This last idea of course is a confusion between the empirical view of knowledge on which you modern Tellurians have founded your current culture and the traditional view of Truth to which (and as eternal beings you cannot fail to be) you are still – but now quite illogically – attached.

Only in the last century or two have you come to believe in history as an aggregate of material facts. Before that you believed in it as a story validating and explaining your existence. Currently you hover uncomfortably between two worlds – your ineradicable need for a historical mythos and your rather odd belief in the nature of history as positivist or atomic – a mere collection of material bits.

You overcome it, of course, by keeping at least some of your myths (or replacing them with new ones, such as progress/evolution) and justifying them as the results of positivist “research” while trying to ignore the fact that the two things have not even the remotest relation one to another.

The elephant on the tightrope is indeed an excellent analogy, though none of your scribal establishment will ever see the ink that is splattered all over the project for the same reason that no one fails to see the emperor’s clothes.

Thank you for the time and effort you’ve put into this. This will make a nice addition to my science fiction collection. In fact, I’ve been also working on a rewrite of a 1939 story (“The Priestess Who Rebelled”) and one of the things I wanted to do was expand on the religion and mythology of the Clan Mother’s village and her people.

For serious research (meaning actual archaeological expeditions and its related documentation), check out the Amazon Research Network. I did a tentative English translation of the preface of the flagship book (“The Lost History of the Amazons”) a while back, which included the following passage: “The subject of Amazon research is a minefield for the serious researcher. One runs into the danger, with the slightest misstep, of becoming stained with the indelible mark of a dilettante…”

If (on the off-chance) the entertainment is here meant for real, it’s shows the agility of an elephant on a tightrope over a sea of ink. I’m not sure a towel will wipe off the stain. Otherwise, if fiction (based, quite obviously, on the musings of Diodorus of Sicily) then some additional raw material might come in handy, such as Kuehne’s 2004 article, “A location for Atlantis” (i.e. off-shore from Cadiz as Plato said) in Antiquity Journal, Volume 78, Number 300.

After all, a good fiction writer these days cannot afford to get by without proper research. Otherwise, the fiction just sounds like — fiction.

– Mark or Marissa (you’ll have to guess which).