Finding Atlantis

by David King

  With his position as herald, guide, messenger, interpreter, and even diplomat of the gods, Hermes held a position of great responsibility. This “sophisticated rogue” had effectively developed into the favorite servant of Zeus. Such great importance for Hermes was, in Rudbeck’s vision, based on the esteem of Heimdall, whose official functions had been enshrined in his name, which drew on the Swedish words hemlig and taler, meaning “secret” and “speaker.” Heimdall was a Heimtaler, “a secret speaker” entrusted with sensitive information and then sent to carry out various special missions.

  Rudbeck believed that Hermes’ Swedish origins were seen clearly in another unexpected place: the god’s famous staff, the caduceus. In classical mythology, Hermes, or Mercury as the Romans called him, carried a staff encircled by two intertwined snakes. According to Rudbeck, the image of the intertwined snakes was common in the north in the distant past, and a perfect microcosm of the runes. In fact, on examination, each letter of the runic alphabet could actually be seen encoded in the god’s emblem. If one relied on various angles formed by the snakes around the staff, every single rune could indeed be crafted.

  Affixing numbers to various points on the staff and the snakes, Rudbeck provided directions for marking the runes by using Mercury’s caduceus. The basic rune, I, was drawn by moving the pen from position 1 to 2. Another rune, ↑, was made by moving from 2 to 5, 9 to 10, and a more complicated one, *, was made using the formula 1 to 7, 11 to 6, 4 to 8. And so on.

  Mercury’s staff, reproduced in the first volume of Rudbeck’s Atlantica.

  What a device for encoding the letters, and for transmitting this knowledge! Rudbeck’s discovery looks even more exciting when it is remembered that Hermes was, according to traditional accounts of classical mythology, the god who brought the alphabet into many places in antiquity, from Egypt to Arcadia. So Rudbeck concluded that the god’s staff was the handy means of teaching the art of the runes. And along with these Hyperborean hieroglyphics, the magical, mystical, and secret learning of the north would also be transmitted to the wise men of the Mediterranean.

  Developing this insight—how, when, where, why, and what it all meant—was to be one of the central functions of Rudbeck’s Atlantica. The first volume was nearly finished, but Rudbeck would try for the rest of his life to elaborate on the many achievements of ancient Sweden. As matters looked worse for his country, and as his own personal affairs continued to deteriorate, Rudbeck’s sense of mission only became stronger, and his fantasy ran amok. Concealed in old manuscripts and carved on standing stones, Rudbeck was everywhere seeing a dazzling image of the ancient north.

  AS THE MONUMENTAL work came to a close, some nine hundred pages detailing his dramatic revision of the past, Rudbeck ended Atlantica with two rather surreal stories. The first was about a peasant with a big nose who went to see a doctor.

  Afflicted by an imaginary disease, the peasant somehow came to fear that the unusually large size of his nose caused death to anyone who happened to touch it. After many unsuccessful attempts to find treatment, he was finally cured. Both impressed with and curious about the doctor’s success, the peasant asked for permission to attend one of the anatomical dissections that were then so much in vogue in the learned world. But when he went to the anatomy theater, the peasant watched with surprise and horror.

  As one physician demonstrated beyond doubt the circulation of the blood, some of the older, more learned doctors refused to accept this controversial new claim. The blood does not circulate, they said, repeating the certainties they had known since the beginning of their medical studies. By the end of the demonstration, the peasant thanked God that he was not so learned as the distinguished physicians in the theater, and so sure of his learning that he could not understand what he saw with his own eyes.

  Rudbeck told this story as part of his final appeal to the reader not to be misled by conventional thought, traditional authorities, and the many prejudices that cloud our judgment. All of these things can lead to maladies from which we do not even know we suffer. Instead, Rudbeck wanted his readers, like the simple peasant, to look at the facts with their own eyes and judge with an open mind. Doing so, he was sure, would enable the unbiased observer to see how everything did in fact fit together. Like the discovery that the blood circulated throughout the body, the unthinkable had once again occurred and shattered our old certainties. Atlantis had been found in Sweden.

