The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton

by John Chambers

  It is to Clement of Alexandria that we owe the quirky information that the god who strummed Apollo’s lyre to tune up the planets and get them playing the music of the spheres was Jesus Christ; that Pythagoras studied with the Druids in England and with the Brahmins in India; that the Brahmins got their name from the patriarch Abraham; and that when you were dancing in the celebration of the Greek mysteries and had reached the final stage of ecstasy, then (in Isaac Newton’s words), “one no longer has to learn, one can see and grasp with one’s mind the nature of things.”11

  It was Clement who originally supplied Newton with the information that, in Newton’s words, “the constellations were invented by Chiron at the time of the Argonautic expedition and inscribed on a celestial sphere for the use of Jason and his men as they navigated uncharted waters.”12

  Saint Clement also intimated that, while it was Chiron who had invented the globe, it was the Argonaut Palamedes, or perhaps the Argonaut Musaeus, who, in the words of Newton:

  made a sphere for his fellow sailors and is reputed the first among the Greeks who made one, that is he made a celestial sphere upon which he delineated the asterisms of Chiron . . . Chiron invented them and Musaeus drew them upon a globe while the ship Argo was building: not sooner because that ship was one of the Asterisms; not later because Chiron was at that time very ancient.13

  Now, Newton found in the Stromata what was a critically important (according to Newton) fact: that an ancient epic called the Gigantomachia (“War of the Giants”), more than 95 percent of which is lost, and whose authorship is unknown, had clearly stated that Chiron the centaur was a “practical astronomer.”

  Or so Isaac Newton insisted on believing. His colleagues were quick to point out that the words “practical astronomer” as used in the Gigantomachia were a loose translation from the Greek of words that actually meant “stars and constellations.” These words would allow him, they said, to translate the words as “astrologer,” but Newton’s colleagues would permit him to go no further.

  Their opinions, however, had no effect on Newton: “practical astronomer” it would be.

  But, even if Chiron really had traced out the constellations in the night sky, what proof did Newton have that he had done it in the very year the Argo sailed?

  To answer this question, Newton wants us to visit a series of others:

  Is there a constellation Helen?

  Is there a constellation Achilles?

  Is there a constellation Hector?

  Is there a constellation Andromache, or Achilles, or Patroclus? And so on.

  No, there are no constellations named for these heroes and heroines of the Trojan War, which was thought to have taken place only thirty years after the voyage of the Argonauts. And this is proof, says Newton, that Chiron did the naming; he would have been dead by the time of the Trojan War.

  Newton believed the fact that the names of sixteen constellations are related to the Argonautic expedition was proof that Chiron did the naming at the time of the voyage; he did not know about the expedition earlier, and therefore would not have named the stars in that way earlier.

  But Chiron seems to know too much about the voyage of the Argonauts! How could he, before it has begun, name a constellation for the sacred bulls that Jason would have to kill, or for the chalice full of poison that Medea would use to help Jason secure the Golden Fleece, an event that took place halfway through the voyage?

  Newton’s colleagues raised these points against him. But Newton saw no problem.

  In our discussion we have avoided the issue of just how incredibly difficult it must have been for Newton to date a millennia-old “primitive sphere” using rather primitive equinoctial and solstitial markings and positioning of constellations. For most Newton scholars, this is the real issue. Professors Jed Z. Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold comment:

  Using the description of the night sky in Aratos’ Phaenomena and Eudoxus’ description of the night sky as summarized in Hipparchus and reproduced in the Almagest, Newton came up with a tight range of dates in the area of 933 BC. This was incredibly difficult thing to do, since the nomenclature of star maps and celestial globes was very different in ancient times and not very well known in Newton’s time (and not completely understood in our own). But Newton did succeed.14

  The figure Newton came up with was 933 BC. It was generally assumed in Newton’s time that the Trojan War took place thirty years after Jason’s voyage, and that King Solomon died forty-two years before the voyage; thus, in nailing down 933 BC as the date of the first year of the Trojan War and 975 BC as the date of Solomon’s death, he had added five hundred years to the chronology of the world and he had—he thought—fixed all the ancient times of the Earth once and for all.

