Finding Atlantis

by David King

  Of all the outlandish barbarians mentioned in the texts, Swedish humanists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came to focus on one tribe in particular: the ancient Goths. Long a terror on the frontiers of the Roman Empire, the Goths had swept south through the Balkans and humiliated the legions that powered the relentless Roman fighting machine. If that were not shocking enough, the Goths had stormed the gates of Rome in A.D. 410 and sacked the Eternal City itself. The Romans, who had conquered a vast empire reaching from the Scottish moors to the Sahara Desert, were now themselves forced to pay ransom. Trying their best to intimidate the rough invaders at their gates, Roman officials warned of a fierce resistance from one million imperial citizens. Unfazed, the Gothic king Alaric replied, “The thicker the hay, the more easily it is mowed.”

  Reading about this martial people, Swedish humanists believed that the Goths had come originally from somewhere in central or southern Sweden. Most prominent among the new champions of the Gothic past were two brothers, Johannes and Olaus Magnus, the last Catholic archbishops in the country. In their wide-ranging works, both had tapped into a long and deep medieval tradition that linked the Goths to the north.

  But even if the vision of a heroic Gothic past extended back for centuries, it would be the Protestant Reformation that truly rekindled the Gothic fire. Sweden had regained its independence from Denmark in 1523, and had broken away from the Catholic Church in the 1530s. Both changes had fueled the great burst of enthusiasm about the Goths, whom they claimed as their own ancestors. The humanists started also to shake off the Greco-Roman prejudice, revived along with the classical texts themselves. They celebrated other, more redeeming qualities in the seemingly uncouth and barbaric illiterates—qualities such as valor, honesty, and simplicity. The large tomes of the Magnus brothers and their followers marked the beginning of a gradual yet monumental shift from shame to a renewed pride in their wild, untamed ancestors who, they claimed, had overthrown the Roman Empire.

  And as many northern countries broke away from the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century, it seemed that Rome had once again been stormed. The Goths, this time wearing the modern guise of sober, black-clad Protestants, had punished the empire a second time for its unbridled decadence. And after 1630, history again seemed to repeat itself. During the Thirty Years’ War, King Gustavus Adolphus’s Swedes were modern Goths carrying the Protestant banner, indeed perhaps saving the Protestant cause from what then looked like certain destruction at the hands of the determined Holy Roman Empire of the Hapsburgs.

  The Swedish king played the part well, too. With his broad shoulders, his rotund figure, his golden beard groomed to a point, the musket ball still lodged deep in his neck, Gustavus Adolphus looked and acted like a modern Goth. At the royal coronation, he had literally dressed up as the Gothic king Berik. He gave speeches challenging the Swedes to uphold the old Gothic virtues, admonishing the noblemen, for instance, “to bring renewed luster to the Gothic fame of their forefathers.” His march from victory to victory indeed made Europe think it was seeing the rejuvenation of the barbarians. Sweden’s sudden rise to great power had made possible—and even demanded—a greater, more dramatic past.

  INTO THIS GLORIFIED vision of history were swept the ornately copied pieces of parchment found in hamlets of Iceland and Norway. Exciting tales of tall, fierce Vikings launching many adventurous raids seemed to fit quite seamlessly into this larger Gothic framework of Swedish history. Many of the original manuscripts would in fact end up in Uppsala, through purchases, gifts, and other, more sordid means. In 1658, for instance, the Swedish army looted Danish libraries and estates, carrying off many priceless manuscripts, in a way strangely reminiscent of the old Vikings that they would soon be celebrating.

  The saga that would start our saga, however, did not come by conquest or piracy. The manuscript of the Hervararsaga was carried over by a young, talented Icelandic student named Jonas Rugman, or, as Rudbeck affectionately called him, “Icelandic Jonas.” Rugman had come to Uppsala by accident. Leaving his native Iceland, he was planning to continue his studies at Copenhagen University. But a terrible storm blew his ship off course, forcing the crew to seek shelter in the Swedish west coast harbor of Gothenburg. Given the tense state of affairs between Denmark and Sweden and the fact that hostilities had once again flared up into open conflict, the Danish crew of the ship found themselves taken captive. Rugman was now unable to make his way to Copenhagen. Instead he decided to try his fortunes in this new country, and eventually ended up at Uppsala, where he started to work with Olaus Verelius.

