Atlantis Beneath the Ice Read online

  Campbell summarized the contribution of this school of mythology. “The bold and truly epoch-making writings of the psychoanalysts are indispensable to the student of mythology; for, whatever may be thought of the detailed and sometimes contradictory interpretations of specific cases and problems, Freud, Jung, and their followers have demonstrated irrefutably that the logic, the heroes, and the deeds of myth survive into modern times. In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dream.”10

  For Campbell the myths provide pathways to ethical wisdom and offer beacons of spiritual guidance. In his view, to look at them as potential lost history is missing the spiritual dimension altogether.

  From Vico to Campbell, mythologists have sought the key to the puzzle of the nature of imagination and thought. In this book we have examined many myths that speak of the lost island paradise and have explored the significance of what we call the “sun-deluge motif”. These are stories which blame the great flood on a dramatic change in the sun’s path. But we do not offer the myths as concrete evidence. However, we do believe that these ancient renditions represent something more than just evidence of the similarity of humanity’s mental makeup. We propose that certain myths do indeed represent lost history, but this conjecture is based on the capacity of the earth crust displacement theory to provide order to recognized, long-standing problems in science.

  The noted sociologist of science Thomas S. Kuhn lists five key characteristics of a good scientific theory. “Accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity and fruitfulness—are all standard criteria for evaluating the adequacy of a theory.”11

  The simplicity of the theory of earth crust displacement drew Albert Einstein to Hapgood’s idea. Hapgood replaces the presupposition of a relatively stable crust with the notion that the crust shifts. Using this simple assumption, the theory is capable of accurately and consistently addressing a wide scope of established problems. It provides a framework with which to comprehend the mysterious myths of the lost island paradise and the worldwide appearance of the sun-deluge motif. And it offers an explanation of why some ancient maps are so strangely accurate—maps that appear to have originated from an unknown civilization.

  The theory also points to Lesser Antarctica as the site of Atlantis. But what have others believed about the lost continent?

  ATLANTIS THEORIES

  After Plato’s death his student Aristotle (384 BCE–322 BCE) became the foremost philosopher in Athens. Aristotle was said to be highly skeptical about Homer’s famous legend of Troy, declaring, “He who brought it into existence can also cause it to disappear.”12

  These words were applied by Aristotle’s followers to discredit Plato’s account of Atlantis, giving rise to the idea that Atlantis was entirely the product of Plato’s lively imagination.b A more sophisticated branch of this “imaginary” school was founded by the second-century Greek philosopher Numenius. He argued that Plato wrote the story as an allegory. This approach still has supporters today.

  But as we have shown, the compelling idea of Atlantis is found woven again and again into the myths of peoples with whom Plato could not possibly have had any contact. The Haida and Okanagan myths of a lost land and the Cherokee story of a floating island in the Southern Hemisphere are not ideas that Plato could have borrowed. Nor is it possible, if Plato’s story were simply an allegory, that he could give an accurate geographic account of the world as seen from Antarctica.

  Crantor (ca. 300 BCE) was one of the first to write extensively about Plato’s dialogue Timaeus, which contained the legend of Atlantis. He was convinced of the truth of the account and went so far as to send envoys to Egypt to verify the story. When the messengers returned, they confirmed that the legend had been found “written on pillars which are still preserved.”13

  Crantor believed that Atlantis was a real place that had existed in the North Atlantic Ocean. As time went by, this became the most popular location for the lost continent—an idea, as we have seen, based on a misunderstanding of the term Atlantic Ocean. The age of discovery opened up land to the west and the intriguing possibility that the vanished continent would surely be found in Central America, North America, or Brazil. Or as new territory was explored, South Africa, Ceylon, Greenland, and so on.

