Atlantis: the key to the lost soul of humanity

A review of Ghosts of Atlantis: How the Echoes of Lost Civilizations Influence Our Modern World by J Douglas Kenyon (US $25, April 2021, UK £19.99, May 2021)

A crucial and topical thread running through this new book is how many researchers seeking genuine scientific advancement are thwarted by the reductionist-materialist paradigm of the establishment.

In referring to catastrophist Immanuel Velikovsky’s theory of ‘cultural amnesia’, Kenyon says that only by overcoming its ‘Great Forgetting’ can humanity rediscover the heights of spiritual and technological advancement of our distant ancestors’ Atlantean civilization — destroyed, under Kenyon’s discussion, 12,000 years ago by comet strike over the North Pole, solar storm (coronal mass ejection) or magnetic pole shift, causing devastating global floods and a rise in sea levels.

The idea is that unconscious memory is transmitted genetically from one generation to the next, over not just centuries but millennia, but that racial amnesia — caused by the trauma of an entire civilization being wiped out — has hidden the truth of human origins and held back spiritual advancement today. Velikovsky (1895–1979) believed that myths and legends about worldwide catastrophe in the distant past derived from literal records of such an event.