Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (8 page)

•   •   •

After crushing my hopes of having found Atlantis, Villarias suggested we grab a bite to eat. We walked over to Madrid’s busy Calle de Alcalá and sat down in the empty dining room of the sort of
classic Castilian restaurant that hasn’t changed its menu since the Spanish Civil War. (It was two fifteen, extremely early to be lunching in Madrid.) We each had a glass of wine and ordered paella. I asked Villarias why he thought it was that only amateurs seemed to be interested in searching for Atlantis.

“That wasn’t always the case. Going backward from the ’60s you have a long line of serious scholars going back to the Renaissance, people like Schulten.” He cracked a piece of bread in two. “I’m curious. I may do it on my own.”

“Really?” I hadn’t gotten the impression that he took Atlantis seriously.

“Plato deserves an anthropological analysis. Is it a myth? It’s intriguing that he names his sources. Why mention Solon? Stuff like the nine thousand years, you can’t take that literally.” He dismissed the notion with a wave of his butter knife. “Anthropologists have a long history of being able to pull out the contaminants like that. They have used the same approach with some of the Genesis Bible stories, with Sodom and Gomorrah, with the Great Flood.”

A recent interpretation of an ancient cuneiform tablet posits that the fire and brimstone that an angry god hurled down on the Sodomites was actually deadly debris from a comet that hit the earth in 3123 BC. The hunt for Noah’s ark has almost certainly consumed more money and hours than the search for Atlantis, with one team after another picking the faint clues out of Genesis and ascending the slopes of Mount Ararat in hopes of finding proof that the biblical deluge was real. The astronaut James Irwin, whose Christian faith was bolstered by his walk on the moon, led two well-publicized but unsuccessful expeditions in the 1980s. Certainly, there was no shortage of ancient flood myths.

Villarias explained how an anthropological approach would work: “Analyze Plato’s narrative in order to see if that narrative actually has a nucleus, an original core of historical information.”

To search for that nucleus, Villarias said, you’d first look for the elements in the Atlantis tale that are consistent with Plato’s other writings, and those of his predecessors, such as Herodotus. If anything remained that couldn’t be explained by either of those sources, “one could safely assume that the story echoes, or encodes, some historical truth.” That core remnant would then be compared to the other literatures and philosophies of the ancient world, starting with Egypt. “Supposing a consistency is then found, the results of the quest would be that at least the information in the narrative regarding Egypt is true.” Assuming that Plato was telling the truth and that Solon didn’t mistake Egyptian mythology for history, we’d be a long way toward “supposing that the land of Atlantis really existed after all.”

Washed Away

Doñana National Park, Andalusia, Spain

E
ighteen hours later, having caught the high-speed train to Seville; having driven my rented Fiat Panda nose-first against a wall before realizing that I did not know how to shift its manual transmission into reverse; having found a kind stranger to show me how to back up my car and locate the highway; having driven through the departures area of the Seville airport three times while trying to find my hotel; and having slept fitfully for a few hours before rising in the dark to drive seventy miles southwest, I found myself sitting in the passenger seat of a Toyota Land Cruiser and plowing through the Atlantic surf as if I were headed to a clambake in a light beer commercial. At the wheel was naturalist José María Galán. His short-sleeve
PARQUE NACIONAL DE DOÑANA
shirt was nattily accessorized with a scarf and a Yellowstone baseball cap. He was comparing the regularity of the Old Faithful geyser (or
high-zer
, as he pronounced it), which he had recently visited, to the predictability of earthquakes and tsunamis on the Spanish coast. “Look at those waves coming in,” he said, pointing at the incoming whitecaps. “Now imagine one of them sixty meters tall.”

