Similar to modern conclusions forced by current understanding of geology in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, Kircher’s map depicts Atlantis not as a continent but as a large island about the size of Spain and France combined. It shows a tall, centrally located volcano, most likely meant to represent Mount Atlas, together with six major rivers, something Plato does not mention (the Critias speaks of large rivers on the island of Atlantis, but we are not told how many). Although the map vanished after Kircher’s death in 1680, it was the only known representation of Atlantis to have survived the Ancient World. Thanks to his research and book, it survives today in what is considered to be a close copy of the original.
Kircher was the first to publish such a map, probably the most accurate of its kind to date. Curiously, it is depicted upside down, contrary to maps in both his day and ours. Yet this apparent anomaly is proof of the map’s authenticity, because Egyptian mapmakers, even as late as Ptolemaic times, designed their maps with the Upper Nile Valley (located in the south; “Upper” refers to its higher elevation) at the top, because the river’s headwaters are located in the Sudan.
Olof Rudbeck (1630–1702) was Sweden’s premiere scientific genius: professor of medicine (Uppsala), discoverer of the lymph glands, inventor of the anatomical theater dome, leading pioneer of modern botany, designer of the first university gardens; initiator of Latin as the lingua franca of the scientific world community; historian of early Sweden. A brilliant scholar fluent in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, Rudbeck possessed a grasp of Classical literature that was nothing less than encyclopedic. Combining his vast knowledge of the ancient world with personal archeological research in his own country, he concluded during a long, intense period of investigation (1651 to 1698) that Atlantis was fact, not fiction, and the greatest civilization in prehistory.
He believed that Norse myths and some physical evidence among his country’s megalithic ruins showed how a relatively few Atlantean survivors may have had an impact on Sweden, contributing to its cultural development, and laid the foundation (particularly in ship construction) for what would much later be remembered as the Viking Age (the ninth to twelfth centuries C.E.).
Critics have since misrepresented Rudbeck’s work by claiming he identified Sweden with Atlantis itself, but he never made such an assertion. In their sloppy research they have confused him with another eighteenth-century scholar, the French astronomer Jean Bailey, who concluded (before being executed during the French Revolution) that Spitzbergen, in the Arctic Ocean, was all that remained of Atlantis.
Born in Kraljevic, Austria, on February 27, 1861, Rudolf Steiner was a university-trained scientist, artist, and editor who founded a Gnostic movement based on comprehension of the spiritual world through pure thought and the highest faculties of mental knowledge. This was the guiding principle of anthroposophy, knowledge produced by the higher self in man, as he defined it, a spiritual perception independent of the senses. Such instinctual awareness of the divine energies that interpenetrate the entire universe is not new; on the contrary, it was exercised by our ancestors during the deep past, when they more freely and fully participated in the spiritual processes of life. A gradual attraction to vulgar materialism through development of the high cultures in the ancient world increasingly diminished their innate sensitivities, which eventually atrophied but did not die out.
To awaken these faculties dormant in all men and women required, Steiner believed, training their consciousness to look beyond mere matter. These concepts were developed in his 1904 book, Cosmic Memory: Prehistory of Earth and Man. He maintained that before Atlantis gradually sank, in 7227 B.C.E., its earliest inhabitants formed one of mankind’s root races, a people who did not require speech but instead communicated telepathically in images, not words, as part of their immediate experience with God.
According to Steiner, the story of Atlantis was dramatically revealed in Germanic myth, wherein fiery Musplheim corresponded to the southern, volcanic area of the Atlantic land, while frosty Niflheim was located in the north. Steiner wrote that the Atlanteans developed the first concept of good versus evil and laid the groundwork for all ethical and legal systems. Their leaders were spiritual initiates able to manipulate the forces of nature through control of the life force and development of etheric technology.
