Ancient Web: Crystalinks Mapped Every Atlantis Theory into One Webpage

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

There may be no lost continent in the Atlantic, but there is certainly a continent's worth of speculation about one. Ellie Crystal collected many of those theories into a single extravagant webpage.

Visit Crystalinks' Theories About Atlantis.

The page starts with Plato's Timaeus and Critias: a powerful island nation that attacks an idealized ancient Athens and is eventually submerged. Its description includes rings of land and water around a central palace, ten royal sons of Poseidon, and the supposed location beyond the Pillars of Hercules.

Then the index moves far beyond Plato. Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, nineteenth-century author Ignatius Donnelly, Theosophist Helena Blavatsky, occult interpretations of the Piri Reis map, Edgar Cayce's predicted rising islands, and channeled accounts of gigantic energy crystals all share the document.

When a collection becomes its own mythology

This juxtaposition is the historical attraction—and the problem. A statement drawn from Plato's literary dialogue is not equivalent to a later clairvoyant's description of Atlantean flying machines. The page sometimes quotes skeptical explanations, such as the effect of plate tectonics on lost-continent hypotheses, while also reproducing claims about underground crystal temples and telepathic civilizations.

There is no accepted archaeological evidence for Atlantis as the advanced vanished civilization described in these claims. The supposed technologies, psychic accounts, and precise destruction dates should be read as occult folklore and speculative literature, not scientific discoveries.

Crystalinks itself has substantial early-Web provenance. Its founder says she launched the site on August 25, 1995, initially publishing 56 pages on a hosted server before obtaining the Crystalinks domain. A 1995 archive records topics such as crystal skulls, Reiki, and megalithic expeditions.

This Atlantis page is one particular part of that larger project. Another already published Ancient Web article covers its Colosseum page; neither the presence of multiple topics nor an old domain should be mistaken for verification of all the site's historical assertions.

The page's many internal links, image breaks, and loosely accumulated sections preserve a way of reading characteristic of metaphysical web encyclopedias: one theory always leads to six more.

Explore the original Atlantis compilation and the site's founding retrospective.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.