  Then, in his second story, Rudbeck told the reader about a gardener who had witnessed all kinds of sweet-smelling spices and exotic animals coming into Europe from the new worlds in the East and West Indies. Curious, the gardener wanted to see the lands that produced such remarkable things. As Rudbeck described it, “He went out. Came back. Wrote a book in his simplicity, according to what he had experienced himself.” Some learned men, however, were enraged that a common gardener would dare to publish his own account. They had already described these spices and animals, adorning them “wonderfully with their eloquent tongues” and scorning the rather plain attempts of this simple observer. So they took their discontent to the patron of the creative arts, identified in this story as Apollo, and asked him to forbid the gardener’s work.

  After listening to their complaint, Apollo ordered the book brought to him and called an assembly of the gods to discuss the matter. As the deities were about to agree with the learned professionals, and planned to outlaw its dissemination, Apollo asked to look at the gardener’s work himself.

  He opened the book, and saw the bold words on the first page: ET NOS HOMINES. Struck by the wisdom in these words—“we, too, are human”—the gods decided to journey to the land of the spices and investigate for themselves. As Rudbeck concluded the tale, “[They] found that the gardener with his own experience and simple writing better found the truth than those who just adorn the writings of another.”

  It is appropriate that Rudbeck closed Atlantica with these stories, which fairly well capture his insistence on observation, experience, and firsthand engagement with the ancient world. Indeed, with one foot in the garden himself, Rudbeck was like the simple cultivator who always wanted to remember the words et vos homines. “You, too, are human”: the theories you craft, however learned and ingenious, can still be wrong. But Rudbeck was also like the peasant in the anatomy theater with the rich imagination. He knew what he saw, what he heard, and what he thought. And by now, no amount of learning would ever convince him otherwise.

  14

  ON NOTHING

  How much more rabidly, too, will he believe in his cause when he sees you and people like you not only coming in crowds but with smiles of congratulation on your faces?

  —CICERO, WRITING IN A LETTER TO HIS FRIEND ATTICUS ABOUT JULIUS CAESAR, 49 B.C.

  ON A SNOWY DAY in late March 1679, the first bound copy of Rudbeck’s work rolled off Curio’s press. Emblazoned triumphantly on the title page was the word Atlantica, the Latin name for the central discovery of the text. The Swedish title elaborated somewhat, adding another twenty-seven of the most prominent findings Rudbeck had made in the course of his investigations. The full title filled almost the entire first page:

  Olof Rudbeck’s Atland or Manheim, from which come the descendants of Japhet, the most prominent imperial and royal families governing the whole world, and from which also poured out the following peoples, namely the Scythians, Barbarians, Aesir, Giants, Goths, Phrygians, Trojans, Amazons, Thracians, Libyans Mauer, Tussar, Gauls, Cimbrians, Cimmerians, Saxons, Germans, Swedes, Longobards, Vandals, Heruli, Gepar, Angles, Picts, Danes, and Sea Peoples, and many others which shall be proven in the work.

  As soon as the inclement weather lifted, Rudbeck sent over the almost nine-hundred-page volume to his patron, Count Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie, in the count’s castle outside Stockholm. The young man chosen to transport this bulky package was Anders Goeding, a “diligent and learned student” who had spent the last seven years at university reading philosophy and theology. He was a close friend, a promising lo
gician, and also the future husband of Rudbeck’s daughter Johanna Kristina.

  In the eyes of Rudbeck, approaching his fiftieth birthday, the publication of Atlantica marked the highlight of his career. Not even his discovery of the lymphatic glands, the observation of comets, or the design of many buildings could compare with the fantastic succession of breakthroughs he had made about the ancient world.

  To Rudbeck’s delight, many contemporaries agreed. Two German visitors, for example, came across Rudbeck’s Atlantica in Stockholm that spring, and each bought a copy. Deciding to make a journey out to Old Uppsala to see the sights of Atlantis themselves, they were so impressed that, Rudbeck joked, he believed one of them was probably “still there and kissing the old walls and big mounds.”

