Places
Place · the 360s BCE
Atlantis
Two Dialogues, Many Afterlives
Plato told it to argue justice; the sunken continent, and its racial history, is Victorian invention.
SignificancePlato set it up to be defeated. Atlantis is the imperial power that grows vast and corrupt, and Athens — poor, disciplined, his ideal republic — defeats it before the sea takes both. The island exists in the dialogues to lose, and its modern career reverses the moral.
The FindingAtlantis begins in exactly two texts, Plato's Timaeus and Critias of about 360 BCE, and everything since is commentary on them — including Donnelly's 1882 version, which credits a vanished race with other peoples' achievements.
Place · the 1550s
Xibalba
Down the Black Road
The Popol Vuh's underworld: twelve lords of death and disease, a road of canyons and rivers, no cave on it.
SignificanceThe lords of Xibalba are defeated by being fooled, not by being fought: the twins let themselves be killed, come back, and trick death into asking for the same treatment. The underworld's power in this reading is beatable by anyone willing to go through it first.
The FindingThe Popol Vuh never puts Xibalba in a cave — its road is steep steps, two canyons, three rivers and a four-way crossroads — and the cave is Barbara MacLeod and Dennis Puleston's 1978 archaeological argument that the Maya entered the underworld through caves.
Place · Sufism · 1274
The Tomb at Konya
Museum by Law, Shrine by Practice
Rumi's grave at Konya: shut by law in 1925, a museum since 1927, visited still as a saint's tomb.
SignificanceThe state calls it a museum and the visitors behave otherwise — they queue, they pray, they leave. The tradition holds that a saint's baraka remains at the grave, which is why an administrative reclassification changed the signage and not the practice.
The FindingThe turning resumed in a Konya cinema in December 1953 — three musicians and two people in street clothes — licensed only if it was billed as a celebration of a great Turkish poet rather than a religious ritual; Law 677, which dissolved the order in 1925, was amended in 1950 to let the ministry open such tombs, and has never been repealed.
- AtlantisOccult Cosmology
- Congo SquareAfrican Traditions
- Esalen InstituteModern Currents
- Meron and the Lag BaOmer HillulaJewish Mysticism
- Oyotunji African VillageAfrican Traditions
- The Abbey of ThelemaCeremonial Magic and the Golden Dawn
- The Great SphinxThe Ancient World
- The TabernacleRites and Doctrine
- The Tomb at KonyaSufism
- UmanJewish Mysticism
- XibalbaMesoamerican Traditions