ESSAY: WAY DOWN BELOW THE OCEAN, WHERE I WANT TO BE, SHE MAY BE...

    "Atlantis is here. No. Wait...It's over here."

THE STORY OF ATLANTIS BEGAN OVER TWO THOUSAND YEARS AGO, around 360 B.C. to be precise. It began a lot earlier, but we’ll come to that. Written as an account of a war between a great island power and ancient Athens, an Athens from a time much older than the Classical Age, Plato is the first to name the land of these powerful invaders in his dialogue the Critias. He called it "Atlantis". In his book, he describes how Solon, the great statesman and lawgiver of Athens, once had journeyed to Egypt and was told by priests the history of a war fought in the distant past by Athenians against an island nation from beyond the Pillars of Heracles—what most scholars believe is the Strait of Gibraltar—in the Atlantic Ocean.  These antediluvian Athenians defeated the armies of Atlantis, which had overrun the western Mediterranean. Shortly thereafter the island nation was wracked by earthquakes and floods and sank beneath the waves taking all traces of its civilization to the bottom of the ocean. And the question that has dogged scholars ever since: Was Plato writing about an historical event or was it a fiction used to illustrate a lesson about the impermanence of civilizations?

But, before we answer that question and one or two others, it might be a good idea to examine how people have thought about Atlantis in the two thousand years since Plato first wrote of it, and what archaeologists, explorers and historians may have done by way uncovering the truth around this most elusive of civilizations.

IN THE CRITIAS, Plato writes that the politician, Critias, before beginning his account of the war between Athens and Atlantis, invokes “Mnemosyne”, the goddess of memory, to aid him in reciting the history as it was passed down through his family, from Solon, many years before. He wants to present all the information as accurately as possible to Socrates* and the others listening to him:

 

“Let me begin by observing first of all, that nine thousand [italics mine] was the sum of years which had elapsed since the war which was said to have taken place between those who dwelt outside the Pillars of Heracles and all who dwelt within them; this war I am going to describe.” 

(Plato, Critias)

 

And Critias goes on to describe the fighting and eventual victory by Athens. He describes the island of Atlantis, its size, shape, landforms, flora and fauna, its cities, its great central harbour, as well as its people and their government. Critias tells the group how the Atlanteans were once semi-divine and had the “perfect” society Plato said all nations should aspire to; how gods and deities lived among them, as they did in ancient Athens and throughout the world at that time. This ancient Athens Critias describes  was also a “perfect” society in its governance and laws, though it was eventually destroyed—by a flood, incidentally—at a later date. (The Athens of Socrates and Plato is the latest iteration of the city-state; it has risen and fallen several times in its long history, according to the Egyptian priest.) Critias tells how the Atlanteans gradually lost their divine status, through pride and greed, until they became the war-like people who invaded the Mediterranean region. After a great battle in which the still-virtuous Athenians proved victorious, earthquakes and a great flood destroyed Atlantis and all its works.

Aristotle, Plato’s student, was skeptical the tale was based on actual events and thought it was instead something devised by Plato as a teaching tool. Crantor, a student of a student of Plato, a generation later, believed otherwise, with some scholars attributing to him (Crantor) an account (since lost) of a journey he had made to Egypt to confirm Critias’s story. The controversy over Plato’s Atlantis has continued ever since.

The Fifth Century A.D. neo-Platonist writer, Proclus, while skeptical of the historicity of Atlantis in Plato’s Critias is less so in his commentary on the Timaeus (book two of Plato’s proposed triology) which also described the sunken island civilization. He cites another, earlier source (“Marcellus”) as verification of the authenticity of Plato’s tale.    

 

“….inhabitants of it—they add—preserved the remembrance from their ancestors of the immeasurably large island of Atlantis which had really existed there and which for many ages had reigned over all islands in the Atlantic sea and which itself had like-wise been sacred to Poseidon. Now these things Marcellus has written in his Aethiopica.” [which means “Ethiopian Tale”] 

(Proclus, critique on Timaeus)

 

The early Christian, Carthaginian writer Tertullian (born 160 A.D.) believed Plato’s tale, as did the Sixth Century map-maker Cosmas Indicopleustes (his name means: “Cosmas who sailed to India”), though he used the mid-Atlantic site of Atlantis to bolster his thesis the world was flat. So, there’s that.

