Tea at Trianon: The Hunt: The City of Atlantis

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, May 17, 2024

The Hunt: The City of Atlantis—Mystery or Plain Myth?

From ArtNet:

The legendary city was first mentioned around 360 B.C.E. by the Greek philosopher Plato. He wrote the story of the nation’s rise and calamitous fall, when the gods punished its citizens for their hubris, sinking it to the bottom of the sea. Since then, Atlantis has been the subject of countless books, T.V. series, films, songs, and even musicals. There are an equally innumerable amount of theories about the lost city’s final resting place. Though virtually no scientist today believes that Atlantis was a real place, this was not always the case.
In 1670, for example, after 23 years of work, Swedish polymath and national icon Olaus Rudeck published a 3,000-page, four-volume series claiming that Sweden was Atlantis’ original location. He further insisted that Swedish was the root of all languages.

Later, in 1882, Ignatious L. Donnelly, a former populist U.S. congressman, released Atlantis: The Antediluvian World a pseudo-archaeological book that treated Atlantis as factual and historical. He posited the existence of an advanced Atlantean civilization whose diaspora shaped the cultures of ancient Europe, Africa, and the Americas, claiming that ancient Egypt was Atlantis’s first colony. Donnelly’s ideas gained traction, particularly among theosophists in the early 20th century, and continue to shape contemporary New Age beliefs. (Read more.)