by Colin Wilson
In the second dialogue, the Critias, Plato goes into far more detail about the history and geography of the lost continent. He tells how Poseidon (Neptune), the sea god, founded the Atlantian race by fathering ten children on a mortal maiden, Cleito, whom he kept on a hill surrounded by canals. The Atlantians were great engineers and architects, building palaces, harbours, temples and docks; their capital city was built on the hill, which was surrounded by concentric bands of land and water, joined by immense tunnels, large enough for a ship to sail through. The city was about eleven miles in diameter. A huge canal, 300 feet wide and 100 feet deep, connected the outermost of these rings of water to the sea. Behind the city there was a plain 230 by 340 miles, and on this farmers grew the city’s food supply. Behind the plain there were mountains with many wealthy villages and with fertile meadows and all kinds of livestock. Plato goes into great detail about the city, suggesting either that he had been told the story at length or that he had the gifts of a novelist. The long account of magnificent buildings with hot and cold fountains, communal dining halls and stone walls plated with precious metals has fascinated generations of readers for more than two thousand years.
But eventually, says Critias, the Atlantians began to lose the wisdom and virtue they inherited from the god, and became greedy, corrupt and domineering. Then Zeus decided to teach them a lesson. So he called all the gods together . . .
And there, frustratingly, Plato’s story breaks off. He never completed the Critias, or wrote the third dialogue that would complete the trilogy, the Hermocrates. But we may probably assume that the final punishment of the Atlantians was the destruction of their continent.
Many later scholars and commentators assumed that Atlantis was a myth, or that Plato intended it as a political allegory: even Plato’s pupil Aristotle is on record as disbelieving it. Yet this seems unlikely. The Timaeus, the dialogue in which he first tells the story, is one of his most ambitious works; his translator Jowett called it “the greatest effort of the human mind to conceive the world as a whole which the genius of antiquity has bequeathed to us”. So it seems unlikely that Plato decided to insert a fairy tale into the middle of it; it seems more likely that he wanted to preserve the story for future generations.
For more than two thousand years the story of Atlantis remained a mere interesting curiosity. But in the late nineteenth century an American congressman named Ignatius Donnelly became fascinated by it, and the result was a book called Atlantis, the Antediluvian World (1882), which became a bestseller and has been in print ever since. Even a century later, the book remains surprisingly readable and up to date. Donnelly asks whether it is possible that Plato was recording a real catastrophe, and concludes that it was. He points out that modern earthquakes and volcanic eruptions have caused tremendous damage, and that there is evidence that the continent of Australia is the only visible part of a continent that stretched from Africa to the Pacific, and which scientists have named Lemuria. (Lemuria was named by the zoologist L.P. Sclater, who noted that lemurs existed from Africa to Madagascar, and suggested that a single land-mass had once connected the two.) He also studied flood legends from Egypt to Mexico, pointing out their similarities, and indicated all kinds of affinities connecting artifacts from both sides of the Atlantic. He notes that there is a mid-Atlantic ridge, and that the Azores seem to be the mountain-tops of some large submerged island. Donnelly’s knowledge of geology, geography, cultural history and linguistics appears encyclopedic. The British prime minister Gladstone was so impressed by the book that he tried to persuade the cabinet to allot funds to sending a ship to trace the outlines of Atlantis. (He failed.)
Writing seventy years later in his book Lost Continents, the American writer L. Sprague de Camp commented on this impressive theory: “Most of Donnelly’s statements of facts, to tell the truth, either were wrong when he made them, or have been disproved by subsequent discoveries”. And he goes on to say: “It is not true, as he stated, that the Peruvian Indians had a system of writing, that the cotton plants native to the New and Old Worlds belong to the same species, that Egyptian civilisation sprang suddenly into being, or that Hannibal used gunpowder in his military operations . . .” De Camp demonstrates that Donnelly’s scholarship is not as reliable as it looks; but there is still a great deal in the 490-page book that he leaves unchallenged.
