The Gospel of Hellas - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

the gospel of hellas
the mythology of Hellas. Therefore the myths her religion revealed were not a
unity as in India, a duality as in Persia, nor a trinity as in Egypt. They revealed
a plurality, a religious conception of polytheism. 45 It is in looking at the various
sites of oracles in Hellas that we may see antiquity, as it were, with the curtain
raised which had fallen upon the landscape of Atlantis.
In fact, Greek mythology is the curtain, but the curtain is not the picture,
as George Grote stated. The picture, the reality, is the stage of Atlantis. Ignatius
Donnelly wrote in his Atlantis: “The history of Atlantis is the key to Greek
mythology.” 46 The gods lived in Atlantis as deified kings, as superhuman beings,
forerunners of mankind. On Olympus they lived together like human beings.
Donnelly pointed out that the word Olympus is connected with Atlantis.
“Greek tradition located the island on which Olympus was situated in the
far West, in the ocean beyond Africa, on the western boundary of the known
world and where the mighty Atlas held up the heavens. And Plato tells us that
the land where Poseidon and Atlas ruled was Atlantis.” The powerful Atlas
who stood as a giant upon the western confines of the earth “supported the
heavens on his shoulders in a region of the West where the sun continued to
shine after he had set upon Greece.” Atlas, ruling in Atlantis, revealed even
through his name the connection with the sunken continent now covered by
the Atlantic Ocean. “The mythology of Greece is really a history of the kings
of Atlantis. The Greek heaven was Atlantis ... [T]he history of Atlantis could
be in part reconstructed out of the mythology of Greece.”
Plato in his Cratylus let Socrates speak of the gods: “My notion would be
that the sun, moon and stars, earth and heaven, which are still the gods of many
barbarians, were the only gods known to the aboriginal Hellenes ... What shall
follow the gods? Must not demons and heroes and men come next? Consider
the real meaning of the word demons. You know Hesiod uses the word. He
speaks of a golden race of men who came first. He says of them:
But now that fate has closed over this race
They are holy demons upon earth,
Beneficient averters of ills, guardians of mortal men.