Atlantis
Atlantis is a legendary island described by the Greek philosopher Plato in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias, written around 360 BCE. An advanced civilization engulfed in a single night by the waves, it has become in Western esotericism the archetypal symbol of lost wisdoms and vanished continents.
Origin and etymology
The founding account appears in two late dialogues by Plato. In the Timaeus (24e-25d), Critias reports a story that Solon supposedly gathered in Egypt from the priests of Sais. The unfinished Critias provides the expanded version: an island greater than Libya and Asia combined, located beyond the Pillars of Heracles (Gibraltar). The Atlantean empire was said to have been founded by Poseidon, to have prospered for centuries, and then to have sunk into corruption before attacking Athens. Its defeat was followed by a cataclysm that engulfed it in a single fateful day and night, about 9,000 years before Plato (around 9600 BCE).
Evolution and tradition
From antiquity onward, the account divided opinion. Aristotle, Plato's student, seems to have doubted it (according to Strabo: he who created it also made it disappear). Plutarch and Proclus discussed it. In the Renaissance, Europeans rediscovered the text and projected it onto the New World: Francisco López de Gómara (1552) and Francis Bacon (The New Atlantis, 1627) saw America in it. In the nineteenth century, Ignatius Donnelly published Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), a bestseller that launched the modern myth. Blavatsky's theosophy made it the cradle of the fourth root race. Edgar Cayce delivered hundreds of readings about Atlantis as early as 1923. In the twentieth century, the myth permeated popular culture: Jules Verne, Conan Doyle, Lovecraft, Disney.
Practical use
In contemporary esotericism, Atlantis functions as the archetype of a prior humanity holding lost knowledge: energetic crystals, vibrational technologies, subtle medicine. Some Akashic readings or hypnotic regressions claim to recover past Atlantean lives. On Tarotoui, you will not find spreads specifically devoted to Atlantis, but the symbolism of submersion, fall, and buried memory remains relevant for interpreting certain cards (the Tower, the Moon, the Hanged Man) when a dimension of civilizational or personal collapse manifests itself in a reading.
Going further
Today's historians and archaeologists regard Atlantis as a pedagogical myth forged by Plato to illustrate the dangers of political hubris: the corrupt city that virtuous Athens must defeat. Several hypotheses attempt a historical substratum: the eruption of the Thera volcano (Santorini) around 1600 BCE, which devastated Minoan Crete, or the mere mythical amplification of the city of Tartessos. No serious archaeological substratum confirms Platonic Atlantis. The account remains a literary creation of exceptional allegorical power.