  This was a sign of things to come. After a slow beginning, with only a few letters of appreciation trickling in over the summer, the pace picked up in the autumn. Rudbeck would be celebrated as the “Atlas of the northern skies,” a pioneer who blazed a heroic trail into the past. According to one enthusiastic reader, Rudbeck was a “Swedish Heracles” who had accomplished his own personal Herculean labor, and restored light where dark Cimmerian mists had formerly prevailed. To another admirer, Rudbeck had solved one of the great riddles of the past, proving how so many peoples had come out of Sweden “as if from a Trojan horse.”

  His adversaries, on the other hand, were appalled at such praise. They had hoped to see Rudbeck’s work flop. Some were even haunted by envy, as if, one contemporary said, pursued by the Furies, those dark mythic creatures with “heads wreathed in swarming serpents” that hounded their victims to madness. And to the horror of these scholars, words of praise, gratitude, and encouragement would continue to reach Uppsala from many different places.

  Merchants discussed the work in the busy port of Gothenburg, and vicars in magnificent Stockholm churches testified to Rudbeck’s “immeasurable labor, wonderful genius and manner of expression.” One reader, the director of the Witchcraft Commission for three northern provinces, Anders Stiernhöök, claimed that he simply could not put the book down. He was undertaking daily studies throughout the fall of 1679, and the joy of the readings, he said, scarcely left him in control of his senses.

  Appreciation for the “oracle of the north” also raged outside Sweden. The famous polymath, Kiel’s own walking encyclopedia, D. G. Morhof, described his own experience with Rudbeck’s mammoth work: “I completely devoured the book in one unbroken reading.” He enclosed a poem on the merits of the “divine Atlantica,” admiring how Rudbeck made the dirt speak and the stones of the north proclaim their unrivaled antiquity. Rudbeck, he added, painted “his genius in most beautiful hues.”

  Similarly, glowing testimony arrived from no less than London’s Royal Society, the famous gathering of natural philosophers and gentleman dilettantes that included Robert Hooke, Isaac Newton, and Samuel Pepys. With Christopher Wren in the presidential chair, the Royal Society sent Rudbeck the following words: “We are not able to admire enough the power of genius and the abundance of learning . . . by which you uncover the secrets of the past.”

  At least three times during the fall and winter of 1681–82, Rudbeck’s theories were discussed in the chambers of the Royal Society. Atlantica was also chosen to be reviewed in the Royal Society’s journal, Philosophical Transactions. In the issue dated January 10, 1681/82 (the double year because Britain was still refusing to adopt the Gregorian calendar and, as a result, was ten days behind most of Europe), the reviewer proclaimed, “This deservedly famous Author has here undertaken a great Work, and much to the honor of his Country, to set forth the Rise and Progress of the kingdom of Sweeden, from Japhet the first king and Possessor thereof in the times nearest the Flood, to Charles now at present Reigning. . . .”

  The reviewer went on, praising Rudbeck’s work on the earliest civilization as flourishing first in Sweden, referring afterwards to the “expedition of the gods” from Sweden, and the establishment of colonies all over the Mediterranean. All of this was mentioned without criticism, even the Swedish conquests over “most of Europe, Asia, the Indies to Aegypt and the parts thereabout.” Such a favorable review no doubt helped disseminate the news and excitement of Rudbeck’s bold theory throughout the international Republic of Letters.

  Accolades for the Swedish physician went further still. At the Royal Society’s meeting held December 14, 1681, Rudbeck was proposed as a member. It was in fact an expert on the ancient world, former Cambridge University Regius Professor of Greek Thomas Gale, who officially proposed Rudbeck to the Royal Society. In his enthusiasm, seconded by the physicist Robert Hooke, he nominated Atlantica’s deliveryman for membership as well.

  DESPITE THE HONOR, Rudbeck never showed any signs of interest in joining the distinguished society, or in engaging in regular correspondence with its members. He was far too preoccupied, busying himself with his own search, as the mysteries of the past had not ceased to unfold. Many new pieces of evidence were still turning up to support his claims, and in some cases, entirely new discoveries were being made along the way.

