Grove Koger
The literature about Atlantis is seemingly endless, a situation quite a bit like those turtles that go all the way down.
Or almost. It all began, so far as we know, with Plato, who mentions Atlantis in two of dialogues, Timaeus and Critias. There seems to be nothing older than that unless it’s folkloric traditions (long since lost) of one kind of natural disaster or another. We might as well call the dialogues a work of fiction, since that’s pretty much what they are—an intriguing but relatively thin story laden with lessons about how a country ought (and ought not) to be governed.
The later literature of Atlantis is, to me, quite a bit more interesting. The crew of Jules Verne’s submarine Nautilus paid Atlantis a short visit in his 1870-71 novel Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers, or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. Arthur Conan Doyle’s late novella The Maracot Deep (1929) begins promisingly, but veers into spiritualism. In his 1919 novel L’Atlantide (translated as The Queen of Atlantis), Pierre Benoit moved Atlantis from the seabed to the Sahara Desert, a salutary move around which Benoit constructed quite a good story. I put it at the top of my very short “Novels about Atlantis” list.
But directly below Benoit’s novel I’d place the Breaking of the Seals by one Francis [Leslie] Ashton (1904-1994), which I originally learned about from a publication I once reviewed for, The Reprint Bulletin: Book Reviews. A small operation from Glanville Publishers, Inc., in Dobbs Ferry, New York, it’s long since ceased publication. Given my tastes in imaginative literature, I might have run across the novel later, but there’s no way to be sure. In any case, here’s what I had to say about the work:
“A welcome reprint of a nearly forgotten fiction classic. Framed by an English country house setting, the novel projects (via psychometry) its protagonist back 200,000 years to the fall of what we immediately recognize as Atlantis. The disaster is caused by the cataclysmic disintegration of one of a series of moons supposed by Austrian scientist Hans Hoerbiger (1860-1931) to have been captured by earth through the ages. This paper edition adds a brief and not particularly informative preface by Donning Editor-in-Chief Hank Stine [a churlish comment on my part], a longer introduction by fantasy writer Andre Norton, and a genially dotty foreword by Hoerbiger enthusiast Egerton Sykes, F.R.F.S., as well as a colorful cover and black and white interior illustrations by Ron Miller. Highly recommended for popular and research collections of imaginative literature, particularly since the original 1946 British edition is rare enough to be absent from the National Union Catalog Pre-1956 Imprints.”
It was thanks to Ashton’s novel and its foreword that I learned about Hoerbiger (or Hörbiger) and Sykes, bold but seemingly genial advocates of what are now recognized as fringe theories. Hörbiger came to believe that, over the aeons, the earth has had a series of moons, with our current one being number seven. Sykes was an amateur archaeologist who, according the site Seachild: Egerton Sykes and His Science of Atlantology, amassed the “largest private collection on Atlantis in the world” and “prided himself on knowing every scientist around the world in the field of Atlantology from 1912 to 1950.” He also edited two journals, Atlantis: A Journal of Research, which ran to 1948 to 1976, and New World Antiquity, which ran from 1954 to 1979. Those were the days!
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