Lost worldsSimplifiedDefined by Blavatsky

Atlantis

Also: Fourth Root-Race continent · Poseidonis

Plato’s Timaeus/Critias, revived as prehistory by Ignatius Donnelly and recast by Blavatsky

In Theosophy Atlantis is tied to the Root-Race scheme, a racialized evolutionary mythology. This entry treats that as intellectual history, not as fact.

Blavatsky

Original sense

Atlantis is not a single island that sank in a night, but a chain of landmasses inhabited by the Fourth Root-Race over immense geological time. Its last remnant, Poseidonis, perished more recently. Atlanteans developed both high occult knowledge and black magic; their cataclysm is moral as well as geological.

The Atlanteans were the first purely human, earthly race… they built cities and developed a science which we have lost.
The Secret Doctrine, Volume II, on the Fourth Race

She used Plato, Donnelly, and Hindu Puranic flood myths, then placed Atlantis inside a seven-race, seven-round cosmology. The point was cyclic evolution, not a crystal-city utopia.

New Age

Later sense

A lost high civilization of crystals, flying machines, and priest-scientists, often remembered through channelled ‘past-life’ recall. Mount Shasta, Bimini, and Antarctica are offered as remnants. The moral collapse is optional; the aesthetic of advanced ancient technology is not.

Typical use. Crystal skull lore, ‘Atlantean healing codes,’ past-life workshops, and alternative-history media.

The drift

The core survived; the metaphysics was flattened.

A chapter in a grim cyclic anthropology became a golden-age brand. Blavatsky’s Atlanteans are a warning about the abuse of occult power. New Age Atlantis is usually a catalogue of recovered gifts.

Related terms

7 of 38