been compelled to leave the surface of the earth, and join his brother Iapetos in the depths of Tartarus. Sir Theodore Martin is right in interpreting this allegory as meaning, Atlas “standing on the solid floor of the inferior hemisphere of the universe and thus carrying at the same time the disc of the earth and the celestial vault — the solid envelope of the superior hemisphere” . . . (Memoires de l‘Academie des Inscriptions, p. 176). For Atlas is Atlantis which supports the new continents and their horizons on its “shoulders.”

Decharme, in his Mythologie de la Grèce Antique, expresses a doubt as to the correctness of Pierron’s translation of the Homeric word ἔχει by sustinet, as it is not possible to see “how Atlas can support or bear at once several pillars situated in various localities.” If Atlas were an individual it would be an awkward translation. But, as he personifies a continent in the west said to support heaven and earth at once (Æschylus, “Prometheus Vinctus,” 351, 429, etc.) — i.e., the feet of the giant tread the earth while his shoulders support the celestial vault, an allusion to the gigantic peaks of the Lemurian and Atlantean continents — the epithet “supporter” becomes very correct. The term “conservator” for the Greek word ἔχει, which Decharme, following Sir Theodore Martin, understands as meaning φυλάσσει  and ἐπιμελἓἳται, does not render the same sense.

The conception was certainly due to the gigantic mountain chain running along the terrestrial border (or disc). These mountain peaks plunged their roots into the very bottom of the seas, while they raised their heads heavenward, their summits being lost in the clouds. The ancient continents had more mountains than valleys on them. Atlas, and the Teneriffe Peak, now two of the dwarfed relics of the two lost continents, were thrice as lofty during the day of Lemuria and twice as high in that of Atlantis. Thus, the Lybians called Mount Atlas “the pillar of Heaven,” according to Herodotus (IV., 184), and Pindar qualified the later Ætna as “the celestial pillar” (Pyth. 1, 20; Decharme, 315). Atlas was an inaccessible island peak in the days of Lemuria, when the African continent had not yet been raised. It is the sole Western relic which survives, independent, of the continent on which the Third Race was born, developed and fell, ³ for Australia is now part of the Eastern continent. Proud Atlas, according to esoteric tradition, having sunk one third of its size into the waters, its two parts remained as an heirloom of Atlantis.

This again was known to the priests of Egypt and to Plato himself, the solemn oath of secrecy, which extended even to the mysteries of Neo-Platonism, alone preventing the whole truth from being told. ⁴ So secret was the knowledge of the last islands of Atlantis, indeed, — on account of the superhuman powers possessed by its inhabitants, the last direct descendants of the gods or divine Kings, as it was thought — that to divulge its whereabouts and existence was punished by death. Theopompus says as much in his ever-suspected Meropis, when he speaks of the Phœnicians as being the only navigators in the seas which wash the Western coast of Africa; and who did it with such mystery that very often they sunk their own vessels to make the too inquisitive foreigners lose all trace of them.

¹ Plato’s veracity has been so unwarrantably impeached by even such friendly critics as Professor Jowett, when the “story of Atlantis” is discussed, that it seems well to cite the testimony of a specialist on the subject. It is sufficient to place mere literary cavillers in a very ridiculous position: —
“If our knowledge of Atlantis was more thorough, it would no doubt appear that in every instance wherein the people of Europe accord with the people of America, they were both in accord with the people of Atlantis. . . . . It will be seen that in every case where Plato gives us information in this respect as to Atlantis, we find this agreement to exist. It existed in architecture, sculpture, navigation, engraving, writing, an established priesthood, the mode of worship, agriculture, and the construction of roads and canals; and it is reasonable to suppose that the same correspondence extended down to all the minor details.” (Donnelly, “Atlantis,” p. 194.)
² Christians ought not to object to this doctrine of the periodical destruction of continents by fire and water; for St. Peter speaks of the earth “standing out of the water, and in the water, which earth, being overflowed, perished, but is now reserved unto fire” (See also the “Lives of Alchemystical Philosophers,“ p. 4, London, 1815).
³ This does not mean that Atlas is the locality where it fell, for this took place in Northern and Central Asia; but that Atlas formed part of the continent.
⁴ Had not Diocletian burned the esoteric works of the Egyptians in 296, together with their books on alchemy — “περι χυμείας αργύρου καὶ κρυσοῦ”; Cæsar 700,000 rolls at Alexandria, and Leo Isaurus 300,000 at Constantinople (viiith cent.); and the Mahomedans all they could lay their sacrilegious hands on — the world might know to-day more of Atlantis than it does. For Alchemy had its birth-place in Atlantis during the Fourth Race, and had only its renaissance in Egypt.

The Secret Doctrine, ii 760–764
H. P. Blavatsky