Five years before the publication of Donnelly’s book, the subject of Atlantis had been raised in an immense two-volume work called Isis Unveiled by the Russian “occultist” Helena Blavatsky, who had dashed off its fifteen hundred pages at a speed that suggests automatic writing. But her comments on Atlantis occupy only one single page of Volume One (593), in which she explains that the inhabitants of Atlantis were the fourth race on earth, and that they were all natural “mediums”. Having acquired their knowledge without effort, this people was an easy prey for “the great and invisible dragon” King Thevetat, who corrupted them so that they became “a nation of wicked magicians”. They started a war which ended in the submersion of Atlantis . . .
Isis Unveiled astonished its publisher by becoming a best-seller; it made its author a celebrity, and she went on to leave New York for India and to found the Theosophical Society. After a shattering expose in which she was declared a fraud, she returned to London and died of Bright’s disease at the age of sixty in 1891. But she left behind her the manuscript of a book that was even larger and more confusing than Isis Unveiled, a book called The Secret Doctrine. This is a commentary on a mystical work called The Book of Dzyan, allegedly written in Atlantis in the Senzar language, and it explains that man is not the first intelligent race on earth. The first “root race” consisted of invisible beings made of fire mist, the second lived in northern Asia, the third lived on the lost island continent of Lemuria or Mu in the Indian Ocean, and consisted of ape-like giants who lacked reason. The fourth root race were the Atlantians, who achieved a high degree of civilization, but were destroyed when the island sank after a battle between selfish magicians. The present human species is the fifth root race, and we are the most “solid” so far; the sixth and seventh that succeed us will be more ethereal. According to Madame Blavatsky, all knowledge of the past is imprinted on a kind of psychic ether called Akasa, and this knowledge is called the Akasic records. She also claims that the survivors of Atlantis peopled Egypt and built the pyramids about a hundred thousand years ago. (Modern scholarship dates the earliest about 2500 BC.)
By the time The Secret Doctrine appeared, Donnelly’s book had popularized the subject of Atlantis. A leading member of the Theosophical Society in London, W. Scott-Elliot, now produced a work called The Story of Atlantis (1896), which achieved immense popularity; Scott-Elliot claimed to possess the ability to read the Akasic records. He made the astonishing claim that Atlantian civilization was flourishing a million years ago. There were seven sub-races, one of which, the Toltecs, conquered the whole continent and built a magnificent city, which is described by Plato. When some of the Atlantians practised black magic, a great lodge of initiates moved to Egypt and founded a dynasty; others built Stonehenge in England.
Scott-Elliot later used his insight into the Akasic records to write an equally startling book about Lemuria. Both books are regarded together with Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine as basic scriptures of the Theosophical Society.
After Madame Blavatsky, the most influential of all Theosophists was the Austrian Rudolf Steiner, who quarrelled with the British Theosophists and developed his own system of “occult philosophy” known as Anthroposophy. In 1904, before the break, Steiner produced a work called From the Akashic Records (Akashic being an alternative spelling), which deals with Atlantis and Lemuria. It would be easy to dismiss this as yet another production of the lunatic fringe; yet, like most of Steiner’s work, it has a solid core of intellectual understanding that rings true. Steiner thinks in terms of the evolution of worlds, and according to his scheme, higher beings called hierarchies are in charge of the process. The basic aim of
evolution is for spirit to conquer the realm of matter. Man began as a completely etherialized being, and has become steadily more solid with each step in his evolution. But the increase in solidity has meant that he has become a slave to matter. When, after evolving through three earlier “worlds”, man was reborn on our present earth, his body was little more than a cloud of vapour. By the time he had developed to the “third root race” (the Lemurians) he had learned the secret of telepathy, and of direct use of his will-power. Fear, illness and death entered human history during this period. In the next epoch of Atlantis man was able to control the vegetable life forces and use these as an energy source; he was unable to reason but possessed an abnormally powerful memory. But hostile forces which Steiner called Ahriman pushed man into mere scientific achievement; he became increasingly corrupt and egotistic, and his attempt to use destructive forces finally caused the catastrophe that overwhelmed Atlantis . . . Unlike Madame Blavatsky, Steiner dates this catastrophe around 8000 BC, which places it within the realm of reasonable possibility. (It is true that, according to archaeological research, the first mesolithic farmers had only just made their appearance on earth at this time. However, one American professor of history, Charles Hapgood, has argued seriously that certain “maps of the ancient sea kings” suggest that there was an advanced civilization covering the globe in 8000 BC, see chapter 25.)
