The Gods of Atlantis

by David Gibbons

  These extraordinary and disturbing discoveries bring to mind later traditions of child sacrifice in the Near East, from the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac to the Phoenicians and their western Mediterranean successors, the Carthaginians; elsewhere in the world, human sacrifice also occurred at places – including submerged caves and sinkholes, as well as man-made altars and pyramids – that may have been seen as access points to the spirit world, for example among the Aztec and Maya and their predecessors in Mesoamerica. The importance of blood and dismemberment is also seen elsewhere, for example among the Moche of Peru. A similarity between European megalithic tombs and the interior layout of Mesoamerican pyramids has also been suggested, including passageways with horizontal and vertical axes that may have given access to the underworld as well as to a spirit realm overhead; these structures may be seen as successors to natural caves used in the same way during the Palaeolithic. The idea of an ‘axis mundi’, a special place where the supernatural world can be reached, is common to many religions. Whether or not these cross-cultural similarities should be seen in terms of lines drawn on a map, of the diffusion of people and ideas, will always be a focus of fascinating debate; what does seem likely is that the receptivity of distant peoples to new religious ideas, rituals and structures – for example, pyramids – may have been increased by common neuropsychological experiences and visions that might have allowed these ideas to be absorbed rather than rejected.

  Epics and scripts

  As well as pulling in the evidence of much earlier prehistory, the new finds from the Neolithic have caused scholars to look afresh at the foundation myths of the ancient Near Eastern civilizations to see whether they might hark back to a formative period soon after the end of the Ice Age. The Epic of Gilgamesh, probably first written down in Old Babylonian in the third millennium BC, is best known for its flood story, which parallels the Old Testament account and may derive from a memory of sea-level rise after the last Ice Age – perhaps even a Black Sea flood that inundated Neolithic settlements in the sixth millennium BC. If that is the case, it strengthens the idea that the central theme of the epic, the struggle and then friendship between the ‘wild’ Enkidu and the ‘civilized’ Gilgamesh, may reflect the period of transition between hunter-gatherers and settled ways of life in the early Neolithic. The epic is told largely as a dream narrative, suggesting the importance of dreams and their interpretation in a world where altered-consciousness experiences gave access to the spirits, and later the first ‘gods’, whose inchoate form is suggested by a reference elsewhere in Babylonian myth to the faceless ‘Annu’ coming from a mountain in the north, perhaps in the region of Anatolia or the Black Sea coast.

  Another fascinating aspect of the Epic of Gilgamesh is the repeated reference to ‘sacred stones’, suggestive of the importance of stones in the archaeology of early Neolithic religion, and particularly the extraordinary account of the meteorite recounted here in Chapter 6: one so heavy that it could barely be lifted, bringing to mind the ancient Greek myth that the Trojan palladion was originally a thunderbolt sent down by Zeus, very probably referring to a meteorite. Meteorites in recent history have most readily been found on the polar icecaps, suggesting that these ancient stories may even recall discoveries made by hunter-gatherer ancestors – before the end of the Ice Age – of objects whose sacred significance was remembered into the Neolithic and the first period when the epics were being written down.

  In my novel Atlantis I suggested that the symbols on the real-life Phaistos disc, a mysterious object found near the second-millennium BC palace of that name in Crete, may have been a lost Neolithic script of Anatolia. One of those symbols, the ‘Atlantis symbol’ seen by Jack and Costas as they dive through the lava tunnel, is on the banner of my website. While an early Anatolian origin for the Phaistos symbols remains possible, no writing system as we would understand it has yet been found pre-dating the early cuneiform of the clay tablets on which myths such as the Epic of Gilgamesh were first inscribed. However, as with so much else that is being overturned by the new discoveries from the Neolithic, we may need to reject the long-held assumption that writing developed in response to the need for record-keeping in the early cities, and instead look to the religious organization and belief systems that may have been behind such developments. The ‘Stone Age code’ in this novel is based on an actual assessment of symbols that are found repetitively and in groups in cave paintings of the Palaeolithic dating as far back as thirty-five thousand years ago. These and similar symbols could have been mnemonics, and together may have formed a narrative of myth or ritual; in that sense they may be regarded as a writing system. These new ways of thinking may allow us to see symbolic and narrative significance in artefacts that have already been excavated, even in the shape and association of stones. The extraordinary nature of the finds so far made at the Neolithic sites suggests that future excavations may reveal more certain evidence of this type than has yet been found.

