When the Conquistadors were  ravaging and looting the ancient cultures of the Aztecs and Incas, native tribesmen told them about an amazing rumor. They said that there was a race, deep in the jungle, whose king was covered with gold dust and who swam in a golden lake. It was the story of ‘El Dorado’, the ‘Golden Man’. One of the first Spaniards to set off to find this fantasy land was Jimenez de Quesada. In 1536, Quesada and 500 soldiers hacked into the undergrowth from the northwest of what is now Columbia. After many hard days trudging through intense and dangerous jungle, they came upon two tribes of Chibchas, a race with plentiful riches. They had gold, silver and huge amounts of emeralds, but they did not have the fabled ‘El Dorado’. However, they told Quesada of a lake in the middle of a huge volcanic crater on the Bogota plateau not far away.
The natives revealed that the lake was called Guatavita and each year the bizarre ceremony of the Golden Man would take place. Tribal witnesses said the occasion was used to offer sacrifices and gifts to the god that they worshipped. The tribal king was smeared in sticky mud, on which gold dust was set. He and four other chiefs then sailed on a raft with their finest jewels and treasures, whilst the tribe played music at the shoreline. When the king and his party reached the centre of the lake they threw the offerings into the water, and the king then bathed himself to remove his golden covering. Quesada travelled to the lake, but could find no clue hinting at treasure. Other Spaniards heard the rumours about Guatavita, and the first attempt to dredge the lake began in 1545.
As the years passed, each new expedition heard other versions of the El Dorado legend. Each one ploughed into the jungle certain they would find the wealth. None ever did, but they did come across other interesting
things. In 1537, one adventurer, Francisco de Orellana, was trying to find the golden city by sailing down the Napo River. Orellana reached the end of the Napo, and realised it was a tributary to another, massive river. As he floated along this, a tribe of long-haired, fierce female archers attacked his boat. The women reminded Orellano of the Amazons of Scythia in Greek legend, and he named the river ‘Amazonas’.
In 1584 another native rumor appeared. It suggested that Incas fleeing from the Spanish invaders had created a new city of gold called Manoa. This became inseparable from the El Dorado legend, and in 1595 the British adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh attempted to find Manoa and its gold for Queen Elizabeth I. He failed, and a further fruitless expedition in 1617 helped to seal his execution. Over the years, yet another myth circulated – that of a lost mystical lake called Parima. It was described as being almost identical to Quesada’s initial discovery, Lake Guatavita. Despite this, more expeditions floundered in the jungle, haphazardly slicing their way through the foliage until they ran out of supplies, funds, men or patience. Meanwhile, other Spaniards had decided to continue attempts at reaching the bottom of Lake Guatavita. In 1580s, Antonio de Sepulveda, a merchant living in Bogota, used 8000 native men to drain the lake by cutting a huge gash in the side. He did manage to remove a fair deal of water, and found considerable gold, but the earth walls
collapsed, killing many workmen and causing the project to be abandoned. Further attempts to drain the lake continued right into the twentieth century, and many historically valuable artifacts were found, but
never the great quantities of treasure promised by the legends. There can be little doubt that, despite the
countless and varied attempts hunting through the jungle, the Conquistadors never uncovered all the secrets of the Amazon. Biology, botany and anthropology show us that there is still plenty of potential for new
discoveries. Did the Spanish adventurers really find the lake of El Dorado? Almost certainly Lake Guatavita is that fabled lagoon. But nobody has found yet Manoa, and if the El Dorado myth has been proven
real, there is good reason to suspect the Manoan legend will be too.