  A native speaker of Icelandic, the closest of all Scandinavian languages to Old Norse, Rugman was a “gift sent from heaven” for Verelius and the circle of Viking enthusiasts at Uppsala. Besides invaluable knowledge of the old language and its culture, Rugman had something else in his possession: a chest full of old Icelandic manuscripts! Most of these had never been seen before anywhere outside the small villages and homesteads of Iceland.

  Icelandic Jonas’s treasure chest of sagas was indeed an invalu-able trove of material about a still undetermined ancient past, and Verelius was one of the first in the world to lay eyes again on these old stories. Among these was a copy of Rolf and Gautrek’s Saga, a beautiful tale loosely focused on an old Swedish king named Gautrek. After losing his wife, the king suffers a tremendous grief, finding his only solace in sitting on her burial mound and flying his favorite hawk. There was also the rollicking Herraud and Bose’s Saga, which deals with the long friendship between an odd pair: Herraud, the son of a Swedish king, and Bose, a tough peasant. Many other sagas, too, were in Rugman’s case, though he had left a handful behind, pawned in a tailor’s shop to cover the costs of his expensive taste.

  Grateful for the privilege of seeing these sagas, Verelius paid for the food, housing, and expenses of Jonas Rugman for the first year and a half of the young man’s stay in Uppsala. This was perhaps only fair, given the incalculable benefit the impoverished student had provided. Brand-new stories were just waiting to be read, translated, and culled for original insights into Scandinavia’s heritage. They were full of figures only dimly perceived before, if known at all. Rugman’s sagas made it painfully obvious how little the Swedish past was really understood.

  AS RUDBECK LOOKED through the manuscript of the Hervararsaga closely and drew his map of Sweden, a spectacular new world was indeed opening before his eyes. The Hervararsaga offered a fresh account of the distant past of Europe’s newest great power, and its tantalizing suggestions would send Rudbeck to the heights of enthusiasm. Yet as breathtaking as the vistas were, it was not simply a matter of chasing down books and following leads.

  This is because Rudbeck was already committed to an ambitious program of teaching at the university. Besides lecturing on anatomy and botany, Rudbeck would take students on strolls in his garden, emphasizing the importance of firsthand knowledge of the properties of plants. He had also pledged to give informal instruction in other technical subjects, including architecture and shipbuilding, just two of the many classes he taught at his factory down by the river. Some of the kingdom’s most prominent future technicians and engineers would indeed be trained by Rudbeck. His absolute favorite course, however, was pyrotechnics; he loved to send up his own homemade fireworks to light up the Uppsala night sky.

  Perhaps an even more serious challenge than his teaching commitments, though, was the array of other projects fighting for his attention. Since Rudbeck had built the anatomy theater, for instance, he was expected to actually use it. Some professors were already heard mumbling about this great expense, complaining that Rudbeck, in characteristic fashion, had built the theater way out of proportion to what was actually needed. At a time when the number of students in the medical school was at best ninety and at worst only three, Rudbeck had built a theater of approximately two hundred seats.

  The academy could of course fill this capacity by opening its doors and selling admission tickets to public dissections, as did on
occasion happen, but some had already started to notice the glaring lack of dissections taking place there. In fact, no more than two or three dissections were ever held under Rudbeck’s leadership in that expensive theater.

  His botanical garden was another concern, though for a slightly different reason. It required regular care and constant vigilance, planting, watering, and cultivating, as well as maintaining the small buildings Rudbeck had constructed on its site. Given the expense, this scientific luxury was often dangerously close to being axed from the university budget. Many professors did in fact want to close it, and Rudbeck had to defend it many times. The common professors did not value this particular garden, Rudbeck once sarcastically explained, because it did not give them any delicious “cabbage, carrots, or turnips.”