    "Atlantis, according to the Egyptians and the description of Plato."

 

Skipping ahead a few centuries, the late-16^th Century cartographer, Abraham Ortelius, speculated that the European and American continents had once been connected when the correspondence between their coastlines is examined. His ideas anticipated modern tectonic plate theory by several centuries, and he wrote with Atlantis in mind:

 

"Unless it be a fable, the island of Gadir…[Cadiz] will be the remaining part of the island of Atlantis or America, which was not sunk (as Plato reports in the Timaeus) so much as torn away from Europe and Africa by earthquakes and flood...” (Ortelius, Thesaurus Geographicus)

 

With the discovery of the Americas, some writers and scholars wondered if this “New World” was, in fact, the legendary Atlantis, or else that it held remnants of the drowned civilization whose descendants existed in a devolved form as various indigenous peoples of the Americas, especially after Mayan and Aztec ruins were uncovered and seen as evidence of a once-superior, Atlantean race. 

“Mayanism” and similar ethnographic speculations were popular in the 19^th Century, with Atlantean theories remaining a small, though withering, branch of this discipline. As Rationalism and the Scientific Method came to dominate Western investigatory efforts during the Nineteenth Century, theories around Atlantis became relegated primarily to esoteric and “spiritualist” circles. Advances in geology, archaeology, histography and ethnology made clearer distinctions between myth and legends and verifiable scientific proofs. Speculation around Atlantis waned.

 

    Ignatius Donnelly

ENTER ONE IGNATIUS DONNELLY, whose 1882 publication of Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, was a runaway best seller, and the source for much of what we know about Atlantis today. Donnelly was an American lawyer and politician from Minnesota. He was an early populist and organizer of the Minnesota Farmer’s Alliance, and a member of the People’s Party, which won several congressional seats and fought an 1896 Presidential campaign. In 1900, Donnelly himself ran a failed Vice-Presidential campaign on the People’s Party ticket. But he is best known for his book on Atlantis which drew as its primary source Plato’s original tale. In Atlantis, he outlined the lost land’s history and people and its eventual destruction in a flood. Donnelly suggests this flood was the original event that became the basis for the many cultural myths about cataclysms caused by floods, including the biblical Great Flood.  Atlantis, he states, was the site where man “first rose from barbarism”, and where its explorers colonized the lands on both sides of the Atlantic, whose settlements were the forerunners of the ancient civilizations we know today in Egypt, Summer, in Central and South America, and the gods of those cultures—the Norse mythologies, the Greek and Phoenician deities, the Mayan and Peruvian legends were all based on the various Atlantean founder colonies. Donnelly imagined Atlantis as the original “garden of Eden”, and the stories and legends we have today about that primal paradise are really about Atlantis.

His book and its sequel, Ragnarök: The Age of Fire and Gravel (which tells of Atlantis’s destruction by floods created when a giant meteorite strikes the Earth) spawned numerous fiction and non-fiction spin-offs including the theory of another giant, mid-ocean continent, this time in the Pacific, called “Mu” or “Lemuria” by other writers.

Donnelly’s story of Atlantis was to be a particular influence in the emerging occult scene, notably with Madam Blavatsky, a Russian emigree to the United States, who began the Theosophical Society in the 1880s, which was dedicated to the metaphysical arts. In her 1889 The Secret Doctrine, she adds to Donnelly’s vision and reinterprets Plato’s tale of the Atlanteans as invaders. To her, they were heroes out of a time nearly 1,000,000 years ago, who became decadent, and whose civilization was destroyed, not by natural causes, but by their own psychic powers unwisely used.**

Edgar Cayce

In the 1920s and until his death in 1944, Edgar Cayce, the famed American clairvoyant, was said to commune with the souls of dead Atlanteans who imparted information to him during the many psychic “readings” he gave. In these sessions, Cayce would diagnose people’s ailments and suggest remedies to address their illnesses. Atlantis became popular in the broader culture during the 1970s with the rise of the “New Age” movement, which picked bits and pieces from the storehouse of more serious occult traditions practiced earlier in the century. Numerous books, movies and songs with Atlantean themes and settings were produced.

