Imagining Atlantis

SIR FRANCIS BACON, author of The New Atlantis, published in 1627—a fable about a lost island in the Pacific (illustration credit 2.1)

Along came Mrs. Ellen Mary Whitshaw,^* director of something called the Anglo-Spanish-American School of Archaeology, who claimed to have found evidence of Atlantis in Andalusia, and wrote a book with that title in 1928. In the practice common to Atlantologists, Mrs. Whitshaw uses Plato retroactively to support her findings. She wrote, “My theory, to sum it up concisely, is that Plato’s story is corroborated from first to last by what we find here, even to the Atlantean name of his son Gadir, who inherited that part of Poseidon’s kingdom which lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules and ruled at Gades, having its echo in the traditional Gadea on the Río Tinto in the jurisdiction of Niebla, an ancient mill under the shadow of a Stone Age fortress, relics of which still stand.”

But by far his most successful and popular work was Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, published in 1882. The book has gone through some fifty editions in several languages and is still being sold in bookstores. “Since Donnelly’s book,” wrote Martin Gardner, “an unbelievable number of similar works have appeared, though none has yet surpassed Donnelly’s in ingenuity and eloquence.” While it is tempting to paraphrase the ingenious and eloquent Ignatius Donnelly, probably the best way to understand the enduring fascination of this book is to quote the thirteen “distinct and novel propositions” with which he begins his disquisition:

1. That there once existed in the Atlantic Ocean, opposite the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea, a large island, which was the remnant of an Atlantic continent, and known to the ancient world as Atlantis.

2. That the description given by Plato is not, as has been long supposed, fable, but veritable history.

3. That Atlantis was the region where man first rose from a state of barbarism to civilization.

4. That it became, in the course of ages, a populous and mighty nation, from whose overflowings the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River, the Amazon, the Pacific coast of South America, the Mediterranean, the west coast of Europe and Africa, the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Caspian were populated by civilized nations.

5. That it was the true Antediluvian world; the Garden of Eden; the Garden of the Hesperides—where the Atlantides lived on the River Ocean in the West; the Elysian Fields situated by Homer to the west of the Earth; the Gardens of Alcinous—grandson of Poseidon and son of Nausithous, King of the Phaeacians of the Island of Scheria; the Mesomphalous—or Navel of the Earth, a name given to the Temple at Delphi, which was situated in the crater of an extinct volcano; the Mount Olympus—of the Greeks; the Asgard—of the Eddas; the focus of the traditions of the ancient nations; representing a universal memory of a great land, where early mankind dwelt for ages in peace and happiness.

6. That the gods and goddesses of the ancient Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Hindus, and the Scandinavians were simply the kings, queens, and heroes of Atlantis; and the acts attributed to them in mythology, a confused recollection of real historical events.

7. That the mythologies of Egypt and Peru represented the original religion of Atlantis, which was sun-worship.

8. That the oldest colony formed by the Atlanteans was probably in Egypt, whose civilization was a reproduction of that of the Atlantic island.

9. That the implements of the “Bronze Age” of Europe were derived from Atlantis. The Atlanteans were also the first manufacturers of iron.

10. That the Phoenician alphabet, parent of all European alphabets, was derived from an Atlantis alphabet, which was also conveyed from Atlantis to the Mayas of Central America.

11. That Atlantis was the original seat of the Aryan or Indo-European family of nations, as well as of Semitic peoples, and possibly also of the Turanian races.

12. That Atlantis perished in a terrible convulsion of nature, in which the whole island was submerged by the ocean, with nearly all its inhabitants.

13. That a few persons escaped in ships and on rafts, and carried to the nations east and west the tidings of the appalling catastrophe, which has survived to our own time in Flood and Deluge legends in the different nations of the Old and New Worlds.

It is obvious that in Atlantis, Donnelly had found the cause of almost everything.^* Unfortunately, there is neither space nor time for a detailed analysis of his book, but it speaks more than satisfactorily for itself. He believed that Plato’s story was “a plain and reasonable history of a people who built temples, ships, and canals, who lived by agriculture and commerce, who in pursuit of trade, reached out to all the countries around them.” (He dismisses Bacon’s New Atlantis as “a moral or political lesson in the guise of a fable.”) Readers with an interest in his theories about “The Ibero-Celtic Colonies of Atlantis,” “The Turanian, Semitic, and Aryan Links with Atlantis,” or “The Origin of Our Alphabet” may consult these chapters in the book.

