Lee Kuhnle

Italians especially, and Europeans more generally, get really interested in classical Greece and rediscover all this stuff.

And again, the question is, well, was this metaphor?

In 1882, though, there's a moment, and there often is with this kind of stuff.

There's a guy, Ignatius L. Donnelly, who writes a book, and he basically just straight up says, nope, this is not metaphor, it is history.

And that's the beginning of the myth.

that we know today.

If you watch, I don't know, one of those History Channel things, they never mention Plato, right?

And so, you can really trace then how layers of the myth are kind of added onto this, in the 20th century especially.

We get Helena Blavatsky, there's Edgar Cayce, he's a big psychic spiritualist in the early 20th century, new religious movements.

And we go from...

okay, maybe there was a continent that disappeared.

It was a continent that had special technology.

I think Blavatsky is the one who suggests that this is the origin of quote-unquote human races, like that there are different types of humans that were there, and then when the island goes underwater, they escape to the different continents, and that's the origin of whatever different cultures and stuff like this.

Edgar Cayce adds crystals to it

At some point, there's going to be crystals.

And of course, there's going to be aliens, which then come even later, right?

Then it gets picked up by these pseudo-historical shows, like the History Channel basically does pseudo-history.

And they're like, well, could it have been aliens, right?

And now we've totally lost the origin.

And people really, like my students every year, are super interested in whether there might not be a lost continent of Atlantis, right?