by Colin Wilson
Like Schwaller de Lubicz, Donnelly was struck by how quickly Egyptian civilisation seems to have attained a high degree of sophistication; like Schwaller, he suggested that this was because its civilisation originated in Atlantis. In his book Lost Continents (1954), L. Sprague de Camp asserts that ‘most of Donnelly’s statements of fact... either were wrong when he made them, or have been disproved by subsequent discoveries.’ Yet his list of Donnelly’s mistakes—such as his views on Egyptian civilisation—only emphasises that Donnelly had a remarkably acute nose for interesting evidence from the past.
It was unfortunate for the budding science of ‘Atlantology’ that it ran into the same problem that Hapgood would encounter when he published Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings and found himself classified with Erich von Daniken and other advocates of the ‘ancient astronaut’ theory. Five years before Donnelly’s Atlantis appeared, a Russian ‘occultist’ named Helena Blavatsky had published an enormous work of ancient mythology called Isis Unveiled, which became an unexpected bestseller; one of its fifteen hundred pages deals briefly with Atlantis, declaring that its inhabitants were ‘natural mediums’, whose childlike innocence had made them an easy prey for some malevolent entity who turned them into a nation of black magicians; they started a war that led to the destruction of Atlantis.
Madame Blavatsky died in London in 1891, having became the founder of the Theosophical Society; her final enormous work, The Secret Doctrine, claimed to be a commentary on a religious work called The Book of Dzyan, written in Atlantis. According to Madame Blavatsky, the present human race is the fifth race of intelligent beings on earth; its immediate predecessor, the fourth ‘root race’, was the Atlanteans.
A leading Theosophist named W. Scott-Elliot followed this up with a work called The Story of Atlantis (1896), which achieved widespread popularity. Scott-Elliot claimed that he gained his knowledge directly from his ability to read ‘the Akasic records’, the records of earth history that are imprinted on a kind of ‘psychic ether’, and which are accessible to those possessing psychic sensitivity. He later went on to write a similar book about Lemuria, another ‘lost continent’ that is supposed to have been located in the Pacific. (Donnelly had pointed out there there is evidence that Australia is the only visible part of a continent that stretched from Africa to the Pacific, and the zoologist L. P. Sclater christened it Lemuria, noting that the existence of lemurs from Africa to Madagascar seemed to suggest a continuous land mass.)
One of the most influential theosophists around the turn of the century was the Austrian Rudolf Steiner, and in 1904 he produced a work called From the Akasic Records, which described the evolution of the human race. Like Madame Blavatsky, he taught that man began as a completely etherialised being, who has become more solid with each step in his evolution. The Lemurians were the third ‘root race’, the Atlanteans the fourth. Like Plato, Steiner declares that the Atlanteans became increasingly corrupt and materialistic, and that their use of destructive forces led to the catastrophe (which Steiner places around 8000 BC) that caused the disappearance of Atlantis beneath the waves.
The annexation of Atlantis by occultists caused the whole subject to fall into disrepute. In the 1920s, a Scottish newspaper editor named Lewis Spence tried to reverse this trend by returning to Donnelly’s purely historical approach in The Problem of Atlantis (1924). He argued for the existence of a great Atlantic continent in Miocene times (25 to 5 million years ago), which disintegrated into islands, the two largest of which were close to the coast of Spain. Another island called Antillia existed in the region of the West Indies. The eastern continent began to disintegrate about 25,000 years ago and disappeared about 10,000 years ago. Antillia survived until more recent times. Cro-Magnon man came from Atlantis, and wiped out the European stock of Neanderthal man about 25,000 years ago. Later Atlanteans, known as Azilian man, founded the civilisations of Egypt and Crete, while other Atlanteans fled westward and became the Mayans.
Like so many Atlantis theorists, Spence became obsessed by his subject, and later works like Will Europe Follow Atlantis? and The Occult Sciences in Atlantis show a decline in standards of intellectual rigour.
