The Ogygian flood “covered the whole world and was so devastating that Attica remained without kings until the reign of Cecrops,” he says. This was the flood that “consumed Atlantis and much of Greece.”16 Thus Newton sets the date of the destruction of Atlantis at 1796 BC.
Clearly, the Ogygian flood is connected with the island of Ogygia. And so the island of Ogygia is associated with the sinking of Atlantis. In the Chronicle, Newton explains this, if a little bit obscurely.
Homer writes that Ulysses [Odysseus] found the Island Ogygia covered with wood, and uninhabited, except by Calypso and her maids. . . . In that island [Gades] Homer places Calypso, the daughter of Atlas, presently after the Trojan War when Ulysses’ being ship-wrecked, escaped thither. Homer calls it the Ogygian Island and places it 18 or 20 days’ sail westward from Phoenicia or Corcyra. . . . This island is by Homer described a small one, destitute of shipping and cities and inhabited only by Calypso and her women who dwelt in a cave in the midst of a wood, there being no men in the island to assist Ulysses in building a new ship or to accompany him thence to Corcyra: which description of the island agrees to Gades.17
Here we run into a contradiction. As we’ll see farther on in this chapter, Newton seems to have believed that Calypso was the last surviving inhabitant of Atlantis. But throughout the Chronology he has been at pains to establish the true date of the fall of Troy as 904 BC. He tells us Odysseus was shipwrecked on Ogygia eight years later. That put the year of Odysseus’s arrival at Ogygia at 896 BC—and makes Capypso, if she is the last surviving member of Atlantean society, at least nine hundred years old!
Perhaps we can get to the bottom of this by looking carefully at the account Newton gives us of the history of Atlantis, which he takes almost word for word from Plato. Newon writes: “The Gods, having finished their conquests, divided the whole earth amongst themselves, partly into larger, partly into smaller portions, and instituted Temples and Sacred Rites to themselves; and that the Island Atlantis fell to the lot of Neptune, who made his eldest Son Atlas King of the whole Island, a part of which was called Gadir.”18
Plato (and Newton) depart slightly from traditional chronology by making Neptune, not Saturn, Atlas’s father; Saturn becomes the father of Neptune and grandfather of Atlas. But in general Newton is here operating in full euhemeristic mode. All of these figures—Saturn, Neptune, Atlas—we regard today as mythical. (Atlas, for example, we think of as the mythical Greek god of astronomy who bore a globe of the world on his shoulders.) But Newton thought of them all as entirely mortal members of an Atlantean dynasty of rulers.
For Isaac Newton, Atlantis wasn’t a vast continent supporting a highly advanced civilization. It was a tiny city-state that had made territorial gains that aroused the ire of the Athenians. Neptune, then Atlas, were kings of this feisty rogue state of Atlantis—and that seems to make Calypso, who was Atlas’s daughter, and who survived on the mountaintop of Ogygia/Gozo, not only the last surviving Atlantean but also the putative queen of Atlantis. (She is all by herself, a sort of Newtonian “remnant,” and it’s almost as if her adoring subjugation of Odysseus is her attempt to play Eve to the Greek hero Adam and revive the lost civilization of Atlantis—an attempt that’s thwarted when the ancient gods force her to set Odysseus free.)
Calypso is, of course, a sea nymph, an immortal goddess—and that could explain why she survived for nine hundred years. But Newton didn’t believe she was a goddess; he didn’t believe there were gods or goddesses. There seems to have been some sort of error in his connecting the destruction of Atlantis with Calypso and the arrival of Odysseus on Calypso’s island; that is, on Atlantis/Ogygia/Gozo. Over the past two decades, there has been a huge upsurge of interest on the part of the people of Malta itself in the possibility that the islands of the Maltese archipelago, and Gozo in particular, might be remnants of Atlantis. Let’s see if Malta’s own experts can help us with this problem.
Running from 60 miles south of Sicily to 100 miles north of Libya, ten rocky islands stick up from the sparkling Mediterranean like the fingertips of a drowning giant yearning to be free. Or, at least, such is the image that presents itself to those (and they are not a few) who believe these ten islands are the topmost parts of a long-submerged Atlantis.