Donnelly’s thesis explained the similarities between pre-Columbian and Egyptian civilizations, often by bending facts until they were virtually unrecognizable. In Atlantis: Fact or Fiction?, Edwin Ramage wrote: “The propositions … hint at the general lack of critical judgment that pervades the book. On nearly every page there is an example of rash assumption, hasty conclusion, circular reasoning, or argument based purely in rhetoric. Many statements of fact are not fact at all, and in his enthusiastic drive to create his Atlantis he reveals a surprising naiveté.” Examples of his twisting of “facts” to make a point are legion, but here, one example will suffice. Answering his own question “Where was Olympus?” he says, “It was in Atlantis,” and then explains how he came to that conclusion: “Olympus was written by the Greeks ‘Olympus.’ The letter a in Atlantis was sounded by the ancient world broad and full, like the a in our words all or altar; in these words it approximates very closely to the sound of o. It is not far to go to convert Atlantis into Oluntos, and this into Olumpos. We may, therefore, suppose that when the Greeks dwelt in ‘Olympus,’ it was the same as if they said that they dwelt in ‘Atlantis.’ ”

Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis was published in 1882, the year before Krakatau erupted. We are probably fortunate that he had moved on to other subjects by 1883 (the year of the publication of Ragnarok), for the gigantic explosion of Krakatau would surely have provided Donnelly with an abundance of supporting evidence for the possibility of disappearing civilizations. The explosion, which began on August 27, was heard in Australia, over two thousand miles away, and sent a 50-mile-high cloud of volcanic ash into the sky that circled the earth for two years. A 6,000-foot-high mountain was reduced to a caldera 4 miles across with only portions of the rim (now the islets of Rakata, Pulau Sertung, Lang, and Polish Hat) projecting above the surface of the Sunda Straits (see this page–this page). He did, however, devote an entire chapter to the question “Was Such a Catastrophe Possible?,” in which he wrote that “there is ample geological evidence that at one time the entire area of Great Britain was submerged to the depth of at least seventeen hundred feet,” and that “the Canary Islands were probably a part of the original empire of Atlantis.” Not only is such a catastrophe possible, but comparable events have occurred time and again throughout history. He mentions the 1775 earthquake at Lisbon (“the point of the European coast closest to Atlantis”), the 1815 eruption of the Javan volcano “Tomboro,” and Santorini, of which he wrote:

Although Donnelly’s Atlantis is a garbled muddle of misunderstood geology, anthropology, mythology, and linguistics, it had twenty-three printings from 1882 to 1890, and a Dover edition was issued in 1976, almost a century after it was written. In the introduction, Bleiler asks, “Why should Dover Publications reprint a book that cannot be taken seriously, a book that is admittedly wrong in all its major conclusions, and can never be rehabilitated?” His answer:

With the advent of more sophisticated tools for underwater exploration, one might assume that searchers would be able to see that there is no drowned continent on the bottom of the ocean, but the pull of the legend is so powerful that despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we are still getting books purporting to prove the existence of Atlantis. (And such books will continue to appear, since it is impossible, of course, to prove that it does not exist.) To write one of these books, the author has to be predisposed to believe not only Plato but the veritable legion of Atlantologists who succeeded him.

Charles Berlitz, the grandson of the founder of the language schools, in 1974 published a book called The Bermuda Triangle, in which he discussed the “hundreds of ships and planes, with their crews and passengers, [that] have disappeared without a trace during the last fifty years,” and in 1977, he published Without a Trace, which is (according to its flap copy) “filled with startling stories of strange occurrences within the Triangle: peculiarities of sea and weather; the appearance of ‘ghost ships’ and a catalog of vessels which have disappeared from 1800 through 1976; clouds that seem to chase and capture planes; time warps; and the possibility of a doorway in the area leading to another dimension, or even to outer space.” In his chapter “Lost Atlantis—Found in the Bermuda Triangle?,” Berlitz introduces his idea that the “Triangle,” in addition to swallowing ships, has also gobbled up an entire continent. He finds support for this idea in the Bimini explorations of Dr. David Zink, the prophecies of Edgar Cayce, and the research of “Ronald Waddington of Burlington, Canada, a researcher and theorist on the Bermuda Triangle.” Waddington—who is quoted at length in Without a Trace—theorizes that underwater volcanoes are constantly shooting chunks of radioactive, densely magnetic material into the air, short-circuiting the electrical equipment of passing airplanes and causing them to nose-dive into the ocean. As for ships, “chunks of this radioactive material could shoot to the surface with the velocity of a hydrogen bomb and home in on the steel hulls of ships like the magnetic head of a torpedo.…” Berlitz acknowledges that “Waddington’s suggestions predicate no link between Atlantis and the present occurrences in the Bermuda Triangle, [but] the series of reactions he describes might, nevertheless, have endured as a by-product of the catastrophe that caused the Atlantean lands to sink beneath the ocean.” Berlitz was evidently so entranced with the mystery of Atlantis that he wrote another book about it, Atlantis: The Eighth Continent.