 

TODAY, Google Book’s helpful Ngram viewer, which compiles percentages of word-use in print since 1400 A.D.⁺, has the word “Atlantis” at its second-highest point of use during the middle decades of the Eighteenth Century, peaking slightly higher in the late 1800s (Donnelly’s book) with its usage in print by 2019 at a mid-point frequency. And yes, I know: The word “Atlantis” still seems to be  prevalent today across our cultural landscape, and in our skeptical, post-modern, myth-adverse age this seems counter-intuitive. I think the answer lies in advertisements and logos, signage and the like—with the word used as a totem or eye-catching tagline that appears in such highlights as “Atlantis-Paradise Island:

Atlantis: Dubai

Featuring a 141-acre water park, including the iconic Mayan Temple's Leap…”, or “Atlantis Strength Equipment” (dumbbells, etc.), or as a board game, a medical school, dental clinic, publisher, high-end eyewear, space shuttle, and so on. And while it’s true that not everyone will stop and ask: “Hey, WTF does Boomer sandal wear have to do with Plato’s Atlantis?” (Answer: Nothing.) Nevertheless, I suspect many people will feel a touch of cognitive dissonance when contemplating cough drops that are named after a lost civilization. And from time to time, there might be that tug at the back of your mind as the lost isle of myth and legend slips past your visual cortex to settle into the thick mud of your brain stem. 

The word “Atlantis” is in the voodoo of advertising, pop culture and remnant New Age schtick. But those aren’t the only places where it's found.   

 

SO THERE WE STAND. A story written over 2300 years ago, debated and ignored, praised and ridiculed, studied and dismissed. And yet, still it’s there in front of us, or in the back of our minds, or it’s on the tips of our tongues—from a bedtime story read to us when we were a child, or in a song, or on the cover of dime store novel. 

It’s also found in expeditions launched in search of the lost isle, something we haven’t yet discussed.

Since the late Eighteenth Century there had been explorers, amateur antiquarians, archaeologists and historians, and tin foil hat enthusiasts of all stripes studying the lands of Egypt and Mesopotamia and other regions of the world, trying to decipher ancient languages and piece together the puzzles of long-ago societies. As they rooted through the shards and fragments of ruined buildings and temples, by the mid-19^th Century such students of the past were also puzzling through more recent histories, particularly the history  of ancient Greece in the centuries before its classical flowering. For example, Troy was a puzzle to solve and a prize to win. Perhaps the greatest prize. And, as with Plato’s Dialogues, those who studied the texts of Homer asked: Was this history? Did King Agamemnon set sail with a thousand ships filled with Greek warriors to battle at the gates of Troy? Did the city ever exist? Well, in 1873 a German businessman and antiquarian named Heinrich Schliemann found what archaeologists and historians today agree is most likely the site where Homer’s Troy once stood. Thus, by a point on a map, some broken pottery and the foundations of thick, stone walls the mythical land of Homer now stands, almost without shade, in the mid-day sun.

Atlantean Empire According to Donnelly

And Atlantis? It, too, has been found. Wha? No, you didn't miss the memo. Bear with me and I'll explain what I mean, shortly.  

In recent times, archaeologists and historians have asked: “Very well, if Plato’s Atlantis is based in fact, where is the most likely spot for it?” Since Continental  Drift and Tectonic Plate theories have more or less put the kibosh on any mid-Atlantic location for the lost land, there appears to be zero evidence anywhere for continent-sized islands existing in any of the world's oceans. Period. So, was Atlantis beyond Straits of Gibraltar, somewhere between Africa and and the Americas? Unlikely. (Though the Azores and Canary Islands have been mentioned in the same breath as "Atlantis".) In addition, there are one or two possibilites that have been floated in recent years: Cadiz in south west Spain and the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Both are on the far side of the Strait of Gibraltar, in accord with Plato's description, and if they're not islands, they're the next best thing. 

Cadiz¹ seems a likely candidate, with its central harbour and long, penninsular location (so ripe for flooding and destruction from tsunamis!)

