The New Atlantis

Most Americans think of their country as a nation that broke away from a king. A certain circle of thinkers saw it very differently. To them, America was the place where a lost kingdom of ancient wisdom would rise again — the New Atlantis. The idea runs from an English philosopher in the 1600s, through secret brotherhoods and lodges, to a 33rd-degree Mason who put it in print in 1944. This study traces that line and what it says about how America was imagined by the men who shaped it.

See what Scripture offered in its place ↓

The Island That Sank

The story of Atlantis comes from the Greek philosopher Plato, written around 360 BC. He described a great island empire in the ocean beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, ruled by kings descended from the sea god Poseidon. It was rich, powerful, and wise, until it grew proud and was swallowed by the sea in a single day and night. Over the centuries, mystics came to treat Atlantis as the homeland of a secret wisdom older than Moses — a wisdom they believed passed to Egypt, then to the Greeks, and was guarded ever since by a chain of initiates.

“The Great Atlantis, That You Call America”

In 1627 the English statesman Francis Bacon published a short book called New Atlantis. Sailors lost in the western sea find a hidden island called Bensalem. It is peaceful and prosperous, and at its center stands Salomon’s House, a college of wise men who study the secrets of nature and quietly guide the whole society. The people do not know everything the wise men know. The wise men decide what to share.

Bacon did not leave the location to guesswork. In the book, the governor of the island explains that Plato’s Atlantis was real, and he names it: “the great Atlantis, that you call America.” In Bacon’s telling, the New World across the ocean was the old Atlantis, and his ideal kingdom of hidden wisdom belonged in its waters.

Bacon was not a distant dreamer. He is named among the members of the Virginia Company in its charter of 1609, the company that planted the first lasting English colony at Jamestown. The man who called America Atlantis was among those who chartered its settlement. After his death, the Royal Society of London, founded in 1660, openly took Salomon’s House as its model. The idea of a nation steered by an inner circle of the learned moved from fiction into institutions, and from England across the ocean.

Bacon Among the Founders

Bacon’s ideas did not stay in England. The men America honors as its fathers read him, revered him, and built on his plan. Thomas Jefferson called Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke “the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception,” and hung their portraits together at Monticello. When Jefferson arranged his own library, he sorted every book under Bacon’s three divisions of the mind — memory, reason, and imagination. In 1815 that library was sold to Congress to rebuild the Library of Congress after the British burned it, and Bacon’s order came with it.

Benjamin Franklin followed the same road. In 1743 he founded the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia on the model of London’s Royal Society, the body that had taken Bacon’s Salomon’s House as its pattern. Franklin was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1756. He was also Grand Master of the Masons of Pennsylvania in 1734, and that same year he printed Anderson’s Constitutions, the first Masonic book published in America. The college of hidden wise men Bacon imagined had an American branch, and Franklin ran it.

Thomas Paine was not a Mason, but he wrote an essay titled The Origin of Free-Masonry, published after his death, in which he traced the lodge straight back to the sun worship of the ancient Druids and Egypt — and wrote of it with approval. The man whose pamphlet Common Sense stirred the colonies to war knew what the lodge was and did not object.

These are the founders whose faces are carved, painted, and enthroned across Washington (Study Eight). The nation that honors them as its fathers inherited their teachers along with them.

The Rose Cross Comes to Pennsylvania

A few years before Bacon’s book, pamphlets in Germany announced a secret brotherhood called the Rosicrucians — the Fraternity of the Rose Cross — who claimed to hold the hidden wisdom of the ages and promised to reform the world. Their emblem was a rose on a cross. The cross was borrowed from the church. The rose was an old sign of secrecy; in the Roman world a rose hung over a meeting meant that what was said there stayed there, the source of the phrase sub rosa, “under the rose.” A rose on a cross is a mystery school dressed as a church.

That dream reached America early. In 1694 a band of German mystics led by Johannes Kelpius sailed to Pennsylvania and settled along the Wissahickon Creek outside Philadelphia. They studied the stars, practiced alchemy, and waited for a new age. Historians have often described them as America’s first Rosicrucians. The Rose Cross ideal later passed into Freemasonry, where the Scottish Rite’s eighteenth degree still bears the name Knight of the Rose Croix (Study Ten).

A New Order of the Ages

When the founders designed the Great Seal, they wrote the new-age hope into the nation’s emblem. Novus Ordo Seclorum — “A New Order of the Ages” — stands beneath the unfinished pyramid, taken from Virgil’s poem about the return of Saturn’s golden age (Study Seven). The seal does not describe a nation restoring something Yahuah gave. It describes a nation beginning a new age of its own.

Manly P. Hall, a 33rd-degree Mason honored by the Scottish Rite as one of its great teachers, said the rest outright. In The Secret Destiny of America, published in 1944, he wrote that America was not an accident of history but the long-planned work of secret orders of philosophers who had chosen the new continent to build the ideal commonwealth Plato and Bacon described. Sixty years earlier, Minnesota congressman Ignatius Donnelly had made Atlantis a national bestseller with Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882). Between the two of them, America as Atlantis reborn moved from the lodge into the public mind.

This study does not need to prove every claim Hall made. It is enough to know what the men inside the system said they believed: that America was built to raise again a kingdom of hidden wisdom that had once been destroyed.

One of Three Cities

One more piece of the pattern places Washington in company. Three small territories sit inside larger countries yet answer to no state or province around them. The City of London, the old Square Mile, keeps its own Lord Mayor, its own police, and an ancient charter, and is the center of British finance. Vatican City has been a sovereign state since 1929, the seat of the Roman church. The District of Columbia belongs to no state and is the seat of the American government and the most powerful military on earth. Each is crowned with a great dome. An Egyptian obelisk stands at the center of two of them, and London’s, Cleopatra’s Needle, stands on the Thames a short walk away. Money, religion, and military power — finance, spirit, and sword.

Revelation describes the great city in those same three parts: the kings of the earth, the merchants of the earth, and the woman who rides the beast.

Revelation 18:3For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies.

The City Built to Heaven

A united people, a wisdom that reaches heaven without Yahuah, and a name made for themselves is not a new plan. It is the first one.

Genesis 11:4And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name.

Yahuah scattered Babel. Plato’s Atlantis drowned. And the great city of Revelation ends the way Atlantis ended.

Revelation 18:21And a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone, and cast it into the sea, saying, Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all.

Men who planned to raise Atlantis in America were planning to raise the city Yahuah has already sentenced to the sea.

Come out of her, my people.

What Scripture Offered in Its Place

Scripture does not leave the believer without a city. It refuses to let men build it.

Hebrews 11:10For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is Elohim.

Abraham lived in tents in the land of promise because he would not settle for any city men could make. Yahuah’s wisdom is not held by an inner circle and handed down to the common people as the wise men see fit. It was written on tablets, read aloud to the whole assembly, and placed “very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it” (Deuteronomy 30:14). Deliverance comes through the Messiah Yahushua, whom Yahuah sent, and the walk that follows is lit by the Torah, not by the secret light of a brotherhood.

At the end there are two cities. One is thrown into the sea. The other comes down from heaven.

Revelation 21:2And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from Elohim out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

Revelation 18:4Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.