The Gods of Atlantis (19 page)

‘Uh-oh,’ Costas said quietly to Jack. ‘The girlfriend?’

Jack raised his voice. ‘What is it?’

Lanowski looked up. ‘Something I’ve been working on. Something I have to thank Maurice Hiebermeyer for.’

‘
Hiebermeyer?
’ Jack exclaimed. ‘I wasn’t aware that the two of you had ever exchanged a word.’

‘Email. He’s my new friend. My new
best
friend.’

‘What about me?’ Costas muttered.

‘Looks like you’ve been knocked off your pedestal,’ Jack replied, looking with concern at Lanowski. ‘Are you going to share with us?’

‘Of course, I’ve read everything Hiebermeyer’s ever written, and I’ve even donated two of my books to his institute in Alexandria,’ Lanowski said more to himself than to anyone else, looking at the screen as if he were talking to it. ‘Egyptology’s always been a fascination of mine. Engineering problems, mathematical problems. Pyramids, mummies, papyrus. Codes.’ He stared at them, his eyes gleaming. ‘Yes, gentlemen. Codes.’

‘What on earth is he on about?’ Costas whispered.

Jack spoke firmly. ‘What about the ROV, Jacob, what you’re actually here for?’

Lanowski kept his gaze on the monitor, but waved one arm behind him. ‘It’s running itself. If it’s still transmitting and anything shows through, it’ll appear on the big screen above the ROV station.’

‘Okay,’ Jack said. ‘We’re at Atlantis, not in Egypt, and we haven’t got all day. While we’re waiting for Jeremy’s image to upload, I want to talk to you about altered consciousness.’

Lanowski continued staring at the screen, then suddenly looked up. ‘About what?’

‘Altered consciousness. Costas said that neuropsychology was another one of your fascinations.’

Lanowski tapped a key and got up, then pushed back his chair and walked over to Jack, staring at him. ‘Yes?’

‘I had a couple of interesting experiences on the dive today. First in the tunnel going down into the volcano, a strange sensation of being in a vortex. Then in the final seconds before reaching the submersible, when I was out of air. Looking back on it, I remember more of what I sensed. The instant I knew I was about to black out I saw sparkly lights all round me in a kind of lattice pattern, and then a tunnel with a light
at the end that I seemed to be drifting towards, with a face appearing and multiplying all around me. The face was Costas, of course, leaning out to pull me in, and the light was the open hatch of the submersible, but the closer I swam towards it, the further away it seemed. I wanted to relax and let it draw me in.’

Lanowski nodded. ‘Anoxia, dopamine, adrenalin, fear, survival instinct. A common feature of altered-consciousness experiences is the sensation of floating underwater. And you were in a high-stress situation, and experiencing sensory deprivation. Odd thing is, it can feel good. Addictive. Diving must tap into something hard-wired in our brains. I’ve been trying to work out what makes you guys always want to go deep. It’s not just nitrogen narcosis, is it?’

‘There’s something to that,’ Jack said, leaning back again. ‘But for me it’s always been cognitive, by which I mean how my own sense of observation and analysis is ramped up by being underwater, and that’s something I relish and want to experience whenever I can. I’ve always seen diving as an interface between present and past, as if putting on the equipment and getting underwater puts you into a different state of awareness, more acute, with the pressure on time making you think quickly and opening up lots of avenues in the mind. Maurice Hiebermeyer says the same thing about going down tunnels, opening up tombs. Being in that state for only a few moments can give those critical insights that don’t always come from hours of patient excavation on land. But my experience today was a different kind of altered consciousness and made me think about the Neolithic. What I’m really interested in now is putting myself in the minds of those shamans who went down tunnels in their minds, who perhaps saw visions that we can understand in terms of neuropsychology but they interpreted as manifestations of a spirit world.’

Costas shook his head in disbelief. ‘So when you were having your near-death experience and I was saving your life, you had a blinding flash of inspiration about the Neolithic? Archaeologists never cease to amaze me.’

