[seicslybearee]

I feel compelled to write about the derivation of the story of Atlantis, and its true meaning as it was understood at the time. This is because Atlantis has come up in another thread and, just like Christian fundamentalists, it seems that there are now New Age fundamentalists that are reading this myth as history, and thus causing no end of confusion. We’ve just got to the end of 2,000 years-worth of similar confusion caused by Christians taking metaphor literally, so I hope we’re not in for another 2,000.

Anyway, in order to understand about Atlantis, one has to understand something first about Plato.

The legend of Atlantis, first told by Plato in Timaeus, was an Egyptian Mystery story and not Egyptian history. Plato was initiated into the Mysteries in Egypt.

This is from Plato's biographer, Thomas Taylor:

"Plato was initiated into the 'Greater Mysteries' at the age of 49. The initiation took place in one of the subterranean halls of the Great Pyramid in Egypt. The Isiaic table formed the altar, before which the Divine Plato stood and received that which was always his, but which the ceremony of the Mysteries enkindled and brought from its dormant state.

“With this ascent, after three days in the Great Hall, he was received by the Hierophant of the Pyramid (the Hierophant was seen only by those who had passed the three days, the three degrees, the three dimensions) and given verbally the Highest Esoteric Teachings, each accompanied with its appropriate Symbol. After a further three months' sojourn in the halls of the Pyramid, the Initiate Plato was sent out into the world to do the work of the Great Order, as Pythagoras and Orpheus had been before him." But Plato has been much misunderstood over the years. The rot set in with his student Aristotle. In the gardens of his academy, Plato taught the same Mysteries that he learned in Egypt through a wordless initiation. Unfortunately, though, for reasons best known to himself, he didn’t teach it to Aristotle, and it’s Aristotle’s teachings and vision (for what it was worth) about ethics and such like, that has come down to us —without anything about how to achieve the divine inspiration that produced such thinking.






Aristotle's education was entirely different from that of Plato. Aristotle did not know the secret science of the 'initiates.'

We are therefore fully entitled to consider Plato as the last exponent and philosophic interpreter of 'ancient wisdom.'

Andrew Efron, The Sacred Tree Script, 1941. The story of Atlantis was an Egyptian Mystery story ... this means it was part of the Egyptian Mystery teachings, and thus was an allegory. It can be found in hieroglyphics and pictures on the walls of various tombs as part of the Book of the Heavenly Cow. Proclus tells us that the 4th century BC Greek philosopher Crantor reported that he, too, had seen the columns on which the story of Atlantis was preserved as reported by Plato: the Saite priest showed him its history in hieroglyphic characters.

The story of Atlantis is about the drowning of the seven pole stars (aka seven islands of Atlantis), one after the other. It is about Ra’s sun boat or ark as it traverses these celestial waters in full spate, carrying the deceased to their destination. This is why it appears on the walls of tombs.





So let’s look at the etymology of the word “Atlantis”.

Egyptian, in its early stages, had no letter ‘l’. So originally the word ‘atr’ (or “atl” as it later became), had several meanings in relation to water. “Atru” is the water, the water flood, the water boundary, limit, measure, frontier, embankment. But when ‘r’ became ‘l’, it was changed to ‘atl’.

Add to that the root word ‘antu’ or ‘anti’, which equals a division of land. Thus Atlantis is a compound of ‘atl’ and ‘anti’, with a Greek ‘s’ added on to the end, meaning ‘the land divided by water’. We know that Plato described Atlantis in Timaeus as a land divided by circular canals.



Artist's impression from Plato's description:





This is from Gerald Massey’s Egypt The Light of the World:

“Now the earliest nomes of Egypt were seven in number, and these were the seven territories marked out, limited and bounded by the ‘atlu’ as river, canal, conduit or water boundaries. In the valley of the Nile, the land was bounded first by water as the natural boundary, and seven nomes would be enclosed by seven ‘atlu’, long before the land limit was marked out by boundary stones or stelae.” These seven earthly nomes were named after the seven celestial astronomes, which were the seven pole stars. The ancient Egyptians knew that the Earth at different times, because of the precession of the equinoxes, had different pole stars and there were seven in all. ...

Massey continues:

“Sufficient mythical matter for a legend of the deluge and the ark may be found in the 64th chapter of the Ritual. It is recorded in the rubrical directions appended to the chapter that it “was discovered on a plinth of the god of the Hennu-bark (Ra in his sun boat) by a master builder of the wall in the time of King Septi the victorious {about 6- 7,000 years ago].

“We learn from this that the bursting forth of the waters in an overwhelming flood was based upon the natural fact of the inundation in Egypt. The imagery has been reproduced in heaven, and also in Amenta (the Underworld)... In this chapter, there is an application of deluge imagery to the sun in the mythos and the departed soul in the eschatology.

The subject matter is very ancient. It belongs to that time when Sut was a pre-Osirian form of Good Being, in relation to the pole, the dog star and the inundation of the Nile. Here the deluge of the inundation is the deluge of destruction directed against the workers of evil. In short, it does what the inundation did for Egypt in washing away the results of the drought ...

Thus, 6-7,000 years ago the so-called ‘deluge legend’ was ancient in Egypt, and it belonged to the time when Sut, in command of the waters had not lost his place in glory, and his deluge was employed to destroy the Sebau, the Sami, the Apap-dragon, the long-armed ones and other evil enemies of man.” So that is why this story was written and painted on the walls of tombs. The story about Atlantis was about a sacred journey or divine adventure that the soul of the deceased would have to undergo as he sailed on Ra's Ark down the White Nile (the Milky Way), through the floods of the “atl-anti”, by which he was piloted by the 'anti fish'. In the Anti Lake, he would fight and conquer the Apap monster and thus eventually reach the Underworld of Amenta. Here, his heart was weighed in the balance against a feather in the Judgement Hall of Ma'at, and if he was not found wanting, he could then go on to the heavenly abode.

This is the real meaning of the story of the seven islands of Atlantis or the heptanomis (seven nomes) of the "atl-anti".