Though it’s not usually associated with seismic activity today, the
Iberian Peninsula has a history of geological instability of the sort that might destroy an island empire in a matter of hours. At 9:40
A.M.
on November 1, 1755, two tectonic plates 120 miles west of Doñana Park faulted, resulting in an earthquake whose magnitude has been estimated at between 8.5 and 9.0 on the Richter scale. (The 2010 Haiti earthquake, which leveled Port-au-Prince and left more than two hundred thousand dead, registered a 7.0. A 9.0 quake would be a hundred times as powerful.) In Portugal, much of Lisbon, including thirty churches celebrating All Saints’ Day, collapsed from the shock. Fire swept through the city. Two-yard-wide cracks split the ground. Thousands of terrified citizens flocked to the port city’s newly built marble quay to escape the inferno; some boarded ships in hope of escaping. Thirty minutes after the first shock, the mob that had swarmed the harbor witnessed an amazing sight: The sea withdrew, leaving the bed of the Tejo River exposed, strewn with lopsided boats and flopping fish stuck in the muck.

The Reverend Charles Davy recorded what happened next: “In an instant there appeared, at some small distance, a large body of water, rising as it were like a mountain. It came on foaming and roaring, and rushed towards the shore with such impetuosity, that we all immediately ran for our lives as fast as possible.” Thousands were dragged into the sea, and boats loaded with refugees “were all swallowed up, as in a whirlpool, and nevermore appeared.” Candles lighted for All Saints’ Day celebrations started fires that burned through most of Lisbon’s remaining structures. As has so often happened with floods throughout history, the catastrophe was explained as the vengeful act of a god angered by the impiety of mortals.

Doñana today is a peaceful oasis on Spain’s heavily developed coast. For nature lovers, there’s a lot to see. Galán pointed out deer and foxes (Doñana had once been a royal hunting ground) and the subtle switchbacking sand trail of a viper. For seekers of lost cities, a
little more imagination is necessary. A lot of trade had obviously come through here long ago. “The only rocks we have here are small piles that ships dumped after using them for ballast,” Galán told me. Pieces of broken pottery in all shapes and sizes were visible everywhere. Avienus’s description of “tiny, deserted heaps of ruined mounds” was still accurate. Small, identical hills of sand turned out to be the remains of ovens used to make ceramics. Buried in each mound was a cornucopia of pottery shards: Phoenician, Roman, Muslim, all mixed together. Only when we were driving away did I notice that the mounds were evenly spaced apart. “Archaeology is very subtle,” Galán said. “You have to be very close to something or very far away.”

We drove a few miles inland to the Cerro del Trigo, the spot where Adolf Schulten had hoped to find Atlantis. A few ancient Roman walls remained exposed in half-filled trenches. “It looks like you should be able to excavate here easily, but there’s water half a meter down,” Galán said, anticipating my next question. There’s also the aboveground water problem. We got back in the Land Cruiser and drove through a bone-dry stretch of sand and scrub. When the autumn rains arrive in October, the Guadalquivir River floods the lowest areas of the park, bringing the tons of sediment that Juan Villarias-Robles described and creating a massive bog that lasts until May. This desertlike area would be transformed in a few weeks by rains into an inland sea. I asked Galán how deep the water would get here once the rains began. “By February, up to here,” he said, holding his hand out the window. Almost five feet high.

We stopped at the Marisma de Hinojos, where Wickboldt and Kühne’s circles and rectangles had appeared on satellite photos. It looked like nothing more than a dry floodplain. I felt an odd sensation, knowing that Atlantis might be a hundred feet below me, packed under layers of sand and clay. My doubts that this habitat would ever be disturbed in the name of Atlantology were confirmed
when we met two of Galán’s colleagues crawling up dunes on their hands and knees picking century-old shotgun pellets out of the sand so that endangered birds wouldn’t eat them.

On the way back to the park’s headquarters, Galán stopped to examine some tiny scorpion tracks in the sand. A gust blew up, and the trail vanished in the cloud. “See, in the end nature erases everything,” Galán said, holding his scarf over his mouth. “I think that’s the real story of Atlantis. No matter how big and powerful you get, you can disappear like
that
.”

The Truth Is out There

All over the Map

A
t this point in the story I should confess something. Atlantis has already been found. Right off the coast of Cadíz, in fact, almost exactly where I’d been driving with José María Galán. I know this because I read a brief 1973 news item about it in
The
Boston Globe
. An instructor at Pepperdine University, Maxine Asher, had used her psychic powers to zero in on signals that told her where the island empire had sunk. Incredibly, divers from her expedition (which also included students who’d paid their own way, expecting to earn college credit) were able to locate compelling evidence of the lost city on the very first day out—roads and columns decorated with concentric-circle designs. Asher was careful not to overstate the importance of her findings. “This is probably the greatest discovery in world history,” she told a reporter, “and will begin a new era of research in anthropology, archaeology, and underwater sciences.”

