Atlantis Beneath the Ice (25 page)

The most notable site, only accepted after some nasty squabbling by the defenders of the clovis first theory, is in Chile and has been clearly dated to at least 14,500 years ago.
¹⁸
The Monte Verde site broke through the wall established by Clovis and opened up the possibility that people had been in America long before 9500 BCE.

The clovis first theory has been falsified, and we who have long believed that the First Nations of America origins date to much farther back than 9600 BCE have been vindicated. But the prevailing paradigm
that assumes that all the first people of America came from Asia has yet to be challenged.

Physical evidence increasingly points to South America as the first entry point to America. Could these people have come from Antarctica? The idea is as unacceptable today as pre-Clovis entry-point sites were just a few years ago. But if we listen to the mythology of the people of Lake Titicaca, we learn that their ancestors came from the south at the time of a Great Flood (see
chapter 6
). If we take seriously the mythology of the Okanagan people, who say their ancestors came from a vast island in the middle of the ocean (see
chapter 3
), then we might just begin to look at the ancient age of South America in a new light.

ELEVEN

FINDING ATLANTIS

There has been a cycle in the quest for knowledge. We began in humility, appealing to the gods to protect us from the unknown. Later, we imagined a world perfectly ordered by God’s divine will. But it was faith in reason that transformed us from believers in supernatural intervention into followers of the creed of progress. And now we have come full circle, once again humbled by the immensity of the universe. We no longer cast spells to protect us against the unknown. We cast spacecraft into the void.

The story of our search for order and pattern has been lost in the mute, unwritten past. For before science, there was magic. Magic was a tool of the hunter when he drew stark images of animals over firelit walls. Through magic the shaman hoped to secure the future, but a future that never dared to challenge the elder’s myths. It was taboo to doubt the gods. This inhibition was the fatal flaw in the design woven by these early magicians. All was explained, but little was truly understood. The power of magic was destined to flounder, for without the freedom to cast doubt on an idea, there can be no genuine inquiry. And without inquiry, magic could not evolve into science.

The hunger to command and the need to pilot our own fate have been among humankind’s most persistent traits. Science has shone a great light along the shadowy road, but it has been a bumpy ride. Unlike shamans or the priests, scientists must by the very nature of their calling be willing to tamper with taboos. From this struggle there emerged a new way of seeing the world and a new way of learning and knowing.

For millennia, our worldview was clouded by the mist of magic and myth. But then, quite suddenly, six centuries before the birth of Christ, came a clearing. On the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, the Ionian Greeks burst forth with a fresh and energetic way of seeing the world. They heralded the death of magic and the birth of science.

The first “immortal” to be struck down by the new sword of science was the Olympian god of the sea, Poseidon. As master of the ocean he commanded the respect, awe, and honor of all seafaring Greeks. Poseidon was a violent god who carried within his arsenal the dreaded weapon of the earthquake. Since the land of the Greeks had often fallen victim to earthquakes, Poseidon was not only worshipped but also feared. It is not surprising then, given this fear, that the Greeks were disturbed when one of the seven wise men, Thales (ca. 636–546 BCE), dared to suggest that the fearful rumbling of the earth was not controlled by the powerful Poseidon.

Thales may have acquired his materialistic explanation of the cause of earthquakes while visiting Egypt. We are told, “He went to Egypt and spent some time with the priests there.”
¹
Thales set no bounds on his curiosity and delved into the enigmas of the soul as well as solutions to the mysteries of the universe. These lines attributed to him touch the depth of his intellect: “Of all things that are, the most ancient is God, for he is uncreated. The most beautiful is the universe, for it is God’s workmanship. The greatest is space, for it holds all things. The swiftest is mind, for it speeds everywhere. The strongest, necessity for it masters all. The wisest, time, for it brings everything to light.”
²

But above all Thales dared to doubt. He argued that the island-earth was like a great ship at sea that, as it rocked on the waters, experienced earthquakes. Thales had proclaimed the unthinkable. He had usurped the role of a god by providing a physical explanation for a natural phenomenon. Thales thus became the world’s first acknowledged scientist.
^a
He began the long, relentless battle that, even in our time, is waged between faith and reason, myth and science.

It is accepted opinion today that mythology and science are like oil and water: they don’t mix. But like Thales we should always be willing to cast doubt on accepted opinion. If we use science as our torch, a pathway can be made through the darkness of mythology: myth and science need not always collide.

Thales found order within the universe: he showed that gods and goddesses were no longer needed to unravel the powers of nature. Human beings could do it alone. However, it would take centuries before this radical notion was to find its proper place in history. Until then another explanation for the mystery of the actions of the gods was needed.

In the fourth century BCE, a Sicilian by the name of Euhemerus wrote
Sacred History,
in which he argued that the exploits of the gods and goddesses of ancient times were simply exaggerated tales of the real deeds of former kings and queens. Thus was born the first school of mythology. The idea was simple but provocative. Myths were signposts to the past. They might be used to recapture the lost lines of history. They were disguised truths that might lead us to hidden treasures, lost cities, perhaps even lost continents. But this “lost history” school of mythology never became widely accepted. The people of Rome preferred to believe in the reality of their gods and goddesses. Later, Christians would seek paradise in the afterlife, not on earth.