  Prehistoric voyages of the mind

  In order to reach Uta-napishtim – the Babylonian Noah – in his mountain fastness, Gilgamesh undergoes a sea voyage that would have taken a lesser man ‘a month and fifteen days’, a span equivalent to a voyage from Mesopotamia to the tip of India or from the Strait of Gibraltar across the Atlantic. Voyages of this nature were well within the capabilities of people in the early Neolithic. Yet our understanding of the period has been plagued by the misconception that people were terrified of the open ocean, and that long-distance voyages only became common with the needs of colonization, trade and warfare after the first civilizations had developed. In fact, the fear of the open sea, fear of the unknown, that remains so strongly embedded in our psyche today may be traced back to this formative period in the early Neolithic, when people moved inland, when the resources of the sea became less important, and when control by the new elite involved keeping people in one place and restraining them from exploration. In the preceding period – the Mesolithic – people had lived near the sea and ranged widely, and hunter-gatherers of the Palaeolithic travelled thousands of miles over land and sea. People first crossed the ocean to Australia some fifty thousand years ago, and by fifteen thousand years ago people had travelled huge distances by sea along the west coast of the Americas from the Bering Strait.

  To those early travellers the ocean was not a barrier but a conduit, the most important conclusion reached by the adventurer Thor Heyerdahl after completing his ‘Ra’ expeditions in 1970 using reed boats. He was referring to his experience on the Atlantic Ocean, where in the right place – sailing south from Gibraltar – it is difficult not to be swept westwards across the ocean, a voyage that would have been well within the technology of early Neolithic seafarers using reed, skin or wooden boats. Yet there is another aspect to early seafaring that new research on Neolithic religion brings to the fore. A sea voyage was the final journey in the dream world of Gilgamesh, his ultimate adventure; and watery visions, of water being an access point to the underworld and of floating in an endless ocean, are common altered-consciousness experiences. Among people who were sensitized to these experiences, a voyage such as one across the Atlantic could be perceived at a level of consciousness unfamiliar to those of us who have not been driven to hallucination – as many are when pushed to their limits at sea – or to interpret those visions within a system of ritual and belief that gave structure to the experience. I have tried to bring something of this across in the Prologue. To these early seafarers, reality may have merged with the spirit world; the sea voyage became a voyage of the mind. For those still steeped in the old religion – the religion of spirit journeys – ocean voyages may not have provoked terror, but actually have been relished.

  It seems possible that for the greater part of the history of Homo sapiens, it has been this type of belief system, rather than belief in gods and deferential acts of worship, that has sustained people’s spiritual needs – a system built on remembering and rationalizing dreams, and on other altered-conscio
usness experiences that seemed to access a supernatural world, a system whose common features may owe much to human neuropsychology. The inception of religion with anthropomorphic gods may have gone hand-in-hand with early state formation and the burgeoning power-base of the new leaders, something we may see appearing with dramatic speed and conflicting with the old religion at the remarkable sites of the early Neolithic – at Çatalhöyük, Göbekli Tepe, Nevali Çori, Çayönü – over nine thousand years ago. As more early sites are discovered and excavated – one day perhaps including submerged sites off the Black Sea coast of Turkey, even a real-life Atlantis – it may truly be possible to speak of archaeologists making the greatest discovery of all time, and revealing the birthplace of the gods.

  The swirling vortex images from the Neolithic may be the origin of two ancient symbols that have come to have dark connotations, the swastika – first seen on Bronze Age pottery of Troy – and the Sonnenrad, the sun symbol that Heinrich Himmler incorporated in the decoration of his SS ‘order-castle’ at Wewelsburg. There, the symbol was placed in the floor as if it were at the apex of an axis mundi, an idea that would have been well within Himmler’s mystical vision of Wewelsburg, and it was this that led me to imagine the Zoo flak tower in Berlin in similar terms.