  Besides that, Rudbeck was trying to keep another one of his typically ambitious projects up and running: the waterworks system. With one man, one horse, one pump, and an elaborate network of underground pipes, Rudbeck had devised a rather ingenious scheme to bring water from the river to many places around town. For the time it ran during the 1660s and early 1670s, many people in Uppsala enjoyed having water carried right to their doorsteps. Beneficiaries included the royal castle, the bishop’s estate, and, according to Rudbeck’s design, even the house of Olaus Verelius. The waterworks also served his botanical garden and even the Community House, so that even the most underprivileged in the university town, quite radically, shared the luxury of fresh water with Sweden’s royalty and their guests at the castle.

  The theater, the garden, the waterworks, the Community House—so many projects, so many interests, so many considerations for a man of Rudbeck’s passions. A great deal indeed depended on the investment of Rudbeck’s time and energy. Additionally, as a high-ranking official at Uppsala University, he was obliged to attend countless meetings in the council chamber. And now, as old stories from Norse manuscripts caught his fancy, the dilemmas of being a Renaissance man were all too clear.

  4

  A CARTESIAN WITCH HUNT

  I have a theory that scientists and philosophers are sublimated romanticists who channel their passions in another direction.

  —CHARLIE CHAPLIN, MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  AFTER MAKING ITS way through several continental centers of learning, a dreaded outbreak started to appear in Uppsala in the 1660s. The cause of concern was a new “suspect philosophy” known as Cartesianism—a highly controversial school of thought that led to some of the fiercest clashes that ever raged in the turbulent academic world of the “scientific revolution.”

  Drawing its name from the Latin form of René Descartes’ name, Renatus Cartesius, the Cartesian doctrine threatened to upset many cherished beliefs. Fundamentally this was a deterministic system that envisioned the universe as a machine. In this pure world of matter and motion, animals were soulless and unthinking automata. Human beings worked like machines as well, statues equipped with the power of reason. Like other types of matter, humans, animals, and all forms of life were whirling about in motion in a larger universe which was conceived of as a giant vortex, and which in turn consisted of an infinite number of other vortices. From the whirls of the tiniest particles to the largest planetary sweeps, Descartes had brought the heavens and earth together under the same single set of laws, with no center, no limits, and, many said, no place for God.

  As if that were not troubling enough, such radical notions took place in the context of Descartes’ exciting new method, which excelled in overturning traditions. His entire philosophical edifice was built on what he called a “method of doubt.” After abandoning all previous knowledge, dismissing it as empty, “vain and useless,” and then casting it “wholly away,” the philosopher put his method to use challenging everything else—that is, until he found something that simply could not be doubted. The result was one of the famous lines in philosophy: “I think, therefore I am” (and at the same time, one of the most punned upon: from the college T-shirt “I drink, therefore I am,” to the skeptic’s quip about modern gullibility, “I am, therefore I think”).

  But Descartes’ concept was the kernel of his larger system, providing an unassailable foundation from which he would construct his broad vision of the world. At its heart, Cartesianism was a rational, deterministic philosophy that built on this method of doubt, emphasizing the strict necessity of proof, and proceeding through the investigation of cause and effect to reach “clear and distinct” propositions. Not surprisingly, this methodical approach appealed greatly to natural philosophers, who were inclined to logical and mathematical thinking.

  No surprise, either, that this doctrine excited emotions in one of the most passionate centuries in modern history. Despite fierce denials by Cartesians, many theologians suspected that Cartesian thought ultimately challenged sacred scripture and the very basis of religious faith. When the Cartesian natural philosophers responded that they could use reason “to prove God,” this also seemed repulsive, and secretly subversive.

  Watching this radical vision of a machine-universe, best understood by using a method of doubt and apparently leading only to cryptic creeds, the Uppsala theology department had good reason to be alarmed. At stake, too, was its long-established authority at the university, where it had enjoyed a frankly privileged position. The department had long exerted a great influence over everything from selecting staff to examining materials for publication to teaching the theology classes that were mandatory for all degree candidates.

  In many ways the Cartesian philosopher was a real threat to this established order—and the battle over this heretical metaphysics was waged as if it were a life-and-death struggle.