  Eventually, however, the North Atlantic Ocean reemerged as the favorite site. Athanasius Kircher, the Jesuit who discovered the Egyptian map of Atlantis, was also convinced that it lay beneath the North Atlantic Ocean. His influence was great because he was widely believed to be the most learned man in the world. After his death in 1680, the dialogue was reduced to a debate between those who thought, like Kircher, that Atlantis had sunk beneath the ocean and was lost forever and those who held out hope that some yet undiscovered land would prove to be the lost paradise (see figure 11.1).

  All this changed in 1882 with Ignatius Donnelly’s book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. Donnelly (1831–1901) is one of the most colorful figures in the story of the search for Atlantis. Born in Philadelphia, he studied law before moving to Minnesota, where he was elected lieutenant governor at the age of twenty-eight. He was then elected to the U.S. Congress and spent most of his time absorbed by the rich resources of the Library of Congress. Like Kircher, Donnelly believed that Atlantis lay beneath the North Atlantic Ocean, and he was excited by the idea that a marvelous new invention, the submarine, would transform the search into a reality.

  Figure 11.1. The legend of Atlantis was first recorded by Plato, and it was his student, Aristotle, who may have been the first skeptic by suggesting that Atlantis was imaginary. Numenius was the first to suggest Atlantis was meant as an allegory. Crantor was the first to insist that Atlantis was real, while the American writer Ignatius Donnelly proposed that it was not only real but also still discoverable. The founder of Boston University, William Fairfield Warren, created the school of thought we support by suggesting that Atlantis had been lost in a global geological event and could still be found in a remote area of the globe. The modern approach was formulated by K. T. Frost, who suggested that the account was an exaggeration of a local event. Drawing by Rand Flem-Ath and Rose Flem-Ath.

  Donnelly’s popular book boldly asserted that the description of Atlantis offered by Plato was not, as had long been supposed, a fable, but was based on actual history. He believed that Atlantis “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.”14

  The idea of Atlantean colonies was a popular one in a newly independent America. However, even if it were true, the remains of such colonies would have perished long ago. We have recovered barely enough artifacts from the oldest known civilization, Sumer, to piece together its history. Most have disintegrated into the dust of time. Any Atlantean colonies would be at least twice as old as Sumer and highly unlikely to survive nearly twelve thousand years of weathering.

  Donnelly also surmised “that the oldest colony formed by the Atlanteans was probably in Egypt, whose civilization was a reproduction of that of the Atlantic island.”15 The newly discovered ancient age of the Great Sphinx as documented by John Anthony West gives support to this claim.16

  Donnelly’s book sent America spinning into an Atlantean fever. In 1883, New Orleans devoted its Mardi Gras to the Atlantis theme.17 Donnelly was elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. By 1890, the book had gone to press for twenty-three editions. It is still in print today.

  Three years after the publication of Donnelly’s work, the founder and president of Boston University, William Fairfield Warren (1833– 1929) published Paradise Found: The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole. This book used comparative mythology and the latest theories of geology to tackle the question of the lost paradise
, of which Atlantis is but one story. His geological idea did not survive, and consequently his whole investigation has been ignored, despite the fact that it was much more comprehensive than Donnelly’s. Because he believed that “paradise” was once at the North Pole, Warren didn’t restrict his investigation to lands on either side of the North Atlantic Ocean. He examined myths from around the globe, finding a great deal of mythology that associated the lost paradise with the pole. He launched the research tradition that treated the lost land as a real place located in a remote region of the world that had been destroyed by a global catastrophe.

  Unlike this “remote” school of thought, which derives its momentum from a geological theory of catastrophe colored by comparative mythology, the most recent investigations of Atlantis take an entirely different line. The “regional” school of thought finds its strength in archaeological evidence of a vanquished civilization and geological support for a local catastrophe that destroyed it.

  Although unaware of it, Charles Lyell, the great uniformitarian geologist, was the first scientist to lay down the arguments that would eventually form one of the backbones of the regional approach to the problem of Atlantis. In his Principles of Geology Lyell was concerned with the worldwide stories of a Great Flood. His uniformitarian beliefs led him to belittle them. “The true source of the system must be sought for in the exaggerated traditions of those partial, but often dreadful catastrophes, which are sometimes occasioned by various combinations of natural causes.”18 This idea of exaggeration would come to play a central role in the “modern” thought about Atlantis.