There are other characteristics that help make it into the top-ten Atlantis Hit List, though so far no orichalcum swords or artifacts have turned up to suggest any millennia-old civilization is buried there, but research continues.

Now, lets call a spade a spade: If you were to stick a pin in a map of the world, at random, chances are you'd land somewhere where someone is sure to say Atlantis once existed. Therefore, going from north to south, a few of those places are: Greenland, Norway, England, Ireland, "Doggerland", Denmark, the mid-Atlantic, North America, Spain, the Black Sea, India, Tibet (where Gestapo head Heimlich Himmler believed survivors of the flood sought refuge). And Australia and Antarctica. 

Map of Mediterranean "Atlantises"

Yeah, my head exploded, too, with the Mt. Everest and Antarctica possibilities. But, I guess more than just paint flakes. For now, I'd like to detour into the Mediterranean and mention a couple of sites that hold a little more promise as Plato's lost Atlantis.

First we need to deal with his timeline. Plato says in the Critias that Atlantis went under the waves 9,000 years before his writing. He was pretty specific about it. And as you can imagine, a great deal of ink has been spilled over whether or not Solon got the right number from the Egyptian priest as he was told the history of the Atlantis-Athens War. Was it transcribed correctly? Was it measured using the Egyptian moon calendar, perhaps? Or was Plato just telling a yarn and using a number to suggest 'a really long time ago'? We just don't know.

 

If we believe in Plato's distant timeline, that opens up certain possibilites and eliminates others. The same thing happens if we ignore his timeline and look for more recent floods and civilizations to match his description of the island kingdom. I'll discuss, briefly, the later choice and conclude with a discussion on Plato's "9,000 year" proposal.

So, here are my top four choices of Bronze Age, Mediterranean possibilities for the location of Atlantis:

#4 Tartessos is interesting. It was reputed to be an important and wealthy cultural centre located in southern Spain near the Strait of Gibraltar. It is mentioned in Phoenician and Greek writings as a land rich in copper and metals; copper, being the native metal many scholars believe was the "orichalcum" Plato said the Atlanteans used.  The Phoenician colony of Gadez (Cadiz) traded with them, as did the Carthaginians and Greeks, who tell of a wealthy and thriving maritime city-state that was flooded in the past and disappeared. Recent archaeological investigations have found Bronze Age  jewellery and other artifacts, and possibly structures buried in an inaccessible, marshy region of the Guadalquivir valley.

Next up, one of my favs (Atlantis or not!) is #3 Malta, with its amazing megalithic stone temples! What are they doing on this tiny island 90 km off the Italian coast? Do they represent a collapsed civilization from which Plato might have drawn his inspiration when writing the Critias and Timeaus? Who knows? 

#2 Helike is a paritally sunken Greek city which was innundated by waters from the Gulf of Corinth after an earthquake in 373 B.C., just a decade or so before Plato wrote his Dialogues.  Coincidence?

    Thera (Santorini)

But my #1 pick has to be Thera. It tics several of the boxes. By 1600 B.C., the Bronze Age Minoan civilization of Crete was a large, prosperous maritime empire with trading alliances throughout the Aegean, including the island of Thera (today's Santorini). The Minoans, an advanced culture by any standard, would have made an excellent model for Plato's Atlantis. In 1646 B.C. an enormous volcanic explosion occurred on the neighbouring island of Thera, virtually obliterating any of the Minoan settlements established there². The resulting tsunami innundated Crete's own shoreline, some 70 miles away, and caused such extensive damage that historians speculate it was the seminal event tipping Minoan society into decline. That and the so-called "Bronze-Age Collapse", a general period of instability around 1200 B.C., whereby several prominent Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures declined or disappeared, with warfare, invasions, and climate change as some of the challenges facing the beseiged city-states. 

    Bull Leaping Fresco at Knossos

By Plato's time in the 4th Century B.C. the Minoans were long gone. But were they forgotten? And could this tale of an obliterated island, a flood, war and invasions, and a destroyed world have been the basis of the Atlantis story by Plato? Place yer bets.