  The Zoo flak tower was one of the most terrifying German creations of the Second World War, a vast five-storey concrete bunker that rose like a castle keep out of the grounds of the Berlin Zoo. The tower provided shelter for thousands of civilians during bombing raids, and had its own power supply, water reservoir and hospital; in the final hours of the Russian onslaught, the defenders even dropped explosives off the parapet like medieval soldiers pouring burning oil on attackers. It was one of three flak towers in Berlin and was ready for action in April 1941, along with the adjacent L-Tower, which housed the radar that directed the flak (anti-aircraft) fire.

  The main armament of the Zoo tower comprised four huge twin 128mm guns, each barrel capable of firing up to ten rounds a minute. The tower was designed with elasticity in the ferroconcrete to withstand the shock of the guns firing at high elevations, which drove the recoil force down into the structure; but damage was caused to the concrete as well as to the gun crews’ hearing when the guns were fired at low elevations, at ground targets. The flak towers shot down many British and American bombers, as well as Russian dive-bombers in the 1945 onslaught that were engaged by the 37mm and quadruple 20mm guns on the outer gallery below the parapet. During the final assault the big guns provided withering fire against infantry and tanks until the Soviets advanced below the minimum elevation of the guns, and the last German defenders outside the tower were overwhelmed.

  Of great significance for this novel, the Zoo tower also provided safe storage for art and antiquities from numerous Berlin museums, held in special air-conditioned rooms on the third floor – among them the Egyptian bust of Nefertiti, the carved frieze from Pergamon in Turkey, Kaiser Wilhelm II’s collection of coins and, most famously, the ‘Treasure of Priam’, excavated by Heinrich Schliemann at Troy in 1873, donated by him to the German people before his death in 1890, and held until the the beginning of the Second World War in the Museum for Pre- and Early History in Berlin.

  In March 1945, under orders from Hitler and overseen by Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, many of the treasures in the Zoo tower were removed to a salt mine at Merkers in Austria, where they were discovered soon after by soldiers of General Patton’s US Third Army. Three crates were left behind; those containing the treasure of Priam. We know this because the Treasure disappeared after the war and for many years was thought lost. The true course of events has only recently been reconstructed, and much remains uncertain. The director of the Museum for Pre- and Early History, Dr Wilhelm Unverzagt, an ardent Nazi, is thought to have insisted that the crates remain in Berlin when the other treasures were removed in March 1945, though whether or not there was a higher authority behind that decision – Himmler would be a likely candidate, with his interest in prehistory – remains unknown. Unverzagt is thought to have stayed in the Zoo tower with the crates after the 2 May surrender to ensure that they were not looted by Russian soldiers but instead remained intact for transport to Moscow, where they remained hidden in the storerooms of the Pushkin Museum until they were rediscovered in 1987.

  In the novel, I imagine the ‘Schliemann Gallery’ in the Museum for Early and Pre-History being presided over by a statue bust of Otto von Bismarck, the ‘Iron Chancellor’, who had been a friend of Schliemann’s; my image of the broken statue in the Zoo tower is based on a real-life shattered statue of Bismarck photographed in 1945 in the town square of Rigorplatz, outside Berlin, and the fictional statue in turn inspires the fictional Hoffman to think of Ozymandias, the toppled statue of the king in Shelley’s poem who seems to stand for all the crumbled dreams of power that Hoffman would have seen around him in those dark days of April 1945.