Seven epochs comprise the “post-Atlantis period,” of which ours, the Euro-American epoch, will end in C.E. 3573. Cosmic Memory goes on to describe the earlier and contemporary Pacific civilization of Lemuria, with stress on the highly evolved clairvoyant powers of its people. Steiner defined Atlantis as the turning point in an ongoing struggle between the human search for community and our experience of individuality.
The former, with its growing emphasis on materialism, dragged down the spiritual needs of the latter, culminating eventually in the Atlantean cataclysm. In this interpretation of the past, Steiner opposed Marxism. To him, spirit, not economics, drives history. Steiner’s views of Atlantis and Lemuria are important if only because of the educational Waldorf movement he founded, which still operates about one hundred schools attended by tens of thousands of students in Europe and the United States. He died on March 30, 1925, in Dornach, Switzerland, where he had founded his school of spiritual science twelve years earlier.
James Lewis Thomas Chalmers Spence, born on November 25, 1874, in Forfarshire, Scotland, was a prominent mythologist who inherited Ignatius Donnelly’s position as the world’s leading Atlantologist of the early twentieth century. An alumnus of Edinburgh University, Spence was made a fellow of the Royal Anthropology Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, and elected vice president of the Scottish Anthropology and Folklore Society. Awarded a Royal Pension for services to culture, he published more than forty books. Many of them, such as the Dictionary of Non-Classical Mythology coauthored with Marian Edwards, are still in print and widely regarded as the best source materials of their kind.
His interpretation of the Maya’s Popol Vuh (Book of Consul) won international acclaim, but he is best remembered for The Problem of Atlantis (1924), Atlantis in America (1925), The History of Atlantis (1926), Will Europe Follow Atlantis? (1942), and The Occult Sciences in Atlantis (1943). During the early 1930s, he edited a prestigious journal, The Atlantis Quarterly. The Problem of Lemuria (1932) is still probably the best book on its subject.
Lewis Spence died on March 3, 1955, and was succeeded by the British scholar Edgerton Sykes. Trained as an engineer, Sykes was a foreign correspondent for the British press, invaluable because of his quadrilingual fluency. During his long life in the diplomatic service and as a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, he published an estimated three million words in numerous books and magazine articles, many of them devoted to a rational understanding of the Atlantis controversy.
Sykes’s erudite journals and encyclopedias of comparative myth went a long way in sustaining and expanding interest in Atlantis throughout the mid-twentieth century. He died in 1983, just before his ninetieth birthday, but a legacy in the form of his large library of Atlantis-related material is preserved in its own room at Edgar Cayce’s Association for Research and Enlightenment in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
Contrary to mean-spirited characterizations by conservative archeologists, it says something for the credibility of Atlantis that many of the greatest thinkers in the history of Western civilization have been among its most prominent advocates.
21 Atlantis in Antarctica
Forget about the North Atlantic and the Aegean, Says Author Rand Flem-Ath
J. Douglas Kenyon
In the not-too-distant future, Atlantis-seeking archeologists may have to trade in their sun hats and scuba gear for snow goggles and parkas. If a rapidly growing body of opinion proves correct, instead of the bottom of the ocean, the next great arena of exploration for the fabled lost continent could be the frozen wastelands at the bottom of the earth. And before scoffing too vigorously, proponents of probable locations for Atlantis—such as the North Atlantic Ocean and the Aegean Sea, as
well as other candidates—would be well advised to give the new arguments for Atlantis in Antarctica a fair hearing.
Already enlisted in the ranks of those who take the notion very seriously are such luminaries as John Anthony West and Graham Hancock. Founded on a scientific theory developed by the late Dr. Charles Hapgood in close interaction with no less a personage than Albert Einstein, the idea appears robust enough to withstand the most virulent attacks expected from the guardians of scientific orthodoxy. At any rate, it will not take a wholesale melting of the ice cap to settle the question. A few properly directed satellite pictures and the appropriate seismic surveys could quickly determine whether or not an advanced civilization has ever flourished on the lands beneath the ice.
