André Thevet and the "Evidence" for Atlantis in America

​As you know, tracking down primary sources is one of the rabbit holes I can’t escape, so when I started flipping through Lewis Spence’s 1925 book Atlantis in America and came across his evidence that the Native peoples of the Americas had Atlantis traditions, I of course wanted to see the originals for myself. I was particularly taken by a quotation he gave on page 68, which Spence says comes from the “Tupi-Guarani of Brazil” and was recorded by “Thevet.” No other information is given to identify the source of an interesting take about a heavenly fire and a subsequent flood—a story later writers would identify as a comet that destroyed Atlantis:

Monan, the Maker, the Begetter, without beginning or end, author of all that is, seeing the ingratitude of men and their contempt for him that had made them thus joyous, withdrew from them, and sent upon them tata, the divine fire, which burned all that was on the surface of the earth. He swept about the fire in such a way that in places he raised mountains and in others deep valleys. Of all men, one alone, Irin Magé (the One who Sees), was saved, whom Monan carried into the heaven. He, seeing all things destroyed, spoke thus to Monan: ‘Wilt thou also destroy all the heavens and their garniture? Alas! henceforth where will be our home? Why should I live, since there is none other of my kind?’ Then Monan was so filled with pity that he poured a deluging rain on the earth, which quenched the fire, and flowing from all sides, formed the ocean which we call partana, the great waters.

​That wasn’t much to go on. Indeed, the text itself is difficult to search, returning mostly matches to editions of Spence’s own book. Not to belabor the point, but I found that he had copied it from Daniel Brinton’s The Myths of the New World: A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America. There, the story appears in almost (but not quite) the same words:

Monan, without beginning or end, author of all that is, seeing the ingratitude of men, and their contempt for him who had made them thus joyous, withdrew from them, and sent upon them tata, the divine fire, which burned all that was on the surface of the earth. He swept about the fire in such a way that in places he raised mountains, and in others dug valleys. Of all men one alone, Irin Magé, was saved, whom Monan carried into the heaven. He seeing all things destroyed, spoke thus to Monan: ‘Wilt thou also destroy the heavens and their garniture? Alas! henceforth where will be our home? Why should I live, since there is none other of my kind?’ Then Monan was so filled with pity that he poured a deluging rain on the earth which quenched the fire, and flowing from all sides, formed the ocean, which we called parana, the great waters.

​Spence seems to have used the 1905 edition, which identifies the text very loosely as having Thevet as its “original” source. The 1876 edition, however, had a much more useful footnote, identifying the source as the book Une fête brésilienne célébrée à rouen en 1550—though, of course, this was not actually the primary source.
 
That 1851 book by Ferdinand Denis, however, was the source that Brinton, and through him, Spencer used. Denis provided an excerpt—confusing, because of course it is—from Thevet, which he describes as having been taken from Thevet’s manuscripts as well as from a printed edition, but a printed edition of what he does not say. It’s probably worth mentioning that these authors all assumed I knew that this was André Thevet and that he was a French priest and explorer, so they felt no need to identify him. I can’t say I remembered him.
 
The first thing I noticed was that Denis’s text doesn’t match Brinton’s translation. It’s much longer and more detailed, for one thing. I won’t belabor the long process of trying to track down Denis’s source, but it turns out that Thevet wrote about the subject twice. The second and longest time, which is Denis’s source, was in his Cosmographie universelle of 1575, where it appears in the second volume on page 913. Here is the passage in translation:

The first knowledge, then, that these savages have of that which surpasses the earth is of one they call Monan, to whom they attribute the same perfections that we do to God, calling him a being without end and beginning, who created the heavens, the earth, and all that is in them, without however making mention of the sea or aman atuppan, which are the clouds of water in their language, saying that the sea was made by an inconvenience occurring to the earth, which before was flat and smooth, without mountains whatsoever, producing all things for the use of men. Now the cause by which was made the sea, which they call Paranan, they reason it occurred in this way: Because men had lived in their pleasure and enjoyment of what the earth produced, watered and aided by the dew of heaven, they began to forget themselves in their way of doing things, living in disorder. They fell into such great madness that they began to despise Monan, who they say lived among them at that time and was quite familiar with them. Monan, seeing the ingratitude of men, their wickedness, and the contempt they showed him, who had thus made them so happy, withdrew from them, then brought down Tatta, which is fire in the sky, which burned and consumed everything on the face of the earth. He worked the fire in such a way that it lowered the earth on one side and raised it on the other, in such a way that it was reshaped in the form we see it; to now know valleys, hills and mountains and the wide expanse of some beautiful countryside. Now, of all men there was saved only one, whose name was Irin-Magé, whom Monan had transported from heaven to another place, so that he would feel the fury of this all-consuming fire. This Irin-Magé, seeing everything thus destroyed, addressed Monan, saying to him thus with tears and sighs: “Do you also want to destroy the heavens and their ornament? Where will our home be from now on? Why should I continue to live, there being no one like me?” Monan, at these words, was so moved with compassion that, wanting to remedy the evil he had done to the earth, because of the sins of men, he made it rain in such abundance on the earth that all the fire was extinguished, and the waters, not being able to return to upward, were forced to stop and take their course through the lowest places on the earth, and were gathered there from all sides. Due to this, these masses of water were called by them Paranan, which means bitterness, which we call the sea. Just so you know that these savages are not at all so stupid that nature does not give them some reason for their discourse on natural causes, they say that the sea is thus bitter and salty, as we all can taste it, because the earth having been reduced to ashes which the fire sent by Monan had made of it, caused this bad taste in this great mass of Paranan and thus the sea running around the earth. This is a fine feature of their philosophy, and certainly more acceptable than that of Aristotle, who, unable to understand the omnipotence of God, preferred to say that the world existed from the dawn of time, rather than confess that it was God who formed it.... But let us return to our subject. Monan saw that the earth was restored to its former beauty, and that the sea embellished its face, surrounding it on all sides. But it seemed to him an inconvenient thing that all this beautiful ornament remained without someone to cultivate it, so he called to himself Irin-Magé, to whom he gave a wife, so that they might populate the world with better men than those who had been the first inhabitants of the earth.

I tend to be enough of a stickler about accuracy to think that Brinton ought not to have called his summary-paraphrase a quotation, nor to have placed it in quotation marks. It also shouldn’t have been this hard to trace the source back to its origin, and it would have been a lot easier had I stumbled first on Janet Watley’s 1993 edition of Jean De Lery’s History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, where she cites the volume and page numbers in her footnotes—apparently the first person to do so in four hundred years! (Claude Lévi-Strauss famously cited the tale in The Story of Lynx but declined to identify where in the thousand pages of Thevet’s book it appeared.)
 
For his part, Thevet had written about the indigenous flood stories previously, in his 1557 book The New Found World, or Antarctica, which, despite its name, was an account of his trip to Brazil. There, he described what sounded to him exactly like the Biblical flood story, except that the natives claimed it had occurred only three or four hundred years before. “It seems to me too repugnant that there could be another flood than that of Noah’s time,” Thevet wrote, arguing that the natives, lacking writing, were unable to accurately judge time farther back than a few generations. “However, I will refrain from speaking of it, since we have no written evidence of it,” he wrote before moving on.
 
Spence’s version of Thevet’s account appears in a number of later books on Atlantis or other fringe books, and Ignatius Donnelly, in Ragnarok, copies from Brinton. (Donnelly saw the story as that of a comet striking the earth.) No one writing about Atlantis, so far as I could see, found the original, nor subjected it to critical analysis. Thevet himself provided a second flood myth in his Cosmographie, one very different from that translated above. Depending on how you count them, modern scholars have found at least four different flood stories from the same cultural group (with variants of each), with some stories about featuring battling wizards, some about a family hiding in a palm tree, etc. In short, the story is neither particularly Noachian nor particularly Atlantis-like, and it seems to fall into a fairly universal human tendency to tell stories about common, if terrifying, natural phenomena—fires and floods.