  But he met with much opposition (especially when historians decided that there had never been a voyage of the Argonauts and that the Trojan War had taken place not in the tenth century BC but in the eleventh century BC), and now this great experience of Newton’s in time travel is taken seriously only because it shows, once again, the sheer originality of his imagination and the immense audacity of his genius.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A GLITTER OF ATLANTIS

  The island of Gozo, part of the archipelago of Malta in the Mediterranean Sea, is one of the sacred places of the Earth.

  The size of Manhattan, called Ogygia (“first memory”) by the ancient world, it is the site of the oldest freestanding structures in the Mediterranean: three Neolithic limestone temples of “extreme architectural sophistication and complexity” dating back to 3700 BC. These “magic and potent island-sanctuaries”1 predate the Great Pyramids of Egypt by a thousand years.

  Gozo boasts lofty cliffs on which nature has carved out vaguely human forms, deep caves, and ancient grottoes giving on to the sea. The seventeenth-century Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher climbed to the cave high above Ramla Bay, where, according to legend, Odysseus spent seven years as the love slave of the sea nymph Calypso.2 Homer says Calypso, the daughter of Atlas and sister of Prometheus, lived alone on the island with her three handmaidens until the Greek hero, returning from the Trojan War, was shipwrecked on her shore.

  Homer testifies that this lustrously beautiful granddaughter of Saturn knew “the depths of the whole sea.”3 The ancient Greeks called the island of Ogygia Omphalos Thalasses, the Navel of the Sea. They revered it as Saturn’s island, where the god slept in a mountain cave made of gold. The Chaldeans believed Ogygia was the home of the divine barmaid Siduri, who “dwells by the deep sea”4 and entertained and consoled the epic hero Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh is associated with Utnapishtim’s flood, on which the story of Noah’s Flood is based. Many in the ancient world believed Ogygia was the last remaining mountain-top of the sunken continent of Atlantis. The fourth-century BC historian Eumalos of Cyrene wrote:

  The summit of Mount Atlas, which was situated in the middle of the island Atlantika, was not submerged. This summit of Mount Atlas has preserved the name of Ogyge from that of its last king, and it is in fact because of this circumstance that we still know as Ogygia that island which still exists between Libya and Sicily; it is nothing more than the summit of the Mount of Atlantika.5

  Today, there has been an enthusiastic revival of interest in the theory that not only Gozo but other islands of the ten-island Maltese archipelago are the last remaining bits of the legendary lost continent of Atlantis. For brief moments in his Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, Isaac Newton shared that belief.

  It’s surprising to find Newton mentioning Atlantis, since he is loath to admit the existence of any great civilization prior to that of the Jews. But he does indeed mention the legendary lost continent, and more than once, albeit briefly, though he seems to regard it as only a tiny city-state. Newton seems to locate Atlantis in or around Ogygia/Gozo, and he connects it with the legendary Ogygian flood.

  But, wait a moment! Was there ever really an Atlantis at all? Millions of bottles of ink have been spilled on the subject o
f where it was and why it sank, but has anyone ever really come up with concrete proof that it existed?

  The Egerton Sykes Collection, housed in the Association of Religious Enlightenment library in Virginia Beach, Virginia, is the largest collection of Atlantis-based materials in the world. It contains more than six thousand books, magazines, pamphlets, photos, slides, tapes, personal letters, unpublished manuscripts, and newspapers on the subject of the lost continent.

  The basic story in every one of these documents can be traced to a single source: the Greek philosopher Plato’s description of Atlantis in his dialogues Critias and Timaeus.

  Newton had a comprehensive knowledge of the works of Plato (427–347 BC), but he might never have lingered over the story of Atlantis if it had not been for the towering stature of the man who, according to Plato, first introduced the story of the vanished continent to ancient Greece and Rome. This was Solon, the paradigm-bending Athenian lawmaker who lived from about 638 to 558 BC.

