Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization

20 Atlantology: Psychotic or Inspired?

Media Stereotypes Aside, What Kind of Person Pursues Knowledge of a Forgotten Civilization?

Frank Joseph

A mainstream archeologist interviewed about Atlantis on a recent special for The Discovery Channel declared that the only people who believe in such garbage are cranks, fools, and charlatans. His assessment is shared by conventional scientists who insist that no one of any intellectual worth would demean him- or herself by seriously considering any sunken civilization. True, virtually no university-trained researchers today are willing to risk the wrath of conservative academics not above sabotaging the careers of independent-minded colleagues.

But contrary to the establishment’s defaming characterization of those interested in the historical possibility of Atlantis, the subject has for centuries attracted some of the best brains in the world. Solon, one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece, introduced social reforms and a legal code that formed the political basis of Classical civilization. He was also the first great poet of Athens. In the late sixth century B.C.E., the great law-giver traveled to Sais, the Nile Delta capital of the twenty-sixth dynasty, where the Temple of Neith was located.

Here a history of Etelenty was preserved in hieroglyphs inscribed or painted on dedicated columns, which were translated for him by the high priest Sonchis. Returning to Greece, Solon worked all the details of the account into an epic poem, Atlantikos, but was distracted by political problems from completing the project before his death in 560 B.C.E.. About 150 years later, the unfinished manuscript was given to Plato, who formed two dialogues, the Timaeus and the Critias, from it.

As one of the very greatest historical figures in Classical Greek history, Solon’s early connection with the story of Atlantis lends it formidable credibility. But neither he nor Plato was the only towering figure of Classical antiquity to embrace the reality of Atlantis. Statius Sebosus was a Greek geographer and contemporary of Plato mentioned by the Roman scientist Pliny the Elder for his detailed description of Atlantis.

All the works of Statius Sebosus were lost with the fall of Classical civilization. Dionysus of Miletus, also known as Skytobrachion, for his prosthetic leather arm, wrote A Voyage to Atlantis around 550 B.C.E., predating not only Plato, but also Solon. A copy of Dionysus’s manuscript was found among the personal papers of the historical writer Pierre Benoit. Tragically, it was lost between the restorers and borrowers who made use of this valuable piece of source material after Benoit’s death.

Another Greek historian, Dionysus of Mitylene (430 to 367 B.C.E.), relying on pre-Classical sources, reported that “from its deep-rooted base, the Phlegyan isle which stern Poseidon shook and plunged beneath the waves with its impious inhabitants.”

The volcanic island of Atlantis is suggested in the fiery (Phlegyan) isle destroyed by the sea god. Tragically, this is all that survives from a lengthy discussion of Atlantis in the lost Argonautica, mentioned four hundred years later by the Greek geographer Diodorus Siculus as one of his major sources for information about the ancient history of North Africa. Interestingly, Dionysus was a contemporary of Plato.

A utopian novel written by Francis Bacon in 1629, The New Atlantis, was the first written discussion of Atlantis since the fall of Classical civilization and probably sparked Athanasius Kircher’s interest in the subject; he published his own scientific study of Atlantis in The Subterranean World thirty-six years later. Although a work of fiction, The New Atlantis came about through excited discussions in contemporary scholarly circles of reports from travelers to America. They said that the indigenous peoples had oral accounts of a land comprising numerous points in common with Plato’s sunken civilization; they even called it Aztlan, which paralleled a native version of the Greek Atlantis. The New Atlantis actually incorporates some Atlanto-American myths Bacon heard repeated in London.

A German polymath of the seventeenth century, the Jesuit priest, Athanasius Kircher was a pioneering mathematician, physicist, chemist, linguist, and archeologist. He was the first to study phosphorescence and he was the inventor of numerous futuristic innovations including the slide projector and a prototype of the microscope. The founding father of scientific Egyptology, he led the first serious investigation of temple hieroglyphs. Kircher was also the first scholar to seriously investigate the Atlantis legend. Initially skeptical, he cautiously began reconsidering its credibility while assembling mythic traditions about a great flood from numerous cultures in various parts of the world.

