The Gods of Atlantis

by David Gibbons

  ‘It was for the ancient Trojan palladion,’ Heidi said. ‘At first I thought the palladion must be another fake, but I came to believe it was genuine. We all knew the swastika was an ancient shape, and had been found decorating pottery at Troy. Himmler told me that Heinrich Schliemann had discovered the palladion in the Tomb of Agamemnon at Mycenae, where it had been looted from a temple at Troy. It was the most sacred Trojan object, dating back thousands of years before the fall of Troy, supposedly a gift from the sky god. It was meteoritic on one side, gold on the other. It’s gone now, though I don’t know where. But I brought you here to see the symbols around the edge of the hollow.’

  Jack peered more closely. There were two circular rings of symbols, the first one close to the lip of the hole, the second inside and below the first ring, obscured in shadow. The symbols on the upper ring were similar to the ones they had seen in the hall above. ‘They’re runes,’ he murmured. ‘Eight of them altogether. Some look like the Futhark, the Scandinavian runes of the Middle Ages. But there are other symbols too, presumably Nazi additions. I can see two swastikas.’

  Heidi pointed with her stick. ‘They’re the creation of Karl Maria Wiligut, Himmler’s occult guru. He retained some of the original Scandinavian runes, but added some with no historical precedent as runes but based on other ancient symbols. As well as the swastikas, you can see those two symbols of a crossed ring, derived from the Phoenician symbol tth.’

  Hiebermeyer looked at Heidi. ‘These SS runes have Roman letter equivalents, don’t they?’

  She nodded. ‘Entirely made up by Wiligut, but applied consistently. The tth symbol means T, and the Hakenkreuz, the swastika, means A. And you can see the Sig rune for the letter S, familiar enough from the SS insignia. The other three symbols are the Heilszeichen rune for L, the Odal rune for N and the Leben rune for I.’

  Jack stared again, panning his torch from symbol to symbol, then running over it again. ‘Good God,’ he said under his breath. ‘They spell out ATLANTIS.’

  ‘Now look at the second ring of symbols,’ she said.

  Jack panned his torch deeper into the hole and stared, his heart pounding. ‘It’s incredible,’ he whispered.

  ‘What is it?’ Hiebermeyer said.

  Jack sat back, his mind racing. ‘The symbols Costas’ ROV photographed two days ago on that cave wall in Atlantis, the ones that Katya is working on intepreting.’ He took out his iPhone, pressed a few keys and passed it to Hiebermeyer, who stared at the image on the screen and then squatted down, looking at the rock-cut symbols in the marble and then at the screen again. ‘There are twenty-six symbols on your screen. Each one of the eight symbols here in the rock is represented. They’re the same.’

  ‘You recognize them?’

  Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘It’s the Stone Age code.’ He looked at Heidi. ‘These symbols are found on cave paintings of the Upper Palaeolithic, most extensively in the famous caves in France and Spain. What does seem incredible is that they are virtually identical across the world.’ He showed her the screen, pointing. ‘The zigzag lines, the clusters of dots, the parallel lines are all found in rock art in North and South America, Europe, South Africa, Australia. Some scholars have tried to argue that these are just common jottings that the artists could have invented independently, but that doesn’t wash with me.’

  ‘You think these symbols could have spread around the world from one origin?’ she murmured.

  Hiebermeyer nodded emphatically. ‘We know people moved huge distances in the Ice Age: across the Bering Strait and to South America at least twenty thousand years ago, and from Asia to Australia at least thirty thousand years before that. Armchair scholars who dispute the idea look at maps and see apparently insurmountable barriers in the seas and deserts and mountain ranges, whereas those like Jack who’ve tried to retrace the routes realize that the sea especially is often an aid rather than a hindrance to long-distance travel.’

  ‘What’s the date range of the symbols?’ she asked.

  ‘Towards the end of the last Ice Age, from about twenty-five thousand to twelve thousand years ago. But they could have survived as relic symbols after the Ice Age, maybe in rituals.’

  ‘At least until 6000 BC,’ Jack said quietly, getting down on his knees and shining his Maglite at the far side of the recess. He took his iPhone back from Hiebermeyer, stared at it and then shone the torch again. ‘Well I’ll be damned.’

  He straightened up and smiled broadly. Hiebermeyer pushed up his little round glasses and peered back. ‘I’ve seen that look before.’

