ONE
Atlantis of the Rationalists
THE ATLANTIC OCEAN
The narrator of Plato’s Timaeus said that Atlantis was “beyond the Pillars of Hercules,” the classical name for the Straits of Gibraltar, and “larger than Libya and Asia combined,”1 that is, much of North Africa plus present-day Turkey. So the Atlantic Ocean is the obvious place to begin.
The Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) was the first to publish a map of Atlantis, putting it fairly and squarely in the middle of the Atlantic.2 There was no reason for him to do otherwise. Plato’s testimony made sense, did not contradict the Bible, and agreed with Kircher’s own experience of the mutability of land and sea. In 1638 he himself had seen the city of Euphemia in Calabria disappear in a volcanic cataclysm, leaving a putrid lake in its place. Noah’s Flood, the subject of his book Arca Noë, had caused the whole earth to be submerged, then reappear with a different arrangement of land and sea. The followers of Charles Hapgood (see below under “Antarctica”) imagine that Kircher based his illustration on some ancient map he had found. Had this been so, Kircher would not have failed to announce the fact, as he did whenever he made some fortunate discovery.3 While he states his reasons for believing that Atlantis existed, his map is an imaginary reconstruction, just like innumerable other illustrations in his works.
A mid-Atlantic location was the keystone of Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), the book by Ignatius Donnelly (1831–1901) that Sprague de Camp calls “the New Testament of Atlantism”4 (Plato’s Timaeus and Critias being the Old). Donnelly was a U.S. senator from Minnesota who made good use of the Library of Congress: he also wrote on the catastrophist model of prehistory (Ragnarök: The Age of Fire and Gravel) and on Francis Bacon’s authorship of the Shakespeare corpus (The Great Cryptogram). He was a strict diffusionist, treating all cultural phenomena as imports rather than as indigenous inventions. Given that, the similarities on the eastern and western sides of the Atlantic had to have a common source. Donnelly spread his net to include not only pyramids and flood legends, but also metallurgy, agriculture, shipbuilding, language, alphabets, religion, and mythology. Consequently he found so many parallels that he assumed they must have all originated in the vanished continent.
As for Atlantis itself, Donnelly accepted Plato’s exuberant description of it as the most wealthy, powerful, and highly cultured of all ancient civilizations, its memory preserved in worldwide myths of a Golden Age, Paradise, Asgard, Avalon, Elysium, and other vanished Utopias. He wrote in conclusion:
The Atlanteans possessed an established order of priests; their religious worship was pure and simple. They lived under a kingly government; they had their courts, their judges, their records, their monuments covered with inscriptions, their mines, their founderies,*1 their workshop, their looms, their grist-mills, their boats and sailing-vessels, their highways, aqueducts, wharves, docks, and canals. They had processions, banners, and triumphal arches for their kings and heroes; they built pyramids, temples, round-towers, and obelisks; they practised religious ablutions; they knew the use of the magnet and of gunpowder. In short, they were in the enjoyment of a civilization nearly as high as our own, lacking only the printing-press, and those inventions in which steam, electricity, and magnetism are used.5
A “modern revised edition” of Atlantis: The Antediluvian World appeared in 19496 with contributions from Egerton Sykes, who edited it and wrote a foreword; H. S. Bellamy, who wrote “An Appreciation of Donnelly”; and Lewis Spence, who wrote a short introduction that is really more about himself.
This is an interesting trio. Egerton Sykes (1894–1983) was a lifelong Atlantologist who ran a bimonthly, Atlantis, A Journal of Research, from 1948 to 1976. He was also drawn to parapsychological and Fortean topics, but from a generally rational approach. As editor, Sykes smoothed out Donnelly’s citation system, cut several chapters whose archaeological and linguistic conclusions he considered outdated, and added many postscripts of his own. The publisher was probably to blame for omitting the 128 engravings that enhanced the original book.
Hans Schindler Bellamy (1901–1980) was a contributor to Sykes’s Atlantis journal and author of eight books published in London from 1936 onward.7 Bellamy’s main object in his books, articles, and in this “Appreciation” was to promote the “World Ice Doctrine” (Welteislehre or WEL) of Hans Hoerbiger (1860–1931) as the solution to the fall of Atlantis, whose prior existence he accepted in more or less Donnellian terms. “I firmly believe that atlantologists, and all those interested in the Myth of Atlantis, cannot do better than accept Hoerbiger’s helpful teachings,” he wrote.8 Bellamy had known Hoerbiger, a fellow Austrian, since the early 1920s and had become convinced that the WEL held the secret of Earth’s prehistory and that of mankind. The doctrine holds that the moon, which is covered with ice, is but the latest in a series of satellites that have been captured by the Earth’s gravity and one by one crashed into its surface, with imaginable results. The present moon, biggest in the series, was previously a planet in its own right; it was gradually drawn into orbit around Earth and “captured” around 12,000–11,500 BCE. The gravity of the new satellite, counteracting that of Earth, allowed humans and animals grow to giant size. It tugged the oceans from the polar to the equatorial zone, causing catastrophic changes in sea level, including the destruction of Atlantis.
It is astonishing that such a prestigious house as Faber & Faber, with T. S. Eliot among their editors, should have published Bellamy’s theories, especially in wartime. Although Hoerbiger had died before Hitler came to power, many influential Nazis had favored the WEL as an alternative to Einstein’s cosmology. It is also hard to believe in an Austrian called Bellamy, but that may have been an assumed surname for English consumption; the “H. S.” initials were never spelled out. Someone at Faber’s must have had a soft spot for Hoerbiger, for they went on to publish another WEL book, Atlantis and the Giants (1957) by Denis Saurat (1890–1959), a literature professor of wide and eccentric interests.
Lewis Spence (1874–1955), the third contributor to the reissue of Donnelly’s work, was a Scottish mythographer whose five books on Atlantis recast Donnelly’s theories in a more modern idiom. Spence began as a skeptic. The entry on “Atlantis” in his Encyclopaedia of Occultism (1920) states, “The theory that the Atlantians founded the civilisations of Central America and Mexico has been fully proven to be absurd, as that civilisation is distinctly of an aboriginal nature, and of comparatively late origin.”9 Soon after, he was preaching the contrary, and would become the most popular of twentieth-century Atlantologists. As to whether Spence belongs in this or a later chapter, Paul Jordan, a severe critic, allows that “though Spence’s chain of reasoning is full of gaps and baseless assumptions, it is not conducted outside the realm of the possible (if unlikely).”10
In contrast to Donnelly’s vision of Atlanteans not far behind modern America in technical achievement, Spence’s version was content for them to be a magnificent Stone Age people. He was aware of recent discoveries of paleolithic cultures, especially the Aurignacian, which flourished from 40,000 to 20,000 years ago, and its successor, the Azilian. He could appreciate the high artistic quality of these cultures’ cave paintings and the refined technique of their flint and bone artifacts. Yet prehistorians could trace no gradual development, nor pinpoint the origin of Cro-Magnon Man, the modern human type to whom those cultures were attributed. Spence saw the perfect solution: the Cro-Magnons had been the dominant race of Atlantis and had come to Europe as refugees from successive catastrophes. As Jordan points out, this showed typical colonial arrogance in the inability to credit any culture with its own inventions:11 everything had to have come from some superior source. Spence certainly did not credit his own aboriginal people.
If a patriotic Scotsman may be pardoned the boast, I may say that I devoutly believe that Scotland’s admitted superiority in the mental and spiritual spheres springs almost entirely from the preponderant degree of Crô-Magnon blood which certainly runs in the veins of her people, whose height and cranial capacity, as well as other physical signs, show them to be mostly of Crô-Magnon race.12
This new wave of Atlantean studies opened with Spence’s The Problem of Atlantis (1924), Atlantis in America (1925), and The History of Atlantis (1927). He used similar methods to examine the possibility of another lost continent in The Problem of Lemuria, the Sunken Continent of the Pacific (1932), then set the subject aside for a decade.