Charles Berlitz’s chapter on animal life is obviously derived from Spence’s “biological evidence,” since it makes just as little sense and, in one instance, lifts a whole paragraph about birds circling around an open area of the sea as if trying to land where there is no land—an obvious indication that there used to be a continent there. Further using animals to verify the existence of Atlantis, Berlitz incorporates a long-winded, irrelevant section on dinosaurs in which he proves—at least to his own satisfaction—that a large-scale catastrophe was responsible for their disappearance, and argues that if such a catastrophe could cause such creatures to vanish, it could certainly eradicate a city. He writes: “Perhaps the combination of fiery shocks from the sky, the resultant shaking of the Earth, and flooding from the sea was the sequence of events that occurred in the prehistoric world that perished.” ^†

The possession of scientific credentials does not automatically bestow verisimilitude on one’s work, especially if one is working outside one’s field of expertise. As Moses Finley asked (in his review of Mavor’s Voyage to Atlantis), “What is it that prompts scientists capable of precise and rigorous work in their own disciplines to career about in other fields of inquiry, where they lack the knowledge, the tools of analysis, or even common sense?” A case in point is the German scientist Otto Muck, who graduated with a degree in engineering from the Munich College of Advanced Technology in 1921 and worked as a scientist/inventor during World War II, inventing the Schnorchel for U-boats and contributing to the development of the V-2 rocket at Peenemünde. Somehow, his studies and experience developing Nazi weapons of war qualified him as an expert on Atlantis, so he wrote The Secret of Atlantis, which was published in English in 1978. (He died in 1956.)

Jürgen Spanuth’s lengthy and detailed study is the quintessential Atlantis document; it employs intricate connections, complicated “evidence,” lengthy documentation, and a hefty bibliography to “prove” exactly what the author believed to be true before he began the research. Germanic in its attention to detail, Atlantis of the North does not differ substantially from those studies that would situate the Lost Continent in the Aegean, the Caribbean, or the North Atlantic.

Bruce Rux, who describes himself as a “playwright and writer [who] researches and dramatizes historical events,” has written a book called Architects of the Underworld: Unriddling Atlantis, Anomalies of Mars, and the Mystery of the Sphinx. “By painstakingly following the paper trails,” says the jacket copy, “that connect such apparently unrelated and unexplained events as crop circles, alien abductions, extraterrestrial activities, and other modern-day mysteries, the author uncovers a legacy of misinformation, denial, and official silence from government organizations.” Even though the title promises to “unriddle” Atlantis, the book treats the subject in a most perfunctory fashion, classifying it with other myths, which are “all the same myth from great antiquity, becoming individually corrupted in various ways over the ensuing centuries.”

* Aelian’s seventeen-book collection, On the Characteristics of Animals, was published in three volumes in 1959 by the Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press. It is described as a “mixed collection of facts and beliefs concerning the habits of animals taken from Greek authors with some personal observation, and having as their chief object entertainment. Fact, fancy, legend, stories and gossip all play their part in a narrative which has, of set purpose, no arrangement. If there is any ethical motive, it is that the virtues of untaught yet reasoning animals can be a lesson to thoughtless and selfish mankind.”