  The Zoo tower provided a headquarters for Josef Goebbels in his final guise as Reich Commissioner for the Defence of Berlin, though he himself did not leave the Führerbunker in the days leading up to the murder of his children and his own suicide. The words and actions of Heinrich Himmler portrayed in this novel are fictional, including his appearance at the Zoo tower on the morning after Hitler’s suicide on 30 April 1945. Nevertheless, Himmler’s movements over the final days before the German surrender were secretive and shrouded in mystery, and allow the possibility of a clandestine visit to Berlin as suggested here. On 28 April 1945, the BBC had reported Himmler’s attempt to negotiate with the Western Allies, and the following day Hitler declared him a traitor and ordered his arrest. Late on 1 May, Himmler attempted to negotiate with Grand Admiral Dönitz, Hitler’s appointed successor, for a place in the new government, and over the next days he followed Dönitz and his puppet government from Plön to Flensburg on the Baltic. Despite being dismissed by Dönitz on 6 May, Himmler continued to retain the trappings of power, driving round with an SS escort and maintaining an aircraft. He was finally arrested in disguise – wearing an eye patch, with his moustache shaved off – by the British, and committed suicide in custody using a cyanide capsule on 23 May.

  Oberstleutnant (Lieutenant-Colonel) Ernst Hoffman is fictional. In my story, Himmler promotes him two ranks higher to the SS equivalent of brigadier, SS-Brigadeführer. A real-life Stuka ace was closely associated with the Zoo tower: Oberst (Colonel) Hans-Ulrich Rudel, one of the most highly decorated German servicemen of the war, with over 2,500 combat missions to his credit. Rudel was a committed Nazi and much feted by the Nazi inner circle. On 8 February 1945, he was shot down and sent to the hospital in the Zoo tower to recover, spending over a month there and being visited by Goebbels and Göring. In a rare eyewitness account from inside the tower, Harry Schweitzer, a Hitler Youth flak auxiliary, described how Rudel was allowed on to the roof to see the 37mm guns in action, a matter of some interest to him as his Stuka mounted a version of the same weapon. Schweitzer was one of many Hitler Youth and Luftwaffe boy auxiliaries who manned the flak guns in Berlin, and he gives a vivid account of the final days in the Zoo tower: the terrible overcrowding, the asphyxiating conditions, attacks by dive-bombers, and the pulverizing effect of the 128mm guns when they were fired at low elevation into the city, causing shock waves so severe that they damaged the parapet of the tower. Colonel Hans-Oscar Wohlermann, a Panzer Corps artillery officer, described the horrific view from the gun platform: ‘One had a panoramic view of the burning, smouldering and smoking great city, a scene which again and again shook one to the core.’

  Harry Schweitzer also described the announcement that came through internal tannoys for a breakout from the Zoo tower at about 2300 hours on 1 May. The tower was surrendered to the Soviets about an hour and a half later. A Luftwaffe doctor present, Dr Walter Hagedorn, estimated the numbers inside at more than 30,000 – mostly civilians – including 1,500 wounded and 500 dead. Miraculously, most of the survivors were able to leave unharmed. The circumstances of the final day in the to
wer are hazy, but provide a basis for the fictional scenario in this novel. On the evening of 30 April, the Russians sent German prisoners to the tower to try to persuade the garrison to surrender, assuring them that there would be no executions. The following morning, the Russians received a reply, signed by Colonel Haller, garrison commander, saying that the surrender would take place at midnight. But Haller had not been the official garrison commander, suggesting that there had been a coup; the reason for the delay was apparently to allow time for a breakout, on the assumption that the Russian assurances were worthless. In the event the breakout never occurred and the Russians reached the tower and took the surrender from Haller, who apparently told a Russian officer that two high-ranking generals were hiding inside. The Russian writer Konstantin Simonov was led to a concrete room, where he found one of the generals lying dead, eyes wide open and clutching a pistol, a dead woman by his side, and between the general’s legs ‘a bottle of champagne, one third full’.

  The idea that Hoffman could have flown out of Berlin in a Fieseler Storch is based on a true-life episode from those final days of Nazi power, when the celebrated Nazi aviator Hanna Reitsch (herself also treated in the Zoo tower hospital, in 1943) flew the wounded Luftwaffe general Ritter von Greim into Berlin and then out again after he had visited the Hitler bunker. They survived Russian anti-aircraft fire and landed on a Berlin street in a badly damaged Storch on 27 April, leaving two days later in an Arado Ar 96, hours before Hitler’s suicide. Both aircraft types were lightweight, but the Storch in particular excelled at short take-off and landing.