A journalist by profession, working for the quality press, Spence had always been more of a compiler and an enthusiast than a scholar. His lasting interest and the majority of his books were in myth, beginning with the ancient Americas and eventually covering the whole world. Unlike academic mythographers, who would apply a structuralist method to their material (as Lévi-Strauss) or seek archetypal themes in it (as Joseph Campbell), Spence was essentially in the business of telling stories, and was always tempted to believe them. He admits in his foreword to Donnelly:
As one almost fatally open to the lure of the subjective, a ready victim to the temptations of fantasy, I still assert with all the emphasis at my command that unless the iron discipline of scientific detachment be recognized in the consideration of such questions as the Atlantean, its study might as well be abandoned. For me there are two Atlantises—the Atlantis of fantasy and imagination and that of reality. Sometimes these ideas appear to fuse; at others they are as far apart as the poles.13
When the Second World War defied any attempt at explanation with the “iron discipline of scientific detachment,” Spence abandoned it. Consequently we will meet him again among the British occultists of chapter 6. From then on, scientists in the Western world, shaken by the example of “Nazi science,” have shunned subjects that touch on the irrational, such as parapsychology, or on a catastrophist view of history, like Atlantology. Peter James analyzes this persisting “neo-Aristotelian” stance, which goes back to Isaac Newton (who excluded divine intervention in history), Charles Lyell (who founded the uniformitarian theory of geology), and Charles Darwin (whose evolutionary theory required vast tracts of undisturbed time).14 Besides an emotional aversion, new findings in geology and oceanography put paid to the idea of a large island or two occupying the north Atlantic Ocean. Among the many proofs are the behavior of the mid-Atlantic ridge, which is the junction between two tectonic plates that are being forced apart, and the quantity of undisturbed sediments on the ocean floor. Henceforth any Atlantis in the Atlantic would have to be much smaller and compatible with the underwater topography. This takes some of the thrill out of the hunt, effectively limiting it to where the ocean floor rises above the surface to form the Canary Islands, the Madeira Islands, the Cape Verde Islands, and the Azores.
The next major contribution to Atlantology came from behind the Iron Curtain, where millennialism was still part of the official philosophy. Nicolas Zhirov, a Soviet chemist, made a serious study of the subject during the 1950s and 1960s, and his book Atlantis; Atlantology: Basic Problems appeared in English translation in 1970.15 It carried great conviction with its command of sources in many languages and its maps, tables, and charts. Zhirov’s conclusion was that a largish island could have existed on the northeastern slopes of the mid-Atlantic ridge, with the Azores as the remains of its mountain peaks.
Of later Atlantologists who favor this location, none has surpassed Zhirov in the scientific breadth and depth of his work. Science, however, is always on the move, and Zhirov’s is now half a century old. Much of it was already superseded in 1981 by another eastern European scientist, Zdenĕk Kukal (see below). Moreover, for all his apparent rigor, Zhirov fell into the besetting sin of Atlantologists, rational and otherwise. This concerns the use of Plato’s Timaeus and Critias as evidence. Whenever some detail of Plato’s account supports their theory, they welcome it as evidence; when it does not, they dismiss it. To take one pair of examples among many, Zhirov concludes from Plato’s report that the Atlanteans enjoyed two harvests a year but had indoor swimming pools that “the country was situated in the south but it had a cool climate due to the elevation of the plateau. Evidence of this kind and the reference to a coconut palm squashes the theory that Atlantis was situated in the northern latitudes.”16 (The theory he was keen to squash was probably that of Jürgen Spanuth; see below.) On the other hand, when Plato makes much of the Atlanteans’ use of metals, saying that “they covered the whole circuit of the outermost wall with a veneer of bronze, they fused tin over the inner wall and orichalc gleaming like fire over the wall of the acropolis itself,” and that the Temple of Poseidon “was covered all over with silver, except for the figures on the pediment which were covered with gold,”17 Zhirov treats it as nonsense: “In our opinion, Atlantis was rather in the Stone Age, a land of cyclopean structures and megalithic edifices.”18
An ephemeral footnote to this section occurred in February 2009, when the Internet resource Google released its maps of the world’s ocean floor. Off the coast of Africa, just west of the Canary and Madeira Islands, there loomed a pattern like a grid of city streets some 100 miles square.19 The media hailed it on their front pages as “lost Atlantis,” whereupon two of the scientists who had compiled the maps issued a statement that it was no such thing.20 The maps were not, as some thought, satellite photographs that had somehow penetrated miles of seawater; they were compilations from satellite radar measurement of sea levels (which are higher above ocean floor rises) and sonar soundings taken by ships. The grid was merely the criss-cross route taken by the ship that had mapped that region, which stood out because of the greater accuracy of its soundings as compared to surface measurements. Needless to say, not everyone was satisfied with this explanation of a feature so pleasingly in accord with Plato’s rectangular plane with its grid of canals, and in one of the prime locations, too.
ARCTICA
Jean-Sylvain Bailly (1736–1793), an eminent astronomer and mayor of Paris who fell victim to the French Revolution, placed Atlantis in the Arctic Circle. Already while writing his history of ancient astronomy,21 he had concluded that humanity, or at least its most important branch, had originated in the far North. His argument was based on some curious numbers found in Greek, Nordic, and Persian mythology, which he interpreted as encoding the number of days of the year when the sun rises. Adonis, for example, is sentenced to spend four months of the year underground with Persephone, which corresponds to the four sunless months at latitude 79°N. The god Odin is absent from his nuptial bed for sixty-five days of the year, which is the case with the sun at latitude 71°N. In the Zoroastrian sacred text, Zend-Avesta, the longest day of the year is said to be twice as long as the shortest, which is the case at 49°N, a latitude far to the north of Persia. Bailly concluded that these and other legends preserved the racial memory of an origin in the far North and a gradual migration to the South.
Bailly next addressed himself to the Atlantis problem. In a correspondence with Voltaire,22 he built on the Nordic Atlantis theory of Olaf Rudbeck (see next section). Bailly’s location of choice was the islands of Spitzbergen, Greenland, and Nova Zemlya. Against the obvious objections based on climate, he explains that when the earth was younger, its interior heat was greater, and life in the Arctic may well have been more tolerable than elsewhere. Besides, he adds, the earth’s movement being less rapid near the poles, the atmosphere was probably less turbid, and so the legend of a perpetual spring may well have been true.23 The “Atlanteans” were the Hyperboreans of classical legend,24 who originated in the “Garden of the Hesperides” near the pole and left evidence of their once-happy climate in the fossil flora and fauna of the Arctic Circle.25 Bailly’s theory had a permanent effect on French Atlantology, blending easily with the occult stream, as we shall see in the next chapter.
SWEDEN
A recent book by David King26 has drawn attention to the most persistent Atlantologist of early modern times, Olaf Rudbeck (1630–1702). Rudbeck was a Swedish professor and entrepreneur whose achievements include the discovery of the lymphatic system and the invention of stratigraphy as an archaeological tool. His attention was first drawn by classical references to the Hyperboreans, dwellers in the “land beyond the north wind.” He naturally took this to be Scandinavia, and in the long-bearded Swedish peasantry he seemed to see descendants of the mythic race. Next he applied his ingenuity to the voyage of the Argonauts and concluded that Jason’s crew, after obtaining the Golden Fleece, had cruised the Russian rivers as far as the Arctic. There, too, was the “Hades” that Odysseus visited. It only remained to find Plato’s Atlantis, and Rudbeck’s archaeological excavations in old Uppsala provided the clue: it could have been nowhere else; the correspondences were irrefutable. He published his findings in Atlantica (Uppsala, 1679). Like his contemporary Kircher, Rudbeck was not the slightest bit mad—only obsessive, and wrong, thus sharing the fate of many Atlantologists: momentary fame, lasting ridicule, and finally incorporation into the history of ideas.