The seven northernmost islands in this straggling chain constitute the Republic of Malta. Four of them, mere foam-encircled specks in the glittering ocean, are uninhabited—though on the four farthest north temples of extreme antiquity rear up to the sky. The other three islands are Malta, a bit smaller than Martha’s Vineyard at 122 square miles; Comino, barely 1 square mile; and Gozo, 8 by 4 miles and home to 31,000 people (one-tenth of the population of the republic).
Almost six thousand years ago, a race of peoples appeared on these islands, spread across the entire archipelago, built limestone temples, raised crops, hewed ports out of the rocky coast—and then, about 3700 BC, melted away to nothing. The traces of these enigmatic peoples have to a large extent been erased in the successive waves of conquest and assimilation that have swept across the archipelago: the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Fatimids, the Normans, the Sicilians, and the Aragonese. After the Knights of Saint John were ousted from the island of Rhodes in 1522, Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain, ceded the property to the order for an annual symbolic rent payment of one live Maltese falcon. Thereafter the history of Malta was to some degree stabilized, although Napoleon rudely conquered the archipelago on his way to Egypt in 1795, and the Nazis pulverized it with bombs in World War II.
In the early nineteenth century, the islands began to renew their acquaintance with the distant past. A local architect, Giorgio Grongnet, examined the temples at Gozo minutely and decided that this tiny isle, with its lush green terraced fields, was the last surviving mountaintop of Atlantis.
You might have expected Grongnet to know what he was talking about; he was a religious architecture expert, who had designed the rotunda of the Church of the Assumption of Our Lady, at Mosta, Malta, the ninth largest unsupported church dome in the world. But it was discovered that he had forged a key inscription in his report, and his work was largely discredited.
In 1995, a Maltese pediatrician named Anton Mifsud went to Gozo to look around and complete the job of discrediting Grongnet. But, instead, he was converted to the idea that Gozo in particular, and also, perhaps, the six other islands in the archipelago, were the remains of Atlantis.
Mifsud assembled a great deal of material and, along with three colleagues, in 2000 published Malta: Echoes of Plato’s Island. It attracted so much attention that, in 2005, documentaries on Malta as Atlantis are regularly aired by the U.S. National Geographic Channel and Japan’s national channel TBS-1.
Mifsud maintains that the Neolithic civilization of Malta is the only one in the West old enough to have existed at the same time as the Atlantis described by Plato. He proudly points out a number of similarities between the two.
Gozo, Malta, and Comino are crisscrossed with hundreds of deep and ancient cart ruts cut in the stone. These often extend for long distances out into the sea; sometimes a cart rut ends at a cliff on one islet and recommences at a cliff on another.
Mifsud contends these ruts, and the very many (usually submarine) canals on the archipelago, are identical with the large grid of irrigation canals Plato claims once crisscrossed Atlantis. He says the continuity of some ruts and canals from one island to another proves the separate islands of the archipelago were once much closer together—that, in fact, they once constituted a single landmass that was torn apart in an aboriginal past by a catastrophe that also sank parts of the landmass.
As in Plato’s Atlantis, says Mifsud, the sacrifice of bulls was a feature of Neolithic religious life in Malta. Bull horns of high antiquity, along with flint knives used in the sacrificial slaughter of bulls and ancient images of the taurines, have been found beneath the floor of the famous temple at Tarxien and at other locations as well.
