Atea

The Marquesans regarded Atea as their ancestral progenitor who, like the
Atlanto-Egyptian Atum, claimed for himself the creation of the world. Fornander
wrote, “In the Marquesan legends the people claim their descent from Atea and
Tani, the two eldest of Toho’s twelve sons, whose descendants, after long periods
of alternant migrations and rest in the far western lands, finally arrived at the
Marquesas Islands.”
Like Atlas, Atea was his father’s first son and a twin. With his story begins
the long migration of some Atlanteans, the descendants of Atea, throughout
the Pacific. Fornander saw Atea as “the god which corresponds to Kane in the
Hawaiian group” and goes on to explain that “the ideas of solar worship embodied in
the Polynesian Kane as the sun, the sun-god, the shining one, are thus synonymous
with the Marquesan Atea, the bright one, the light.” Atum, too, was a solar deity.