GERMANY
Jürgen Spanuth (1907–1998) spent his life as the Lutheran pastor of Bordelum, a village on the northwest coast of Germany facing the North Frisian Islands. His Atlantis theory, first published in 1953,27 became known in the English-speaking world through his books Atlantis: The Mystery Unravelled28 and the weightier Atlantis of the North.29 Spanuth’s Atlanteans were really Bronze Age Germans living on a fertile plain in what is now the North Sea. Their capital was Basileia, an island outside the mouths of the four rivers Eider, Elbe, Weser, and Jade. Their civilization ended after a cometary impact in the thirteenth century BCE, correctly dated in Plato except that it happened 9,000 months, not years, before Solon’s visit to Egypt. Basilea sank into a mess of impassable mud,30 leaving the island of Helgoland as a solitary witness. The survivors marched through Europe and Asia Minor, some eventually reaching Egypt, where they were already known as the Haunebu, sea people and traders in amber. That substance, says Spanuth, is the true meaning of Plato’s “orichalc.”31 His Atlantean theory apart, Spanuth’s work is a fair account of Bronze Age culture in his home region and of his own archaeological discoveries.
BRITAIN
In 1902 Beckles Willson (1869–1942), a Canadian journalist and historian, wrote in Lost England of the land that once stretched from Land’s End to the Scilly Isles.32 Saint Michael’s Mount, now standing amid the tidal sands of Mount’s Bay, was then a promontory rising from a dense forest, whose fallen trunks can sometimes be glimpsed through the clear water. This was the fabled land of Lyonesse, known throughout the ancient world for its tin, the indispensable metal that hardens copper into bronze. Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans in turn depended on it for their tools and weaponry. In the Dark Ages the land began to subside, and by the Middle Ages it was gone.
Willson did not mention Atlantis, but identical observations inspired a book by a Berlin judge who had already written about Odysseus. Hans Steuerwald’s Der Untergang von Atlantis is crammed with detailed arguments and the usual selective use of Plato. The mysterious orichalc now became Cornish tin ore,33 the Atlantean empire a region under Cornish control that stretched from Scotland to Libya, which explains the elephants that Plato mentions.34 Alas, the empire was literally built on sand, but the chief reason for its fall was not the subsidence and rise in sea levels affecting the Cornish coast and its royal island: it was the coming of iron, which put the tin trade out of business.35
A new factor enters the picture with Paul Dunbavin’s Atlantis of the West, a more elaborate blend of local Atlanticism (Atlantis now being in the Irish Sea) with cosmic and geophysical speculations. Dunbavin is an independent researcher whose previous book argued, mostly on linguistic grounds, that the Picts were of Finnish origin. His Atlantean theory is that in 3100 BCE, the earth was struck by a comet, causing the crust to shift 1°–2° relative to the poles of rotation.36 Among the consequences, “from 3100 BC to about 800 BC, the axial tilt continued to oscillate between about 20° and 26° before settling to its modern value”37 [23° 27']. As the bulge around the equator readjusted itself, some regions sank, including the British Isles, while others such as South America rose. Climates changed, and the length of the year increased from its previous 360 days, necessitating a worldwide resetting of the calendar.
Dunbavin’s theory emboldened him to discard the scientists’ view, based on Ice Age studies, of how and when Ireland, Britain, and continental Europe were split from a single landmass. He writes: “The hypothesis that the Earth’s axis has shifted is able to produce a map of the former shorelines around Britain and Ireland which bears a remarkable resemblance to Plato’s description of his lost island.”38 The citadel of Atlantis rises on a new island south of the Isle of Man; the rectangular plain is east of it, north of Wales. This becomes the hub of a Neolithic Empire whose influence stretched from Libya to Scandinavia until the catastrophe of 3100 BCE.
THE SAHARA DESERT
Albert Herrmann’s book Unsere Ahnen und Atlantis (Our ancestors and Atlantis, 1935) may have been the last of several efforts to place Atlantis in the present Sahara Desert. There was a wave of enthusiasm for this idea after the bestselling novel L’Atlantide (1919) by Pierre Benoit. In the novel, two French officers are whisked away to a hidden realm in the Sahara ruled by a nymphomaniac queen. Herrmann, a professor at Berlin University, was content to stump around in the sand, looking for evidence of a less glamorous but more plausible Atlantis.39 On his fourth archaeological expedition (1933),40 he believed that he had found it in the salt pan of Chott el-Djerid, southern Tunisia, and located Poseidon’s city on the delta of a former river (Triton), by a former lake.41 Perhaps as a means of promoting his modest discovery, Herrmann gave his Atlanteans a Nordic origin. He entered the heated debates over the authenticity of the Oera Linda Book (see chapter 5), taking the middle position: that it contains genuine information about a matriarchal civilization in a now-vanished northern land but is contaminated by later additions. This Nordic civilization—“our ancestors” of the title—ended around 1680 BCE with floods and conflagrations due to a cometary impact. The information for that came from another disputed source, the Chinese Bamboo Annals.42 The survivors migrated south, passing through the British Isles (where they built Stonehenge), then settling on the banks of the Triton. But their paradise was not to last.
The more the Triton region dried up, the more tragic was the fate of the formerly happy inhabitants. One group, the forbears of today’s Berbers, retreated to the wetter zones of the bordering lands, but the majority were compelled to emigrate. Thus in the course of centuries Philistines and Phoenicians went to Palestine; beside the Amazons, Lyceans, Moscoi, Libyans and Chaldeans to Asia Minor and Armenia; Etruscans to the Aegean and Italy; Gauls or Druids to France and Britain; Iberians to Caucasia and Spain. They all ensured that although Atlantean culture had died in North Africa, it would put out new shoots in other parts of the Mediterranean.43
Thus all the most creative people of antiquity, with the exception of the Semites, are endowed with Nordic ancestry! Lastly, Herrmann attributes a common source to all concentric constructions, including the citadel of Atlantis, Stonehenge, labyrinths, and “Troytowns.” Derived from Herman Wirth, it is a symbolic diagram created by Stone Age people as they wandered north and noticed the changes in the sun’s course.44
CRETE AND THERA
Most classicists believe Plato’s story of Atlantis to refer to the civilization of Minoan Crete (third to second millennia BCE) and to the destruction of the volcanic island of Thera (now called Santorini). Several writers have described the sequence of events in the rise and fall of this “Minoan hypothesis.”45 Although it had been hinted at in the nineteenth century, its main proponent was the Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos (1901–1974), who had excavated on Crete and discovered on Santorini the city of Akrotiri: a Pompeii-like time capsule buried beneath volcanic ash. In 1939 Marinatos proposed that the eruption of Santorini around 1500 BCE had not only destroyed most of that island, but that its repercussions had put an end to the flourishing Minoan civilization. This explained the sudden decline of that rich and fascinating culture, formerly blamed on raiders from mainland Greece. In 1950 Marinatos gave his theory the golden touch by suggesting that it explained Plato’s Atlantis. Very soon after, Wilhelm Brandenstein was promoting the Minoan hypothesis in the German-speaking world46 and Massimo Pallottino, in a long and favorable review of Brandenstein’s book, offered it to the scholars of Italy.47
To Marinatos’s countryman, the seismologist Angelos Galanopoulos, the Minoan hypothesis verified the statement in the Timaeus that Atlantis vanished “in a single dreadful day and night.” Galanopoulos published a series of studies from 1960 onward arguing that it was Santorini itself that Plato had in mind. He went on to include in his explanation the myths of Deucalion’s Flood, the Fall of Phaeton, and the miracles of the Exodus, thus providing an alternative to the scarier theories of Immanuel Velikovsky.