  The concept of a small, localized Atlantis was launched after Sir Arthur Evans (1851–1941) excavated the remains of the Minoan civilization on Crete. Nine years later, on February 19, 1909, an article appeared in the London Times under the title “The Lost Continent.” It was written by K. T. Frost, a young man who was on the staff of Queen’s University in Belfast. He argued that Evans’s discovery meant that Crete might have been Atlantis. Frost was killed in action in World War I. His idea was taken up again on the threshold of World War II.

  In 1939, Professor Spyridon Marinatos, director of the Greek Archaeological Service, presented the theory that a volcanic explosion had occurred on the island of Thera, just north of Crete. In the 1950s and 1960s, Professor Angles Galanopoulos dated the debris from the Thera eruption to 1500 BCE, a time corresponding with the fall of the Minoan civilization. Was Thera Atlantis?

  The classical account of the theory of Thera/Crete as Atlantis was written in 1969 by I. V. Luce, a classics and philosophy lecturer at Trinity College in Dublin. In The End of Atlantis: New Light on an Old Legend,19 Luce treats Plato’s account as an exaggeration of the actual fall of Crete, which, in turn, was triggered by the volcanic explosion on Thera.

  Luce’s theory fails on several counts. Plato’s Egyptian priest described Atlantis as being larger than Libya (North Africa) and Asia (the Middle East) combined. It is an island continent. Such an immense landmass could never be found within the confines of the Mediterranean Sea. Moreover, Plato’s account directs our attention to Atlantis as located beyond the Pillars of Heracles (Strait of Gibraltar) and in the “real ocean,” of which the Mediterranean Sea is but a small harbor. The Crete theory ignores the sun-deluge motif and distorts the timing of events by a factor of ten.

  The idea of misrepresenting the age of Atlantis by a factor of ten makes sense to modern eyes because we use Arabic numbers, in which, for instance, the numerals 10 and 100 seem visually similar. However, the ancient Egyptians at the time of Plato (and of Solon and Pythagoras) did not use an Arabic system. The difference between the written forms of 1,000 and 10,000 in Egyptian hieroglyphics is extreme, and they could not possibly be mistaken.

  Finally, Luce’s theory ignores the description of Atlantis’s great mountains and high altitude. While it may be true that a volcanic explosion on Thera destroyed Crete, there is no justification in tying it to the legend of Atlantis.

  In 1979, Harald A. T. Reiche, a professor of classics and philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published “The Language of Archaic Astronomy: A Clue to the Atlantis Myth?” in which he argues that the layout of the city of Atlantis mirrors “features of the southern circumpolar sky.” In other words, the various rings of the city of Atlantis equate to the layout of the stars in the Southern Hemisphere. Reiche sees in Plato’s account “an embellished version of what in original intention was a map of the sky.”20

  Reiche died in 1994 at age seventy-two, but in 2006 an expanded version of his article, previously unpublished, was released by the Epigraphic Society.21 In the expanded paper, he emphasized the immense water management system that the Atlanteans constructed. Their canals extended from the mountains and covered an area measuring 2,000 by 3,000 stades (1 stade = 606.75 feet). That’s an area equal to the size of the state of Nebraska. The layout of the city of Atlantis, according to Reiche, mirrored “the southern sky from the south pole to about the latitude of 50° and is to be equated with the central island of the Atlantis myth.”22

  In 1996, after the first edition of this book had been in print for a year, we received a letter directing our attention to The First Sex, written in 1971 by a librarian in Florida, Elizabeth Gould Davis (1910–1974). Davis was inspired by the British writer Harold John Massingham (1888–1952), who had argued that civilization “was consciously planted by ‘ancient mariners.’”23 In her book, which was the first to suggest Atlantis was in Antarctica, Davis wrote:

  Writing in the early years of this century, Massingham was daring enough in his attribution of world travel to a people of the third millennium BCE, but now we know that the “ancient mariners” belonged to an even more remote period in history than Massingham assumed. For, incredible as it may seem, these ancient mariners drew an accurate map of a continent, Antarctica, that disappeared under three miles of solid ice at least 6,000 years ago.