Our knowledge of the world famous lost continent comes from the work of one man – Plato. The great Greek philosopher was the singular source of all information about the ill-fated island race and whilst experts write longwinded theses about the age and position of Atlantis, nobody is entirely sure that Plato did not just invent the Atlantan people as an allegory for what happens when a civilization over-reaches itself. Despite this, the hunt for Atlantis is as fierce as ever. Plato lived in Greece between 428 and 348 BC, and revealed the story of Atlantis in his dialogues ‘Timaeus’ and ‘Critias’. Many of Plato’s fables were fictional creations used to illustrate a point, but the history of Atlantis was repeatedly stated as fact. The dialogues recount the story of Solon, a Greek scholar who traveled to Egypt in around 600 BC to
learn more about the ancient world. The Egyptians were known to have knowledge and records dating back centuries, and as Solon tried to impress his hosts with tales of Greece’s achievements, the wise old
Egyptian priests put him in his place. They revealed a story about a continent and a people completely unknown to him.
Around 10,000 BC, a powerful race lived on an island in the west, beyond the ‘Pillars of Hercules’, now believed to be the land masses along the coasts of the Straits of Gibraltar. The island was the kingdom of
Poseidon, the Sea God. It had a huge central mountain with a temple dedicated to the deity, and lush outlying districts, there was an elaborate system of canals to irrigate its successful farms, and a bustling central city.
The island was rich in vegetables, and was home to different types of exotic animals. The Atlantans were originally a powerful but fair race. They were an advanced people with a prosperous trading industry, a strong
and noble army and a highly educated, cultured society. Their influence reached far and wide, and they controlled large areas of Africa, Asia and the Mediterranean. Although the island left its inhabitants
wanting for nothing, their taste for power and empire led to them over-extending themselves. An attempt to conquer Athens failed, and the Atlantans retreated home to face a cataclysmic disaster. Legend says that
the great god Zeus saw the corruption that had seized the island’s people, and sent down upon them an immense barrage of earthquakes, fire and water. Atlantis disappeared under the waves.
Whilst Plato’s story was well known, the renewed modern interest in Atlantis began in 1882 with the publication of Atlantis: The Antediluvian World by a former US congressman, Ignatius Donnelly. Donnelly’s
book was a mixture of conjecture, misinterpreted fact and actual history. But there were some interesting ideas; he noted similarities in the science and culture of native races which apparently could never have met.
Likewise, the great ancient flood, which is said to have destroyed Atlantis, is logged in ancient writings and traditions of peoples around the world. Exactly who the Atlantans were is unknown. Some say they were aliens, some believe they were descendants of the Lemurians (see p. 81), and some say they eventually traveled westward and became Native American tribes. Similarly, the actual placing of Atlantis is a subject open to argument. Many experts suggest the island was actually in the Mediterranean, and a constant stream of archaeological investigations in the area has tried to prove this. There are theories that Sardinia in the
Mediterranean, and the island of Thera in the Aegean Sea, could be Atlantis. Both had highly-evolved civilizations: the Nuraghi people on Sardinia and the Minoan culture on Thera. Both also suffered terrible natural disasters. But neither of these islands are westwards of the Straits of Gibraltar, so to accept them is to doubt Plato’s geography Also, the advanced races on these islands disappeared about 900 years before Plato – he stated that Atlantis became extinct 9,000 years before him.
Other experts say Atlantis was in the middle of the Atlantic, and all that is left of the island are its mountains, the peaks of which show through above the waves. These are now believed by many to be the Azore islands. There is also evidence to suggest a huge comet or asteroid crashed into the southwest Atlantic Ocean many thousands of years ago and two 23,000-feet-deep holes have been identified on the seabed close to Puerto Rico. Experts believe the falling rock that caused them would have created massive natural movements, enough to destroy any mid-Atlantic islands.