The year 1969 was the heyday of the Minoan hypothesis, with books published by Galanopoulos and Edward Bacon,48 James Mavor (a Woods Hole, Massachusetts, oceanographer),49 and J. V. Luce (a classicist of Trinity College, Dublin).50 In 1971 Prince Michael of Greece began his career as a historian by explaining the theory to the Francophone world.51 For twenty years or more, the hypothesis set the Atlantean question to rest. But critics were quick to see the flaws in it. First, it required an ingenious twisting of Plato’s plainspoken account to place Atlantis in the Mediterranean, not the Atlantic, and to have it destroyed 900 years, not 9,000 years, before Solon heard the story in Egypt around 600 BCE. The excuses were that Plato’s “Pillars of Hercules” were really Capes Tainaron and Malea, at the south of the Peloponnese; and that Solon had muddled up Egyptian numerical symbols and read thousands for hundreds.
What was worse was the matter of dating. Marinatos assumed that both the Santorini eruption and the fall of Knossos (capital of Minoan Crete) happened around 1500 BCE. Since his time, C-14 and tree-ring dating have separated the two events, pushing the eruption back as far as 1628 BCE, while the destruction of the Knossos labyrinth is dated to 1380 BCE.52 Scholars are still arguing about the dates of both events, but they agree that the simple cause and effect no longer holds up.
MALTA
A map in the National Library, Valletta,53 drawn by Giorgio Grongnet in 1854, shows “Atlantis” as one large and several smaller islands filling the whole region from the Gulf of Gabes to the Gulf of Sirte. This is reproduced in Malta: Echoes of Plato’s Island,54 one of several publications on Maltese prehistory by the Mifsud family and their colleagues. The Mifsuds, who work as physicians and have no difficulty with scientific data, are an irritant to the official archaeologists, who are unable to explain how such a small area as Malta gave birth, around the middle of the fourth millennium BCE, to the world’s earliest architectural civilization, and how it abruptly ended in the middle of the third millennium BCE. While accepting all the adjustments to Plato’s text necessary for a Mediterranean Atlantis, the Mifsuds contest the claims of Thera and Crete and present multiple parallels with the more ancient civilization of their own islands. Their theory is that Malta was the center of a much larger region that is now under water. Its destruction came through tectonic and volcanic action, as the African and Eurasian continental plates ground into one another. A subsidence of the Pantelleria Rift left only the Pelagian Islands on one side and Malta on the other, both severely tilted.55 The cart tracks that break off at the tops of Malta’s cliffs and canals cut in the seabed are evidence that this happened in civilized times.56
SICILY
Thorwald Franke, an independent researcher, has built on an idea first proposed by Marinatos and seconded by Spanuth: that the Atlantean invasion mentioned by Plato refers to the incursion into Egypt of the “Sea Peoples.”57 Marinatos’s Sea Peoples came from Crete, whereas Spanuth’s came from the North Sea. Franke’s came from Sicily around 1200 BCE. His argument hinges on the fact that Plato is retelling an Egyptian story—that the geographical details reflect Egyptian misconceptions and even shifts, such as transferring the name “Pillars of Hercules” from the Straits of Messina to those of Gibraltar. Franke equates Atlas with Italos, the sole named king of Sicily. He locates the Atlantean plain near Catania and its capital on the Rocchicella Hill near Palagonia, site of the Sanctuary of the Palikè, which becomes a relic of the Atlantean cult. As for the total destruction of Atlantis, Franke explains it as Egyptian political propaganda: having defeated the invaders, they had to declare them annihilated.
CYPRUS
Robert Sarmast, an independent writer and mythologist from Los Angeles, starts from the fact that the Straits of Gibraltar have periodically been closed.58 While geologists date this situation to the prehuman past, Sarmast believes that it has happened much more recently, and that by 10,000 BCE the Mediterranean Sea had dried up and become a desert. Adjoining the island of Cyprus, toward the coast of Syria, 1,500 meters beneath the present sea level, he finds an ideal site for the plain, and presumably the city, of Plato’s Atlantis. The characteristics and mythology of Cyprus serve as corroborative evidence, while the opening of the straits and consequent flooding of the Mediterranean provide for Atlantis’s fall, Noah’s Flood, and so forth.
TURKEY
Eberhard Zangger holds a Stanford University Ph.D. in geology and has written many articles on “geoarchaeology.” His book The Flood from Heaven argues that Atlantis was really Troy.59 It is a bold stroke to link two great Greek myths, and according to Zangger, Plato himself did not make the connection until he was well into writing the Critias.60 That is why he left it unfinished and abandoned his intended Atlantean trilogy. Zangger’s interest was aroused by his excavations at the Greek site of Tiryns. Corings revealed that between 1250 BCE and 1200 BCE, the city had been destroyed by a flash flood, probably due to an earthquake that changed the course of a river and left the settlement buried deep in mud. A close analysis of Plato’s texts, which is the theme of much of Zangger’s book, discredits the “conventional wisdom . . . that Atlantis was destroyed by a single catastrophe and subsequently drowned in the sea.”61 Solon’s tale states that after the Greek warriors’ triumphant return from their conquest of the Atlanteans (i.e., the Trojans), in one day and night earthquakes and floods caused them all to be swallowed up. It adds that Atlantis was destroyed “in like manner.” This suggests a scenario very different from the usual one and compatible with local disasters at the end of the Bronze Age. Zangger goes on to explain Plato’s words about the straits becoming henceforth unnavigable: it was because the Trojans’ knowledge of how to navigate the Dardanelles and Bosporus was lost.62
“The Atlantis Mystery Solved” might have been the subtitle of any of the books treated in this chapter. It is, in fact, that of The Sunken Kingdom by Peter James, an ancient historian who has already been quoted. James deconstructs the mid-Atlantic and the Minoan hypotheses but allows that there must be some truth behind Plato’s account. He credits Zangger with pointing him toward the Bosporus, whose entrance at the Straits of the Dardanelles was apparently known in antiquity as the other “Pillars of Hercules.”63 But rather than Troy, James finds clues in another lost city in ancient Lydia, now the west coast of Turkey. It was Tantalis, whose king was the mythical Tantalus and whose chronicler was not Plato but Pausanias. The stories of Tantalus and his kingdom are so similar to those of Atlas and Atlantis that they seem to have been versions of the same topos.64 On an expedition in 1994 to the area around Smyrna, James found many remains and features that confirmed his suspicions. He concluded that Solon had gathered his material not in Egypt but there in Lydia. It concerned a Bronze Age civilization that had struggled with the Hellenic Greeks and probably perished in one of the frequent earthquakes. The mystery, it turns out, is nothing but an embellished, misattributed story, handed down in Critias’s family and used by Plato in all innocence for his philosophical interpretation of history.65
THE CARIBBEAN
Most proponents of the Caribbean as the site of Atlantis have been influenced by Edgar Cayce’s predictions that the lost continent would be found there, or else they accept dubious evidence such as the “Bimini Road.” Two exceptions are Emilio Spedicato, a mathematics professor at the University of Bergamo, and Andrew Collins, an English psychical researcher and prolific author on ancient mysteries. Spedicato argues for the island of Hispaniola (now divided into Haiti and the Dominican Republic),66 while Collins prefers Cuba.67
Spedicato’s original essay of 1985 was a landmark in Atlantology because of its scientific integrity and introduction of a known agent of catastrophe, the asteroid-like “Apollo objects” that periodically hit the earth. The only adjustment he makes to Plato’s text is to assume an error in transmission:68 that the dimensions given for the irrigated plain (300 by 200 stadia) are those of the whole island, in this case Hispaniola. He finds two possible situations for the plain itself in the southern part of the present Dominican Republic and makes an ingenious suggestion for the original form of the capital city, now submerged: “The information about the ring structure of the central part of the capital of Atlantis and the colored stones carved there suggests indeed that the site had a coralline atoll structure, exposed when the onset of the glaciation lowered the level of the oceans.”69 But Spedicato does not seriously engage the question of what sort of civilization really existed in the Caribbean 12,000 years ago. His specialty is the impact and its consequences.