  By now, too, Rudbeck had, incredibly, launched another massive project, a botanical work called Campus Elysii, which attempted to describe all the plants of the world, complete with life-size reproductions. This work received its name from the Elysian Fields, the ancient paradise lands that Rudbeck had earlier found in Sweden. Since his sons and daughters were now old enough to help, Rudbeck’s adventure was becoming a family enterprise. Olof junior, Johanna Kristina, and young Vendela in particular helped with the project, working on many of the woodcuts of the plants. This collaboration with his children, along with the recognition he had received for his Atlantica, must have provided a powerful boost.

  But the last few years had not only seen glowing tributes to Atlantica, and poetic fanfares to its wonderful, bewildering genius. There were those who had been less than impressed. Schefferus, Rudbeck’s rival in the Old Uppsala dispute, had received a copy straight from the press while he lay on his deathbed in March 1679, and had said, “God knows where he got all this he has written! I did not think Rudbeck was capable of such a work.”

  When Rudbeck heard this, he took it as a compliment, a sign that the former contender had finally been brought around by the sheer force of the argument. One of Schefferus’s friends at his bedside, however, knew otherwise, because the dying scholar had added, “For there is much craziness in it, too.”

  Wisdom pours out of the ancient north, and Europeans catch the overflow. Some, however, try to devour more than they can stomach.

  Indeed, from the very beginning, even before the long-awaited publication of the book, all sorts of rumors about Rudbeck and his integrity were circulated by his enemies at Uppsala University. One of the worst was a savage satire of Atlantica’s author as a buffoon who “knew nothing.” Written as a pamphlet, this “censura gravissima” pretended to be a proclamation issued by the classical god Apollo high atop Mount Parnassus. Transcribed from “the protocols” by his secretary Mercury, another god of Swedish descent in Atlantica, this anonymous pamphleteer launched into a tirade against “the very celebrated Herr Olof Rudbeck.” The jack of all trades was now pronounced, in the words of Apollo, incompetent in each of his areas: “In theology as well as jurisprudence, as well as medicine, chemistry, philosophy, Herr Rudbeck knows nothing.”

  Undismayed on the surface, but not known for taking criticism well, Rudbeck responded by announcing his upcoming lecture series at the university; he would teach the greatest, most profound subject, and his self-proclaimed specialty: nothing.

  So imagine the surprise of students, not to mention the officials, when they read the formal lecture catalog for Uppsala University for the fall term 1679. Next to botany, anatomy, theology, and the familiar academic subjects, there was the following offering:

  Olof Rudbeck is going to treat his listeners to a very useful, very intricate, and very subtle subject that is never praised enough: Nothing.

  Su
rprise, laughter, and probably some cheers for one of Uppsala’s perennially favorite teachers. Rudbeck was once again having fun at his enemies’ expense. As the university catalog went on to describe the course, Rudbeck kept playing with his rivals’ own Aristotelian terms in a mocking fashion. “He is going to show how Nothing arose and fell, and trace its unending affections, virtues, and deficiencies as well as its multifaceted uses in theology, law, medicine, philosophy, all mechanical arts, and daily life.”

  Needless to say, few of his Uppsala colleagues were amused by this prank. University officials were upset at this “tasteless gesture,” with one professor saying, “Each and every person who tastelessly cracks jokes about a serious matter knows nothing about good manners and culture; but Olof Rudbeck does this in the Uppsala professors’ lecture catalog; therefore he knows nothing about education.”

  Some professors evidently worried about the effects on young people. Would this not bring the educational mission into disrepute, or perhaps give the impression that there was no such thing as knowledge? Even the archbishop, Johannes Baazius the Younger, agreed that this prank was insulting and went a little too far.

  Again Rudbeck was forced to explain himself, both at the council meeting and to the university chancellor. No, he said, this lecture series “On Nothing” was not meant to insult his colleagues or deny the existence of knowledge. He had only intended to offer some reflections on the many uses of “nothing” in the sciences. From medicine to pharmacy to physics, he saw nothing, and nothing everywhere. This was, as he put it, an attempt at a “true science of nothing.”