The first great mythologist of the modern age was the son of an Italian bookseller. Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) was a selfeducated scholar who saw myths as valuable keys to understanding human culture and the workings of the mind. Vico believed that societies move through various stages of development and that each stage produced a corresponding level of mythology. He wrote, “The fables originating among the first savage and crude men were very severe, as befitted the founding nations emerging from a state of fierce bestial freedom.”
³

In this anthropological approach myths are vital keys to understanding culture. Each culture is seen as a unique and self-contained unit. Vico recognized the limitations of his interpretation and augmented it by comparing myths from around the world. “Uniform ideas originating among entire peoples unknown to each other must have a common ground of truth.”
⁴

Also, Vico offered the prospect of finding common ground in the nature of the human mind. “There must in the nature of human things be a mental language common to all nations, which uniformly grasps the substance of things.”
⁵

This psychological school of mythology found forceful proponents in the English anthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) and the psychiatrists Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and Carl Jung (1875–1961). More recently the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (born 1908) and the American mythologist Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) have enriched this approach to myths.

For Tylor the fascination lay within the commonality of myths from around the world. “The treatment of similar myths from different regions, by arranging them in large compared groups, makes it possible to trace in mythology the operation of the imaginative processes recurring with the evident regularity of mental law; and thus stories of which a single instance would have been a mere isolated curiosity, take their place among well-marked and consistent structures of the human mind.”
⁶

Freud believed that the mind filters memories to suit its present state and distrusted myths as an inaccurate representation of real events.

One is thus forced by various considerations to suspect that in the so-called earliest childhood memories we possess not the genuine memory-tree but a later revision of it, a revision which may have been subjected to the influences of a variety of later psychical forces. Thus the “childhood memories” of individuals come in general to acquire the significance of “screen memories” and in doing so offer
a remarkable analogy with the childhood memories that a nation preserves in its store of legends and myths.
⁷

Jung took the idea of myths as doorways to the mind even further than Freud. Like Vico, Jung was fascinated by the appearance of similar myths around the globe. “Although traditional transmission by migration certainly plays a part there are, as we have said, very many cases that cannot be accounted for in this way and drive us to assume the existence of a collective psychic substratum. I have called this the
collective unconscious.
”
⁸

Like Freud and Jung, Levi-Strauss seeks clues in myths to the workings of the mind. “The purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction.”
⁹

Campbell summarized the contribution of this school of mythology. “The bold and truly epoch-making writings of the psychoanalysts are indispensable to the student of mythology; for, whatever may be thought of the detailed and sometimes contradictory interpretations of specific cases and problems, Freud, Jung, and their followers have demonstrated irrefutably that the logic, the heroes, and the deeds of myth survive into modern times. In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dream.”
¹⁰

For Campbell the myths provide pathways to ethical wisdom and offer beacons of spiritual guidance. In his view, to look at them as potential lost history is missing the spiritual dimension altogether.

From Vico to Campbell, mythologists have sought the key to the puzzle of the nature of imagination and thought. In this book we have examined many myths that speak of the lost island paradise and have explored the significance of what we call the “sun-deluge motif”. These are stories which blame the great flood on a dramatic change in the sun’s path. But we do not offer the myths as concrete evidence. However, we do believe that these ancient renditions represent something more than just evidence of the similarity of humanity’s mental
makeup. We propose that certain myths do indeed represent lost history, but this conjecture is based on the capacity of the earth crust displacement theory to provide order to recognized, long-standing problems in science.

The noted sociologist of science Thomas S. Kuhn lists five key characteristics of a good scientific theory. “Accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity and fruitfulness—are all standard criteria for evaluating the adequacy of a theory.”
¹¹

The simplicity of the theory of earth crust displacement drew Albert Einstein to Hapgood’s idea. Hapgood replaces the presupposition of a relatively stable crust with the notion that the crust shifts. Using this simple assumption, the theory is capable of accurately and consistently addressing a wide scope of established problems. It provides a framework with which to comprehend the mysterious myths of the lost island paradise and the worldwide appearance of the sun-deluge motif. And it offers an explanation of why some ancient maps are so strangely accurate—maps that appear to have originated from an unknown civilization.

The theory also points to Lesser Antarctica as the site of Atlantis. But what have others believed about the lost continent?

ATLANTIS THEORIES

After Plato’s death his student Aristotle (384 BCE–322 BCE) became the foremost philosopher in Athens. Aristotle was said to be highly skeptical about Homer’s famous legend of Troy, declaring, “He who brought it into existence can also cause it to disappear.”
¹²

These words were applied by Aristotle’s followers to discredit Plato’s account of Atlantis, giving rise to the idea that Atlantis was entirely the product of Plato’s lively imagination.
^b
A more sophisticated branch of this “imaginary” school was founded by the second-century Greek
philosopher Numenius. He argued that Plato wrote the story as an allegory. This approach still has supporters today.

But as we have shown, the compelling idea of Atlantis is found woven again and again into the myths of peoples with whom Plato could not possibly have had any contact. The Haida and Okanagan myths of a lost land and the Cherokee story of a floating island in the Southern Hemisphere are not ideas that Plato could have borrowed. Nor is it possible, if Plato’s story were simply an allegory, that he could give an accurate geographic account of the world as seen from Antarctica.