We assume that the catastrophic event of Plato’s story was the oceanic impact which terminated the last glaciation, as previously hypothesized. The great Atlantic tsunami devastated America, Europe and Africa. The ocean penetrated possibly for thousand of kilometers into the Amazonian basin and the Sahara. Immense devastation affected the Mediterranean region. No architectural structure, already weakened by the earthquake that preceded the tsunami, could have resisted. A tsunamic wave of the envisaged size would not only flatten a city, but carry away its debris, leaving virtually no trace. The deluge following the magmatic emission would have affected mostly Europe, northern Africa and west-central Asia, bringing havoc where the tsunami could not reach. Finally, the melting of ice and the subsequent elevation of the sea level by 60 meters would have changed the coastline configuration and affected the direction of currents, thereby justifying the claim that Atlantis had vanished and the ocean had become impassable.70
Collins and Spedicato acknowledge each other’s researches, and neither is dogmatic about his proposed location for Atlantis. Collins’s argument for Cuba over Hispaniola is that its western end accommodates a “fertile plain” of Plato’s dimensions facing south and shielded by mountains. Before the post-glacial rise in sea levels, this would have included the Gulf of Batabanó, while the present Isola de la Juventud (Isle of Youth) would be a plausible site for the citadel.71 Cultural evidence is harder to come by, but Collins does find Cuban cave paintings of humans baiting or capturing bulls, as Plato’s Atlanteans did. He himself saw a series of petroglyphs in the Seven Caves of the Isle of Youth that looked like targets and comets.72 As an afterthought, Collins speculates about the oversized, elongated skulls that have been found in Mexico and wonders whether they represent a strain of gigantism among the ruling classes. Donnelly had pointed out the practice of cranial deformation (squeezing and lengthening infant skulls) on both sides of the Atlantic as one of his many proofs of cultural diffusion. Collins had already written a highly speculative work about the “Watchers,”73 a legendary people in the Kurdish region endowed naturally with such features. Now he wondered whether they could have crossed the Atlantic and set off a parallel set of legends.74 A curious corroboration will appear below (see “Venezuela”).
A recent study by three scientists75 confirms the catastrophic theories of these Atlantologists, with convergent evidence from many sources pointing to a date of 13,000 years ago, or circa 11,000 BCE. Richard Firestone (a nuclear physicist on the staff of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) and his co-authors draw on a wealth of material evidence to propose the following scenario: 41,000 BP (Before Present), a supernova exploded close to Earth; 34,000 BP, the first shock wave reached the earth with radiation, comet, and asteroid impacts; 16,000 BP, the second shock wave arrived, with similar results; 13,000 BP, the “main event” occurred, with multiple impacts of cometlike objects hitting the Northern Hemisphere.76 Besides creating the Carolina Bays and causing earthquakes, ground fires, climate change, magnetic oscillations, and increased radiation,77 this event brought the Ice Age to an end, with all the associated changes in sea level, flooding, and so forth. If any prehistoric “Atlantis” was flourishing beforehand, this provides an incontrovertible cause of its end.
CENTRAL AMERICA
In their book Atlantis in America,78 Ivar Zapp and George Erikson address the mystery of the stone spheres scattered around Central America. Zapp, Estonian by origin, has taught at the University of Costa Rica, where he lives; Erikson is a Santa Barbara publisher and anthropologist. They believe that the stone spheres, which are up to two meters in diameter, were the tools of an ancient “navigational university,” set out in patterns corresponding with the stars and indicating routes to distant sites. The authors bombard the reader with questions: Who made these spheres? Were they descendants of the Atlanteans? Did they and the Mayan astronomers interact with people of other great megalithic sites in Peru, England, or Egypt? Their answers are implicit in the idea of Atlanteans as survivors of the cometary impact that ended the Ice Age, who in time built the stargazing and seafaring civilizations of the Americas. These people were not limited geographically, but a good candidate for Plato’s site is the Diquis Delta of Costa Rica, where many of the spheres are found.79 Atlantis in America tries to cover all possible bases, calling on astroarchaeology and on the “New Archaeology” of Graham Hancock and others (see below, under “Everywhere”). Zapp and Erickson distrust the view of the past defined by scientific authority and Eurocentric attitudes. Like many contemporary Atlantologists, they conclude by moralizing and warn that if we fail to live in harmony with the cosmos, as did those peoples of the Golden Age, our civilization will go the way of Atlantis.80
VENEZUELA
When Rafael Requena (1879–1946) published Vestigios de la Atlántida, he had risen through a medical, diplomatic, and political career to become private secretary of the autocratic president of Venezuela, Juan Vicente Gómez. His book illustrates a collection of prehistoric artifacts and human bones, which, as the title implies, are seen as relics from a great continent of which Venezuela was once a part.81 Many of them come from the “Cerritos del Valle de Tacriqua,” mounds built by a prehistoric race different in character from any tribes known since the discovery of America, and of a more advanced civilization. Requena tentatively accepts Scott-Elliot’s theory of races (see chapter 4) and reproduces his map of a large Atlantic island,82 but there is nothing occult about his own work. As a medical doctor, he was particularly struck by the number of skulls with depressed foreheads and bulging at the back. Although such cranial deformation was later practiced worldwide, Requena did not believe that primitives could have done it and argues that it was natural.83 In support of this, he points out that prehistoric American horses, too, have depressed foreheads.84
BOLIVIA
J. M. Allen,85 a specialist in maps and their interpretation, who has worked with the RAF, based his search for Atlantis on Plato’s description and dimensions of a rectangular plain, facing south and sheltered to the north by mountains. In Atlantis: The Andes Solution he finds this in the Altiplano (Bolivian Plateau), the largest high-altitude plain in the world, which stretches from Lake Titicaca to Lake Poopo. According to Allen, it not only supplies the geographical requirements but even contains a canal system, an ancient city on a lake, a lush soil, deposits of metals, and an alloy of copper and gold that could well be Plato’s orichalcum.86 But since the South American continent obviously did not sink into the sea, Allen has to blame local floods and volcanic eruptions for Atlantis’s destruction. A lack of visible traces, especially on the supposed island capital, is one weakness of his theory. Another, depending on how much faith one puts in comparative etymology, is his explanation of the name Atlantis. Apparently “Andes” is a corruption of antis, the native name for copper, while atl means water.87 Mix together the two words (or, on a figurative level, bring together copper and water), and there you have it: “atl-antis”!
ANTARCTICA
Charles Hapgood (1904–1982), a history professor who taught at Springfield College (Massachusetts) and Keene State College (New Hampshire), did not mention Atlantis in his best-known book, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings.88 Nor, as is sometimes said, did Albert Einstein validate that book and its theories. (The great man wrote a foreword to Hapgood’s earlier work, Earth’s Shifting Crust.) However, Hapgood’s theory is a favorite of the New Archaeology. It implies that some prehistoric seagoing people was able to visit and map the coast of Antarctica at a time when it was yet unglaciated, and that their maps survived from copy to copy up to the era of Columbus. Hapgood’s evidence is early modern world maps that show a southern polar continent, which was later omitted as sailors failed to reach it, and especially the map of 1517 compiled by the Turkish pirate (or admiral) Piri Reis.
