Caleb Jones

He wrote a book called Atlantis, The Antediluvian World.

And a lot of the things that we think about in Atlantis really come from him and they get tied up into the old story, but they actually don't come from the old story.

This is his like 10 part thesis, and you can see some things, some things come from Plato, but some things do not come from Plato.

So number one, there once existed in the Atlantic Ocean a large island outside the Strait of Gibraltar.

That comes straight from what we just read.

Two, the description given by Plato is not fable, good.

Now, three, that Atlantis was the region where man first rose from a state of barbarism to civilization.

He's incorporating this evolutionary mindset of civilization and man into his understanding of Atlantis.

That it became a populous and mighty nation.

It was the source of the cultures of Americas, the Mediterranean, Europe, Africa, the Baltic, Black Sea, and the Caspian.

And it was the true source of the universal memory of the Garden of Eden, the Garden of the Hesperides, the Elysian Fields, Asgard, and Olympus.

So he's kind of going into a modern sort of ancient, the way you look at myth too, but he's kind of merging it back into maybe it was real.

He says that the gods and goddesses of myth were simply the kings, queens, and heroes of Atlantis.

And so he definitely historicizes them, doesn't treat them as supernatural.

These myths are a confused recollection of real historical events.

And that the mythology of Egypt and Peru represented the original religion of Atlantis, sun worship.

Don't know where he gets that from, kind of makes it up.

And that the oldest colony of the Atlanteans was Egypt, whose civilization was very similar to that of Atlantis.

That's kind of the opposite of what we read in the Timaeus.

They were at war with each other.