transcript

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[00:02] Some of history's myths are repeated so often, and with such authority that we begin to believe they're true. Many experts would classify the lost civilization of Atlantis as one of those tales. For centuries, amateurs and experts have combed the globe for evidence that this fabled island existed. Tonight, we'll trace the story of Atlantis back to its roots in ancient Greece, and follow this trail of questions to the wild conspiracy theories of the modern day. So, just relax and let your mind drift as we explore the sleepy history of Atlantis. It seems like there is hardly a place on Earth that hasn't been suggested as the original site of the lost city of Atlantis. Although most people probably envision it being somewhere in the vicinity of the Mediterranean, enthusiastic historians and hobbyists have found reasons to place it in locations as far-flung as Ireland, Scandinavia, the Americas, Antartica, and, last but not least, the North Pole. This wide variety of theories epitomizes the allure of Atlantis. The idea of this lost civilization is like an empty bucket that can be filled with the aspirations and wishes of almost anyone who wants to construct a story around it. Ironically, this has only been possible because of the great vacuum of true historical evidence about Atlantis that exists. To begin with, let's go back to the very root of this legend, ancient Greece. The philosopher Plato lived between roughly 423 and 328 BCE. As part of the dialogues called Critias and Timaeus, which he wrote in or around 360 BCE, he told a story about a civilization called Atlantis. He described Atlantis as a marvellous island, bigger than Libya and Asia Minor combined. It was constructed of concentric circles of land and water that had canals running into the center. Atlantis was a great naval power in Plato's story, exerting control over other islands and places on the continents of Europe and Africa. He described its location as being in the Atlantic Ocean, just beyond the pillars of Hercules. For modern listeners, those happen to be the two promontories that mark the mouth of what we know as the Strait of Gibraltar. As the icing on the cake, this marvelous place called Atlantis had deities on its side. It was protected by the god Poseidon and ruled by his son Atlas. Atlantis sounds like a wonderful place to live, with rich soil and comforts, such as beautiful architecture and advanced irrigation. The government was organized, and people were active in recreation and prayer. But, as is the case in many a cautionary tale, Atlanteans became overly confident and greedy. They tried to expand their rule over more territory in Europe and Africa. That is, Plato says, until the much smaller city of Athens efficiently organized against Atlantis and defeated them. As the story goes, Atlantis was subsequently swallowed by earthquakes and floods, sinking under the ocean forever. Knowing especially that Plato was a proud citizen of Athens, it seems clear that this story was a parable, including to people of the day. The philosopher claimed that it had come down to him through a chain of storytellers that included his grandfather, via the Athenian statesman named Solon, who had gotten it from an Egyptian priest. And even then, the priest said it had happened 9,000 years prior. So, to begin with, this story would have been about something almost unimaginably long past, even when Plato told it. Despite that, there are many who argue that parallels exist between the story of Atlantis and actual historical events. Still, people of the day seemed to accept the story of Atlantis as a parable, and it is one that resonates even today. A small, righteous city-state defeats a larger corrupt and greedy power. Spiritual might conquers wealth and engineering. In short, the little guy wins because his heart is true. Some would point out that this parable of Atlantis is in keeping with Plato's other thoughts, such as those in his work The Republic, about the downward slide of a state that becomes too accustomed to luxury. All of this fits in with the theory that Atlantis was never meant to be anything but fiction. Of course, it makes sense that Plato didn't conjure the entire concept of Atlantis out of thin air. Some historians suggest that the island civilization might have been inspired by the prior history of Persia or Carthage, which had both been imperialistic powers fueled by military might. And the actual destruction of Atlantis may well have been a fictional echo of the very real Minoan eruption that devastated the island of Santorini, once called Thera, in about 1600 BCE. But there is a big difference between drawing inspiration from life and actually documenting true history. If Plato did get ideas from the real world, he may well have been trying to teach a moral lesson relating to fairly recent events, such as the Trojan War or the unsuccessful Greek invasion of Sicily in 413 BCE. He did have a follower named Cranthor, who seems to have believed his story about Atlantis was true. But another follower named Strabo, a few centuries later, referenced a joke Aristotle made about how good Plato was at conjuring nations out of nowhere and then decimating them. So, to be fair, even for his relative contemporaries, one could say mileage may vary when it came to their views of his parable and its veracity. Atlantis didn't really come up much in written discourse for nearly 2,000 years after that, but that changed