falling; in other words, it took nine days and nights of a
sailing-voyage to bring it from Atlantis.

The modern theory that the gods of Greece never had any personal
existence, but represented atmospheric and meteorological myths, the
movements of clouds, planets, and the sun, is absurd. Rude nations
repeat, they do not invent; to suppose a barbarous people creating their
deities out of clouds and sunsets is to reverse nature. Men first
worship stones, then other men, then spirits. Resemblances of names
prove nothing; it is as if one would show that the name of the great
Napoleon meant "the lion of the desert" (Napo-leon), and should thence
argue that Napoleon never existed, that he was a myth, that he
represented power in solitude, or some such stuff. When we read that
Jove whipped his wife, and threw her son out of the window, the
inference is that Jove was a man, and actually did something like the
thing described; certainly gods, sublimated spirits, aerial sprites, do
not act after this fashion; and it would puzzle the mythmakers to prove
that the sun, moon, or stars whipped their wives or flung recalcitrant
young men out of windows. The history of Atlantis could be in part
reconstructed out of the mythology of Greece; it is a history of kings,
queens, and princes; of love-making, adulteries, rebellions, wars,
murders, sea-voyages, and colonizations; of palaces, temples, workshops,
and forges; of sword-making, engraving and metallurgy; of wine, barley,
wheat, cattle, sheep, horses, and agriculture generally. Who can doubt
that it represents the history of a real people?

Uranos was the first god; that is to say, the first king of the great
race. As he was at the commencement of all things, his symbol was the
sky. He probably represented the race previous even to the settlement of
Atlantis. He was a son of Gaea (the earth). He seems to have been the