Atlantis is presented as a legendary sunken island whose imagined past became a resource for Western occultism and National Socialist thought. Its significance in the account lies not in evidence for a historical civilization, but in the way the legend of a lost, advanced people was reworked into modern esoteric and political narratives.

The Legend in Western Occultism

The Atlantis myth endured as a story of a mysterious island that had once housed inhabitants more advanced, and almost godlike, than people of the present. That image made the legend adaptable: it supplied a seemingly ancient origin for claims about knowledge and power beyond those of contemporary civilization. The book places Atlantis among recurring themes in Western occultism, where the lost island’s imagined history could be treated as more than a tale of disappearance.

Theosophy, Ariosophy, and National Socialist Occultism

In the late nineteenth century, Helena Blavatsky notably promoted the idea that the Atlanteans had been more advanced than modern civilization. Her Theosophical movement influenced mystically inclined German ariosophists, some of whom became forerunners of National Socialist thought in the 1920s and 1930s. The account traces a route of reception: an occult interpretation of Atlantis helped furnish ideas that circulated among ariosophic groups, whose tenets in turn influenced parts of National Socialism.

The Thule Gesellschaft and related organizations were instrumental in developing the NSDAP, placing occult societies within the broader history through which these ideas acquired political significance. This does not make Atlantis itself a historical foundation for the movement; rather, the legend entered a modern ideological setting through the interpretations and organizations that took it up.

A Modern Myth of Origins

Atlantis’s importance in this history comes from its capacity to make a speculative past appear to authorize claims about the present. The story’s advanced, quasi-divine inhabitants could be imagined as predecessors to contemporary society, giving occult accounts of human origins a grand historical frame. The book thus treats Atlantis as an example of how a myth can be selected and recast within modern systems of belief: its enduring force lies in the uses made of the lost island, not in proof that the island or its civilization existed as described.