From Atlantis to the Sphinx (16 page)

Now this fitted in comfortably with a theory Hapgood had been developing since the early 1950s, and had put forward in a book called
Earth’s Shifting Crust
(1959), whose evidence so impressed Einstein that he wrote a preface to it. The purpose of the book had been to explain abrupt changes in the earth’s climate—what one palaeontologist called ‘sudden and inexplicable climatic revolutions’, often involving great extinctions of creatures like mammoths. The Beresovka mammoth, found in Siberia in 1901, had frozen in an upright position with food in its mouth, and spring plants—including buttercups—in its stomach. Hapgood devotes a whole chapter to such ‘great extinctions’.

Hapgood’s theory was that the crust of the earth is rather like the skin that forms on cold gravy, and can be literally pulled around by great masses of ice at the poles. It was not until the 1960s that scientists became aware of the earth’s tectonic plates, and Hapgood took these into account in a later edition of his book called
The Path of the Pole
. His argument was still that ice could cause the whole crust—tectonic plates and all—to move as one. He cites scientific evidence that Hudson Bay was once at the North Pole, and quotes a study of magnetism in British rocks made in 1954 that shows that the British Isles were once more than two thousand miles further south. Soviet scientists have stated that the North Pole was as far south as 55 degrees latitude sixty million years ago, and that it was
in the Pacific
, to the south-west of southern California, three hundred million years ago. Moreover, India and Africa were once covered with a sheet of ice, while—incomprehensibly—Siberia escaped. Is it not possible, Hapgood suggested, that an Ice Age does not cover the whole earth simultaneously, but only those parts that move into polar regions? He goes on to argue that, before the last ‘catastrophic event’ of 15,000 years ago, the Antarctic continent was 2,500 miles further north.

So it did not surprise Hapgood to find in the Oronteus Finaeus map evidence that the South Pole was once free of ice, and probably contained cities and ports.

A Turkish map of 1559, five years before the birth of Shakespeare, shows the world from a northern ‘projection’, as if hovering over the North Pole. Again, the accuracy is incredible. But what may be its most interesting feature is that Alaska and Siberia
seem
to be joined. Since this projection shows a heart-shaped globe, with Alaska on one side of the ‘dimple’ and Siberia on the other, this could merely indicate that the mapmaker did not have space to show the Bering Strait which divides the continents. If this is not so, the consequences are staggering; a land-bridge
did
exist in the remote past—but it may have been as long as 12,000 years ago.

Other early ‘portolans’ were equally remarkable for their accuracy—the Dulcert Portolano of 1339 shows that the cartographer had precise knowledge of an area from Galway to the Don basin in Russia. Others showed the Aegean dotted with islands that do not now exist—presumably drowned by melting ice—an accurately drawn map of southern Great Britain, but without Scotland, and with indications of glaciers, and a Sweden still partially glaciated.

A map of Antarctica published by the eighteenth-century French cartographer Philippe Buache in 1737 shows it as divided into two islands, one large, one small, with a considerable area of water between them. The 1958 survey showed that this is correct. On modern maps, Antarctica is shown as one solid mass. Even Oronteus Finaeus showed it as a solid mass. The implication is that Buache used maps that were far older than those used by Oronteus Finaeus—possibly thousands of years older.

Perhaps the most interesting piece of evidence uncovered by Hapgood is a map of China which he found in Needham’s
Science and Civilisation in China
, dating from 1137, and carved on stone. Hapgood’s studies of Piri Re’is and other European portolans had made him familiar with the ‘longitude error’ mentioned above; now he was astonished to find it on this map of China. If he was correct, then the Chinese had also known the ‘original’ maps on which Piri Re’is was based.

All this explains why Hapgood reached the startling conclusion that there was a flourishing worldwide maritime civilisation on earth before 4000 BC, and that its centre was probably the Antarctic continent, then free of ice. He says in the final chapter of
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings
: ‘When I was a youth I had a plain simple faith in progress. It seemed to me impossible that once man had passed a milestone of progress in one way that he could ever pass the same milestone again the
other
way. Once the telephone was invented, it would stay invented. If past civilisations had faded away it was just because they had not learned the secret of progress. But Science meant
permanent
progress, with no going back...’ And now the evidence of his ‘vanished civilisation’ seemed to contradict that conclusion. He quotes the historian S. R. K. Glanville as saying (in
The Legacy of Egypt
): ‘It may be, as some indeed suspect, that the science we see as the dawn of recorded history was not science at its dawn, but represents the remnants of the science of some great and as yet untraced civilisation.’

