Atlantis (commune)

[3] At any one time, around thirty people lived in the commune in "Atlantis House", which was brightly decorated, with eyes around the windows and symbols on the walls.

They received bomb threats, and some members of Dáil Éireann – the lower house of the Oireachtas, the Republic of Ireland's parliament – called for them to be deported.

[2][6] After a split and two years of traveling, James relocated the commune again in 1989, this time to Colombia, moving to near the town of Icononzo in Tolima, where membership peaked at around sixty during the 1990s.

James was planning a gap year in Ireland and wanted to see his half-brother who was being fostered in the village of Hoya Grande, located down the mountain from the commune's farm, before he left.

Both were warned against returning, and Javier Leto was reluctant to do so, but Tristan trusted the assurances he had been given by another commune member, Anne Barr,[11] and they continued to the village.

[15] In an interview for RTÉ show The Live Mike, James claimed that the aggression of this approach was both helpful and healthy, and a counterpoint to a society that "puts a premium on mediocrity and niceness, and being sweet and being polite".

[2][10] In an interview in 2002, James stated Atlantis's goals as "self-sufficiency, to show ourselves and everyone else that life is possible without technology, without damaging and raping the planet" and stressed the importance of physical labour, saying that "therapy, sexual freedom for children, no school, political involvement, all flow organically from this basic premise".

[12] In the 1970s and 1980s, Jenny James wrote several books about Atlantis and her ideas:[1] Two later e-books have since been produced:[17] A documentary about the commune, The Family, was made for RTÉ in 1978 by Bob Quinn, as part of "The Other Lives" sequence of films about alternative lifestyles.

[3] In 2020, the BBC World Service broadcast "The Downfall of the Screamers", a documentary by Faye Planer, who had spent a week living with Jenny James and her daughter Becky in their present farm in southern Colombia.