Just as it began to look as if Atlantis had fallen into the hands of occultists and the purveyors of science fiction, a new and more serious advocate appeared on the scene. Lewis Spence was a Scottish newspaper editor who also wrote scholarly studies of the mythologies of Babylonia, Egypt, Mexico and Central America. His Problem of Atlantis appeared in 1924, and, like Donnelly’s book, reached a wide audience. What Spence proposed was that there is geological evidence for the existence of a great continent in the Atlantic region in late Miocene times (25 to 10 million years ago). It disintegrated into smaller island masses, the two largest of which were in the Atlantic close to the Mediterranean. Another large island existed in the region of the West Indies. Further disintegration of the eastern continent began about 25,000 years ago, and it finally vanished about 10,000 years ago, as Plato said. The other continent to the west – Antillia – survived until more recently. Spence argued that man was not a seafarer ten thousand years ago (Hapgood would probably disagree) so there should be evidence of the inhabitants of Atlantis taking refuge in nearby lands. Studying the coast of south-western France, northern Spain and the Bay of Biscay, Spence adduces evidence that three primitive races, the Cro-Magnon, the Caspian and the Azilian, all migrated from the west. He believes that Cro-Magnon man arrived about 25,000 years ago and wiped out Neanderthal man. (Modern students of prehistory would place the date of the disappearance of Neanderthal at least ten thousand years earlier than this.)
The Caspian and Azilian people came 15,000 years later; the Azilians are known to have used boats for deep-sea fishing, and Spence reasons that the land bridge that had joined Atlantis and Europe had now ceased to exist. Spence believed that the Azilians founded the civilizations of Egypt and Crete. Other “Atlantians” fled westward to Antillia, and remained there until it was also partly submerged some time before the Christian era; its inhabitants became the Mayans. (This identification of the Mayans with Atlantians is one of the usual features of Atlantis speculation.) One of Spence’s odder theories is that lemmings – the small rodents who often drown themselves in large numbers – are attempting to migrate back to Atlantis. In fact, we now know that lemmings are simply responding to overcrowding, like so many other animals, and that mass suicide is not one of their usual habits – they simply tend to disperse randomly from areas where the birth rate has risen too steeply.
There are other objections to Spence’s theory. He argues that the cultures of Egypt, Crete and South America appeared suddenly; archaeology has since established that this is untrue; they evolved slowly from primitive beginnings. Nevertheless, there is a great deal in Spence’s first three Atlantis books – The Problem of Atlantis was followed by Atlantis in America and The History of Atlantis – that deserves to be taken seriously. The same cannot be said of the two later books: Will Europe Follow Atlantis?, in which he speculates whether the modern world is plunging into the same wicked excesses that destroyed Atlantis (this was in the Hitler period) and The Occult Sciences in Atlantis, in which he is inclined to build bricks without straw (“the reader must bear in mind that here we are dealing with the question of Alchemy in Atlantis only . . .”) But altogether, Spence is probably the most interesting and reliable writer on Atlantis, and his Problem of Lemuria shows the same sober, scholarly approach, even though he is forced to rely too heavily on speculation and guesswork.