And before we take our leave of Atlantean waters, I'd like to suggest one more  place where Atlantis might be found.

    

OCCULT WRITER AND ALL-ROUND POLYMATH, John Michael Greer, as a thought experiment, suggests the possibility that a sea-faring civilization might once have existed in the now-submerged land mass off Cuba and the Bahamas during the last Ice Age when sea levels were much lower. Greer speculates that a confederate, island-based culture could have developed in the Gulf of Mexico, whose sovereignty extended into the surrounding hinterlands of North and Central America, and one predating the Western Hemisphere's aboriginal societies that developed after the last Ice Age. These Gulf Islanders may even have even conducted trans-Atlantic trade and thus encountered Mediterranean societies as described in Plato's Critias and Timaeus. Such ancient ocean-spanning voyages may not be as unlikely as they first seem. Nor can the possibility of European settlement along the East Coast region of North America prior to 10,000 B.C. be ruled out completely. Traces of such ancient, coastal settlements or of the intriguing Gulf Islands civilization that Greer hypothesizes--another candidate for the ‘ur-Atlantis’ of myth and legend--today, unfortunately, lay beneath the risen seas and little evidence of their past may be recoverable⁺⁺. 

WE ASK: WHY DOES ATLANTIS REMAIN such a popular cultural meme? We talk about it, here for instance. We explore for it. We have fantasies about swimming beneath the waves with Atlantean mer-people. There are books, movies, songs, and paintings about the lost isle. Yet do we ever get close to it? do we understand it, even a little? I said earlier that Atlantis was already found and, frankly, you can take your pick on so many lost civilizations and disappeared cities in the last 10,000 years, and nail Atlantis to its mantle. Many people do, regardless of whether their choice is logical. (Though, perhaps logic is overrated.) So, in a sense, it has been found, again and again; it depends on what you’re searching for. Are you looking for a place in the past? Or perhaps the future? John Michael Greer thinks the search for Atlantis, what it represents, is more about how we see and understand our future than it is about the location of a specific, watery site, Antarctica notwithstanding. 

What if conclusive evidence were found proving, say, the Tartessos location in southern Spanish coast was where Atlantis was located? After sifting carefully through all the remains and the ruins, collecting, and restoring what was possible, what would we have? And don’t get me wrong—I LOVE the study and contemplation of prehistory, our remote past, but in the end, we’d still have a museum full of the remains of another extinct civilization. There are many such sites in the world, and many more yet to be found. Again, I’m not trying to make light of this. Expanding our understanding of our past, however flawed or incomplete our reasoning may be, is entirely relevant to our present, and Greer says it is crucial for our future, as well. He writes:

 

“At the same time, attempts to locate Atlantis in many corners of the world have turned up evidence for many lost cities and civilizations, raising the uncomfortable possibility that the fall of Atlantis may have been only one of many civilization-wrecking catastrophes in the history of our species.” (Greer, 151)

 

Related to this is a passage from Plato's second Dialogue, the Timaeus, where Critias is again reporting the words of the old Egyptian priest and what he was supposed to have told Solon about the Atlantean-Athenian War 9000 years in the past. The priest says something interesting:

 

“O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you.” Solon in return asked him what he meant. “I mean to say,” he replied, “that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age. And I will tell you why. There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes.” (Plato, Timaeus)

 

The old priest is telling Solon, and us, about the impermanence of civilizations—that they come and go and are at the whim of nature’s forces. And importantly, their memory is also lost, time and again. We keep losing vital lessons, traditions, practices, and technologies of the past.  It's like he's reminding us that we keep re-inventing the wheel, and that all the ‘progress’ we made is an illusion. We are always where we are, so to speak.

 

John Michael Greer (he is a druid and practicing occultist) makes this point in discussing the need to preserve various occult practices into the future. He warns of “the fragility of human knowledge” (210), and how we must preserve the knowledge of the mystical arts, along with a suite of “other legacies of the past and present—literary, artistic, cultural, scientific, and practical…to be kept for the future.” (212) Greer also suggests one more thing: We must not assume because we have spaceships and smartphones that we are superior to those who came before us, that our ancient ancestors were mere ‘rough drafts’ of ourselves, maquettes to be discarded with the sculptor’s final work. We share a common humanity that expresses itself in different ways at different times. Thus, our “…forgotten cultures [come] with values and thought patterns very different from ours, and the things they saw, heard, and felt…probably don’t have much in common with our current ideas…” (221) It is by understanding this fact in its breadth and depth that Atlantis will be found.

