Atlantis In Plato's Riddle By John Michael Greer

The author, John Michael Greer starts with “Plato’s Riddle” as chapter one. From the scant mention of Atlantis in Plato’s Timaeus, Greer examines the context in which Plato used Atlantis as an example of a civilization gone bad. For Plato, was Atlantis a real place in a forgotten age, the existence of which was told to him by the priests of Egypt? Greer provides an illuminating answer and really comes back to answer it in the final chapters of the book. In between start and finish, we learn of Atlantis the mythology and Atlantis the legacy. They are entirely different subject matter.
Greer gives ample warning that he is going off the Atlantis beaten path when he mentions the “modern myth of progress”. Though Greer does not go into the details,

Greer precedes his discussion of Blavatsky with a look at others who preserved and expanded upon Plato’s original mention of Atlantis. By the nineteenth century, two hundred years after the last mention of Atlantis by Guillaume Postel and John Dee in the 17th century, the way was open for Blavatsky and other mystics as well as writers such as Jules Verne to portray Atlantis as a developed civilization which crumbled into the eroding waters of ocean and time. In this discussion, Greer stresses the point that occultism (“‘hidden philosophy'”) is not a religion. The reason he stresses the point is probably because much of what came out of the renewed interest in Atlantis after Blavatsky took on the flavor of religious belief. Reincarnation, a tenet of nearly all main stream religions except Christianity, became a pivotal requisite in the Atlantis myth adhered to by Blavatsky as well as mystics such as Edgar Cayce. Greer also cites entertainment media–books, movies–which took up the Atlantis myth, implanting the idea in the popular mind as a possibility if not

Remember the “population time bomb”? The refined definition of “over population” is now given as a condition in which the density of a population exceeds its survival resources. The popular definition started out as simply too many people in the world. Aside from the latest “impending disaster” pushing the last “impending disaster” from prominence, time has a way of dulling the dagger of doom these disasters portend. Factor in a little logic, as opposed to descriptive statistics which rely upon speculation and guesses, and most “impending disasters” turn out to be manageable conditions requiring changes in perspective and attitude (as opposed to new technological