Though Plato’s Atlantis may sound like fiction, it has been taken seriously right up until modern times. As per the 4th-century Roman historian Ammianus Marcellus, Atlantis was commonly considered to be a historical fact by educated people of the day. For most of the next 1,500 years or so, however, Atlantis kept a low profile. It was name-checked in the title of Francis Bacon’s 1626 work The New Atlantis, a novel about a utopian society, but did not really surface again until the 19th century, when a number of theorists and explorers started to put together evidence from cultures widely separated by geography and history, to adduce the possibility of some sort of root or precursor civilization, which they identified with Plato’s Atlantis.
Atlantis was to get stranger still through the trance-readings of Edgar Cayce (1877–1945), the celebrated ‘sleeping seer’. As a young man Cayce had discovered that, when put into a hypnotic trance, he apparently had the ability to diagnose ailments and prescribe cures. Later he developed the ability to read people’s past lives and to channel historical and spiritual wisdom, in particular from ancient Atlantis. According to Cayce, Atlantis had enjoyed a 40,000-year history, during which Atlantans developed from pure energy thought-forms into humans with the sort of high Neolithic culture described by Plato, but with the added twist of advanced technologies such as energy-crystals, lasers, airships and death-rays. Like Donnelly, Cayce said that historical civilizations such as Egypt and the Mayans were founded by Atlantan refugees or colonists. Cayce also borrowed heavily (though probably unconsciously) from Donnelly in describing the location of Atlantis. Originally it had filled most of the Atlantic between Spain/Africa in the East and the Caribbean in the West, although apparently large tracts of eastern North America had once been part of Atlantis. In particular, Cayce pointed to the Bimini Islands in the Caribbean as being remnants of Atlantis, and claimed that a giant subterranean Hall of Records, a repository of earth-shattering Atlantan wisdom, would be discovered in this area. There was much excitement among Cayce followers when divers discovered a strange rock formation on the seabed near Bimini, now known as the ‘Bimini Road’ because of its resemblance to a Roman road. Many claimed that the Bimini Road was proof of the prior existence of an advanced civilization, which had evidently been submerged beneath the waves just as in the tale of Atlantis. However, most geologists and archaeologists agree that it is simply a curious-looking but natural beach-rock formation.

The original and initial source for Atlantis is the work of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. Two of his dialogues Timaeus and Critias, which were written around 360 BCE, feature conversations between various characters. One of the characters in these dialogues, Critias, tells of a tale that has come down to him fourth-hand, supposedly from an Egyptian priest from around 600 BCE who in turn was linking knowledge conserved for 9,000 years, which was recorded in inscriptions on columns in the city of Sais. This tale, which is used to illustrate the nobility of the ancient Athenians, describes Atlantis as a great civilization from the West that dominated the Western Mediterranean from its base ‘beyond the Pillars of Hercules’. Normally these pillars are taken to refer to the Straits of Gibraltar, which separate the Mediterranean from the Atlantic, placing the land of Atlantis in what we now call the Atlantic Ocean. Both the name of the lost continent and the name subsequently given to the ocean refer to Atlas, the first high king of Atlantis, equivalent to the Titan of myth who supported the world on his shoulders. (Although Plato gives his Atlas a different parentage to the Titan, it is generally assumed that the two are cognate.)

Plato depicts Atlantis in some facet. It was roughly oblong, about 700 kilometers (435 miles) across, with mountains around the coast and a great central plain, the most prominent feature of which was a mount to the south, upon which a great acropolis was built and around which grew the capital city of Atlantis. The central acropolis was protected by concentric rings of canals, with mighty walls shielding each ring of prevailing land. A huge canal linked the circular moats with the ocean to the south, and all the commerce of the world passed up and down the great waterway. At its height, Atlantis was a glorious Bronze Age civilization, with a mighty army and fleet, rich in natural resources and prosperous from the trade of nations.

Plato also describes how Atlantis was created: Poseidon, god of the sea, took it for his own when the gods of Olympus were carving up the world, and he shaped it according to his needs. His children (the eldest of whom was Atlas) became the kings of the land and ruled according to his precepts. In a familiar tale of decline, however, they became morally corrupt and debased as their wealth and power increased, and so the gods visited disaster upon them, smiting the land with a great earthquake that caused it to sink beneath the waves, becoming an impassable mud shoal that hindered free transport between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. These questionably unsteady foundations have given rise to many libraries’ worth of assumption from ancient times until the modern day.

The classic lost land, Atlantis has been positioned all over the place - from Ireland to Antarctica. Its vagueness has grown throughout the years, possibly out of all proportion to the actual proof for its reality, as it has developed into a criterion of the New Age progress, a key element of the unconventional history mythology.
So what is Atlantis? Is it the celebrated relic of an indisputably significant prehistoric culture? Is it a harmless narrative for “castle in the sky” novelists? Is it an idealistic self-satisfaction for romantics? Or fodder for hazardous prejudice? And if it actually did exist, where was it situated? We will return to discuss about it.