Leading the charge of those betting that such evidence will soon be forthcoming are Canadian researchers Rand and Rose Flem-Ath, the authors of When the Sky Fell: In Search of Atlantis, a book that contains the couple’s painstaking synthesis of Hapgood’s theory of Earth’s crust displacement and their own groundbreaking discoveries. The result has already won many converts.
Graham Hancock believes the Flem-Aths have provided the first truly satisfactory answer to the question of precisely what happened to Plato’s giant lost continent. Since devoting a chapter in his best-selling Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth’s Lost Civilization to the work of the Flem-Aths, Hancock continues to discuss in media appearances the importance of their Antarctic theories. Flem-Ath himself talked about his ideas on the February 1996 NBC Special “The Mysterious Origins of Man.”
To get to the bottom of all the excitement, if not the planet, Atlantis Rising interviewed Rand Flem-Ath at his home on Vancouver Island in British Columbia.
The author has not forgotten how his own interest in Atlantis began. In the summer of 1966, while waiting for an interview for a librarian’s position in Victoria, British Columbia, he was working on a screenplay involving marooned aliens hibernating in ice on Earth for 10,000 years. Suddenly, on the radio, came pop singer Donovan’s hit “Hail Atlantis.” “Hey, that’s a good idea,” Flem-Ath thought. “I wanted ice, so I thought, ‘Now where can I have ice and an island continent?’ and I thought of Antarctica.”
Later, researching the idea, he read everything he could find on Atlantis, including Plato’s famous account in the Timaeus and the Critias, where Egyptian priests described Atlantis—its features, location, history and demise—to the Greek lawgiver Solon. At first the story didn’t work for Flem-Ath, but that changed when he made a startling discovery—unmistakable simsimilarities between two obscure but remarkable maps.
A 1665 map by the Jesuit scholar Athenasius Kircher, copied from much older sources, seemed to have placed Atlantis in the North Atlantic but, strangely, had put north at the bottom of the page, apparently forcing study upside down. The 1513 Piri Ri’is map, also copied from much more ancient sources, demonstrated that an ice age civilization had sufficient geographic knowledge to accurately map Antarctica’s coast as it existed beneath an ice cap many millennia old (as pointed out by Charles Hapgood in Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age). What seemed obvious to Flem-Ath was that both maps depicted the same landmass.
Suddenly Antarctic Atlantis “stopped being a science-fiction story,” Flem-Ath says. The revelation had dawned that it might be “something that could have been real.” Further study of Plato yielded even more clues. “I noticed that the description is from Atlantis,” he recalls. Soon, armed with a U.S. Navy map of the world as seen from the South Pole, he discovered a new way of understanding Plato’s story and a new way of looking at Kircher’s map. Viewed from this southern perspective, all of the world’s oceans appear as parts of one great ocean, or as what is described in Plato as “the real ocean,” and the lands beyond as a “whole opposite continent.” Sitting in the middle of that great ocean, at the very navel of the world, is Antarctica. Suddenly, it was possible to understand Kircher’s map as drawn, with north at the top, Africa and Madagascar to the left, and the tip of South America on the right.
The term “Atlantic Ocean,” Flem-Ath soon realized, had meant something quite different in Plato’s time. To the ancients, it included all of the world’s oceans. The idea becomes clearer when one remembers from Greek mythology that Atlas (a name closely related to Atlantis and Atlantic) held the entire world on his shoulders.
The “whole opposite continent,” which surrounded the “real ocean” in Plato’s account, consisted of South America, North America, Africa, Europe, and Asia, all fused together in the Atlantean worldview as though they were one continuous landmass. And, in fact, these five continents were at that time (9600 B.C.E.) one landmass in the geographic sense.
Flem-Ath would render Plato’s account to read: “Long ago the World Ocean was navigated beyond the Straits of Gibraltar by sailors from an island larger than North Africa and the Middle East combined. After leaving Antarctica you would encounter the Antarctic archipelago (islands currently under ice) and from them you would reach the World Continent which encircles the World Ocean. The Mediterranean Sea is very small compared to the World Ocean and could even be called a bay. But beyond the Mediterranean Sea is a World Ocean which is encircled by one continuous landmass.”