Asher was chased out of the country by Spanish officials shortly thereafter—one of her students, Tony O’Connell informed me, claimed to have seen a draft of her triumphant press release two days prior to the actual discovery, and the alleged roads and columns were never seen again. But she was by no means the first person—or the
last—to put forth an Atlantis discovery divined solely by extrasensory means. Perhaps the most famous of these was the Kentucky-born psychic Edgar Cayce, known as “the sleeping prophet.” Cayce believed that he could lie down and enter a “superconscious” meditative state. Once plugged into the collective wisdom of the universe, he could answer questions both personal and profound. From 1901 to 1945 Cayce gave more than fourteen thousand of these readings, as he called them. Though he considered himself to be primarily an alternative healer, about seven hundred of his psychic bulletins dealt with Atlantis in some way. According to his supporters, Cayce never read Plato or Ignatius Donnelly, so any similarities on the subject must be either coincidental or evidence of great minds thinking alike.

Today the impressive headquarters for Cayce’s Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE), located in Virginia Beach, houses a sort of extrasensory institute, complete with museum, day spa, and holistic healing school. Yoga classes and tai chi are offered. There is also a library that holds typescripts of Cayce’s original readings and a separate room for Atlantis-related materials, including maps.

“A lot of people had readings done, and they had past lives in Atlantis,” a helpful research librarian named Laura explained cheerily when I called to ask about Cayce’s insights on Atlantis. “There were three destructions. The Atlanteans had the Tuaoi Stone”—a massive crystal that Cayce said provided them with healing powers as well as energy to operate sophisticated aircraft and submarines—“but they powered the stone too high.” This act of arrogance set off geological turbulence worldwide. Prior to the final destruction of Atlantis, which Cayce dated to 10,500 BC, important artifacts and stone tablets containing the recorded history of humanity were secreted away to three Halls of Record located in the Yucatán, Egypt (“under the Sphinx’s paw,” Laura the librarian specified), and, per a 1933 Cayce reading, “under the slime of ages of sea water—near what is known as Bimini, off the coast of Florida.”

Cayce claimed to be able to see the future as well as the past. “Poseidia will be among the first portions of Atlantis to rise again,” he exclaimed during one reading. “Expect it in ’68 and ’69; not so far away!”

A large binder of psychic readings given while diagnosing cases of asthma and kidney stones might not be enough evidence for conventional archaeologists to start writing grant proposals, but Cayce’s predictions about Bimini—an island chain that’s part of the Bahamas—have resulted in what is probably the most concentrated effort to find Atlantis. Starting in the late 1960s, several large-scale underwater explorations have been undertaken in the area of the islands, many of them sponsored by the ARE. The most famous discovery was the so-called Bimini Road, located in 1968, conveniently confirming the prophet’s predicted date. Initially believed to be a J-shaped, man-made limestone path about a third of a mile long, it turned out to be a natural formation. This evidence has not diminished the zeal of ARE-supported projects, and searches for Cayce’s three Halls of Record are ongoing. In 2011, the group announced that it had carbon-dated a rock from an underwater foundation wall near Bimini to 20,000 BC. Cayce’s channeling also provided information regarding Atlantis’s fellow mythical sunken continent of Mu, a name that he used interchangeably with Lemuria.
7
The ARE website posits that recent gene research may prove a mass diaspora from Mu between 50,000 BC and 28,000 BC. This opinion is not widely shared.

Another writer famous for her supernatural insights into Atlantis
was the late nineteenth-century Russian-born occultist Madame Blavatsky, whose head would surely be carved alongside Cayce’s on the Mount Rushmore of psychics. Famous for her séances and for founding the grab-bag spiritual movement known as Theosophy, Blavatsky popularized the idea of Atlantis as the ancient home of a race of supermen. She claimed that her book
The Secret Doctrine
was based on a manuscript written in Atlantis (translated from the original language, Senzar), which was at its height in the years prior to 850,000 BC, at least half a million years before the first
Homo sapiens
is believed to have emigrated from the African continent. The populace of Blavatsky’s Atlantis enjoyed such modern conveniences as electricity and airships powered by psychic energy called
vril
. The causes she attributes to its downfall seem obvious in retrospect: a group practicing black magic spoiled everything by breeding human-animal hybrids akin to centaurs, which were exploited as warriors and sex slaves.