“I confess for a long time I had regarded all this,” he said of various European traditions of Atlantis, “as pure fables, to the day when, better instructed in Oriental languages, I judged that all these legends must be, after all, only the development of a great truth.” His research led him to the immense collection of source materials at the Vatican Library, where, as Europe’s foremost scholar, he had at his disposal all its formidable resources. It was here that he discovered a single piece of evidence that proved to him that the legend was actually fact.

Among the relatively few surviving documents from Imperial Rome, Kircher found a well-preserved, treated-leather map purporting to show the configuration and location of Atlantis. The map was not Roman, but had been brought in the first century C.E. to Italy from Egypt, where it had been executed. It survived the demise of Classical times and found its way into the Vatican Library. Kircher copied it precisely (adding only a visual reference to the New World) and published it in The Subterranean World. His caption describes it as a map of the island of Atlantis, originally made in Egypt after Plato’s description, which suggests it was created sometime following the fourth century C.E., perhaps by a Greek mapmaker attached to the Ptolemys. More probably, the map’s first home was the Great Library of Alexandria, from which numerous books and references to Atlantis were lost, along with another million-plus volumes, when the institution was burned by religious fanatics. By relocating to Rome, the map escaped that destruction.

Similar to modern conclusions forced by current understanding of geology in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, Kircher’s map depicts Atlantis not as a continent but as a large island about the size of Spain and France combined. It shows a tall, centrally located volcano, most likely meant to represent Mount Atlas, together with six major rivers, something Plato does not mention (the Critias speaks of large rivers on the island of Atlantis, but we are not told how many). Although the map vanished after Kircher’s death in 1680, it was the only known representation of Atlantis to have survived the Ancient World. Thanks to his research and book, it survives today in what is considered to be a close copy of the original.

Kircher was the first to publish such a map, probably the most accurate of its kind to date. Curiously, it is depicted upside down, contrary to maps in both his day and ours. Yet this apparent anomaly is proof of the map’s authenticity, because Egyptian mapmakers, even as late as Ptolemaic times, designed their maps with the Upper Nile Valley (located in the south; “Upper” refers to its higher elevation) at the top, because the river’s headwaters are located in the Sudan.

Olof Rudbeck (1630–1702) was Sweden’s premiere scientific genius: professor of medicine (Uppsala), discoverer of the lymph glands, inventor of the anatomical theater dome, leading pioneer of modern botany, designer of the first university gardens; initiator of Latin as the lingua franca of the scientific world community; historian of early Sweden. A brilliant scholar fluent in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, Rudbeck possessed a grasp of Classical literature that was nothing less than encyclopedic. Combining his vast knowledge of the ancient world with personal archeological research in his own country, he concluded during a long, intense period of investigation (1651 to 1698) that Atlantis was fact, not fiction, and the greatest civilization in prehistory.

He believed that Norse myths and some physical evidence among his country’s megalithic ruins showed how a relatively few Atlantean survivors may have had an impact on Sweden, contributing to its cultural development, and laid the foundation (particularly in ship construction) for what would much later be remembered as the Viking Age (the ninth to twelfth centuries C.E.).

Critics have since misrepresented Rudbeck’s work by claiming he identified Sweden with Atlantis itself, but he never made such an assertion. In their sloppy research they have confused him with another eighteenth-century scholar, the French astronomer Jean Bailey, who concluded (before being executed during the French Revolution) that Spitzbergen, in the Arctic Ocean, was all that remained of Atlantis.

Born in Kraljevic, Austria, on February 27, 1861, Rudolf Steiner was a university-trained scientist, artist, and editor who founded a Gnostic movement based on comprehension of the spiritual world through pure thought and the highest faculties of mental knowledge. This was the guiding principle of anthroposophy, knowledge produced by the higher self in man, as he defined it, a spiritual perception independent of the senses. Such instinctual awareness of the divine energies that interpenetrate the entire universe is not new; on the contrary, it was exercised by our ancestors during the deep past, when they more freely and fully participated in the spiritual processes of life. A gradual attraction to vulgar materialism through development of the high cultures in the ancient world increasingly diminished their innate sensitivities, which eventually atrophied but did not die out.

