Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World

by David King

  ENJOYING THE THRILL of the search, Rudbeck was spending less time at the medical school. His lectures were languishing, and university authorities were once again warning him about neglecting his duties. Fortunately for Rudbeck, his old friend Professor Petrus Hoffvenius was picking up the slack, though it was clear that he could not continue to do so indefinitely.

  Rudbeck’s waterworks system, meanwhile, had broken down; its pipes had burst in a severe winter a few years earlier. His anatomy theater needed a new roof, and one of his suspension bridges over the town river had collapsed in a recent spring flood. There were many matters that needed attention, but Rudbeck had first to be satisfied with his work on Atlantis.

  Hunting down every possible claim about the legendary civilization, Rudbeck came across one of the great unsung heroes in the tradition of Atlantis: the first-century-B.C. historian Diodorus Siculus.

  Writing during the bloody upheavals that tore Rome apart during the last days of the republic, this Sicilian-born scholar spent three decades gathering materials for his monumental work, the Library of History. Originally spanning forty books, Diodorus’s collection aimed to present an overall sweep of the past, a universal history that began with the earliest recorded events and made its way up to Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars (58–50 B.C.). The ten surviving books show a certain idiosyncrasy in the selection and treatment of its subject matter. Indeed, for this historian, the citizens of Atlantis were just as real as the Romans, Greeks, Gauls, or any other ancient people he discussed.

  Although Diodorus does not earn much praise today as a reliable authority, he nevertheless preserved many invaluable traditions that would otherwise have been lost. By the time his eccentric chronicle reached the history of Atlantis, he essentially took Plato’s vision of an advanced civilization and magnified it considerably. Even more, Diodorus added a twist to the tale; he claimed to have access to the traditions of the Atlanteans themselves.

  After this rather surprising revelation, Diodorus really dropped a bomb. Zeus, Poseidon, and the gods of ancient Greece had, according to these same records, come originally from the island of Atlantis! Such a claim was “in agreement with the most renowned of the Greek poets, Homer.” In the Iliad, for instance, the Olympian goddess Hera thus announces her plans for an upcoming journey: “I am going to the ends of the fruitful earth to visit Ocean, the forebear of the gods, and Mother Tethys, who treated me kindly and brought me up in their home.” And this “Mother Tethys” was, Diodorus added, an ancient queen of Atlantis.

  From the vantage point of 1670s Sweden, these were extraordinary words. In the version of the classical myth most widely known, Tethys was an important though hazy figure who had married Oceanus and played at least some role in raising Hera, if not also the other gods as Homer sometimes seems to suggest. Now the assiduous collector of old traditions, Diodorus Siculus, had preserved some vague legend that connected Tethys to the island of Atlantis. Rudbeck could only wonder about how well this information fitted with his own emerging vision of the past. For Tethys sounded strangely close to a place on his Atlantis, called Tethis Fiord, which was located firmly in the far north, at the sixty-eighth meridian, indeed, as Homer put it, “at the ends of the fruitful earth.”

  But Tethys was also known to be a Titan, and some descriptions of this powerful race of giants have actually survived. In the oldest extant account that offers some detail, the eighth-century-B.C. Greek poet Hesiod described their home as “hidden under misty gloom, in a dank place where are the ends of the huge earth.” The shepherd poet further described their “awful home of murky Night wrapped in dark clouds.” Where Tethys and the Titans dwelt, “the glowing Sun never looks upon them with his beams,” just as actually happens, every winter, at Tethis Fiord in northern Scandinavia.

  DIODORUS SICULUS WAS not only greatly encouraging the Swedish doctor, but now also helping direct his enormous energies. Rudbeck had started to follow some fascinating leads, particularly about the classical gods and those vague, supposed traditions connecting them with the kingdom of Atlantis.

  Zeus, Apollo, and the other gods of Mount Olympus were known to every educated person in Rudbeck’s day. Needless to say, nowhere the Olympians were said to have lived, visited, or otherwise had anything to do with Sweden or with the Scandinavian far north. All the oldest surviving accounts clearly place the Olympians somewhere within the ancient Greek world. Tradition associated Zeus with Crete, Hera with Argos and Mycenae, and Aphrodite with Cyprus; Hephaestus “fell” on the island of Lemnos; and so on. The locations of their birth, the sites of many of their known deeds, and their main shrines all were placed mainly within the limits of the ancient Mediterranean.

  Yet the idea of the Swedish origin of the classical gods had caught Rudbeck’s attention, and the flamboyant Renaissance man could not let go of this possibility. Faint signs of uncertainty and dissension about the gods, however subtle and hinted, would be chased down and pounced upon with an overwhelming fixation, as Rudbeck obsessively tried to root up Mount Olympus and situate it in his homeland, not far from where he had reconstructed ancient Atlantis. His imagination could, as one scholar put it, take on a frightening quality.

  Years later, for instance, when Sweden was considering a comprehensive reform of its calendar, a committee of experts requested Rudbeck’s opinion. He agreed that the old Julian calendar needed to be abandoned, but unexpectedly he did not favor switching over to the Gregorian, as many European countries had already done. Instead Rudbeck proposed that Sweden adopt a calendar based on the runes of Atlantis! This rather unusual choice would mean losing a few minutes every year, but that did not really matter, Rudbeck said, because the end of the world was near anyway. The committee had difficulty determining whether he was serious, and his imaginative proposal was politely turned down.

  Back in the search for the classical gods, two important traditions were probably guiding Rudbeck in his ever-growing ambition. The first was a nearly universal belief that traced the ancestry of the classical gods back to the Titans. Usually the parents were identified as Cronos and Rhea, though some preferred another minor and perhaps older tradition that suggested Oceanus and Tethys. At any rate, the oldest Olympians were in all accounts the children of the Titans.