Lanowski flicked away his fringe and pushed his glasses up his nose.
‘When I was a first-year undergraduate at Princeton, I worked evenings in the neuropsychology lab. I needed money, and I signed on as a guinea pig.’

‘Uh-oh,’ Costas muttered. ‘This is about to explain a few things.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Lanowski said cheerfully. ‘Only a few mild opiates, and some marijuana. Far less than most students were consuming around me. And the beauty of it was, I didn’t need it. I could put myself into an altered state of consciousness without drugs.’

‘Why does that not surprise me?’ Costas said.

‘If you really believe in the world of your visions, then the mind can easily take you there,’ Lanowski continued. ‘That’s the essence of religious experience. There’s little difference in that respect between a shaman having visions in front of a cave wall and a worshipper in a church transfixed by a statue of the Virgin Mary. Neither of them needs hallucinogenic drugs to get there. Or as in my case, you can really believe in the power of your own mind and your ability to control it.’

‘This lab you worked in,’ Costas said. ‘Let me guess. You did most of their analytical work for them too?’

‘It came out as a paper in the
Journal of Cognitive Archaeology
. My name isn’t in the author list because I wasn’t officially part of the team, being merely a guinea pig.’

Jack stared at him. ‘
That
paper? That was your work?’

‘I was in the lab one evening and saw the garbled manuscript they were working on, so I rewrote it until it actually made sense. It was sent off the next day with each of the authors assuming the others had fixed it up. They were hardly on speaking terms anyway. My first publication, anonymously.’

Jack turned to Costas. ‘That paper’s become the launch pad for exactly what I’ve been pondering, the mind-state of people in the late Stone Age.’

Jeremy pulled a battered old book out of his pocket. ‘I’m not a neuropsychologist, but I do like poetry,’ he said. ‘What you’re describing, the religious experience, we tend to think of as rapture in the face of God. But you don’t have to believe in a god to experience rapture, to
have the same sort of visions and pleasure as the believer contemplating the Virgin Mary. In deep prehistory, the experience of rapture may have been the preserve of the shaman or seer. In the West today, I’d argue that the shaman’s role is largely taken by the poet and the musician and the artist. In fact, you could say that the mark of a true gift in a poet, the poet as shaman, is whether we can see rapture in the process of creativity, and whether we can experience something of that when we read the work.’

He flipped through the book and found a page, and Costas leaned over to look. ‘Ah. “The poet who had drunk the milk of paradise”.’

Jeremy nodded. ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge, his poem
Kubla Khan
. And for milk of paradise, read opium.’

Costas glanced at Jack. ‘While we were working on the ROV, Jeremy and I went through his undergraduate dissertation on Homeric imagery in the poetry of W. H. Auden. There’s all that dark imagery of the fall of Troy and modern war in “The Shield of Achilles”, and for relief we went for some eighteenth-century romantic euphoria. That meant Coleridge. This poem’s good because of the watery imagery, and I can relate it to the experience of diving in the way you were just describing.’

‘Coleridge wrote the poem one night in 1797 after what he described as a “sort of reverie” brought on by two grains of opium,’ Jeremy continued. ‘So in this case, drugs were used, but it’s the effect we’re interested in, and that fits closely with what you’re talking about. Coleridge had just been reading an account of the Tartar emperor Kublai Khan’s pleasure palace by the sea, and that seems to have made him think about creative power that works with nature and creative power that doesn’t. That’s also what made me think of the poem, the idea of a tension between two Neolithic belief worlds, the one of the shaman and the one of the gods, the one attuned to nature and the other to man. But just now I also thought of Coleridge’s dream images, and how they were like the ones Lanowski was describing. A lot of them have to do with with rivers and the sea.’ He read from the page:

‘
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea
.’

Costas followed from memory:

‘
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean
.’