The Reis map, like Plato’s Atlantis, requires selective interpretation if it is to serve as evidence for a prehistoric culture. The portion that supposedly shows Antarctica must be taken as accurate, while the gross inaccuracies in mapping South America and the Caribbean islands cannot be allowed to impugn the credibility of the whole. As for how Antarctica acquired its covering of ice, Hapgood’s earlier book had argued that the Earth’s crust periodically slips around like a loose orange peel, while the inner bulk of it continues to rotate around the same axis. This puts different places at the poles, or, from another viewpoint, the poles migrate, and wherever they are, an ice cap is liable to build up, as it has done over Antarctica. Therefore the mapping in question must have been done before the last slippage, which in turn explains the catastrophes that destroyed that worldwide maritime civilization.
In Hapgood’s later life two Canadian librarians, Rand and Rose Flem-Ath, corresponded with him and developed his theories further in their own writings. When the Sky Fell89 works out the consequences of a crustal shift around 9600 BCE that would have moved the Antarctic continent from a comparatively temperate to a polar position. The sky would have seemed to “fall” because the elevations of the stars would have changed; but the change would not be uniform. Some locations, such as North America, were wrenched from one zone to another, killing off their large mammals, while Africa remained relatively stable.90 “Lesser Antarctica, the site of Atlantis,” they wrote, “was destroyed not only by earthquakes and floods, but also by a dire winter that completely covered the achievements of a lost civilization.”91
EVERYWHERE
Some Atlantologists have resisted the temptation to fit Plato’s account to a specific location. Instead, they read it as testimony to some highly sophisticated culture that has left its traces on a continental, even a global scale.
Mary Settegast, an independent scholar with high academic credentials, determined in Plato Prehistorian not to take the easy route of the Minoan-Thera hypothesis, but to treat Plato’s dates seriously and see what was going on then. She writes:
The Thera hypothesis was formed before seafarers were discovered in the Late Paleolithic Aegean, and before the magnitude of the loss of Greek lands to the postglacial seas was fully known. The extent of the mid-to-late ninth millennium spread of arrowheads was not yet recognized; the date of Jericho’s fortifications had not been moved back to the last half of the ninth millennium; and the depth and complexity of Magdalenian culture, whose location in time and space closely parallels that of the European holdings of Plato’s Atlantic empire, was still to be demonstrated.92
In 16,000 BCE, at the height of the Ice Age, a pan-European and uniform culture tamed horses, painted caves, and carved figures out of mammoth ivory. What else they did can only be guessed, especially as much of their territory (including their ports) has been lost to the rise in sea levels. Settegast sees this as the “Golden Age” of Greek myth and reckons that it subsisted until the mid-eighth millennium BCE. Then occurred the wars, invasions, earthquakes, and floods recorded in Plato’s Atlantis story, ushering in the new epoch of the Neolithic Revolution. From the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea “extraordinarily advanced communities emerged, seemingly out of nowhere,” complete with hybrid grains, rectangular architecture, pottery, and even metalwork.93
Plato Prehistorian is a complex book that defies further summary here. Its treatment of Plato moves the subject and its problems to a new level. Previous attempts to plant a flag (typically in one’s native land) and declare that one has found Plato’s Atlantis seem quite provincial by comparison. But Settegast’s careful scholarship kept her from taking the next step toward a fully global concept of prehistoric civilization.
A new phase of Atlantology began in 1990 when John Anthony West persuaded Robert Schoch, a Boston University professor, to give a geologist’s opinion of the weathering of the Sphinx of Giza.94 West, an independent Egyptologist and defender of astrology, had long pondered a statement by R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz that the Sphinx showed the results of water erosion.95 After several visits to the site, Schoch confirmed that the monument and its enclosure (which are both carved out of the native rock) had all the signs of exposure to centuries of torrential rain. But as everyone knows, the Sphinx is in the Sahara Desert, where heavy rains have not fallen for thousands of years. This verdict placed the Sphinx’s construction in an epoch before Egyptian dynastic civilization and well before the accepted date for the Sphinx and the Giza pyramids of circa 2500 BCE. Schoch’s findings did not trouble his fellow geologists, who think on a scale of millions of years and are unconcerned with Egyptian history; but they greatly perturbed the Egyptologists, especially when in 1993 the West-Schoch theory was the center of a high-profile television documentary.96 High emotions were generated and are still swirling around as other geologists propose alternative explanations.
Worse yet for the guardians of orthodoxy, the English journalist Graham Hancock then entered the field. Hancock had a reputation for adventurous reporting from war and famine zones and had already written a bestseller on the search for the Ark of the Covenant in Ethiopia. The theme of his Fingerprints of the Gods and Heaven’s Mirror97 is that there was indeed high culture in prehistoric times, and that it was not just continental, like Mary Settegast’s, but worldwide. Its preoccupations were the stars and the destiny of the soul; its greatest talents, ocean navigation and moving large stones. Its legacy is the megalithic monuments of northwest Europe, Egypt, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, India, Cambodia, and the Pacific islands. Much more might be found if we could properly explore the coastal shelves that were submerged after the end of the Ice Age. Hancock himself made a start at this with the diving explorations chronicled in his book Underworld.98
Hancock’s work coincided at several points with that of Robert Bauval, a Belgian engineer who had grown up in Egypt.99 Bauval’s crucial intuition was that the three pyramids of Giza were laid out to replicate the configuration of the three stars of Orion’s Belt, and that to make the replication accurate, one has to go back to the position of those stars circa 10,500 BCE. At that time, too, the Sphinx was properly aligned with the constellation of Leo, giving it a date anterior even to what Schoch was willing to allow. Although in Bauval’s opinion the pyramids themselves were not built for another 8,000 years, they followed the ancient layout. This means that the worldwide culture tracked by Hancock somehow preserved its traditions from the prehistoric into the historical period, which in Plato’s version is exactly what the Egyptian priest told Solon. It also requires a selective treatment of evidence. Paul LaViolette (see next section) points out that compared to the stars they are supposed to reflect, the pyramids err by 10 percent in their relative separations and by 32 percent in the angular deviation of the small pyramid from the line joining the larger ones.100 Whether this discrepancy affects Bauval’s Orion theory depends on the “tolerances” or margins of error that any engineering project involves. In this case (assuming no mysterious technology or extraterrestrial help) one must imaginatively reconstruct the processes of (1) the naked eye observation of moving stars, (2) projecting a hand-sized diagram over thousands of feet, and (3) much later, building the pyramids themselves; then calculate the cumulative tolerances of each stage, which may well suffice to explain the deviations.
Among those attracted by the New Archaeology was the omnivorous philosopher Colin Wilson. He summarized its findings and theories in the first of his three contributions to Atlantology, From Atlantis to the Sphinx,101 but the theme of the book was the question that has inspired Wilson’s whole career as a writer and thinker: what are the latent possibilities of the human being? In this particular case, why do we seem to have lost capabilities and sensitivities that prehistoric cultures possessed? Wilson, like Hancock, had a global approach to the problem of lost civilization. It was more a case of a recapturing a lost state of mind, even of soul, evidenced by the mysterious and awe-inspiring monuments scattered all over the globe.
Wilson’s next step was to collaborate with Rand Flem-Ath, Hapgood’s correspondent, on The Atlantis Blueprint.102 Flem-Ath had been studying the location of sacred sites all over the world and had found an extraordinary number of them at points that made simple fractional divisions of the Earth’s circumference, calculated not from the present poles but from the poles as they were (according to the Hapgood theory) before the crustal shift of 9600 BCE. This grid of strategically placed sites was the “blueprint” of the title. Wilson writes:
We believe that the ‘great catastrophe’ took place about 9,600 BC, and that the North Pole then moved [from Hudson Bay] to its present position. Which implies, of course, that Atlantis (or whatever we choose to call this earlier civilisation) existed for some time before 9,600 BC. How long before? It must surely have been a long time, since the Atlanteans established more than sixty sacred sites all over the world.103
That was not all. Some of the sacred sites, such as Baalbek, turned out to be more closely aligned with an even earlier position of the North Pole, namely in the Yukon nearly 100,000 years ago. Also some of the placements, not explainable through the grid, turned out to divide the circumference of the globe through the Golden Section. With so many possible alignments relative to two or three poles and to the Great Pyramid, the reader may feel that it was too easy to find a rationale for almost any location.