Hapgood, of course, does not mention Atlantis—it would have been more than his academic reputation was worth. Yet the story of Atlantis can hardly fail to occur to the minds of his readers—after all, his great catastrophe of fifteen thousand years ago sounds as if it might have been the beginning of the disaster that, according to Plato, engulfed the continent.

The problem, as we have seen, is that Plato’s account of Atlantis is—to put it mildly—hard to accept. In the
Timaeus
he tells us that Atlanteans were warring aggressively against Europe in 9600 BC, and conquered Europe as far as Italy and North Africa as far as Libya. It was the Athenians who, according to Plato, fought on alone, and finally conquered the Atlanteans—after which both Atlantis and Athens were engulfed by floods. But since archaeological investigation shows no sign of occupation of the site of Athens before 3000 BC (when there seems to have been a fairly sophisticated Neolithic settlement on the site of the Acropolis), this must be regarded as myth rather than history (although some of the surprises we have encountered in ancient Egyptian history suggest we should keep an open mind).

In his fragmentary dialogue
Critias
, of which only a few pages exist, Plato tells us that the Atlanteans were great engineers and architects; their capital city was built on a hill, surrounded by concentric bands of land and water, joined by tunnels large enough for a ship to sail through. The city, eleven miles in diameter, contained temples (to the sea god Poseidon—or Neptune) and palaces, and there were extensive harbours and docks. A canal, a hundred yards wide and a hundred feet deep, connected the outermost ring of water to the sea. Behind the city was an oblong plain, three hundred by two hundred miles, on which farmers grew the city’s food supply; this was surrounded by mountains that came down to the sea, and which were full of villages, lakes and rivers. Plato goes into considerable detail about the architecture—even to the colour of the stones of the buildings—and the communal dining halls with hot and cold fountains make it sound like some Utopian fantasy of H. G. Wells.

But as a result of interbreeding—presumably with immigrants—the Atlanteans gradually began to fall away from their god-like origins, and to behave badly. At this point Zeus decided they needed a lesson to ‘bring them back into tune’, and called a meeting of the gods... At which point, the fragment breaks off, and the rest of the history of Atlantis—which once continued in a third dialogue—is lost.

The editors of the Bollingen edition of Plato explain that Plato was ‘resting his mind ... making up a fairy tale, the most wonderful island that could be imagined.’ But if it was intended as a fable or fairy tale, the motive is obscure; it seems far more likely that it is an old story that was told to Plato by Socrates. And if it was fiction, why did Plato insert his first brief account of Atlantis in the
Timaeus
, his account of the creation of the universe, which Benjamin Jowett called ‘the greatest effort of the human mind to conceive the world as a whole...’ if it was merely a fairy tale?

In the second half of the nineteenth century, ships of the British, French, German and American navies began soundings of the floor of the Atlantic, and discovered the ‘Mid-Atlantic Ridge’, a mountain range running from Iceland almost to the Antarctic Circle, which is at one point 600 miles wide. This has proved to be an area of great volcanic activity. Understandably, the discovery caused considerable excitement, and drew the attention of an American congressman named Ignatius Donnelly, whom L. Sprague de Camp has described as ‘perhaps the most erudite man ever to sit in the House of Representatives’. On losing his seat in 1870, when he was 39, Donnelly retired to write
Atlantis: The Antediluvian World
, based upon extensive studies in the Library of Congress; it appeared twelve years later, and became an instant bestseller. The success was deserved; the book shows considerable learning, and even today is as readable as when it was written. Donnelly shows a wide knowledge of mythology and anthropology, and quotes in Greek and Hebrew. He studies flood legends from Egypt to Mexico, pointing out their similarities, and argues that ancient South American civilisations like the Incas and the Maya bear interesting resemblance to early European civilisations. His suggestion that the Azores may be the mountain tops of the sunken continent so impressed the British Prime Minister Gladstone that he tried—unsuccessfully—to persuade the British Cabinet to allot funds to send a ship to search for Atlantis.