  Modern scientific instruments have affirmed that the continent of Antarctica became glacierized no later than 4000 BC and that it has lain under an impenetrable mountain of ice ever since. This fact, plus the probability that Antarctica lay in temperate latitudes prior to 4000 BCE combined with the further fact that tremendous coal deposits have been detected indicating forest growth, leads to the incredible thought that Antarctica must have been mapped by an Antarctican—prior to its glacierization [sic] 6,000 years ago. Was this Antarctic cartographer an Atlantean? And was the vast continent of Antarctica once the vast continent of Atlantis?24

  To support her idea of Antarctica as Atlantis, Davis cites Hapgood’s Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings and in particular the maps of Antarctica that Hapgood studied. There exists a prevalent misconception that Hapgood believed Antarctica had been Atlantis. The fact is that he thought Atlantis lay in the mid-Atlantic and the remnants of the lost land would be discovered under the islands of St. Peter and St. Paul.

  Again and again people return to Plato’s famous account to squeeze yet another clue from it. Why have these attempts always failed?

  As we have seen, the original meanings of the Greek terms Atlantic Ocean and Pillars of Heracles have been consistently misunderstood. These mistakes restricted the search to either the North Atlantic Ocean or the Mediterranean Sea. But Atlantis was in the real ocean, the world ocean of oceanographers. And it wasn’t until the earth’s violent history was known that we could look beyond the Northern Hemisphere for the lost land.

  The theory of earth crust displacement provides a mechanism for the destruction of Atlantis, and Plato’s account points to Antarctica as the former site of the lost land. But Atlantis was also a city as well as a continent. Where on Antarctica might the remains of this ever fascinating city be found?

  TWELVE

  CITY OF ATLANTIS

  We now ask the gentle reader’s indulgence in a writers’ flight of fancy as we introduce you to a sailor of the Atlantean fleet. Courtesy of Plato’s description1 as entrusted to Solon by the Egyptian priest
Sonchis, we will follow a young man’s journey into the deepest recesses of the most compelling city of them all—Atlantis.

  The Sailor

  The chill of the ocean wind stiffened his bones. His lips were cracked and sore from long months of exposure to bitter sea salt. But there was a gleam in his pale eyes as the sailor squinted across the ship’s deck. There she was, only a few hours’ travel away, shining against the horizon, a vision he had only dimly seen in his dreams for all the months he’d toiled and done his duty at sea. Atlantis. The shining city. Capital of an empire. Home.

  The mountains of the continent rose in defiance of the waves, reassuring him with their eternal lines that dominated the sky, the sea, and the land itself. The austere welcome of the rigorous peaks was softened by their beauty, reaching so high they seemed to invite a duel with the sun.

  The last hours seemed interminable, but as the fleet drifted toward port the clamor from the harbor and the surrounding merchants’ quarter was carried to the crew by the wind. The ceaseless din, the calls and demands of anxious traders, the cries of animals, and the clanging of wares were a sweet tune to the sailors of the colossal Atlantean fleet. From their pivotal location in the belly of the ocean, the Atlanteans had access to every corner of the world. But to the weary sailor, no land, however exotic or fascinating, could compare with Atlantis.

  The buildings clustered atop the forbidding outer wall were infused with the brilliance of the approaching sunset as the ship’s crew began their familiar preparations to enter the first of the great canals that would guide them through a ten-kilometer route to the city center. Pungent odors from bustling stalls gradually replaced the bracing sea air. The increasing din of the marketplace signaled a return to civilization as the monotony of the sea gave way to the frantic activity of the merchants’ section stretched along the great wall.