  Plutarch tells us that Solon was “entirely original, and followed no man’s example, and, without the aid of any ally, achieved his most important measures by his own conduct.”6 In about 594 BC, Athens found itself mired in its own unequal-distribution-of-wealth predicament, one quite a bit more serious than the “1 percent/99 percent” inequality-of-income problem that led to mass demonstrations in the United States in 2012. Plutarch writes that, in the Athens of Solon’s time, “All the people were indebted to the rich . . . [many were] sent into slavery at home, or sold to strangers; some (for no law forbade it) were forced to sell their children, or fly the country to avoid the cruelty of their creditors.”

  The Athenians decided they needed a despot—a single ruler holding all the power of the state—to tell them how to get out of this predicament. They called on Solon “to take the government into his own hands, and when he was once settled, manage the business freely and according to his pleasure.” Solon gave the Athenians a whole new set of laws, many of them entirely original. He used these laws to engineer the cancellation of almost every debt in Athens. The city’s creditors complied with this because Solon’s “own private worth and reputation” outweighed “all the ordinary ill-repute and discredit of the change.”7

  His laws having been passed and implemented, Solon left Athens, “under the pretense,” writes the Greek historian Herodotus, “of wishing to see the world, but really to avoid being forced to repeal any of the laws which, at the request of the Athenians, he had made for them. Without his sanction the Athenians could not repeal them, as they had bound themselves under a heavy curse to be governed for ten years by the laws which should be imposed on them by Solon.”8

  This extraordinary lawgiver arrived in Egypt in about 590 BC. A tireless gatherer of knowledge, he sought out the priests of the temple of Neith in Sais, Egypt’s administrative capital. Solon’s great fame easily gained him entry to the temple. In a dimly lit chamber, surrounded by stelae so ancient the hieroglyphs had faded from some, he opened the discussion by recounting to the two priests assigned to him the history of Athens.

  Solon seems to have been largely an egoless man, but even he must have been startled when the older of the two priests replied tartly: “O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you.” The younger priest chimed in, “Those genealogies of yours which you just now recounted to us, Solon, they are no better than the tales of children!”9

  Solon inquired as to what they meant. And it is at this point that the story of Athens became one with the history of the world. The priests told Solon the story of a devastating war they claimed had been fought nine thousand years before. Athens had been a combatant in this conflict—not, the priests hastened to add, the Athens Solon knew, but a proto-Athens, an earlier version of the present-day city-state. This proto-Athens had gone to war with a huge country named Atlantis that lay beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. The warriors of Atlantis conquered the southern shore of Africa as far east as Egypt and the northern shore of Europe up to Italy. The proto-Athenians raced to the rescue of the subjugated nations on the other side. A spectacular battle was fought between Athens and Atlantis. Athens won, and all of Atlantis’s conquered nation-states around the Mediterranean were liberated.

  There was no time for the victors to rejoice or for the vanquished to weep. Almost immediately a great flood overwhelmed that part of the world, sweeping Atlantis beneath the ocean. Only a tiny portion of the proto-Athenians survived, to live in the forests in a primitive state for centuries until finally a new Athens began to emerge.

  This is all Plato has to say, in Critias, about what the priests told Solon of the last days of Atlantis. (Plato’s Timaeus contains a lengthy if incomplete history and description of Atlantis, apparently from the same Egyptian priests.) Solon left Egypt not long afterward, continued on his travels, and eventually arrived back in Athens.

  The great lawgiver had intended to turn his notes on Atlantis into an epic poem. But age and new responsibilities intervened. Plato tells us the lawgiver passed his notes on to his nephew, Dropides, who bequeathed them to his son, Critias. At age ninety Critias gave the Atlantis material to his ten-year-old grandson, also named Critias. This was the Athenian citizen for whom Plato’s dialogue Critias is named, and the Critias who, in that dialogue, tells Socrates (Plato’s literary persona) the story of Atlantis.

  Despite the thousands of books that have been written on the subject, this, and the pages from Plato’s Timaeus describing Atlantis, are the only sources we have for the story of Atlantis. (Solon died about 560 BC; the younger Critias was born about 460 BC and died in 403 BC, when Plato was twenty-four.)