To awaken these faculties dormant in all men and women required, Steiner believed, training their consciousness to look beyond mere matter. These concepts were developed in his 1904 book, Cosmic Memory: Prehistory of Earth and Man. He maintained that before Atlantis gradually sank, in 7227 B.C.E., its earliest inhabitants formed one of mankind’s root races, a people who did not require speech but instead communicated telepathically in images, not words, as part of their immediate experience with God.

According to Steiner, the story of Atlantis was dramatically revealed in Germanic myth, wherein fiery Musplheim corresponded to the southern, volcanic area of the Atlantic land, while frosty Niflheim was located in the north. Steiner wrote that the Atlanteans developed the first concept of good versus evil and laid the groundwork for all ethical and legal systems. Their leaders were spiritual initiates able to manipulate the forces of nature through control of the life force and development of etheric technology.

Seven epochs comprise the “post-Atlantis period,” of which ours, the Euro-American epoch, will end in C.E. 3573. Cosmic Memory goes on to describe the earlier and contemporary Pacific civilization of Lemuria, with stress on the highly evolved clairvoyant powers of its people. Steiner defined Atlantis as the turning point in an ongoing struggle between the human search for community and our experience of individuality.

The former, with its growing emphasis on materialism, dragged down the spiritual needs of the latter, culminating eventually in the Atlantean cataclysm. In this interpretation of the past, Steiner opposed Marxism. To him, spirit, not economics, drives history. Steiner’s views of Atlantis and Lemuria are important if only because of the educational Waldorf movement he founded, which still operates about one hundred schools attended by tens of thousands of students in Europe and the United States. He died on March 30, 1925, in Dornach, Switzerland, where he had founded his school of spiritual science twelve years earlier.

James Lewis Thomas Chalmers Spence, born on November 25, 1874, in Forfarshire, Scotland, was a prominent mythologist who inherited Ignatius Donnelly’s position as the world’s leading Atlantologist of the early twentieth century. An alumnus of Edinburgh University, Spence was made a fellow of the Royal Anthropology Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, and elected vice president of the Scottish Anthropology and Folklore Society. Awarded a Royal Pension for services to culture, he published more than forty books. Many of them, such as the Dictionary of Non-Classical Mythology coauthored with Marian Edwards, are still in print and widely regarded as the best source materials of their kind.

His interpretation of the Maya’s Popol Vuh (Book of Consul) won international acclaim, but he is best remembered for The Problem of Atlantis (1924), Atlantis in America (1925), The History of Atlantis (1926), Will Europe Follow Atlantis? (1942), and The Occult Sciences in Atlantis (1943). During the early 1930s, he edited a prestigious journal, The Atlantis Quarterly. The Problem of Lemuria (1932) is still probably the best book on its subject.

Lewis Spence died on March 3, 1955, and was succeeded by the British scholar Edgerton Sykes. Trained as an engineer, Sykes was a foreign correspondent for the British press, invaluable because of his quadrilingual fluency. During his long life in the diplomatic service and as a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, he published an estimated three million words in numerous books and magazine articles, many of them devoted to a rational understanding of the Atlantis controversy.

Sykes’s erudite journals and encyclopedias of comparative myth went a long way in sustaining and expanding interest in Atlantis throughout the mid-twentieth century. He died in 1983, just before his ninetieth birthday, but a legacy in the form of his large library of Atlantis-related material is preserved in its own room at Edgar Cayce’s Association for Research and Enlightenment in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Contrary to mean-spirited characterizations by conservative archeologists, it says something for the credibility of Atlantis that many of the greatest thinkers in the history of Western civilization have been among its most prominent advocates.