In the late 1960s, a Greek archaeologist, Professor Angelos Galanopoulos, proposed the startling theory that Atlantis was the island of Santorini, north of Crete. This was blown apart around 1500 BC by a tremendous volcanic explosion, which probably also destroyed most of the Greek islands and the coastal plains of Greece and Crete. But how could the small island of Santorini have been Plato’s enormous continent of Atlantis, with its 300-mile inland plain? Galanopoulos suggests that the scribe simply multiplied the figures by ten—and that this also applies to the date—Plato’s 9000 years earlier should actually be 900 (i.e. about 1300 BC). Surely, says Galanopoulos, a canal 300 feet wide and 100 feet deep is absurd; 30 feet wide and 10 feet deep sounds more reasonable.
The chief objection to this theory is that Plato states clearly that Atlantis was beyond the Pillars of Hercules—Gibraltar. Galanopoulos argues that since Hercules performed most of his labours in Greece, the Pillars of Hercules could refer to the two southernmost promontories of Greece. But Plato also says that the Atlanteans held sway over the country as far as Egypt and the Tyrrhenian sea, and these are certainly not within the Greek promontories. In spite of these objections, the tourist board of Santorini has taken full advantage of the theory to display notices declaring itself to be the original Atlantis.
In 1968, it looked as if Edgar Cayce’s prophecy that Atlantis would rise again in 1968 and 1969 was about to be fulfilled. A fishing guide called Bonefish Sam took the archaeologist and underwater explorer Dr J. Manson Valentine to a place where there was a regular pattern of enormous underwater stones that looked man-made. Valentine concluded that this was part of a ceremonial road leading to a sacred site, built by ‘the people who made the big spheres of Central America, the huge platforms of Baalbek in Lebanon, Malta in the Mediterranean, Stonehenge in England, the walls of Ollantaytambo in Peru, the standing stone avenues of Brittany, the colossal ruins of Tiahuanaco in Bolivia, and the statues of Easter Island—this was a prehistoric race that could transport and position cyclopean stones in a way that remains a mystery to us.’ When Valentine leaned of Edgar Cayce’s prophecy that Atlantis would begin to reappear near Bimini, he was startled and impressed.
For a while, the ‘Bimini road’ was the subject of much speculation, and an expedition led by Dr David Zink spent months studying the stones. Yet the result was inconclusive. Although a grooved building block and a stylised head weighing over 200 pounds seemed to contradict the sceptics who declared that the blocks were natural formations, no positive evidence was ever discovered to link the road with a vanished civilisation; the stones may be merely remains dating from the past thousand years.
No wonder, then, that Hapgood had no intention of exposing himself to ridicule by mentioning Atlantis. In later life, he showed remarkable courage in publishing a book called Voices of Spirit, a series of interviews—or rather ‘sittings’—with the trance medium Elwood Babbitt, in which Hapgood was apparently able to hold conversations with—among others—Nostradamus, Queen Elizabeth I, William Wordsworth, Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, Albert Einstein and Adlai Stevenson. But by then Hapgood was retired and didn’t care what the academic world thought about him. The book is a vehicle for expressing his conviction that the next step in man’s evolution will be in the realm of the psychic and paranormal.
However, Hapgood’s notion that the earth’s crust might be capable of ‘slipping’ came to intrigue a young Canadian named Randy Flemming, who lived in British Columbia. In the 1970s, waiting to hear whether he had secured a librarian’s job at the University of Victoria, Flemming decided to distract himself by writing a science fiction novel about Atlantis, set in 10,000 BC. He decided that the present site of Antarctica would make a good location for Atlantis.