A common mistake in most readings of Plato, Flem-Ath believes, is the inappropriate attempt to interpret the ancient account in the light of modern concepts. Another example is the familiar reference to the Pillars of Hercules, beyond which Atlantis was said to reside. Though it is true that the term sometimes referred to the Straits of Gibralter, an equally valid interpretation is that it meant “the limits of the known world.”
For Flem-Ath, the world as seen from Antarctica matched perfectly the ancient Egyptians’ account of the world as seen from Atlantis. The ancient geography was, in fact, far more advanced than our own, which made sense if Atlantis was, as Plato argued, an advanced civilization.
Platonic theories notwithstanding, the most difficult challenge—explaining how Atlantis might have become Antarctica—remained. How could land currently covered with thousands of feet of ice have once supported any kind of human habitation, much less a great civilization on the scale described by Plato? For the Flem-Aths, the answer, it turned out, had already been worked out—thoroughly, convincingly, and published in the Yale Scientific Journal in the mid-1950s.
In his theory of Earth crust displacement, Professor Charles Hapgood had—citing vast climatalogical, paleontological, and anthropological evidence—argued that the entire outer shell of the earth periodically shifts over its inner layers, bringing about major climatic changes. The climatic zones (polar, temperate, and tropical) remain the same because the Sun still shines from the same angle in the sky, but as the outer shell shifts, it moves through those zones. From the perspective of earth’s population, it seems as though the sky is falling. In reality, the Earth’s crust is shifting to another location.
Some lands move toward the tropics. Others shift, with the same movement, toward the poles; yet others escape great changes in latitude. The consequences of such movements are, of course, catastrophes, as throughout the world massive earthquakes shake the land and enormous tidal waves batter the continental shelves. As old ice caps forsake the polar zones, they melt, raising sea levels higher and higher. Everywhere, and by whatever means possible, people seek higher ground to avoid an ocean in upheaval.
The Flem-Aths corresponded with Hapgood from 1977 until his death in the early eighties, and though he differed with them about the location of Atlantis (his candidate was the Rocks of Saint Peter and Saint Paul), he praised their scientific efforts to buttress his theory. In the summer of 1995, Flem-Ath was allowed to read Hapgood’s voluminous, 170-page correspondence with Albert Einstein, wherein he discovered a much more direct collaboration between the two men than had been previously supposed.
Upon first hearing of the research (in correspondence from Hapgood), Einstein responded: “very impressive . . . have t
he impression that your hypothesis is correct.” Subsequently, Einstein raised numerous questions that Hapgood answered with such thoroughness that Einstein was eventually persuaded to write a glowing foreword for Hapgood’s book Earth’s Shifting Crust: A Key to Some Basic Problems of Earth Science. Earth crust displacement is not mutually exclusive with the now widely accepted theory of continental drift. According to Flem-Ath, “they share one assumption, that the outer crust is mobile in relation to the interior, but in plate tectonics the movement is extremely slow.” Earth crust displacement suggests that over long periods of time, approximately 41,000 years, certain forces build toward a breaking point. Among the factors at work: a massive buildup of ice at the poles, which distorts the weight of the crust; the tilt of the earth’s axis, which changes by more than three degrees every 41,000 years (not to be confused with the wobble that causes the precession of the equinoxes); and the proximity of the earth to the Sun, which also varies over thousands of years.
“One of the common mistakes,” says Flem-Ath, “is to think of the continents and the oceans as being separate, but really the fact that there’s water on certain parts of the plates is irrelevant. What we have in plate tectonics are a series of plates that are moving very gradually in relationship to each other. But what we have in Earth crust displacement is that all of the plates are considered as one single unit, as part of the outer shell of the earth, which changes place relative to the interior of the earth.”
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