  ‘I’ve just seen one I recognize above all others. It’s astonishing.’

  Hiebermeyer followed his gaze. The torch lit up a symbol like a garden rake, a single slash with four lines coming off it at right angles. ‘Is this what I think it is?’

  Jack scrolled down his screen. ‘It’s symbol number twenty-three in the Stone Age alphabet, what they call “pectiform”, from the Latin for comb-shaped, with short lines extending off a single line. According to Katya’s email to me summarizing the code, it’s quite rare, only occurring at five per cent of the cave sites. But it first occurs in the oldest groups, twenty-five thousand years ago.’ He tapped the screen again, and showed it to Heidi. ‘That’s why I’m so excited.’

  The screen showed the cover of Jack’s monograph publication on Atlantis, based on their discovery of the site five years before. In the centre was the symbol they had first seen on the papyrus that Hiebermeyer had discovered in the Egyptian desert, the account by the ancient Greek traveller Solon of his visit to the Egyptian high priest who had told him the story of Atlantis. It was the symbol that Jack and Costas had found on the golden disc from the Bronze Age shipwreck, a disc they realized had been created in Atlantis more than five thousand years earlier, before the citadel had been drowned by the rising waters of the Black Sea. Heidi peered at it, then at Jack. ‘The symbol here is a mirror image of the Stone Age symbol. It’s as if that pectiform symbol had been flipped over.’

  Jack nodded. ‘You won’t believe it, but my colleague Costas and I saw this very symbol underwater at Atlantis during our dive, on a stone pillar at the entrance to a tunnel into the site. We call it the Atlantis symbol. We believe it was shaped like that in the form of two wings, and was meant to represent an eagle or a vulture, a sacred bird. And it also served as a map, like a labyrinth. Five years ago, we were able to follow the shape of the symbol in the tunnels and galleries in the rock of the volcano that formed the summit of the citadel, until we reached the holy of holies.’

  ‘The place you and Costas revisited a few days ago,’ Hiebermeyer said.

  Jack nodded. ‘Unfortunately the volcano decided to heat up just as we were about to enter the chamber. But we did manage to photograph a section of the wall containing these other symbols, clearly much older. I believe that this older Stone Age code and the newer Atlantis script were the preserve of priests and shamans, rather than a widespread writing system. That these two scripts should exist side by side fits in with some extraordinary ideas we’ve been developing about the dawn of civilization. On the one hand, the Atlanteans would have retained something of the rituals and beliefs of their Ice Age ancestors, particularly shamanistic rituals involving animals and the hunt. That’s what we see in the Palaeolithic cave art, where the symbols first appear. On the other hand, early farmers were developing new belief systems. The old animal gods of the spirit world were being eclipsed by anthropomorphic gods, created when people were beginning to see that they could determine their own destiny. The new script, its sacred meaning, may have been tied up with that. The period when Atlantis was destroyed may have been a time of tension and even bloody conflict between the two belief systems, between shamans of the old ways and priests of the new. When we went back to Atlantis, I wanted to find out who those new gods were.’

  Hiebermeyer pointed to the symbols in the floor. ‘And now the big mystery. How on earth did these Stone Age symbols get here?’

  Jack
paused. ‘I’ve just been thinking about that. The Palaeolithic cave art of France and the Pyrenees, at famous sites such as Lascaux, was known by the 1930s. Given the Ahnenerbe obsession with runes and symbols, it makes sense that they would have cast their net that wide. They would have known about the great antiquity of the caves, and might have associated the symbols with the fantasy of Aryan origins. It would have been fitting to reproduce those symbols in this secret place, this Nazi holy of holies, really a kind of sacred cave too.’

  Heidi looked at him. ‘You’re right. I myself knew the scholar who had been to the Lascaux cave, a secretive Ahnenerbe expedition that took place after the occupation of France in 1940. He penetrated further into the caves than anyone has done since, and found many paintings with animal art and these symbols. Back at Wewelsburg, the SS ideologues assembled the symbols as evidence not just of Aryan ancestors, but of Atlantis. Their theory was that the survivors of Atlantis huddled in the caves, where they sought refuge after the flood. That day here with Ernst we attended an indoctrination lecture on Atlantis, given by an acquaintance of Ernst’s from university days who insisted that he come along. It was a clever lecture, not occult nonsense, and I remembered enough from my schooling in the classics to know that the lecturer was talking sensibly about Plato. But it was there that I first saw the symbols, the same ones I was to see that afternoon down here with Himmler. The lecturer showed us some slides taken by the primitive underwater cameras of the time revealing symbols incised on what seemed to be a cavern wall. He said it was the most astonishing discovery ever made by the Ahnenerbe, in conditions of great danger to the divers.’

