The Moon is a harsh mistress

“The Atlantis Myth” is a book written by H S Bellamy, a mysterious writer based in Britain. The years of his birth and death are a matter of some controversy, and so is his exact name. The website Atlantipedia lists H S Bellamy, Hans Schindler Bellamy, Elmar Brugg and Elmar Vinibert von Rudolf as pseudonyms, suggesting that Rudolf Elmayer von Vestenbrugg might be the elusive Atlantophile's real name. Some believe that Bellamy was an Austrian or Anglo-Austrian residing in Germany, that he supported the Nazis, and that he published a work on the SA in 1939 claiming to be a former Obersturmführer! This may explain his secrecy once he moved to (or returned to) Britain. It's also a bit suspicious that Bellamy promoted the cosmological speculations of fellow Austrian Hanns Hörbiger, whose “Welteislehre” (World Ice Theory) or “Glazial-Kosmogonie” (Glacial Cosmogony) was popular among Nazis, including – so it is said – Adolf Hitler himself…

That being said, Bellamy is nevertheless a relatively important figure in the history of Atlantis-related speculations. His mentor Hörbiger was a catastrophist who believed that Earth didn't capture the Moon until about 15,000 years ago. The capture of Luna (originally an independent dwarf planet) led to cataclysms on Earth. Bellamy speculates that this explains the destruction of Atlantis. His reading of Plato's accounts in “Timaeus” and “Critias” is relatively literal. Bellamy also believes that the Biblical Book of Revelation contains hidden references to the destruction of Atlantis, and mentions pagan myths about a time when the Earth didn't have a moon. Bellamy's combination of heterodox cosmology, catastrophism and literal reading of ancient myths is strikingly similar to that of Immanuel Velikovsky in general outline, although the details of course differ. For starters, the Jewish Velikovsky was more forthrightly “Biblical”. Bellamy's reason for believing in Atlantis is less clear (at least from this book), but he does speculate that Plato's fabled continent was hierarchic and that the hierarchy was based on race, although he refrains from telling us which race was at the top and which at the bottom end of the societal pyramid…

A modern version of the same catastrophist scenario is promoted by Graham Hancock, who believes that the destruction of “Atlantis” (or the Lost Civilization) was caused by the collision of Earth with a comet – a real one, not the peculiar Venus-comet of Velikovskian fame. Personally, I'm willing to believe that the legend of Atlantis might be a faint echo of an actual lost civilization (or civilizations in the plural), but its destruction was probably caused by massive flooding at the end of the last Ice Age, not by captured moons or colliding comets. And no, we probably won't find the key to Ancient Mystery Religion laying on the sea floor somewhere outside the Azores, although a few interesting megaliths may be awaiting discovery there or elsewhere…