The Atlantis
Syndrome P.1
Atlantis
started with Plato and in his hands it was never a supercivilization of the sort
conjectured by later authors; perhaps in strictly Greek terms it was no
civilization at all but rather a fatally luxurious elaboration of an
essentially barbarian way of life, for all its inception by a god. At all
events, it was no seminal civilization: it wasn't the fons
et origo of all later civilizations in the world,
indeed Athens was its independent contemporary. Both Atlantis and old Athens
were, for Plato, but episodes in the ever ongoing cycle of catastrophes and
renewals that he saw as the most rational and scientific interpretation to
which the world of human experience could be subjected. For him, science and
religion were quite bound up together, so that the natural catastrophes were at
the same time eras in which the divine light was withdrawn from the world and
the equally natural renewals were times when it returned. So rational and
obviously true was this scheme of things to Plato that the "problem"
of the real historical location and fate of Atlantis that has exercised so many
writers after him would have left him cold, or perhaps amused to think of what
he had started. We quoted early in this book several passages of Plato to show
how he handled stories in his works.
In the
Republic, we find Socrates remarking that "We first tell stories to
children. These are in general untrue, though there is some truth in
them." Again, "We then make the fiction as like the truth as
possible, and so make the lie or untruth useful." In the Protagoras we are
asked by Socrates, "Now shall I, as an old man speaking to his juniors,
put my explanation in the form of a story or give it a reasoned argument? ... I
think it will be pleasanter to tell you a story." In the Pbaedrus, we recall, Socrates is told to his face that
"It is easy for you, Socrates, to make up tales from Egypt or anywhere
else you care to." Atlantis is just such a tale from Egypt, made up indeed
to bring home the truth of Plato's view of history and his warning about the
direction that he saw his civilization taking. Aristotle appreciated that, and
we would have heard a whole lot less about Atlantis if everyone else had agreed
with him.
The
literal-minded, not very interested in Plato's science and philosophy, were
soon taking him at face value in the classical world. But before the age of European
exploration, there was small scope for them to speculate where in detail
Atlantis may really have been sited. With the discovery of the New World at the
end of the fifteenth century AD, and then the exploration of the Far East and
Africa, speculation could run riot and Atlantis was given a new lease of life,
or rather a myriad of new leases in places as far apart as Mexico, South
Africa, Spitzbergen and Mongolia. But, only justly in view of Plato's Atlantic
placing of Atlantis, it was the New World and the western Atlantic that had the
biggest pull and the best staying power. In the nineteenth century it was
possible for Donnelly to take the idea on in a really significant way by
popularizing, if not inventing, the grand theory of a uniquely seminal
civilization lurking behind all known ancient civilizations. There was in
Donnelly, and in Spence after him, very little of the supercivilization
concept. Their versions of Atlantis were Bronze Age or advanced Stone Age
entities, full of wonders for their time but not noticeably decked with the
sort of achievements in high technology or sophisticated astronomical science
or general 'ancient wisdom' that later writers load on to theirs. Still, there
was in the very idea of a prior civilization, which influenced and inspired all
later ones, the seed of a notion of superiority, of a pristine quality that all
the rest only aped and fell away from in their various ways. Donnelly at least
did not push this and managed to keep his theories looking as though they belonged
in the rational world of nineteenth-century science.
