Atlantis

Atlantis is a vanished continent in Doc Sportello’s vision of history, where its ancient rivalry with Lemuria becomes the deep-time pattern behind the Vietnam War. The vision places the United States between two drowned worlds and makes present-day conflict seem less like a freely chosen policy than the recurrence of an old struggle. Elsewhere, Los Angeles’s real-estate battles echo that pattern on the scale of neighborhoods: land changes hands, communities are uprooted, and those with power describe displacement as development or preservation.

The Continent in the Vision

During an acid trip, Doc finds himself in a city that is at once an ancient ruin and everyday Greater Los Angeles. Its inhabitants appear to belong to both the present and a world shaped by Lemuria’s submergence; the beach residents, including Doc and his neighbors, are imagined as refugees who came to the California coast seeking safe land. This unstable geography makes the lost continent not simply a remote setting but a submerged past that still organizes how people inhabit the present.

The vision then connects Atlantis and Lemuria to the war in Indochina. The United States, positioned between the oceans into which the continents disappeared, becomes the middle term in their ancient rivalry. Doc’s vision identifies Richard Nixon as descended from Atlantis and Ho Chi Minh from Lemuria, and recasts the U.S. war in Southeast Asia as a proxy conflict caught in a karmic loop. The account reaches back beyond the United States, French Indochina, organized religion, and written history, grounding the modern war in a mythic geography that precedes conventional political memory.

Atlantis and the Sacred Stone

The vision gives the Lemurian side of the conflict a material emblem: a stone pillar rescued by three holy men fleeing the inundation of their homeland. They carry it to Indochina and establish it as the foundation of their new life in exile. Known as the sacred stone of Mu, it is repeatedly removed for safekeeping when invading armies arrive and set up again elsewhere when the troubles end.

By the time France begins colonizing Indochina and the United States occupies it, the stone has become invisible, withdrawn into its own space. Atlantis is not assigned a corresponding surviving object in the account; instead, it is named as the ancestral source of one side of a rivalry whose effects persist. That difference reinforces the vision’s asymmetry: Lemuria’s exile leaves a trace that can be moved and hidden, while Atlantis survives here chiefly as a lineage and a historical claim.

The Myth Returns to Los Angeles

The vision’s sinking city gives the ancient history an immediate, bodily threat. As water rises through the lower levels, Doc understands that the entire structure is going under. He climbs toward higher ground, but the water continues to rise; the escape from the ruined world comes through the intervention of Kamukea, the Lemurian spirit guide, who tells him they must leave. The drowned continents’ history is therefore not safely past: it returns as a landscape that can engulf the dreamer.

The novel also sets this mythic displacement beside Los Angeles’s history of land use. Aunt Reet understands the basin lot by lot, including the histories that deeds and contracts leave out; her knowledge makes land a record of family conflict, water, and change. Tariq recalls that many Japanese residents of South Central were sent to camps during World War II, after which Black residents moved in, only to face removal in their turn. The narration places that history alongside the Mexican families displaced from Chavez Ravine for Dodger Stadium and American Indians swept from Bunker Hill for the Music Center. These are distinct episodes, but together they make the city’s development resemble a recurring transfer of place and possession.

Channel View Estates makes the process visible in the terrain. Its signs advertise “A Michael Wolfmann Concept”; model homes and completed houses give way to construction skeletons pushing into unincorporated land. Doc parks near the future corner of Kaufman and Broad, where the street signs are already in place but the streets remain unpaved. Spanish Colonial styling and red-tile roofs suggest more prestigious coastal towns, while the development overlooks a neglected branch of the Dominguez Flood Control Channel, cut off by fill, regrading, and industrial debris. The promised new neighborhood thus stands on a landscape already altered and on the site of a neighborhood whose residents have been moved along.

A Contested Claim to Place

Channel View’s opponents frame the struggle in competing moral languages. Crocker Fenway describes residents as defenders of the environment against high-density development, while Doc calls the issue property values. Crocker answers with a broader assertion of entrenched possession: real estate, water rights, oil, and cheap labor have always belonged to those already in place, while newcomers are transient and available to be bought off. The exchange exposes how preservation rhetoric and commercial development can both obscure the question of who has the power to remain.

Against this background, Atlantis enlarges the book’s account of recurrence without resolving it. Its vanished world turns modern war into a repetition of ancient rivalry; Los Angeles’s clearances show displacement repeating through tangible decisions about neighborhoods, infrastructure, and land. The parallel is not that every historical event is identical, but that the claim to territory persists across vastly different scales—from drowned continents and sacred relics to freeway corridors and unfinished suburban streets.