  ‘Divers,’ Jack exclaimed. ‘Where was it?’

  ‘The location was not revealed. He showed a picture of an underwater habitat that had been secretly developed in the U-boat base at Lorient, an early version of the ones Captain Cousteau and his divers used in the 1960s and 1970s. It was very rudimentary by comparison, like two bathyspheres joined together. He said the divers used it as a base for their explorations, but I doubted it. I thought the habitat was too small for that, and afterwards wondered if it had been some kind of storage facility. I remember seeing fish, tropical fish. I took up scuba-diving myself in the 1950s, and often went to the Caribbean and the Red Sea. It could have been one of those places, or somewhere else in the tropics. Remember, the Ahnenerbe got everywhere, especially in the late 1930s, leading up to the war.’

  Jack squatted down, and peered at Heidi. ‘When you were down here with Himmler, did you actually see the palladion?’

  ‘Only briefly. He treated it like the Holy Grail. Another man came down to lift it from that hollow and show it to us, an unpleasant Nazi named Dr Unverzagt, who was its custodian. I saw it for long enough to notice that it had symbols around the edge. There was no doubt in my mind that they were genuine, as old as the time when the gold was melded to the meteorite and the metal was forged into the swastika shape, far back in prehistory. The symbols on the palladion were exactly the same as the symbols that Himmler had carved into the marble in front of you.’

  ‘Including that early Atlantis symbol?’ Hiebermeyer asked.

  ‘I remember it vividly on the edge of the palladion. There was no other symbol quite like it.’

  Jack looked at Hiebermeyer. ‘We’ve got some brainstorming to do.’

  ‘You start.’

  ‘The palladion, the most sacred symbol of ancient Troy, was taken by Agamemnon to Mycenae, where it was buried in the Royal Grave Circle and then discovered by Heinrich Schliemann. He hid it away under his house in Athens, where it was discovered by Himmler’s Ahnenerbe men and brought here.’

  ‘Right,’ Hiebermeyer replied. ‘The palladion was meteoritic in origin, exactly in accordance with the ancient Trojan legend that it had been the gift of the sky god. Meteorites are most easily found on ice, suggesting that the original artefact was in the hands of the ancestors of the Trojans long before the time of the recorded citadel, perhaps as far back as the end of the Ice Age, when the glaciers were close to northern Greece and the Black Sea. Some time between then and Bronze Age Troy, the meteorite was fashioned into the swastika shape and melded with gold, when it had those symbols added.’

  ‘Symbols of the Ice Age.’

  ‘Symbols exactly identical to those found at Atlantis, the first great civilization after the Ice Age, whose inhabitants fled with their belongings after the glacial meltwaters finally flooded the Black Sea basin in the sixth millennium BC.’

  ‘And their first landfall to the west would have been the Dardanelles, and the site of Troy.’

  Hiebermeyer slapped his thigh. ‘Troy was founded by the Atlanteans.’

  ‘The palladion came from Atlantis.’

  ‘Bingo,’ Hiebermeyer said triumphantly.

  ‘The only question is, how could Himmler’s people possibly have associated it with Atlantis?’ Jack murmured.

  ‘I think it goes back to what I was telling you before we met up with Heidi. The Ahnenerbe collected a lot of real-life artefacts, some of them extraordinary treasures like the palladion, but then assembled them into a story according to their own mythology. Yet by accident, or sometimes by design – because there were occasional genuine scholars involved – some of that held a shadow of the truth. Behind the Aryan obsession lay a reality that we ourselves are uncovering, the spread of early Neolithic culture in prehistory, the advance of agriculture and Indo-European language, something we now know goes back to the diaspora of Atlanteans from the Black Sea. And behind the Nazi idea of a worldwide precursor civilization lies the truth of a people we know did profoundly influence the rise of civilization elsewhere. I’m certain that Himmler could have had no evidence that the palladion came from Atlantis or the meaning of that pectiform symbol, but sealing this sacred artefact in a hole surrounded by the word Atlantis in fake Nazi runes is exactly what we should expect.’