Having obtained the job, he came upon Hapgood’s Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, and sa
w the ice-free map of Antarctica (p. 93), which immediately reminded him of the map of Atlantis drawn by the seventeenth-century Jesuit archaeologist Athanasius Kircher. Now he launched into serious research on Atlantis, with the help of the university library. A major step forward occurred when his wife Rose—also a librarian—gave him a National Atlas of Canada that revealed that the northern Yukon and some Arctic islands were free of ice during the last Ice Age. It was while puzzling on this curious anomaly that he heard of Hapgood’s theory of the earth’s shifting crust. When he saw that Hapgood’s theory would place the Antarctic continent 2,500 miles closer to the equator around 15,000 BC, he left the library ‘jumping for joy’. Suddenly, it began to look as if his science fiction novel might be based on fact.
Flemming began work on a paper for the Anthropological Journal of Canada on the problem of why agriculture seems to have begun all over the world around 9000 BC. His own suggestion was that Hapgood’s ‘Earth Crustal Displacement’ occurred some time before 9000 BC, and made large areas of the globe uninhabitable, trapping people who would normally have been mobile in small areas. Since wild food would soon become scarce under these conditions, they were forced to learn to grow their own food...
He also wrote to Hapgood to discuss Earth’s Shifting Crusty and Hapgood, unaware that the Flemmings already knew his Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, sent them a copy.
Some time around now—1977—the Flemmings had the romantic idea of hyphenating a combination of their surnames—Flemming and De’Ath—to make Flem-Ath; Randy Flemming was later to admit ruefully that ‘it seems mainly to have resulted in getting us lost in the file of every bureaucracy in Canada’.
With considerable rashness, the Flem-Aths decided they had to move to London, so that they could continue their researches in the British Museum. It was a highly fruitful period, which ended with their return to Canada in the 1980s, and continuation of researches into ‘earth’s shifting crust’ which led to the writing of When the Sky Fell (1995).
I heard of the Flem-Aths from John West during a meeting in New York in 1994. I wrote to them, and as a consequence, received a copy of the typescript of When the Sky Fell.
Their starting point was Plato—not just the accounts of Atlantis, but the remark in Laws (Book 3) that world agriculture originated in highland regions after some great flood catastrophe that destroyed all lowland cities. Plato, of course, had already given the date of the destruction of Atlantis as 9600 BC. The Flem-Aths note that the Soviet botanist Nikolai Ivanovitch Vavilov collected over fifty thousand wild plants from around the globe, and concluded that they came from eight centres of origin, all in mountain ranges. They also note that the modern scientific account of the origin of agriculture dates it roughly from this period. One of the major sites of origin was Lake Titicaca in Peru, the highest freshwater lake in the world. (We shall have more to say of Lake Titicaca in the next chapter.) Oddly enough, another mountain area known as a site where agriculture originated at about the same time lies in the highlands of Thailand, exactly on the opposite side of the earth from Lake Titicaca. Hapgood’s theory had, in fact, pinpointed these two places as areas of stability after the great upheaval that he posited.
'After hundreds of thousands of years of living by hunting and gathering, humankind turned to experimenting with agriculture on opposite sides of the earth at the same time. Is this likely without the intervention of some outside force?’
Egypt had been tropical before the crust displacement; now it became temperate. So, according to Hapgood, did Crete, Sumeria, India and China. All became places where civilisation flourished.
In the pages that follow, the Flem-Aths discuss the catastrophe myths of many tribes of American Indians—the Utes, the Kutenai, the Okanagan, the A’a’tam, the Cahto, the Cherokee, and the Araucanians of Peru. All have legends of violent earthquakes followed by floods which caused widespread disaster. The Utes tell a story of how the hare god fired a magic arrow at the sun, causing it to shatter into pieces and earthquakes and floods to engulf the earth. Many similar legends suggest that some great catastrophe was preceded by some change in the face of the sun that made it look as if it was shattered; a Spanish chronicler remarks on the terror of the Incas at an eclipse of the sun—while another comments that the Araucanians rush to the highlands whenever there is an earth tremor.