 

THERE WILL BE FOUND NO SUBMARINES or death-rays in the artifacts and ruins of Atlantis when we finally discover it. And, again, does that mean we, with our science and technology, are superior to those ancient, less-technologically proficient Atlanteans? Can we be so sure we understand their society, their worldview, knowledge and skills, their technologies? And if we cannot be superior, then what can we be? Where are we on the scale of one to ten between primitive and god?

 

Just as the past is limited by our perceptions of it, the future can be as limitless as our ability to imagine a range of possibilities beyond the ones our current civilization offers, trapped as we are in the hallucinatory vision of perpetual progress with which our fossil fuel-enhanced technologies blankets us. We can’t see the impermanence of our times, that the arc we think we're on, the one we assume soars ever upward into space, is really the arc of a circle, at most a spiral, and while making for a much smaller, more humbler journeying, perhaps, it is one that is still vital and important.

 

Cheers, Jake.

 

 

 

“Atlantis” definition: "Site of the island of Atlantis, in the sea, from Egyptian sources and Plato's description. 17^th C.  Athanasias  Kircher [MAP]

Mythical island-nation, by 1730, from Greek Atlantis, literally "daughter of Atlas," noun use of fem. adjective from Atlas (stem Atlant-; see Atlas). All references trace to Plato's dialogues "Timaeus" and "Critias," both written c. 360 B.C.E.

 

 

* Socrates appears in the Critias along with the politician Critias (a historical figure), Hermocrates and Timaeus. The four are characters in a dialogue written by Plato. Socrates, himself, left no written texts, save a single poem. What we know of him comes from the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, or through contemporaries like the comedy playwright, Aristophanes. But the question remains: Was Critias’s account, as written by Plato, based on a real civilization destroyed by flood in the deep past?

** It should be said that Theosophy was a school of occult philosophy and the Atlantis myth, as a belief system, was used as a “gateway” into deeper esoteric training by Blavatsky. One well-known theosophist was Ruldolf Steiner, who was the founder of anthroposophy, and the Waldorf Schools in the 1930s.

+ Prior to 1400 A.D. use of the word was flatlined. (The church frowned upon any form of pagan beliefs. Plato was a pagan, so what do you think you're doing reading him?!?)  The mid-Eighteenth-Century uptic is probably due to publications like Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels that stirred the public’s imagination and writers’ inventions. As well, the rise of scientific studies such as geology and cosmology began piecing together the natural history of our world, and Atlantis, from time to time, featured in such speculations. The later Nineteenth Century surge of "Atlantis" in print was because of Donnelly’s book, of course.)

++ The “Bimini Road” may be a trace of such a past civilization existing in the Gulf region as Greer hypothesizes. Bimini is a small island in the westernmost region of the Bahamas chain. And the “road” is a stretch of underwater stonework that looks remarkably like the remains of an ancient road. The jury is still out on this one.

1. For an interesting excursion into an underwater and dry land archaeological dig check out the 1973 "expedition" (read: "grifting operation") to Cadiz to explore possible Atlantaen ruins. Led by Maxine Archer, an "Alantologist", and author of several books on the lost isle, she seems also to have been a bit of a scam artist in her day, specifically with her Iowa-based diploma-mill operation that ran afoul of federal  authorites by the late 1990s. Still, I wouldn't mind snorkeling around the Mediterranean with her--she was a babe! (I'd hang onto my wallet, though.)

2. See recent excavations on Santorini.    

       

 

 

Adams, Mark. Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City. Penguin Random House Company. New York, New York. 2015.

 

Greer, John Michael. Atlantis: Ancient Legacy, Hidden Prophecy. Llewellyn Publications, Woodbury, Minnesota. 2007.

 

Plato. Critias

--        Timeaus

 

 [And Donovan, of course.]