To write the universally readable book on Atlantis would require something more than wide scientific knowledge. It would require something of the inspired guesswork of Columbus, something of the insolence and swagger of the picaroon who pursues his way through Don Quixote and the works of Smollett no less arduously for being a figure of fun, and also, not least, a certain reverence for the labours of others in the past, however discredited they may be by contemporary standards of “scientific” Atlantean study. Thus the little tragedy of the main body of Atlantean literature is that it falls between two stools. On the one hand the scholars interested in the subject have not the necessary range of imaginative perception; and on the other the amateurs have not the power of marshalling the facts and drawing the right conclusions from them—a power which ensures that the words of the more erudite persons shall at least meet with respect, if not enthusiasm.
—JAMES BRAMWELL
Lost Atlantis, 1938
IN THIS BOOK, I intend to review many of the ideas that have been suggested for the existence and location of Atlantis. The literature is a rich garden of possibilities, with a history that ranges from Plato, who lived some two and a half thousand years ago, to writers who have published their theories within the past couple of years. When one is reading this vast body of literature, it is inevitable that one’s own biases creep in. I could not look at Plato’s carefully prepared account in the same way that I read Ignatius Donnelly’s hodgepodge of anthropology, archaeology, and fairy story; I could not compare the well-reasoned theory that the myth of Atlantis is connected with the downfall of Minoan Crete with Edgar Cayce’s clairvoyant prediction that a fifty-thousand-year-old Atlantis would rise again in the Caribbean in 1968.
The story of Atlantis has long fascinated oceanographers, historians, archaeologists, geographers, explorers, psychics—anyone with a taste for the more intriguing mysteries of human history. In Atlantis: Fact or Fiction?, Edwin Ramage, a professor of classical studies at the University of Indiana, writes that “it is difficult to know how many books have been written about Atlantis over this long period of time [since Plato originally wrote about it]. A reasonable round number seems to be 2,000, though estimates range as high as 10,000.” (In a 1992 promotion for Eberhard Zangger’s Flood from Heaven, we read that “estimates range as high as 20,000,” but this seems somewhat hyperbolic.) There is no shortage of theories about its rise and fall, ranging in verisimilitude from the identification of Atlantis with North America to Atlantis flying out of the ocean and becoming the moon. In 1922, Karl Georg Zschaetzsch published Atlantis: Die Urheimat der Arier (The Homeland of the Aryan), in which he told the story of a blond, blue-eyed race of vegetarian Atlanteans, the only survivors of the collision of the earth with a comet. Zschaetzsch—who claimed that his name proved that he was a descendant of Zeus—attributed virtually every known myth to the “racial memory” of the Atlanteans, from Romulus and Remus to the Christmas star.
I believe that the story of Atlantis has been influenced by many contributors over the thousands of years since it was first broached, and indeed, many of these influences may be lodged in our collective unconscious. Almost every culture contains a story, myth, or legend of the flood-related disappearance of a corrupt civilization. Over the years, various historians (as well as antihistorians, archaeologists, popular writers, occultists, and scuba divers) have tried to tie the story up in a neat package, but while some have succeeded better than others, the mystery still remains unsolved. We will probably never know precisely what inspired Plato to describe “the island of Atlantis that was swallowed up by the sea and vanished” in the dialogues the Critias and the Timaeus, but conjecture fuels the elaborate studies of legitimate classical historians like A. E. Taylor, Desmond Lee, and J. V. Luce; scientists like Bruce Heezen and Angelos Galanopoulos; and archaeologists of the caliber of Spyridon Marinatos and Sir Arthur Evans. The school of unrestrained conjecture has also given us Ignatius Donnelly, Murry Hope, Rudolf Steiner, Edgar Cayce, Charles Berlitz, and David Zink.
Until Plato’s description is validated, or another solution proves to be correct, we will continue to be hard-pressed to separate his legions of successors into appropriate categories of fact or fiction. Moreover, authors who tackle this complicated subject often find themselves in the awkward and unenviable position of somehow having to validate a myth. With only a few exceptions, such as Jules Verne’s description of Atlantis in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, or Conan Doyle’s Maracot Deep, which are clearly intended to be fiction, much of the Atlantis literature falls into a category that might be called “Atlantean fantasy.” (It could be called “science fiction,” were that appellation not generally applied to a variety of writing wherein the author makes up almost everything, often including the “science.”) In “Atlantean fantasy,” the writer begins with some sort of demonstrable actuality—such as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge or the ruins of the Minoan palace at Knossos—and then speculates, often wildly, about how this particular subject might be related to Atlantis. Since many of the proponents of these Atlantean doctrines are respectable scientists, we cannot automatically disregard their theories, but because not one of them—to my mind, anyway—has satisfactorily proven his case, we are left with a bookful of contrasting, and often contradictory, theories. This is the essential nature of “Atlantology,” a discipline that combines literature, philosophy, geology, oceanography, archaeology, ancient history, mythology, art history, mysticism, cryptography, and fantasy. There is, as far as I know, no other “science” that employs such a heady mixture and produces such divergent results.
The myth of Atlantis has come down through history as one of the most enduring of all ancient stories. Not a part of any religious cosmography, the story has lasted for thousands of years without benefit of a proselytizing clergy. Where Judeo-Christianity has the Bible, Islam the Koran, and Vedic religions the Upanishads, there is no “religion” based on Atlantean principles, or any sort of a book that might be said to have handed down the wisdom of the ages. It first appears in Plato’s dialogue the Timaeus, which is itself a philosophical treatise on creation, but Plato was not the founder of a religion. It is a story so powerful that it has lasted solely on the basis of its own merits, passed along, often by word of mouth, for two and a half millennia, and today, in an era characterized by technological marvels like atomic energy and the Internet, the legend of Atlantis still thrives.
Whether its source was extraterrestrial, prehistorical, or imaginary, Atlantis, unique among the Western world’s myths, has become a part of our mythohistory. The story of the disappearance of a powerful civilization appears in many forms in many other cultures. Alone among the ancient accounts, Atlantis comes down to us complete, a tale that has survived for three thousand years, woven into chronologies as disparate as Periclean Athens and interplanetary travel.
There is no question that the story of Atlantis originated with Plato, and therefore it is important to examine what he actually wrote. But almost everyone with a theory about Atlantis has done that; Atlantologists have read the dialogues the Critias and the Timaeus and come up with often irreconcilable propositions. Plato often makes it possible for an author to “prove” that his hypothesis is the correct one; one is able to quote the Greek philosopher—at least on the subject of Atlantis—in such a way as to prove almost anything. Was there really a Lost City? If so, where was it? Did Plato make up the story, or did he base it on historical fact? Which fact or facts? Is some of it true and some of it the product of a vivid imagination?
Plato wrote that Atlantis was “outside the Pillars of Hercules,” so when Atlantis is placed in Tunisia or Nigeria, one supposes that the location must have been some sort of a mistake on Plato’s part. On the other hand, if someone locates the Lost Continent in the Atlantic Ocean, the suggestion supports Plato’s contention and goes a long way toward verifying his story. The idea that Plato was correct, that Atlantis was really an island in the Atlantic Ocean, was first presented (says Bramwell) by a Frenchman named Cadet in 1787, who claimed that the Azores and the Canaries were the remains of the Lost Continent. Others would follow suit; if Plato said it was in the Atlantic Ocean, then that seems a good place to start our search. But did Plato even know the Atlantic Ocean existed?