Like Schwaller de Lubicz, Donnelly was struck by how quickly Egyptian civilisation seems to have attained a high degree of sophistication; like Schwaller, he suggested that this was because its civilisation originated in Atlantis. In his book
Lost Continents
(1954), L. Sprague de Camp asserts that ‘most of Donnelly’s statements of fact... either were wrong when he made them, or have been disproved by subsequent discoveries.’ Yet his list of Donnelly’s mistakes—such as his views on Egyptian civilisation—only emphasises that Donnelly had a remarkably acute nose for interesting evidence from the past.

It was unfortunate for the budding science of ‘Atlantology’ that it ran into the same problem that Hapgood would encounter when he published
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings
and found himself classified with Erich von Daniken and other advocates of the ‘ancient astronaut’ theory. Five years before Donnelly’s
Atlantis
appeared, a Russian ‘occultist’ named Helena Blavatsky had published an enormous work of ancient mythology called
Isis Unveiled
, which became an unexpected bestseller; one of its fifteen hundred pages deals briefly with Atlantis, declaring that its inhabitants were ‘natural mediums’, whose childlike innocence had made them an easy prey for some malevolent entity who turned them into a nation of black magicians; they started a war that led to the destruction of Atlantis.

Madame Blavatsky died in London in 1891, having became the founder of the Theosophical Society; her final enormous work,
The Secret Doctrine
, claimed to be a commentary on a religious work called
The Book of Dzyan
, written in Atlantis. According to Madame Blavatsky, the present human race is the fifth race of intelligent beings on earth; its immediate predecessor, the fourth ‘root race’, was the Atlanteans.

A leading Theosophist named W. Scott-Elliot followed this up with a work called
The Story of Atlantis
(1896), which achieved widespread popularity. Scott-Elliot claimed that he gained his knowledge directly from his ability to read ‘the Akasic records’, the records of earth history that are imprinted on a kind of ‘psychic ether’, and which are accessible to those possessing psychic sensitivity. He later went on to write a similar book about Lemuria, another ‘lost continent’ that is supposed to have been located in the Pacific. (Donnelly had pointed out there there is evidence that Australia is the only visible part of a continent that stretched from Africa to the Pacific, and the zoologist L. P. Sclater christened it Lemuria, noting that the existence of lemurs from Africa to Madagascar seemed to suggest a continuous land mass.)

One of the most influential theosophists around the turn of the century was the Austrian Rudolf Steiner, and in 1904 he produced a work called
From the Akasic Records
, which described the evolution of the human race. Like Madame Blavatsky, he taught that man began as a completely etherialised being, who has become more solid with each step in his evolution. The Lemurians were the third ‘root race’, the Atlanteans the fourth. Like Plato, Steiner declares that the Atlanteans became increasingly corrupt and materialistic, and that their use of destructive forces led to the catastrophe (which Steiner places around 8000 BC) that caused the disappearance of Atlantis beneath the waves.

The annexation of Atlantis by occultists caused the whole subject to fall into disrepute. In the 1920s, a Scottish newspaper editor named Lewis Spence tried to reverse this trend by returning to Donnelly’s purely historical approach in
The Problem of Atlantis
(1924). He argued for the existence of a great Atlantic continent in Miocene times (25 to 5 million years ago), which disintegrated into islands, the two largest of which were close to the coast of Spain. Another island called Antillia existed in the region of the West Indies. The eastern continent began to disintegrate about 25,000 years ago and disappeared about 10,000 years ago. Antillia survived until more recent times. Cro-Magnon man came from Atlantis, and wiped out the European stock of Neanderthal man about 25,000 years ago. Later Atlanteans, known as Azilian man, founded the civilisations of Egypt and Crete, while other Atlanteans fled westward and became the Mayans.

Like so many Atlantis theorists, Spence became obsessed by his subject, and later works like
Will Europe Follow Atlantis
? and
The Occult Sciences in Atlantis
show a decline in standards of intellectual rigour.