in a roundabout sort of way in the year 1516. Thomas More wrote his book Utopia, coining the term for ideal societies that would dominate the coming centuries. The word utopia is a clever choice, because it resembles both the Greek words utopos, which means no place, and eftopos, which means good place. Written in Latin, Moore's book suggested an imaginary and perfect society, or a perfect society which cannot exist. While Moore's work was considered both ironic and whimsical, it echoed ideas from Plato's Republic. Not long after, in 1623, an Italian friar named Tommaso Campanella wrote another book called The City of the Sun about an ideal society built on equality. However, it was a posthumously published and incomplete work by the English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon that pulled Plato more explicitly into the discussion in 1627. Tucked into the back of a larger work about history, a section called New Atlantis featured a vision of humanity's ideal future. Specifically, he wrote of a highly advanced society on a previously unknown oceanic island called Ben Salem, whose inhabitants were chaste, honest, and highly moral. Bacon's work isn't actually about Atlantis, but it's allusion to Plato's Atlantis in the title marks an important moment in the history of the fabled civilization. Bacon's Ben Salem is located somewhere near Peru, and one of its most important features is a hallmark reverence for scientific inquiry. Rather than a land built upon military might and engineering, Bacon's version of Atlantis values generosity and enlightenment, dignity and splendor, piety and public spirit. Students of Plato's original work may remember that the ancient Atlantis had fallen due to hubris and overreach, ultimately defeated by Athens. Therefore, Bacon's reference in his story about the admirable island of Ben Salem shows a shift in people's recall about the true nature of the original story. One might call it a makeover, that evolution would continue unchecked in the ensuing centuries. For the next couple of centuries, Atlantis popped up a few times as an ironic reference in satirical works that were designed to criticize politics, religion and society. In general, these pieces represented the flip side of utopia, which we now know well as dystopia. But all this did was more firmly establish the legend of Atlantis as a story about a perfect civilization. It was the foil for all the bad things the authors of these pieces wished to criticize. In 1882, a former US congressman named Ignatius L. Donnelly published a book that ignited a whole new series of conspiracy theories about Plato's Atlantis. In his book Atlantis, the anti-diluvian world he asserted with only the most questionable evidence, that Atlantis was a real island. Using a blend of archaeology, natural sciences and language studies, he said that every existing human civilization could be traced back to it. Accordingly, he suggested that Atlantis had been the root of all the great advances in society. Incredibly, despite its enormous faults, the book became a bestseller. And it's fair to say that its effects are still being felt today. Quoted in a live science article, Atlantis author Mark Adams characterizes Donnelly as the first great Atlantis fundamentalist, in that he believed that Plato's story was factually accurate. Adams says that Donnelly added plenty of his own material to his book, and refers to the ex-Congressman as a bag of winds. According to Adams, Ignatius even sent a copy of his Atlantis book to Charles Darwin, who was polite but skeptical. Basically, Adams concludes, Donnelly chose facts to suit his needs. Nonetheless, people love a good story. Donnelly's book kicked off a flurry of other publications entertaining his theories and suggesting the true location of Atlantis. Donnelly had promoted what is now called diffusionism, which asserts that, against scientific evidence, all great cultures began with a single source. Only six years after Donnelly's publication, a Russian-American woman named Helena Blavatsky contributed her own story to the history of Atlantis. Known as Madame Blavatsky, she was a founder of a theory called Theosophy. Blavatsky described this movement as a revival of ancient wisdom that represented the synthesis of science, religion, and philosophy. The Theosophists believed that an ancient religion, centered on one god, would soon return to eclipse other world religions. Some of the principles of theosophy were freedom of the spirit and reincarnation. For modern listeners, it's helpful to know that theosophy is often considered to be a predecessor to new age beliefs that flourished many years later during the 1970s. In her book, The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky put forth her own theory about the origins of humanity, suggesting that Atlantis was one of the major sources. Her ideas were both outlandish and unethical, and they flew in the face of the work of Charles Darwin, who had read Ignatius Donnelly's book only a few years before. Historians have condemned the Secret Doctrine for profound faults, ranging from plagiarism and fabrication to anti-Semitism and racism. Unfortunately, Blavatsky's ideas would be fuel for the fire when the Nazi party sought to pursue such ideas a few decades later. One of the adherents to Blavatsky's theories was a German archaeologist named Paul Borchardt. Coming to theosophy in early adulthood, Borchardt went on to become an expert in the region of Tunisia after serving in the