Had Blavatsky’s thoughts on “cosmic evolution” merely served as fodder for future New Age fantasies about Atlantis—you can still browse a nice selection of tarot cards at the Theosophical Society bookstore on East Fifty-Third Street in Manhattan—she could be written off as a harmless crank. But her ideas about “root races”—a division of humanity into higher and lower species—were adopted by German mystics with a passionate interest in demonstrating that the superior Nordic race could trace its lineage back to a mythical island. Blavatsky had written of the Aryans as the most developed of the root races of Atlantis. The term
Aryan
(from the Sanskrit word for “noble”) had originally been used by linguists to describe peoples stretching from northern Europe to India whose languages had shared origins. With the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s, any theory supporting the notion that a master Aryan race was responsible for laying the foundations of culture found a warm welcome in Berlin. A special Nazi research institute, named the Ahnenerbe, was
created for the purpose of finding and disseminating scientific evidence of Germany’s glorious past.

The leader of the Ahnenerbe was Heinrich Himmler, who also led the Gestapo and the Schutzstaffel, or SS, the paramilitary force responsible for carrying out the Final Solution outlined by Adolf Hitler. Himmler’s top adviser in the Ahnenerbe believed that the German peoples could be traced to Plato’s Atlantis, which he theorized had sunk in the Atlantic Ocean. In the late 1930s, as Heather Pringle describes in
The Master Plan
, Himmler sponsored expeditions around the globe to search for evidence of this lost utopia. One trip was to the Canary Islands. Early reports sounded promising, but a major follow-up expedition scheduled for late 1939 was canceled after the German invasion of Poland in September of that year.

The Nazis’ favorite work of Atlantean speculation was the World Ice Theory, an idea based on an epiphany by its originator, the Austrian engineer Hans Hörbiger. He had imagined that the cosmos was filled with small ice planets that Earth sometimes captured in its orbit as moons. When these satellites eventually began their descent through the atmosphere, their spinning mass created its own gravitational pull. This pulled the oceans toward the equator, causing waves thousands of feet high. The capture of our current moon had been violent enough to produce earthquakes, cracks in the crust layer, and enormous volcanic explosions as the Earth’s molten core escaped. When the oceans coalesced around the planet’s girdle like a gigantic spin cycle, Atlantis was among the civilizations washed out.

Juan Villarias-Robles’s description of using anthropological analysis to pull the contaminants out of the ancient world’s most famous stories seemed sensible, but the World Ice Theory was a mythological Superfund site. Part of its appeal to the Nazis was that it contained very little science or math—and therefore served as a counterweight to Albert Einstein’s “Jewish” theory of relativity.
Hörbiger’s famous defense of his unscientific methods—“Calculation can only lead you astray”—may be the least Platonic sentence ever uttered.

•   •   •

Reading about the World Ice Theory I couldn’t help but think of two people. One was Tony O’Connell. The only time I’d seen him angry was when I’d asked at the coffee shop one day about Cayce and Blavatsky and their unconventional methods. “These people who just make things up without evidence get my blood pressure pumping,” he said, turning red. Tony was not a big fan of Mu, either.

The other person I thought of was Rand Flem-Ath, whom I telephoned at his home on Vancouver Island. I should state for the record that Flem-Ath is one of the least Nazi-like people I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to. A librarian on Canada’s laid-back west coast, he created his intriguing last name by combining his surname with that of his wife and sometime coauthor, Rose, also a librarian. The photos I’d seen of him online made him look like a friendly, furry creature from an enchanted forest.