Spence advised Conan Doyle on his Atlantis novel The Maracot Deep, and also corresponded with the explorer Colonel Percy H. Fawcett, who was convinced that Brazil was part of ancient Atlantis – a theory Doyle utilized in The Lost World. The novelist Rider Haggard presented Fawcett with a basalt image inscribed with characters, and when the British Museum was unable to identify it, Fawcett took it to a psychometrist (psychometry is the ability to “read” the history of an object by holding it in the hands).2 Although the psychometrist had no clue to Fawcett’s identity, he told him: “I see a large irregularly shaped continent stretching from the north coast of Africa across to South America. Numerous mountains are spread over its surface, and here and there a volcano looks as though about to erupt. . . On the African side of the continent the population is sparse. The people are well-formed, but of a varied nondescript class, very dark complexioned though not negroid. Their most striking feature are high cheek bones and eyes of piercing brilliance. I should say their morals leave much to be desired, and their worship borders on demonology . . .”
On the western side, the inhabitants are “far superior to the others. The country is hilly and elabourate temples are partly hewn from the faces of the cliffs, their projecting facades supported by beautifully carved columns . . . Within the temples it is dark, but over the altars is the representation of a large eye. The priests are making invocations to this eye and the whole ritual seems to be of an occult nature, coupled with a sacrificial . . . Placed at various parts of the temple are a few effigies like the one in my hand – and this one was evidently the portrait of a priest of very high rank”.
The psychometrist went on to say that this image would eventually come into the possession of a reincarnation of the priest “when numerous forgotten things will through its influence be elucidated”. “The teeming population of the western cities seems to consist of three classes; the hierarchy and the ruling party under an hereditary monarch, a middle class, and the poor or slaves. These people are absolute masters of the world, and by a great many of them the black arts are practised to an alarming extent”. The psychometrist went on to describe how, as punishment for presumption, the land is destroyed by volcanic eruptions, and sinks beneath the sea. “I can get no definite date of the catastrophe, but it was long prior to the rise of Egypt, and has been forgotten except, perhaps, in myth”.
So Fawcett became a firm believer in the reality of Atlantis, and considered that he would find further evidence for it in certain lost jungle cities of Brazil and Bolivia. He had another reason for wishing to go to the Mato Grosso of south-western Brazil. In Rio de Janeiro he had found an old document in Portuguese written by a man called Francisco Raposo, who had gone into the jungle in 1743 in search of the lost mines of Muribeca – Muribeca being the son of a Portuguese adventurer and an Indian woman. According to Raposo’s manuscript (which is cited in Fawcett’s posthumous book Exploration Fawcett), he found a remarkable ruined city that had obviously been destroyed by earthquakes, “tumbled columns and blocks weighing perhaps fifty tons and more”. After spending some time in this ruined city, Raposo and his party made their way back to Bahia, where he wrote his account for the viceroy, who pigeonholed it.
So when Fawcett finally set off in 1924, after endless fr
ustrations and delays, he had a threefold objective: the search for the mines of Muribeca, for the lost city of Raposo, and for Atlantian remains like his basalt idol. With his son Jack and a friend named Raleigh Rimell, he made his way finally to Dead Horse Camp in the Xingu Basin, where he took a final photograph of Jack and Rimell. On 29 May 1924 he wrote a final note to his wife. Then all three men vanished. In 1932 a Swiss trapper named Rattin reported that Fawcett was a prisoner of an Indian tribe. Rattin himself went in search of the “white colonel”, but never returned. Various other rumours about Fawcett were carried back by explorers and missionaries, and in 1951 the chief of the Kalapalos tribe, Izarari, made a deathbed confession to killing Fawcett and his companions. He had refused Fawcett carriers and canoes, “on grounds of intertribal strife”, and Fawcett slapped his face, whereupon the chief had clubbed him to death, then killed the other two men when they attacked him. He also alleged that Jack Fawcett had been consorting with one of his wives, and the Brazilian who reported this story mentioned that the chief’s eldest son seemed to have white blood. However, a team of experts announced that bones found in a jungle grave were not those of Colonel Fawcett; so the mystery of his disappearance remains unsolved. It has even been suggested that Fawcett found his lost city and preferred to stay there rather than return to civilization . . .