Middle East during World War I. He subsequently became convinced that the waters off the coast of Tunisia were the original site of Atlantis. Borchardt published his findings in a few German articles in the late 1920s. However, as a Jew, he found his career in Germany cut short by the rise of anti-Semitism in the 1930s, and he eventually had to flee the country. Ironically, a member of the rising Nazi regime named Albert Herrmann was sold on Borchardt's Tunisia theory, and he ran with it. Even prior to the publishing of Borchardt's articles, Herrmann got funding to take an expedition to Tunisia in order to search for the lost city. In an amazing display of hubris, Herrmann decided Plato's descriptions of the location of Atlantis had been faulty, and that it had actually existed in the vicinity of Tunisia as recently as the 14th century BCE. But the silliness went even further than challenging Plato on his own story. Herrmann further insisted that Atlantis was actually a phantom island called Frisland. This was a huge leap, as Frisland had previously been unrelated to Atlantis, and almost certainly never existed. It had merely appeared on a few maps from the late 16th to early 17th centuries, located in the largely unexplored areas around Iceland and Greenland. Its possible Frisland was a representation of one of those real places. But it was certainly never a real, freestanding island. Whatever the case, Ehrman resurrected the idea of Frisland, said it was Atlantis, and then, as the final flourish, he decided the Atlanteans were Germanic, and that the Tunisian Atlantis was a colony of the Aryans at Frisland. This assertion was not only bizarre, but also clearly calculated to suit the purposes of the Nazi Party. The additional conspiracy theories that populated the 20th century were often wild and uninformed, but perhaps less seriously unethical. Around the same time that these strange imaginings were occupying people in Germany, an American psychic named Edgar Case put a fundamentalist Christian spin on the Atlantis legend. He conducted psychic readings for people whom he claimed had lived past lives in Atlantis, and suggested that it was a landmass located between the Strait of Gibraltar and the Gulf of Mexico. Case claimed that the civilization had existed 12,000 years ago, before the end of the last ice age, and that the water level would have been 300 feet lower, exposing Atlantis as one great island instead of the chain of islands that appear there today. He claimed that Atlantis had been a highly advanced society, but that its destructive use of technology had resulted in its demise around 10,000 BCE. He further insisted that surviving Atlanteans migrated to areas such as Egypt, the Yucatan Peninsula and Bimini in the Bahamas, taking their technology with them. Philosopher and academic Robert Todd Carroll had major critiques of Case to offer in his book, The Skeptic's Dictionary. He said, Case is one of the main people responsible for some of the sillier notions about Atlantis. And he pointed, for example, to Case's belief that Atlanteans powered their cities with a giant crystal. He also cited Case's prediction that in 1958, the United States would rediscover a death ray which had been used on Atlantis. No such death ray was ever discovered. It's pretty easy to trace a line, however, between Case's bizarre fictions and another Atlantis conspiracist from the 1970s, who is going to come up again shortly. Throughout the 20th century, the growth of New Age beliefs spawned even wilder tales on Atlantis mythology. In some cases, Atlantean lore collided with Mayanism, which was a specific type of blending of New Age beliefs and pre-Columbian Maya myths. It's important to note that Mayanism is not the same as historical studies about the Maya people, nor is it a representation of their contemporary religion. Instead, thanks to science fiction trends, Mayanism evolved to include contacts with extraterrestrials, suggesting that ancient lost civilizations might have been highly advanced because of visitors from outer space. Mayanism was able to flourish during the 20th century, partially due to pop culture and fantasy literature. Instead of dying out as science advanced, the New Age conspiracy theories flourished in the latter half of the century, thanks to books published by people like Charles Berlitz in the 1970s. If you recognize the name Berlitz, you're not alone. He was a member of the family behind the Berlitz language learning empire. In fact, having been educated at Yale, he had served as vice president in his family's publishing house. He reportedly spoke 25 languages to some degree. At the time of his death, he was reported as having sold more books than any other linguist in history, thanks to the family business. However, underneath his prosperous, ordinary exterior, Charles Berlitz pursued a lot of paranormal research topics. An article written for Skeptic magazine after his passing in 2004 said he was responsible for some of the greatest pseudo-scientific hoaxes in history. Among the first of his tall tales were some about the lost civilizations of Atlantis. As far back as his teens in the 1930s, Berlitz had been dabbling in science fiction writing. In 1969, his passion for scuba diving converged with his interest in the paranormal, leading him to write a book called The Mystery of Atlantis, which he further expanded upon five years later in his notorious book about the Bermuda Triangle. And this is where we run back into Edgar Cayce. Berlitz