Jeremy put his finger on some handwritten notes under the poem. ‘Coleridge wrote a letter to a friend of his, John Thelwell, about the same time he composed the poem. Listen to this: “I should much wish, like the Indian Vishnu, to float about along an infinite ocean cradled in the flower of the Lotus, and wake once in a million years for a few minutes.” And then he writes: “My mind feels as if it ached to behold and know something great – something one and indivisible.”’ Jeremy paused. ‘The metaphor of flowing water as a vehicle for the imagination is pretty widespread, and images of water are common among the Romantic poets. But this is one case where we can talk in neuro-psychological terms about altered consciousness, because Coleridge tells us himself that he’d taken opium.’

‘Coleridge himself called the poem a “psychological curiosity”,’ Costas added. ‘He also writes of a mighty fountain, spewing out huge fragments, spoken of almost as if it’s a volcano: it comes from a deep chasm, a savage place. The poem’s like a cosmology of the earth and the underworld combined with visions that come from an altered state of consciousness, visions that are familiar to us because they’re hard-wired into our brains just as Lanowski suggested.’

Jeremy shut the book and pocketed it. ‘I think it’s another way of understanding what we’re looking at in early prehistory. For too long
archaeologists have assumed that ancient belief systems are somehow beyond their reach. Many early archaeologists were dogmatic about their Christianity, and shamanistic religion was regarded as the least accessible of all, a primitive, ill-formed system of spiritualism that existed before God revealed himself. But I’d argue that’s precisely where we need to go if we are to understand the origins of religion today, to look at neuropsychology. And most fascinatingly, what Coleridge was describing shows how that experience could have been intense and rapturous without the worship of gods.’

‘It’s not just in modern poetry,’ Jack said thoughtfully. ‘You get the same kind of imagery in the earliest literature of all, in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, where long voyages are taken over water and there’s that same juxtaposition of the world of nature and the world of men. And the Epic of Gilgamesh may preserve an actual memory of the spiritualist world of the early Neolithic, a world just before the gods came into being.’

Lanowski got up, put the blackboard resolutely back on the chair and whipped out his piece of chalk. He drew a spiral on one side of the board, then turned back to them, his eyes gleaming. ‘Here you see the vision of a tunnel, a vortex. It’s the most common altered consciousness vision, and also the most common early Neolithic symbol. You find it everywhere, from the megalithic tombs of Ireland to Atlantis. The vortex can be surrounded by animal images, like Jack’s image of Costas repeatedly on the edge of his vision, but here it’s empty. You could call it a vision of pure rapture. But then something changes.’ He flourished the chalk, then drew two circles beside the first, the same size but without the spiral. ‘Think of Stonehenge. Think of the Neolithic temples. They’re circles. But what do they have inside them?’ He slashed a T shape and a pi shape on the top of the board. ‘What you’ve got, gentlemen, is gods. That’s what the trilithons at Stonehenge are. That’s what the T-shaped pillars of Göbekli Tepe and Atlantis are. And how do you depict this new type of temple, this new religion, as a symbol?’ He put the chalk in the centre of the second circle and drew a series of straight lines radiating out, turning each line sharply to the
left. He swivelled back to them, his arms held out questioningly.

‘The
Sonnenrad
,’ Jack said quietly. ‘The ancient sun symbol, used by the Nazis as the SS symbol.’

Lanowski flourished the chalk. ‘The old vortex, hijacked. Now you see not a swirl, but the walls of the tunnel lined with these images of gods.’

‘And there’s another ancient symbol,’ Jack said quietly.

Lanowski turned and drew inside the third circle, this time only four lines intersecting, the ends turned left. Jack stared at it.
The swastika
. But now he saw it not as a cross at all, but as a symbol of the ascendancy of the gods; the gods who had taken over the old religion ten thousand years ago.
And a horrifying modern symbol, a symbol of gods reborn, not in the depths of prehistory but in the cauldron of Europe eighty years ago
.