There doesn’t seem to have been any one prominent explorer, writer, or scientist championing Atlantis in the 15th century, but, according to writings and recorded conversations from that period, this was the time in which it was reborn in popular consciousness. This was the age, Cameron says, when people really became aware that the world was “enormously larger than they’d ever imagined” and when some began to suppose that Atlantis could be a real place, after all. (Some even thought that Atlantis might have been the Americas, although, as Cameron notes, the problem with that theory is that “they’re still there.”) William Altman, author of Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic, said that Plato’s story helped make ancient Greeks think of the Mediterranean as just a sea—just one part of an infinitely larger whole. It makes sense, then, that the legend came into new meaning around the discovery of the New World.
The transformation never reversed. Pandora’s box (to borrow again from the Greeks) had been opened, and for many, Atlantis would never again exist only in literature. Joe Nickell, an investigator at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and Atlantis debunker, says that the story reappeared in the 19th and 20th centuries, and each time Atlantis looked suspiciously less like what Plato described and more like whatever era its new narrator was from. According to Nickell, Ignatius Donnelly’s 1882 work Atlantis: The Antediluvian World depicted a highly sophisticated ancient society, whereas Edgar Cayce’s 1930s Atlantis looked more like a shinier version of his own time.
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