After Donnelly
and Spence, there comes a divergence between two different sorts of Atlantological speculation (though Spence's later work
foreshadows both developments). This divergence is still with us and nowadays
presenting further subdivergences. On the one hand
there are the people still looking for a fairly mundane explanation of
Atlantis, more or less in terms of conventional archaeology: Thera, Old
Anatolia and even antediluvian Cuba are examples of this relatively sober
approach. On the other, there are bolder spirits looking to unknown Antarctica
or the oceanic deeps for their rather more exotic long-lost civilization. On
the whole, the more mundane-minded favour much less
in the way of a supercivilization of sophisticated science and ancient wisdom,
while the bolder speculators usually add on the hints of anti-gravity,
astronomical expertise, spiritual quest and what have you. Atlantologists
willing to settle for the Neolithic Antilles or Bronze Age eastern
Mediterranean usually employ the catastrophist approach to explain the
particular demise of their versions of Atlantis, but tend not to elevate
catastrophism into such a cosmic principle as the other group does, with all
its apparatus of arcanely encoded warnings and immortal longings. There is
within this latter group something of a further division between the high-tech
and the Arcadian tendencies: submarines and lasers versus contemplation of
stars and navels; anti-gravity makes a good bridge between these two wings,
since manoeuvring pyramid blocks or the cyclopean
masonry of Tiahuanaco can be attributed either to advanced physics or to
superior mentalist powers or a blurry indistinction between the two. Finally,
of course, there is the divergence between those who leave their
supercivilization rooted on earth and those who project it into outer space.
The possible
combinations of traits exhibited in any particular piece of Atlantological
writing are large in number, and sometimes quite startling. You may find the
supercivilization in question given exalted cosmic origins - and then reduced
to clanking around in steam-powered Zeppelins, looking for sex. You may
encounter some survivors of another such supercivilization of purely terrestrial
origins, lost under the ice or in the deeps, bringing a religion of immortality
and anti-materialism to some benighted corner of the world, only to see it
collapse for the most part into mass human sacrifice, with just a golden thread
of the original ancient wisdom to be detected by the most recherche "decodings." You may be invited to see in some
vanishingly paltry neolithic or Bronze Age remains
the sure sign of the invisible presence of yet another version of the lost
supercivilization.
At the core of
the Atlantis Syndrome, in both its mundane and exotic manifestations, is a
stubborn literal-mindedness that cannot credit the human race with what is
actually one of its most obvious traits: its inventiveness. I have wryly
commented before on the oddity that these highly inventive and imaginative
writers of Atlantology evidently cannot believe that
anyone else ever invents anything - whether it is Plato inventing Atlantis, Ute
Indians inventing a folk-tale or various human groups around the world inventing
civilization. This is where the Atlantologists'
powers of imagination fail them: their own imaginations are revealed to be of a
strictly trammelled variety after all, rarely if ever
breaking out from the prejudices of their own time and place.
I believe it
is no undue simplification of the case to say that modern Atlantology
is in essence little more than certain vulgar assumptions of western religion
and colonialism unthinkingly imposed on to the entire past history of the human
race. The conviction that civilization must be a gift from the gods (of one
sort or another) and must be introduced around the world by an elite of priests
(of one sort or another) is precisely in line with such religious and social
prejudices, of a very low order of sophistication it must be said. (There is
nothing of this in Plato, who saw civilization as endlessly renewed, reinvented
countless times all over the world, in the natural course of events. On the
contrary, his Atlanteans are condemned for their imperialism in reaching out
for Europe and Egypt.) It is really no wonder that the Nazis showed such an
enthusiasm for every sort of Atlantological theory:
Nazism was the product of a bunch of romantic autodidacts, stuffed full of the
popular prejudices of their time and place (exceptionally spiteful prejudices
in their case), bent on expansion - eastward in Europe, rather than in overseas
colonies - at the expense of the current inhabitants of the regions they wanted
to get their hands on.
There is about
the Nazis' aspirations and exploits something like a pathological perversion of
the romantic adventure stories for boys of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries: stories by no means free of inhumane attitudes and
assumptions in themselves. Stories of white explorers among, at best, gullible
natives, frequently senselessly hostile; and stories of lost tribes and cities
and treasures, sometimes presented in a pseudo-Egyptological or pseudoarchaeological context. (It was one of the depressing
aspects of the Hollywood revamping of this genre in the 1980s that an
apparently liberal sector of an essentially non-colonial country could have
carried on so many of the negative traditions of the pre-war empire adventure
story ethos.)
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