To go along with the suggestion of civilization before the Magdalenian era (ca. 18,000–10,000 BP) and even before Cro-Magnon Man, The Atlantis Blueprint printed a letter from Charles Hapgood with the teasing statement: “Furthermore, in recent exciting discoveries I believe I have convincing evidence of a whole cycle of civilization in America and in Antarctica, suggesting advanced levels of science that may go back 100,000 years.”104 Two months later, Hapgood was hit by a car and died, so his evidence remained unpublished. But Wilson was on the track of it. He describes in his autobiography how, while writing The Atlantis Blueprint, he contacted an unnamed “retired New England academic” who said that it was he who had convinced Hapgood of the immense age of civilization. Wilson says: “When I asked him why he thought so, he mentioned two reasons. First: that the measurements of the earth prove that ancient man knew its exact size long before the Greeks. Second: that there is evidence that Neanderthal man was far more intelligent than we give him credit for.”105
Because his co-author excluded this theory from The Atlantis Blueprint,106 Wilson expounded it himself in Atlantis and the Kingdom of the Neanderthals.107 Like its predecessors, the book is a lively summary of discoveries and writings, ranging in this case from the consciousness of plants to Goethe’s color theory, from Rennes-le-Château to Hapgood’s psychical researches. When eventually the Neanderthals come on stage, they are credited with a handful of anomalous artifacts that long predate Homo sapiens and with a “cosmological canon” involving precise knowledge of astronomical and geographic measurements. Wilson surmises that the Neanderthals may have realized one of the latent human potentials, a talent for calculation that only survives today in mathematical prodigies. But of the kingdom promised by the title, there is no sign.
Several of the authors in this section have strayed across the frontier that separates the rational from the occult. Colin Wilson is one of the most popular authors on the latter subject; John Anthony West has written a defense of astrology and leads tours to “sacred Egypt”; Graham Hancock now writes about experiences with entheogenic drugs; Robert Bauval, while perhaps not a believer, attaches his pyramid theory to concepts of astral immortality; Robert Schoch is now concerned with psychical research. The New Archaeology has a New Age aura about it. But the efforts, arguments, and theories that led to the works surveyed here do not rest on revealed, channeled, or traditional teachings. Their prime material is the monuments themselves; their prime intent, to understand why they are as they are. The only explanation that satisfies them is that prehistoric peoples experienced states of being incomprehensible through the materialist paradigm. The reasonable course, then, is to try a different paradigm.
ALLEGORICAL
Paul LaViolette, a systems science Ph.D. from Portland State University, based his theory of Atlantis on cosmogony and the role of the center of our galaxy. He argues that the naming of the zodiacal constellations contains clues to the exact location of this center, which is invisible even to telescopes, and that the chosen symbols imply an understanding of how the galactic center is continually spewing out newly created matter108—a controversial position, for LaViolette rejects the Big Bang theory of creation and the hypothesis that the galactic center is a black hole. This creative process periodically causes “superwaves” that impact the solar system, causing catastrophes recorded in myths from all around the world. LaViolette attributes the end of the last Ice Age to the arrival of such a superwave and assembles a large body of scientific data to support his theory. Although the process of deglaciation lasted several thousand years, the period around 12,700 BP (10,700 BCE) keeps coming up as significant, both in the data and in mythology. Among other events, it marks the unexplained extinction of large mammals in North America and the end of the “Age of Virgo” (see chapter 12). This is close to Bauval and Hancock’s “First Time” of 10,500 BCE and to Firestone’s date of cometary impact around 11,000 BCE.
As for Atlantis, LaViolette rejects the Atlantic, Thera, and Antarctic hypotheses and reads the Egyptian priest’s story as a double allegory, one part of which Plato put into the Timaeus and the other into the Critias. The allegory in the Critias is “a highly sophisticated theory about the nature of subatomic matter and how it first came into being out of the primordial ether.”109 Unfortunately, it requires a knowledge of atomic physics to understand it, as well as an open mind about some of the basic presuppositions of that science. For instance, LaViolette revives the unfashionable concept of the ether and holds that at galactic centers, matter condenses out of some prematerial, etheric state. Like the New Archaeologists’ speculations about prehistoric people’s consciousness, this kind of thinking collides head-on with the materialist paradigm, from whose point of view it is all occult nonsense.
LaViolette’s interpretation of the Timaeus is not so demanding. Plato’s text states that after the defeat of the Titans, Poseidon received Atlantis as his only land territory. LaViolette continues:
It also states that the Atlantean civilization was spawned through Poseidon’s union with Clito, a mortal maiden who lived within the earth, that is, through the union of the water and earth elements. Water becomes earth-like when it solidifies to form ice and it forms continent sized masses when it forms an ice sheet. One might then speculate that Atlantis is none other than the ice sheet that once covered North America.110
This cleverly satisfies Plato’s location, size, and date of Atlantis. The Atlanteans’ attack on Europe becomes an allegory for the “floods of glacial meltwater that the ice sheets periodically released from their surfaces. . . . Like Atlantis in the myth, the ice sheets eventually ‘disappeared into the depths of the sea’ as their meltwater coursed to the oceans and with their wasting, they left behind a shoal of mud and rock, or what some geologists call ‘the drift’.”111 The date given to Solon of around 9600 BCE coincides with the warming at the end of the Younger Dryas period, when the glacier melting reached its peak. LaViolette does not speculate about who could invent such an allegory of events that took place 9,000 years before. He assumes that some prehistoric tradition of advanced thought, analogous to Hancock and Bauval’s First Time, survived the millennia to resurface in dynastic Egypt.
No such assumptions are needed by two other allegorical readings of Plato’s Atlantis story: those of John Michell and Ernest McClain. But even though they do not require advanced physics, they rest on the authors’ elaborate mathematical or musical structures, to which no summary can do justice. Michell (1933–2009), an English philosopher and student of anomalous phenomena, interpreted Plato’s numerical myths in The Dimensions of Paradise.112 They are a part of Plato’s writing that classical scholars have avoided, but which Michell believed to be the esoteric core of the philosopher’s work, never fully explained because they came from a secret tradition (probably Pythagorean). In the case of Atlantis, Plato “believed no doubt that it was based on fact and that it came, as he said, from ancient Egyptian temple records. But the details of its dimensions and so on were clearly of his own devising. To existing traditions of the lost city he attached a mathematical allegory, designed to illustrate the crucial importance of number and true reckoning in all human affairs.”113 Plato’s disciples were expected to take up the challenge by constructing the geometrical figures from his hints and calculating their numerical consequences. They had, after all, enrolled in an academy whose portal bore the motto Let None Ignorant of Geometry Enter.