&
nbsp; There are fifty-three temples of high antiquity on the Maltese archipelago today, many of them well preserved, a number of them partially or wholly underwater. A nineteenth-century researcher wrote ecstatically that “these anthropomorphic structures indicate the islands [of Malta] in pre-history as probably the Holy Shrine of the Middle Sea.” During the nineteenth century it was still possible to see that the temples had been constructed from rectangular blocks of “unbelievable sizes . . . stones five to six feet long, and laid without mortar.”19 The American journalist Mark Adams, visiting the Neolithic structures of Mnajdra and Hagar Qim in 2014, described them as “stunning, clusters of oval rooms built from giant slabs of cut yellow limestone and set on a desolate bluff overlooking the water.”20
Mifsud asserts that these temples, in their great antiquity, in their deployment and orientation, and in the motifs and ornamentation that adorn them, are almost identical with Atlantean temples described by Plato in Timaeus. Mifsud doesn’t mention that some of the Neolithic temples of Malta, especially on Gozo, resemble, by virtue of their central hearth and their circular shape, prytanea—the ancient temples whose origins Isaac Newton believed could to traced to the time before the Flood. Did Newton know of these formidably ancient temples on Malta? Certainly he never visited that archipelago country; this great genius, who discovered what makes the tides rise and fall, probably never saw the sea and lived all his life inside a tiny triangle of English land whose three points were his birthplace—Woolsthorpe, the town of Cambridge, and the city of London. But Nostradamus knew of the temples of Malta and mentions them in century 1, quatrain 9, of his Prophecies, and it’s almost certain that Newton had read, however skeptically, Nostradamus’s famous volume of prognostications. So we can probably assume that the great man knew about Malta’s beguilingly venerable temples.*47
So nothing new about Calypso—who, as we’ll recall, does have a “cave” on Gozo—emerges from the minute research of Anton Mifsud and his colleagues. Calypso is only one brilliantly colored thread in the bright and vivid tapestry Newton weaves of the “embroilments” (his word) of a multitude of squabbling city-states in the ancient world surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. Let us let go of the Calypso thread and turn over some of the other threads that Newton introduces into his brief story of Atlantis. We may find (especially on account of Newton’s habit of turning mythical heroes into humans and conflating them with each other) that the scientist has some tantalizing hints to offer, especially for Atlantis buffs, on the true history of the lost continent of Atlantis.
Newton sets the stage for something like this when he tells us that Neptune, Atlas’s father and Atlantis’s second king, invented ships with tall sails and originated the concept of seaborne fleets. We’ll recall that, often when he makes such statements, Newton is simultaneously using the name of, for him a historical person, for us a mythical figure, as a symbol or emblem for a technological innovation he considers has been important for the advancement of mankind. Here, though, Newton is perhaps giving is some idea of the very seaworthy nature of the Atlanteans (whom, after all, we associate with oceans).
Newton says about Neptune:
The Cretans affirmed that Neptune was the first man who set out a fleet, having obtained this Prefecture of his father Saturn; whence posterity reckoned things done in the sea to be under his government, and mariners honored him with sacrifices: the invention of tall Ships with sails is also ascribed to him. He was first worshiped in Africa, as Herodotus affirms, and therefore Reigned over that province.21
Newton goes on to describe a war fought between Neptune’s son, Atlas, and the Greek warrior hero Hercules. Before doing so, he conflates Atlas with Antaeus.
Antaeus is the son of Neptune and of the Earth goddess Gaia. Therefore, he is Atlas’s half brother. He is a mythical (for us, though not for Newton ) giant who was in the habit of engaging everyone he met in a fight to the death, and who invariably won. To maintain his great strength, Antaeus was dependent on regular physical contact with his mother, the Earth. Hercules (also for Newton a human and not a god) defeated Antaeus by holding him aloft, and so unable to touch the earth, for a long enough period that the giant’s strength drained away and Hercules, still holding him aloft, was able to strangle him to death.