  ‘And in their search for Atlantis, the Ahnenerbe chanced on a place where someone who could only have come from Atlantis inscribed those symbols into a cavern wall, underwater and somewhere in the tropics,’ Jack murmured. ‘With the symbols being identical to those inscribed on the palladion, it must have convinced them that the place those divers had found held huge significance. And they may have been right.’

  He turned to Heidi. ‘Is there anything more you can tell us about the palladion? Anything you remember from when you saw it?’

  She looked pensive, and then clasped her stick. ‘It had peculiar magnetic properties. The meteoritic iron was strangely affected by changes in the earth’s magnetic field, becoming dramatically heavier at certain places. For Himmler, this seemed to add to the mystique. The marble hollow in the floor has a magnet embedded in it, and when it was activated, only the palladion could unlock it. Himmler enjoyed the fact that the palladion was stuck there like Excalibur embedded in the rock, another Arthurian fantasy. It apparently had a unique magnetic signature.’

  Jack stared at Hiebermeyer. He remembered the shape in the bunker door. The palladion was a key. He looked back at Heidi. ‘Anything else?’

  She paused, and then looked Jack full in the face. Her eyes were moist again, and she suddenly seemed very old. ‘I need to get out of here now. I need to leave this grim place, and feel the sun on my face.’

  ‘Tante Heidi,’ Hiebermeyer said, concern in his voice. ‘Let’s get you back to your wheelchair immediately, and we’ll go out into the courtyard.’

  She rose unsteadily, then put a hand on Hiebermeyer’s, staying him. She looked at Jack again. ‘There is something else,’ she whispered. ‘Something I’ve never told anyone, not even my son. I know where you’ve seen the shape of that reverse swastika before.’

  ‘Tante Heidi?’ Hiebermeyer said.

  ‘You’ve seen it in the bunker in the forest.’

  Jack stared at her. ‘How do you know about that?’

  ‘In the door of that horrible death chamber. I was there too, in the autumn of 1944. You know that I was a toxicolo
gist. I was one of the scientists who worked there. That’s my terrible secret. When you called and told me about the discovery of a lost art cache in a bunker beneath the NATO base, Maurice, I knew what was also there and that you would find it. That’s really why I called you here now. I had to tell you what I knew, a truth I had hoped would remain buried in that bunker and die with me. I will tell you everything now. But first I need the sunlight.’

  16

  Jack leaned back in his chair below the castle wall, reeling at what he had just heard. Over the past twenty minutes, Frau Hoffman had told them everything she knew about Himmler’s secret project to develop a deadly biological weapon. They had learned how two victims of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic had been exhumed from Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris and secretly transported to the bunker in the forest, where Heidi herself had been part of the team who dissected the bodies and isolated the virus. They had learned how another lethal microbe had been sought, a waterborne bacterium hinted at in the ancient sources that Himmler’s scholars thought had been the cause of Alexander the Great’s death in the third century BC. From the late 1930s, Ahnenerbe expeditions had scoured the world looking for it, eventually finding a place where the conditions were right for its growth and returning to the laboratory with a sample. The two weapons had been kept apart, the virus and the bacterium, ready to be used as a threat against the world in a scheme by Himmler that far exceeded in horror any secret wonder-weapon the Nazis were previously known to have contemplated.

  Jack in turn had told Heidi everything they knew about Saumerre and his scheme: about how Saumerre’s grandfather had been in the concentration camp next to the bunker and had come to know of the secret research being carried out there; and how he and his son and grandson had pursued the truth of it as they built up their criminal empire, the prospect of a secret Nazi weapon being the greatest prize they could offer to the terrorist clients whose cause Saumerre himself supported. Jack had begun to understand more clearly the link with Atlantis, how the search for a lost Aryan civilization had been used by the Ahnenerbe to shroud the truth of what they were really after; and how an underwater archaeological discovery somewhere in the tropics had provided the perfect place for a hideaway that allowed Himmler to continue the ruse, a place that Jack felt certain was the landfall for the western exodus from Atlantis that he had hoped to find. It was now vital that they discovered every clue they could to its whereabouts, with each moment that passed risking Saumerre losing his patience and deciding to sell to the highest bidder the phial Auxelle had stolen for him from the bunker.