One of Michell’s lifelong concerns was the defense of traditional measures such as the mile, the foot, and the inch, with their duodecimal system and their links, via the sacred numbers, to cosmic measures (e.g., 5,040 miles as the combined radii of the earth and the moon114). He shared Plato’s conviction that society can function harmoniously only if it respects the traditional canon of number. Michell finds Plato’s lesson to this effect in the contrast between two imaginary city-states: Magnesia with its 5,040 inhabitants, described in the Laws, and Atlantis. Magnesia is the ideal city, like the New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation, first conceived in circular form as a Platonic Idea, then brought down to earth as a square. Atlantis is its antithesis, the city that fell because it was “subtly incorrect, a close imitation but a travesty of the ideal, constructed from sacred numbers misapplied.”115 The misapplication in question was the use of the decimal system. Whereas Magnesia and the City of Revelation divide by 12s, everything in Atlantis divides by 5s and 10s, starting with the five pairs of Poseidon’s descendants and going on with the 100 statues of nereids around the temple, the division of the plain into plots of 100 square stades, and so on. When the diligent Platonist actually works out the details, the figures do not add up, and the geometry is not exact. Consequently, as Michell says of the imaginary Atlanteans, “Their cumbersome number system and the ambiguities in their geometry and land measuring would have caused minor grievances which would grow ever more irritating as time went on. In the original formula and foundation plan of Atlantis lay the seeds of its eventual destruction.”116
An utterly different reading of Plato’s intentions inspired The Pythagorean Plato by the American musicologist Ernest McClain.117 He treats the same numerical myths as Michell, but interprets them according to a musical scheme, derived from his earlier studies of sacred texts such as the Rig Veda and the Hebrew Bible. McClain finds that ancient peoples (or the intellectual elite among them) were obsessed by the problems of tuning. While practical musicians do this to the best of their ability, theorists want to quantify the intervals, and this produces endless difficulties and requires ever-increasing numerical matrices. (The Well-Tempered Clavier of J. S. Bach is the best-known monument to the problem.) “Atlantis,” McClain writes, “was a sophisticated entertainment for Pythagoreans only—if my story is ‘the likely one.’ For the musically innocent, it is and must remain merely a Platonic fairy tale, incomprehensibly loaded with absolutely meaningless numerical detail.”118 To the Pythagorean, on the other hand, every number can be represented as a specific tone, and Plato’s numbers in particular belong to an arcane dialog concerning perfect intonation. In the Atlantis myth, the generations descending from Poseidon imply progressively larger numbers for the definition of the octave (the larger ones allowing for finer divisions within it).119 The Atlantean plain with its mountains and its network of canals is nothing but a fanciful image derived from a diagram that plots the powers of 3 along one axis (musically, intervals of a fifth; philosophically, the divine strain in the Atlanteans) and powers of 5 along another axis (musically, intervals of a major third; philosophically, the human strain). As one develops the diagram following Plato’s numbers, the powers of 5 come to predominate, with consequences similar to those of which John Michell complained: the system gets so badly out of tune that a god has to intervene. And this leads to the famous ending of the Critias: “[Zeus] accordingly summoned all the gods to his own most glorious abode, which stands at the centre of the universe and looks out over the whole realm of change, and when they had assembled addressed them as follows.”
McClain must be the only Atlantologist who accepts this as the intended end of the dialogue: “Plato’s unfinished last sentence—a sentence that could never have been finished anyway, and addressed to an audience wholly familiar with his mathematical metaphors—deserves to be studied as the best punch line a musical comedy ever had.”120
NOWHERE
After this parade, the most rational view of all might be that Plato’s Atlantis never existed, either on Earth or in his own mind. This has long been the position of classical scholars, and it continues to generate books, though such a dampening attitude has little audience appeal. Two works of this genre seem to me outstanding, one from a scientific and the other from a literary point of view.
The first is by Zdenĕk Kukal (born 1932), of the Central Geological Survey of Prague, who published in 1978 a book-length study of “Atlantis in the Light of Modern Research.” Six years later, the academic journal Earth-Science Reviews devoted a special issue to a revised version in English.121 Kukal was able to take advantage of advances in the earth sciences that followed the study of cores, plate tectonics, and paleomagnetism, and of publications in east European as well as Western languages. He was also a good writer, sympathetic to his subject, and never scathing about the theories of other Atlantologists even when refuting them.
Before embarking on a tour of proposed sites, Kukal treats the question of what could be left of an advanced civilization overcome by seawater 11,500 years ago. The answer is very little, due to chemical and biological degradation, and that extremely difficult to find under the sediment on the ocean floor. He dashes one hope after another. The Atlantic islands are not the remnants of large sunken islands; in geological terms they are young and grew up from the ocean floor as volcanic cones.122 The Guanches, indigenous blue-eyed people of the Canary Islands, were not Atlanteans but Berbers, probably taken there as slaves by Arabs or even Carthaginians.123 The freshwater diatoms found in the Atlantic sediments are not the result of ancient freshwater lakes but were blown there from Africa.124 The Mediterranean was a desert, yes, but 6 million years ago.125 Recent geological evidence is all against the possibility that a large meteorite struck the Atlantic or the Mediterranean around 11,500 BP.126 During the same period, sea level was between 20 and 50 meters lower than today, but although this allowed broad areas in the Mediterranean to emerge and eventually be flooded, the process was gradual, not overnight.127
Despite his efficient demolition of these and other pillars of the Atlantologists, Kukal still wants something to be found that answers to Plato’s myth. He writes:
Atlantis, as described by Plato, has never been found by anyone anywhere, and it seems that it never will be. But it was the Mediterranean, with its ancient civilizations, its conflicts, and its tectonic activity, that inspired Plato. It is the Mediterranean, with its sunken harbors and cities, that can still reveal many surprises. Many parts of its floor remain to be explored. But even if we do not find Plato’s Atlantis, we may well find a pseudo-Atlantis, some other ancient civilization competing with the Phoenicians, the Cretans, or the Carthaginians, or, later, even with the Greeks and the Romans. We may even find the remains of some ancient monuments that were destroyed “in a single day and night of misfortune.”128
To those who deny any historical reality to the Atlantis story, there remains the fascination of how it has inspired philosophers, novelists, earnest seekers, and cranks. The science-fiction writer L. Sprague de Camp (1907–2000) reviewed this motley assembly in his Lost Continents,129 with erudition and wit seldom equaled in the field. He covers the occultists and Theosophists, Donnelly and the post-Donnellians, the pseudoscientists like Hoerbiger and Velikovsky, and Atlantis fiction, on which he was an unrivaled expert. The main shortcoming is that a book written in 1954 cannot include later literature and films.130
De Camp was a complete skeptic but, like Kukal, a sympathetic one, with a novelist’s appreciation of eccentrics and “bumptious amateurs.” He writes of the Atlantis myth:
Most of all it strikes a responsive chord by its sense of the melancholy loss of a beautiful thing, a happy perfection once possessed by mankind. Thus it appeals to that hope that most of us carry around in our unconscious, a hope so often raised and as often disappointed, for assurance that somewhere, some time, there can exist a land of peace and plenty, of beauty and justice, where we, poor creatures that we are, could be happy. In this sense Atlantis—whether we call it Panchaia, the Kingdom of God, Oceana, the Classless Society, or Utopia—will always be with us.131
This survey of the rational Atlantologists deserves a rational conclusion. The need to theorize and explain is a psychological trait that can lead, at the extreme, to a dissociation from reality and a humorless conviction of one’s own special status. Atlantologists since Olaf Rudbeck must have finished their books with a serene smile and the certainty that they, and they alone, had put a stake through the heart of the matter. The fact that it now looks like a pincushion gives one pause. But every one of these authors has found something of value and contributed in some way to knowledge of the distant human past. Field researchers like Jürgen Spanuth and Eberhard Zangger may be wrong about Atlantis, but they have taught us a lot about the Bronze Age. Library addicts like Ignatius Donnelly have ransacked obscure sources and scientific journals that the ordinary reader would never find and shaped them into something readable. The New Archaeology draws attention to mysterious sites and arouses curiosities that the old archaeology cannot satisfy. All this is highly educational and entertaining, irrespective of any theories that may come trundling behind. As someone has pointed out, Plato’s Atlantis story has turned out like the buried treasure in Aesop’s fable “The Farmer and his Sons”: there was no treasure buried in his vineyard, but in digging for it the sons so improved the soil that they raised a bumper crop.