  WITH THE HIGHLY esteemed theologian Lars Stigzelius leading the charge, the theologians went after individuals who were suspected of harboring Cartesian sympathies. Well trained in logical discourse himself, Stigzelius was teaching Aristotelian logic at the university when Olof Rudbeck was a boy playing the gallant Spanish knight on his hobbyhorse. Stigzelius began by complaining of the imbecillitas animi, or feebleness of mind, that had recently struck the academy.

  The problem emanated, the theologians said, from the medical faculty, particularly some of the young professors, who were almost certainly the first Swedes to import Cartesian thought. Many Uppsala doctors had studied at Leiden University, a hotbed for the dangerous philosophy. The leading medical authorities, Olof Rudbeck and Petrus Hoffvenius, had both studied there, and they were now accused of being the first Cartesians in Sweden, that is, after René Descartes himself.

  One of the first occasions for this inevitable showdown, and the incident that first brought Rudbeck into the proceedings, came quite early. The jovial “Don Juan of doctors,” and good friend to Rudbeck, Petrus Hoffvenius issued a dissertation in the spring of 1665 with a blatantly Cartesian veneer. The theologians rallied, and requested that the troublesome medical doctor receive a scolding.

  Claiming that he could not bear the arrogance of Hoffvenius’s accusers, Olof Rudbeck came to the medical professor’s defense. It was a peculiar situation, he said, to see scholars so vehemently opposed to Hoffvenius’s treatise when in fact very few of them had ever read the work, or would even have understood it had they tried. “They had not even looked at the index of topics on the title page,” Rudbeck observed.

  Disturbed at the turn events were taking in this attack on Hoffvenius, and the implications for the university at large, Rudbeck could not restrain himself. He blurted out, “If this is the way a faculty or a professor will be treated, no honest man will ever be able to write anything for the public good,” then continued, “I recognize no one’s right to censure my work before he shows himself to be more skilled in those matters than I am, and as long as I am recognized by both the King and scholars abroad as knowing something in physics, I will not tolerate a professor or faculty to censor my work.”

  Inside these strong words was a thinly veiled pledge of resistance against anyone who would try to bully Uppsala’s playful genius.<
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  Adding a coda that made him sound like a Swedish Galileo, Rudbeck affirmed in no uncertain terms that the business of doctors was to cure not the soul but the body: Non curare animam, sed corpus. Rudbeck was, as usual, speaking his mind, clamoring for greater independence for science in Sweden’s oldest university.

  Hoffvenius and Rudbeck simply would not back down, nor would the theologians, and the whole affair was about to blow up. As Hoffvenius continued to complain that the theologians acted with a libido dominandi, “a passion for dominating,” Rudbeck was even more provocative: “If a faculty member shall be allowed to censor another one, then it would be best for the academy to hire little boys as professors.” That way, they could make sure they would hire the best sort of people to perform the childish tasks of censorship, as well as those most suited to laboring in a university subjected to an iron grip.

  “I would rather advise Hoffvenius,” Rudbeck said, “to tear up the disputation in pieces, or burn it completely and never write anything at all, than allow it to be censored word for word.” Yet however well Rudbeck made his point, and however much he took up the struggle, he was the only one to speak publicly in Hoffvenius’s defense, and so this first battle of the Cartesian affair must be seen as a defeat for the doctors. Hoffvenius’s work was not allowed to be published, and he had to promise, on pain of penalty, not to teach Cartesian thought again at the university. As for Rudbeck, many professors would not forget his outburst or, for that matter, what he did next.

  While the embittered Hoffvenius tried to resign from his position, Olof Rudbeck decided to have some fun at his enemies’ expense. He wrote a short work titled De principiis rerum naturalium (On the Principles of Natural Things). Behind this impressive scholarly sounding title, Rudbeck penned a hilarious parody of his enemies’ view of the physical world. He coyly pretended to see the light in the darkness of his soul, merrily poking fun at his opponents’ cherished Aristotelian principles of nature while all the time staying carefully within the prescribed orthodox framework. Some laughed at the humor and others were silently amused, but a great number were offended or even outraged at this jest.