Flem-Ath is the leading proponent of what’s called the Earth Crust Displacement Theory, which is sort of like Plate Tectonic Theory on fast-forward. He also believes that Atlantis was located in Antarctica and is now buried under ice and snow. Flem-Ath’s theory, which he has expounded on in several similar books, is brilliant in its simplicity and its irrefutability. This winning combination has made him both an A-list guest on the Atlantis documentary and talk-radio circuit and a case study for debunkers of pseudoscience. Antarctica wasn’t always cold, Flem-Ath posits. Around 9600 BC, when it was still known as Atlantis, the continent was situated in the tropics. Then it migrated south very rapidly and froze over.

Where the World Ice Theory crowd disdained Einstein’s genius,
however, Flem-Ath eagerly drops Einstein’s name to support his own hypothesis that Antarctica had changed latitude. In a letter to the originator of the Earth Crust Theory, Charles Hapgood, in 1953, Einstein wrote, “I find your arguments very impressive and have the impression that your hypothesis is correct.” The following year the twentieth century’s greatest scientist wrote the foreword to Hapgood’s book
Earth’s Shifting Crust.

Hapgood was a New Hampshire history professor who hypothesized that the earth’s outer skin occasionally shifts violently in a relatively short period of time. The two inner layers, the core and mantle, remain unchanged. (The writer Paul Jordan, who calls Flem-Ath’s theory “perhaps the ultimate catastrophist vision of Atlantis,” compares the effect to an orange whose skin rotates while the fruit wedges inside remain immobile.) Flem-Ath applied Hapgood’s theory to a literal reading of Plato’s Atlantis story, with the sudden shift causing not only Plato’s earthquakes and floods but also rapid climate changes. These shocks, Flem-Ath speculated, had been passed down as myths.

“One thing that seems certain is that a tremendous amount of things were happening around 9600 BC,” Flem-Ath told me. “Melting ice caps. Mass extinctions in North and South America. Suddenly, virtually simultaneously, agriculture appears on several continents but with different crops. I believe a single idea, mobile crust, solves these problems on a global scale.”

Hapgood’s 1966 book,
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings
, used late Renaissance-era maps to try to prove that Antarctica had been ice-free prior to a shift in the position of the poles around 9600 BC. The most famous of these maps is probably the Piri Reis map, a large fragment of a hand-drawn world map assembled in 1513 by the Ottoman admiral after whom it is named. The map was mislaid until 1929, when it was rediscovered during renovations of the former Ottoman sultan’s palace in Istanbul. Geographers generally agree that
the Piri Reis map is genuine and was based on portolan charts, ancient maps by Ptolemy, modern maps by Portuguese sailors, and the New World discoveries of Christopher Columbus. Indeed, the map has been celebrated as a rare copy of Columbus’s own maps, all of which have been lost.

The map’s southernmost section is what has attracted the most interest from Atlantologists. Three hundred years before mainland Antarctica was first sighted in 1820, Piri Reis drew a large continent on the bottom of the world. Thinkers as far back as Aristotle had hypothesized the existence of a landmass at the bottom of the globe, acting as a counterweight to the lands of the Northern Hemisphere. But Hapgood believed Piri Reis’s mystery continent at the bottom of the world was in fact an ice-free Antarctica, because its general shape matched up with maps of subglacial Antarctica that were being assembled in the 1950s. Piri Reis, Hapgood surmised, had based his depiction on ancient maps, which subsequently vanished.

Flem-Ath explained that his eureka moment came when he compared Hapgood’s seismological map of subglacial Antarctica with one of Atlantis published in 1664 by the German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher. On Kircher’s map, Atlantis is a continent that sits in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, between Europe and South America. Flem-Ath speculated that Kircher had based his own map on an ancient Egyptian one that might have been stolen by the Romans. “It was a near-perfect match” with the modern Antarctic one, he told me.

I wasn’t so sure about that. For starters, even the illustrations in Flem-Ath’s book didn’t look that much alike. Also, the cartographic resemblance Flem-Ath sees applies only if Kircher knew exactly where Atlantis was located but had somehow mixed up the locations of Spain and Africa. Seemingly Flem-Ath shared Ignatius Donnelly’s tendency to equate coincidence with evidence. Just because my kids’ snow days always seem to occur on my babysitter’s day off doesn’t mean she controls the weather.