  Some twenty-two hundred years later, Isaac Newton, reading about Atlantis in Timaeus and Critias in his rooms in Cambridge, smelled something fishy in the grandiosity of the Egyptian priests and their mocking rejoinders to Solon. Let’s recall the words of modern-day chronologer Larry Pierce (see chapter 11, “Deconstructing Time”): “In the centuries before Christ, a war broke out to see which nation had the oldest pedigree, whether real or invented. . . . Each claimed to have the oldest history. . . . While some writers seemed interested in the truth, others were playing a game to see who could spin the biggest and most convincing yarn about the antiquity of their nation.”10

  No one understood this better than Newton, who, as has been discussed, began the Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended with these words: “All nations, when they begin to keep exact accounts of Time, have been prone to raise their Antiquities; and this humor has been promoted, by the Contentions between Nations about their Originals [Origins].”11

  This “vanity-of-nations” syndrome is mainly why Newton asserts that Atlantis wasn’t nearly as old as the priests claimed, and very likely not as big. He claims that the Egyptian priests “magnified the stories and antiquity of their Gods so exceedingly as to make them nine thousand years older than Solon, and the island Atlantis bigger than all Africa and Asia together, and full of people.”12

  The Egyptian priests had to make Atlantis disappear, because that would make it impossible for Solon, or anyone else, to prove or disprove their assertions about the “lost” continent. Newton writes: “And because in the days of Solon this great island did not appear, they [the priests] pretended that it was sunk into the sea with all its people: Thus great was the vanity of the Priests of Egypt in magnifying their antiquities.”13

  According to Plato, Solon recorded that the priests told him Atlantis was located in the Atlantic. If this is so, why did Newton place it in the area of Ogygia in the Mediterranean? He may have believed the priests had really told Solon that it was in the Mediterranean, but that Plato himself changed the ocean to the Atlantic (“beyond the Straits of Gibraltar”).

  Such is the theory of Professor J. V. Luce, who argues in The End of Atlantis: New Light on an Old Legend (1975), that the story of the destruction of Atlantis is the story of a violent volcanic eruption that took place on the island of Thera (Santori
ni), seventy-five miles north of Minoan Crete, in the Mediterranean Sea about 1500 BC.

  Examining numerous ancient Egyptian and Greek documents, Luce decided that the Egyptians of Solon’s time “knew little and cared less about foreign countries. They were not great travelers or seafarers, and their geographical horizons were quite restricted.” Their knowledge of the Mediterranean extended no farther than the “isles which are in the midst of the Great Green [Sea]”; that is, Crete, and they had no reason to assume that the Mediterranean wasn’t big enough to swallow an entire continent.14

  Two hundred years later, the Greeks knew enough about the size and depth of the Mediterranean to decide that actually it wasn’t big enough to contain an entire sunken continent. So—perhaps to make the story sound more authentic—Plato crossed out “Mediterranean” (or whatever name the Egyptians and Solon used for this body of water) and substituted “beyond the Straits of Gibraltar.”

  Luce also offers a more complex motive: Plato “was influenced by an imagined parallel between the Persian invasion of Greece from the east and the antediluvian aggression by Atlantis from the west. In the interests of poetic symmetry the vast land empire had to be balanced by the vast sea empire.”15

  Newton places the destruction of Atlantis in the same time period. What prompts him to override the statement in Plato that Atlantis is in the Atlantic is the legendary “Ogygian flood,” which Newton considers actually took place, and which he connects with the destruction of Atlantis.

  Newton explains that for the ancient Greeks the word ogygian had the connotation of “as old as the first memory of things.” (Modern-day dictionaries list ogyges and ogygian as synonyms for “primeval,” “primal,” and “earliest dawn.”) He suggests that the word originated with the (certainly) legendary King Ogyges of Thebes. The Ogygian flood has its name because it took place during the reign of Ogyges. Newton says the Ogygian flood was “1,020 years older than the first Olympiad.” In the second-century AD Chronicon I, Eusebius states that the first Olympiad took place in 776 BC. So Newton is able to place the Ogygian flood at 1796 BC.