* “Marvel you not,” says the Governor, “at the thin population of America, nor at the rudeness and ignorance of the people; for you must account your inhabitants of America as a young people, younger a thousand years at the least than the rest of the world, for that there was so much time between the universal Flood and their particular inundation. For the poor remnant of human seed which remained in their mountains peopled the country again slowly, by little and little, and being simple and savage people (not like Noah and his sons, which was the chief family of the earth), they were not able to leave letters, arts and civility to their propriety; and having likewise in their mountainous habitations been used (in respect of the extreme cold of those regions) to clothe themselves with the skins of tigers, bears, and great hairy goats; when after they came down into the valley, and found the intolerable heats which are there, and knew no means of lighter apparel, they were forced to begin the custom of going naked, which continueth at this day.”

* In some discussions of Spanish Atlantis literature, Mrs. Whitshaw is referred to as “Whishaw.” This confusion appears to be self-generated, since she signs her preface “according to the ancient custom by which a married woman in Spain retains her maiden name, which is that of both of her parents: Elena María Williams y Windsor, Viuda de Whishaw (Don Bernardo).”

* In the foreword to the 1949 edition of Donnelly’s Atlantis, Edgerton Sykes (“Fellow Royal Geographical Society, Fellow Royal Central Asian Society, Fellow Royal India Society,” etc., etc.) described the author as “one of the many liberal intellectuals which the Anglo-Saxon world produced in the nineteenth century, in what may well have been the last outburst of learning before it was swamped with mediocrity.” An alternative view was expressed by Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote (in his autobiography, Astounding Days), “Donnelly should be the patron saint of the peddlers of UFO/parapsychology mind rot.…”

* It is a little too easy to ridicule the exaggerations and ignorance of Ignatius Donnelly from the secure vantage point of the present, when we have a much more comprehensive understanding of geology and ancient history than was available to him. In the introduction to the 1976 Dover edition of Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, E. F. Bleiler wrote, “In Donnelly’s day geology was an infant science, and his position, though extreme, was not outside the range of acceptance. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century geology contained many theories of violent earth action, and the concept of cataclysm was still current during Donnelly’s lifetime.… Indeed, well into the twentieth century, one can still find reputable geologists writing of land bridges that might break or sink in relatively brief periods.”

* There are indeed submarine volcanoes “smoldering in the depths of the ocean”; the entire Mid-Atlantic Ridge is a seam of volcanic activity. Although deep-earth convulsions, like earthquakes or volcanoes, occasionally destroy land, more often they create it. A case in point is Iceland, built almost entirely of hardened lava that has welled up from the sea floor. Although people like Donnelly would like to equate the sinking of Atlantis with the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the Ridge is actually rising rather than sinking.

* As “evidence” for this theory, he writes the following: “The soundings taken by vessels dispatched by the various European and American Admiralties served to map out the bed of the Atlantic, and revealed the existence of a great bank occupying a major portion of the whole Atlantic basin. This is covered with volcanic detritus. The irregularities of its surface could not have been produced by submarine agencies, but must have received their present contour while still above water.”

* Termier believed that a vitreous lava known as tachylite was supposed to dissolve in seawater after fifteen thousand years, but when a hunk of it came up on a broken transatlantic cable in 1898, he examined it and decided that its “porous microcrystalline structure” showed that it had solidified in the air, neatly demonstrating—to his followers, anyway—that there had once been a continent there.

* Circumstantial evidence of Paul Schliemann’s dependence on Donnelly can be seen in his designation of the “owl-headed vase.” In Heinrich Schliemann’s Troy and Its Remains (1875), the two vases are described as “a terra-cotta vase with a helmeted image of the Iliac Athena,” and “a Trojan terra-cotta vase with an ornament like the Greek lambda.” In Donnelly’s Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), the same illustrations are reproduced, only now they are both labeled “owl-headed vases.”

* Brad Steiger, the author of Overlords of Atlantis and the Great Pyramid (1989), disputes Ewing’s statements by quoting “Professor Georgly [sic] Lindberg of the Soviet Union’s Zoological Institute of the Academy of Sciences,” who said that there was indeed a North Atlantic continent, presently submerged in 4,500 to 5,000 meters of water. Steiger also identifies Charles Berlitz’s elusive “Dr. Malaise” as “Dr. René Malaise of the Riks Museum in Stockholm.” Steiger mentions Plato and “Plimy [sic],” but the last may be only a typographical error—then again, it may not. Steiger’s book also contains discussions of subjects such as “Did the Ancient Egyptians Have Television?,” “Undersea UFOs,” and “Monsters in Mining Tunnels.”

