Atlantis enters the depth-psychology corpus primarily as a mythological archetype of catastrophic civilizational loss — a figure for the annihilation of a culture at the apex of its spiritual and material development. The primary textual authority is Plato, whose Timaeus and Critias furnish the myth's canonical form: a maritime empire governed by descendants of Poseidon, raised to magnificence, then submerged beneath the Atlantic in divine retribution for the corruption of its divine inheritance. Within the corpus, Atlantis functions along several distinct axes. As literary symbol, Harold Bloom traces its deployment in Hart Crane's The Bridge, where the lost continent becomes a Pindaric emblem for sublime aspiration and inevitable catastrophe, refracted through Platonic eros. As proto-historical speculation, the Harding-attributed popular material — drawing on Theosophy, Edgar Cayce, and catastrophist archaeology — treats Atlantis as a literal antediluvian civilization whose fall encodes racial and cosmic memory. As philosophical myth, Platonic scholarship situates the narrative within Plato's broader cosmological and political project: a 'noble lie' that dramatizes the tension between divine virtue and human corruption. The central tension across these treatments is epistemological: is Atlantis a genuine historical tradition, a political allegory, or a symbolic projection of the psyche's encounter with irretrievable wholeness?
In the library
16 passages
Such was the vast power which the god settled in the lost island of Atlantis; and this he afterwards directed against our land for the following reasons, as tradition tells: For many generations, as long as the divine nature lasted in them, they were obedient to the laws
This passage articulates the myth's core moral architecture: Atlantean greatness was inseparable from its divine inheritance, and its eventual corruption — the loss of divine nature — precipitated the catastrophic war with Athens and the island's destruction.
In the division of the earth Poseidon obtained as his portion the island of Atlantis, and there he begat children whose mother was a mortal.
Plato's Critias establishes the foundational mythological origin of Atlantis as a divine-human hybrid civilization, its very constitution defined by the union of a god and a mortal woman.
Is it not a wonderful thing that a few pages of one of Plato's dialogues have grown into a great legend, not confined to Greece only, but spreading far and wide over the nations of Europe and reaching even to Egypt and Asia?
The Timaeus introduction frames the Atlantis narrative as a myth of extraordinary cultural fertility, one that answered the universal human desire to locate a vanished primitive civilization at the origin of the arts.
Atlantis, a Pindaric ode with elegiac overtones, celebrates Brooklyn Bridge as a prime way to the lost city, whose glory and catastrophe were recounted by Plato in Critias and Timaeus.
Bloom demonstrates how Hart Crane consciously appropriates the Platonic Atlantis myth to invest Brooklyn Bridge with the dual valence of sublime aspiration and elegiac catastrophe, making the lost city a figure for the American sublime's constitutive loss.
Bloom, Harold, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015thesis
Love is the driving force of Atlantis: The word begins in the Platonic epigraph and is repeated four times in the poem.
Bloom identifies eros, rooted in the Platonic Symposium epigraph Crane selects, as the animating principle of the Atlantis section of The Bridge, linking the mythic lost city to a Shelleyan-Platonic metaphysics of desire.
Bloom, Harold, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015supporting
No one knew better than Plato how to invent 'a noble lie.' Observe (1) the innocent declaration of Socrates, that the truth of the story is a great advantage
The Critias commentary foregrounds the literary artifice of the Atlantis narrative, enumerating the rhetorical devices Plato deploys to confer historical verisimilitude upon a philosophical fiction.
Could any war between Athens and the Island of Atlantis have really coincided with the struggle between the Greeks and Persians, as is sufficiently hinted though not expressly stated in the narrative of Plato?
The Timaeus commentary raises the possibility that the Atlantis myth is a politically coded allegory of the Greco-Persian wars, a reading that places the narrative's historical claims under systematic critical suspicion.
Solon, who was intending to use the tale for his poem, enquired into the meaning of the names, and found that the early Egyptians in writing them down had translated them into their own language
Plato constructs a chain of transmission for the Atlantis story — Egyptian priests to Solon to Dropides to Critias — that functions simultaneously as an authentication of historical depth and a marker of the narrative's literary constructedness.
The annals of ancient history unveil a turbulent chapter as Atlantis and Lemuria, once harmonious civilizations, plunged into conflict around 25,000 years ago.
Drawing on Theosophical and Cayce-derived traditions, this passage treats Atlantis as a literal historical civilization whose catastrophic war with Lemuria encodes a cosmic moral struggle between domination and autonomy.
Harding, M. Esther, Woman's Mysteries, Ancient and Modern, 1955supporting
Whispers of Atlantis, Extraterrestrial Gifts — As the Antikythera Mechanism slowly revealed its secrets through meticulous scans and images, scientists embarked on a journey to reconstruct its intricate design.
The passage links Atlantis to speculation about anomalous ancient technology, positioning the myth as a repository for anxieties about suppressed or lost civilizational knowledge.
Harding, M. Esther, Woman's Mysteries, Ancient and Modern, 1955supporting
Crane weaves throughout a song by Sigmund Romberg from a 1922 musical, The Rose of Stamboul, varying it until Atlantis rises up, displacing 'O Stamboul Rose—dreams weave the Rose!' with 'Atlantis Rose drums wreathe the rose.'
Bloom traces Crane's technique of gradual mythic displacement, in which Atlantis emerges from the poem's sonic texture as an ideal that supplants merely temporal realities.
Bloom, Harold, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015supporting
The new trilogy is to transfer this state to the plane of actual existence, not in the future, but in the remote past, as the Athens of nine thousand years ago.
Cornford's analysis situates the Atlantis narrative within Plato's systematic philosophical project of grounding the ideal Republic in a mythologized archaic past, demonstrating that the lost civilization serves a specifically political-cosmological function.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
(9000 years ago) for the foundation of Athens and for the repulse of the invasion from Atlantis
The Timaeus locates the Atlantis conflict within a chronological framework of nine thousand years, establishing the myth's coordinates as deep prehistory and grounding Athens' victory as a foundational civilizational act.
British writer James Churchward emerges on the scene, introducing Mu, a sunken continent initially linked to Plato's Atlantis but eventually intertwined with the legend of Lemuria.
The passage situates Atlantis within the broader nineteenth- and twentieth-century tradition of lost-continent speculation, noting its genealogical connection to Theosophical constructs such as Lemuria and Mu.
Harding, M. Esther, Woman's Mysteries, Ancient and Modern, 1955aside
beginning from the sea they bored a canal of three hundred feet in width and one hundred feet in depth and fifty stadia in length, which they carried through to the outermost zone, making a passage from the sea up to this, which became a harbour
This passage furnishes the architectural elaboration of Atlantis — its concentric rings, canal systems, and harbour works — that has made the myth a persistent template for imagining the engineering achievements of lost civilizations.
The memorials which your own and other nations have once had of the famous actions of mankind perish in the wa
The Egyptian priest's account of cyclical catastrophe — fire and flood periodically erasing human memory — provides the cosmological rationale for why Atlantis and its conflict with Athens survive only as fragmentary oral tradition.