Newton justified his conflation of Atlas and Antaeus in this way:
Antæus and Atlas were both of them sons of Neptune. Both of them Reigned over all Libya and Afric, between Mount Atlas and the Mediterranean to the very Ocean; both of them invaded Egypt, and contended with Hercules in the wars of the Gods, and therefore they are but two names of one and the same man; and even the name Atlas in the oblique cases seems to have been compounded of the name Antaeus, and some other word, perhaps the word Atal, “cursed,” put before it.22
But we shouldn’t trust Newton entirely on this. He keeps changing his mind. Elsewhere he argues that both Antaeus and Atlas are actually Phut, the evil brother of the Egyptian ruler Sesostris; somewhere else he asserts that Atlas is the son of Antaeus and the nephew of Sesostris. And then he says that Atlas and Sesostris are brothers! Finally, he declares disingenuously: “But it is difficult to state these things exactly. So it’s of small consequence.”23
If Atlas and Antaeus are really the same person, Newton has given Atlantis buffs something to chew on. Might it be that when he writes, “In these wars Hercules took the Libyan world from Atlas, and made Atlas pay tribute out of his golden orchard, the Kingdom of Afric,”24 he means by Hercules, proto-Athens, and by Atlas, Atlantis—and that he’s talking about the last, great battle between these two nation-states? It may be that in Newton’s conflation of Atlas with Antaeus—which brings into the story the image of Hercules holding the son of Gaia aloft in order to kill him—we may have a kind of veiled allegory of a critical feature of the final battle between the Atlanteans and the proto-Athenians. (Note that Newton says mysteriously, “Hercules overthrew him several times, and every time he grew stronger by recruits from Libya, his mother earth.”25)
Not even all of Plato’s admiring contemporaries believed his Atlantis story was true. His great pupil and successor Aristotle believed Atlantis wasn’t real and said famously that “the man who dreamed it [Atlantis] up, made it vanish.”26 (On the other hand, Crantor [ca. 300 BC], the first editor of Timaeus, thought every point in the narrative was literally true, and he is even supposed to have sent emissaries to Egypt who were able to verify Solon’s story by examining the appropriate stelae in the temple of Neith.27)
The classical scholars of the nineteenth century, schooled in the skeptical-rationalist mode of thinking of the Age of Enlightenment, didn’t believe Atlantis had ever existed. Benjamin Jowett, perhaps Plato’s greatest translator, observed caustically: “The world, like a child, has readily, and for the most part unhesitatingly, accepted the tale of the Island of Atlantis.” Jowett noted that the story rested on the authority of the Egyptian priests and that historically the Egyptian priests took pleasure in deceiving the Greeks. What we never seem able to to realize, he tells us, is that “there is a greater deceiver or magician than the Egyptian priests, that is to say, Plato himself.”28
Should we regard the story of Atlantis as simply a great Platonic poem, a multilayered philosophical truth that nonetheless is not anchored in concrete reality? Perhaps; but for those of us less rational than Benjamin Jowett, the findings of the Maltese researchers and the brief observations of the “universally learned” and preternaturally intuitive Newton perhaps deserve some careful thought.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE SECRET OF LIFE
At the beginning of August 1669, shortly after being appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, Isaac Newton, aged twenty-six, disappeared into London.
This was only his second trip to the city. We can be sure this haughty Puritan didn’t visit any of London’s notorious fleshpots. He probably didn’t do much sightseeing at all. Isaac Newton, already the greatest scientist of the age (though nobody knew it exce
pt his mentor, Isaac Barrow), was in London on a mission. This reclusive genius, who had barely survived his own birth, was about to take his first steps toward discovering how anything got born at all.
We know little of what Newton did during that month of August he spent in London. But we can imagine him hurrying through the streets, glancing swiftly from side to side, and fastening his attention on whatever raucous and mud-splashed event reflected his intellectual passion of the moment, which, just then, was how life could ever have emerged from nonlife. London was shimmering in a heat wave; Nefertem, the Egyptian god of perfume, ruled the streets and alleys that morning, but Nefertem was in a bad state of mind; the stench of rotting excrement and decomposing carrion rose up like a thick and rancid mist.
Newton stopped at the mouth of an alley and watched intently an army of maggots swarming out of the belly of a decomposing dog. What, Newton asked himself, made this phenomenon of “spontaneous generation” happen? Hamlet had demanded: Does the sun breed maggots out of a dead dog? (2.2.180) and the answer was yes. Robert Boyle had written that decomposing lion corpses gave birth to bees; decaying twigs stirred, wriggled, and became worms; and horsehairs stood up, weaved back and forth, and metamorphosed into snakes. The slow putrefaction of dead plants and animal corpses, brought to a fine simmer by the summer heat, birthed buzzing, squirming creatures that were completely different from their sires.
The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton Page 31