insisted that the lost city of Atlantis was actually just off the Bahamas. He claimed that it was a civilization founded by aliens and powered by some form of powerful crystal, just like the one Cayce had proposed. Then, in a melding of multiple conspiracy theories, Berlitz asserted that the unexplained occurrences in the Bermuda Triangle were due to that sunken crystal, or the remnants of an ancient nuclear war or other mysterious technology among the alien residents. We can only imagine what Plato would have thought. In his book, 50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True, author Guy Harrison devotes an entire chapter to theories about Atlantis. According to research completed in the last few decades, people have not given up on this alluring idea of a lost civilization. He cites a 2006 study from Baylor University that revealed 41.2% of Americans at the time still believed in ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis. Even more incredible were the findings of a study mentioned in a 2011 textbook called How to Think About Weird Things. According to the authors of that book, a study on pseudoscientific beliefs showed that 16% of surveyed high school science teachers believed in the existence of Atlantis. The persistence of these beliefs is only boosted by the constant recurrence of headlines about Atlantis theories and discoveries. A casual internet search easily turns up many 21st century headlines on the topic from mainstream news sources such as the BBC and NBC. For example, in 2001, an article declared Atlantis obviously near Gibraltar. Then, in 2004, satellite images show Atlantis. The very next year, tsunami clue to Atlantis found. 2011 brought us Lost City of Atlantis believed found off Spain. If you asked current Atlantis believers to explain their faith, they would probably point to some of the less bizarre theories about where the fabled civilization might have gone. After all, Atlantis is often referred to as a city, and a lot of people don't realize how large Plato said it had been. If you recall from earlier in our story, that was supposedly larger than Libya and Asia Minor combined. Perhaps it's easy for folks to imagine a cataclysmic event, such as the eruption of the volcano in the second millennium BCE, that appears to have devastated what is now Santorini. This event also seems to have affected nearby islands and areas on Crete, resulting in destructive earthquakes and tsunamis. Further heightening the appeal of this theory, the eruption and its other effects seem to have destroyed a highly advanced Minoan society that flourished there at the time. However, in a National Geographic article, renowned ocean explorer Robert Ballard discusses the problems with that theory. He points out that, although this type of event seems like a logical catalyst for the story, the dates don't line up. The eruption would have occurred many thousands of years after the time frame during which Plato set the story. But, taking a step even farther back, what really convinces serious historians that Atlantis was fictional is the total lack of any kind of reliable, human-made evidence that it existed. As Harrison points out, history is silent when it comes to the topic of Atlantis. He adds, there should be direct and obvious references to it and other writings by other cultures, but they are not there. He paraphrases archaeologist Kenneth Fedder as saying, the cross-cultural silence is telling. More broadly, Plato's works are the only primary sources about Atlantis whatsoever. This is a very clear fact. And that silence extends to advances in oceanography and mapping, it seems nearly inconceivable that, with all the technology we now have at our disposal, allowing us to see farther under the water than ever before, that such a large landmass or some evidence of this civilization would not have been noted by now. Further, as author Benjamin Radford points out in his article in Live Science, it would be impossible for such a large area to simply sink into the ocean and disappear. That's just not how plate tectonics work, because the seafloor has spread over time. It is not contracted. Radford quotes archaeologist Ken Feder as saying, The geology is clear. There could have been no large land surface that then sank in the area where Plato places Atlantis. Together, modern archaeology and geology provide an unambiguous verdict. There was no Atlantic continent, there was no great civilization called Atlantis. As for the more untethered assertions made by people like Case and Berlitz, Harrison also points out the total lack of any sort of artifacts to corroborate their stories. He quips, until somebody actually shows up at a press conference with an 11,000-year-old nuclear-powered chariot that levitates and has a big A engraved on the side. It only makes sense to resist believing in Atlantis. Nonetheless, despite all the criticism, people like Harrison seem to view the believers of Atlantis with a fair amount of understanding and good humor. Who discovered the wreckage of the Titanic seems optimistic that there are always new discoveries waiting to be offered up by the sea. And paranormal skeptic Kevin Christopher offers this final thought. Atlantis continues to captivate people's imaginations because it offers the hope that some untapped human potential will someday be uncovered. The undiscovered country of human ideals. Whether or not that's the legacy that Plato intended, it still seems like something worth celebrating.