* Berlitz’s discussion of seals and manatees comes from an obviously hasty—and wildly erroneous—reading of Lewis Spence on the same subject. In his chapter “The Biological Evidence,” Spence quotes “the Messrs. Sclater … who recognize … two genera of mammals that are characteristic of the Mesatlantic region, Monachus, the Monk Seal, and the Sirenian Manatus, [whose] ancestors have spread along some coast-line which probably united the Old World and the New at no very distant period.”

† In Flim-Flam!, his 1982 exposé of “psychics, ESP, unicorns and other delusions,” James Randi wrote, “It is careless of a man to fail to sufficiently research a subject on which he claims to be an authority. It is irresponsible for him to resist telling the facts when he discovers them. And it is irresponsible and callous for him to continue to misrepresent matters about which he has been informed to the contrary. J’accuse Charles Berlitz of these failings.”

* A regular reference for Atlantologists, the Popul Vuh is the Quiche Mayan book of creation. The Mayan civilization flourished until the sixteenth century, and the town of Quiche was located northwest of what is now Guatemala City. Between 1701 and 1703, a friar named Francisco Ximénez came across a Quiche book describing the creation of the world, written in a Roman alphabet. Ximénez translated the book into Spanish, but the translation was not found until 1857, when an Austrian physician named Carl Scherzer found it in the library of the University of San Carlos in Guatemala City. (It is now in the Newberry Library in Chicago.) The Popul Vuh says nothing about the Atlantic Ocean or a lost continent, but it does contain an account of a flood and perhaps a volcanic eruption: “Again there comes a humiliation, destruction, and demolition. The manikins, woodcarvings [the Quiches believed that men were carved from wood, women from reeds] were killed when the heart of the sky devised a flood for them.… There came a rain of resin from the sky.… They were pounded down to the bones and tendons, smashed and pulverized even to their bones.… The earth was blackened because of this; the black rainstorm began, rain all day and rain all night … their faces were crushed by things of wood and stone …” (from the 1985 Tedlock translation).

* Many scientists were outraged by the publicity for Velikovsky’s book and its classification as “science” rather than “fiction” by the publishers. The book was ridiculed by the scientific community to such an extent that Albert Einstein (who had also liked Charles Hapgood’s theory about polar slippage) took up his defense, but for his right to be heard, not for the theory itself. In an interview given to Bernard Cohen and published in Scientific American, Einstein said, “You know, it is not a bad book. No, it isn’t really a bad book. The only trouble with it is, it is crazy.”

* Although the evidence is fragmentary and inconclusive, most historians believe that the “Sea Peoples” who invaded Egypt during the reign of Pharaoh Rameses II (1290–1223 B.C.), and again during the reign of his successor, Merenptah (1223–1213 B.C.), came from the north, but they mean northern Anatolia and Greece, not Denmark and Germany.

* Pytheas was a fourth-century B.C. Greek traveler who was the first of the Greeks to visit the British Isles and the North Atlantic coast of Europe. Around 325 B.C., he sailed from Massilia (present-day Marseilles) through the Pillars of Hercules and into the Atlantic, making his first landfall at the Phoenician city of Gades. Following the shoreline, he sailed around Brittany and reached Bolerium (Land’s End, Cornwall), where he visited the famous Cornish tin mines. He rounded the westernmost point of Britain and headed north through the Irish Sea, supposedly intent on discovering whether “Albion” was an island or part of the European mainland. Pytheas’s story includes a six-day voyage to “Thule,” whose location is one of the most controversial issues in Atlantic geographical history. He may have actually sailed there, or he may simply have heard about it from the Britons, but whatever the source, the stories include accurate information on the climate and conditions of some northerly isle. From a place that may have been Pentland Firth in the Orkneys, he sailed to “the northernmost inhabited island,” and while it cannot be identified with certainty, it is believed to be either Iceland or an island off the Norwegian coast in the vicinity of the Trondheim Fjord.

* In my copy of the Critias, the stone used for the buildings of Atlantis was “white, black, and yellow,” but “they covered the whole circuit of the outermost wall with a veneer of bronze, and fused tin over the inner wall and orichalch gleaming like fire over the walls of the acropolis itself.” Anybody who explains Atlantis by invoking Santa Claus and the Japanese flag must be onto some big conspiracy indeed.

WHO WRITES OF ATLANTIS?