One method to appreciate esotericism is to understand historical ideologies. Classical and historical texts about lost civilizations such as Atlantis need to be stripped before we take them at face value. For example, it's highly likely that even in Plato's day, readers were not expected to accept Atlantis as a historical fact. Instead his audience might have understood the political and social statements behind a narrative about Utopia and Dystopia, behind the collapse of a society.
It is not uncommon to find a mythological narrative among ancient literary civilizations about a model society ruled by the gods themselves in the distant past, before men gradually establishes his kings and monarchs and corrupts the world. Many of these civilizations also described the destruction of society and the world in natural cataclysm.
There is some truth to this. Some ancient writers viewed Atlantis as fiction while others believed it was real.
Many of the myths involving such lost lands are recurring in the earliest writings of man all over the world, from the Gitas to the Old Testament.
For example the Hyperboreans in some sources mixed with divine beings, and in the work of Hesiod, spawned giants which reminds one of the Nephilim mentioned in Genesis. The Atlanteans were also said to be the descendants of a semi-divine founder.
There is another theme common to the "Lost lands" which is the theme of devolution, rather than evolution. That is that in their original state, such inhabitants were really semi-divine, but eventually devolved, in some cases with their offspring becoming modern people, to a lower state.