There are also many legends of survival that bear a family resemblance to Noah’s Ark. The Haida of north-west Canada have a flood myth which is virtually identical with the flood myth of Sumeria in the Middle East.
From all corners of the earth the same story is told. The sun deviates from its regular path. The sky falls. The earth is wrenched and torn by earthquakes. And finally a great wave of water engulfs the globe. Survivors of such a calamity would go to any lengths to prevent it from happening again. They lived in an age of magic. It was natural and necessary to construct elaborate devices to pacify the sun-god (or goddess) and control, or monitor its path.
Hence, according to the Flem-Aths, the many strange magical customs connected with the sun which anthropologists have observed all over the world.
The Flem-Aths go on to review the evidence that many areas of the earth were believed to be buried deep under ice during the last Ice Age. Wolf bones found in Norway north of the Arctic Circle revealed that this area must have had a temperate climate 42 thousand years ago, when it was supposed to be in the grip of an Ice Age. ‘Of the thirty-four species known to have lived in Siberia before 9600 BC, including mammoths, giant deer, cave hyena and cave lions, twenty-eight were adapted to temperate conditions’, indicating that Siberia’s climate was then much warmer than today. At this time, two vast ice sheets lay across Canada. Yet the evidence shows that there was an ice-free corridor between them. Why? Hapgood’s answer is that, at this time, the Gulf of Mexico was in the east and the Yukon in the west, so the sun melted the snow along this corridor as fast as it fell.
The Flem-Aths cite evidence that an earth crust displacement around 91,600 BC moved Europe within the Arctic Circle, while another around 50,600 BC moved North America into the polar zone.
All this evidence, the Flem-Aths submit, points to the present Antarctica as the site of the legendary Atlantis. (They also cite Hapgood’s map evidence to reinforce the point.) Some shift in the earth’s crust, beginning about 15,000 BC, ended in violent upheaval in 9600 BC, the time when, according to Plato, Atlantis and Athens suffered catastrophic upheavals.
And how did the seventeenth-century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher come upon the map of Atlantis that first struck Randy Flemming as being so similar to Antarctica? In the first volume of his encyclopaedic work Mundus Subterraneus, published in 1665, Kircher claimed that the map he had discovered in his researches was stolen from Egypt by the Roman invaders. The original of the map has not been discovered, but it seems unlikely that a Jesuit scholar would have concocted it, particularly in a scientific work. As the Flem-Aths point out, both the shape and the size of the map correspond remarkably to Antarctica as we now know it from seismic soundings—or even to Antarctica as it is now shown on most globes.
For Graham Hancock, the Antarctica theory of the Flem-Aths came as a kind of deliverance. A few months into work on his book about the problem of a lost civilisation, he received a letter of resignation from his researcher. It explained that, as far as he could see, the search was quite pointless, since such a civilisation would have to be enormous—at least two thousand miles across, with rivers and mountains, and a considerable history of long-term development. There was no known land mass in the world that could have accommodated such a civilisation. As to the notion that it could lie at the bottom of the Atlantic, the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, now so thoroughly mapped, showed no sign of a lost continent. The same was true of the floor of the Pacific and the Indian Oceans. So in spite of all the evidence for some earlier civilisation—such as that contained in Hapgood’s maps—it looked as if there was nowhere its remains might be lurking.
In
fact, the answer was in Hapgood, and in the belief that he states in Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings—that the maps of Antarctica show that someone living in the continent, at a time when it was free of ice, must have been responsible for mapping it.
Yet I can hardly blame Graham Hancock for failing to draw the obvious conclusion. I was also thoroughly familiar with Hapgood’s book, and had discussed it at length in an ‘encyclopaedia’ of unsolved mysteries, and I had also failed to see what was staring me in the face. It took Randy Flemming’s chance decision to write a science fiction novel in which—purely as a fictional hypothesis—he assumed that Antarctica was Atlantis, to start the chain of reasoning that led him to the ‘Eureka’ experience.