  The second tradition was a popular way of viewing mythology that had flourished for centuries, now called Euhemerism after the early-third-century-B.C. philosopher Euhemerus of Messene, who sought real historical figures behind the stories of the gods. They were, in other words, kings, queens, heroes, sages, or people who had performed such memorable deeds that they were, with the passage of time, remembered as gods. And for Rudbeck, looking at the ancient gods and working within this tradition, the temptations must have been irresistible.

  For, according to standard accounts of classical mythology, especially Hesiod’s Theogony, the Titans once ruled the universe. Fearing the loss of power, the leader of the Titans, Cronos, decided to launch a preemptive strike. He would eat his children. Hestia, Poseidon, Hades, Demeter, Hera—the entire family of Olympians—were swallowed. By the time the sixth and youngest child, Zeus, had been born, the Titan mother Rhea had had enough. When Cronos prepared to devour her new son in the usual fashion, Rhea tricked him by presenting a stone wrapped up as an infant. In the meantime she smuggled the baby Zeus to safety on the island of Crete.

  After reaching maturity, Zeus rescued his siblings, who were magically disgorged unharmed, and rallied them to victory over Cronos and the whole Titan lot. That is, except his mother, Rhea, who would move into the new home of the gods on Mount Olympus. Oceanus and Tethys also escaped the harsh punishment. The ultimate reason is not specifically stated, though this was probably because of Olympian loyalty to their kind rearers, as hinted in the Iliad, or perhaps it was gratitude for their valuable services in the war against the Titans.

  Now Rudbeck put the fragmented pieces together into a stunning proposition. Could it be that, after winning this war of liberation, Zeus and the gods left
their Titan overseers imprisoned in the dark abode at the ends of the earth, that is, around the arctic Tethis Fiord, and then made their way, for the first time, into Crete, Mycenae, Argos, and all the places that held their early sanctuaries and that were also undoubtedly some of the oldest known settlements of the ancient Greek world? Could memories of these events still be encoded in the oldest, most obscure stories of classical mythology?

  To Rudbeck, who was willing to entertain any potential solution, even the most daring and revolutionary, this was certainly a possibility. Soon his enthusiasm would make it a probability, indeed almost a certainty, in the unfolding vision of the past that he was desperately trying to capture on paper. Yet before he could pursue this specific point further, there was another idea that must have struck his imagination and convinced him even more of the Atlantis-Titans-Sweden connection.

  All the whimsical and wrathful Olympians who usually displayed the full gamut of human passions looked like another rowdy, boisterous gang Rudbeck had come across. Unlike the classical gods, however, this was a family that was known only to a select few who had access to their adventures, recorded in some of the world’s rarest books and still unpublished manuscripts housed in Scandinavia: the gods of Asgard.

  How similar were the classical gods who feasted on nectar and ambrosia atop snowy Mount Olympus to the Norse gods who dined on mead and boar in Valhalla! How similar, too, were Zeus, Poseidon, and the classical gods who fought the Titans to Odin, Thor, and the Norse gods who waged war against their archenemies, the monstrous giants! Once again, Rudbeck’s head swirled as he contemplated the possible implications.

  What were those “Atlantean traditions” that Diodorus Siculus had mentioned, anyway? Could they have been preserved in Sweden, where, after all, Rudbeck had found Atlantis and, it seemed, a possible home for the Titan Tethys? Could they have anything to do with those mysterious runes carved on stone, wood, and metal? Better yet, could they have something to do with the much more elaborate Norse sagas and eddas that Rudbeck was starting to appreciate with a new passion? Although most were obviously written down in the Middle Ages, could these brittle manuscripts contain memories of older, lost Atlantean stories, perhaps fragments of fragments? Even if Diodorus was not the most authoritative of sources, must he necessarily be wrong about every single point?

  It was time to investigate the worlds of Olympus and Valhalla. Looking to learn everything he could, Rudbeck pored over the oldest and most authoritative accounts of ancient history and mythology. After rowing with 102 Platonic oars to Atlantis, Rudbeck would effectively “hoist sail with Homer” and embark on his own maverick odyssey into the dreamy world of his own creation.

  EVEN BEFORE RUDBECK had stumbled upon the quest for Atlantis and attempted to storm Mount Olympus, there was an unmistakable sense of urgency about the venture. He was already six hundred pages deep in the writing of the work, and, as he started to worry, he had not even made it a quarter of the way through to the desired end. Rushing to cram all his new discoveries, which were expanding exponentially almost each way he turned, Rudbeck could not work fast enough to keep up the hectic pace. Seven hundred pages into the text, there was still no end in sight.

  Raising the stakes in this race against time, Rudbeck had earlier taken the advice of his friend Olaus Verelius. He had decided to begin printing as early as February 1675, though the many new discoveries had delayed it further, not to mention the firing of Curio the printer and the uproar over the subsequent lawsuits. The legal manipulations and the suit, however, were not looking all that good. “Only the Lord knows what will happen to him,” Rudbeck said to his friend Count de la Gardie as the prospects in the case looked worse and worse.

  Given the looming uncertainty, the prudent thing, Verelius and Rudbeck agreed, was to start printing at once. As soon as new pages were written, they were immediately rushed to Curio’s press. Atlantica, as the work would be called after Rudbeck’s discovery of Atland or Atlantis, would be printed a few pages at a time, sheet by sheet, right after he finished writing them.

  Regardless of Curio’s fate, which Rudbeck’s clever maneuvering had at least for the moment managed to forestall, the costs of the search for the lost world were quickly adding up. He had taken Verelius’s advice about another matter as well. Originally Rudbeck had planned to publish the Atlantica only in Swedish, and if the scholarly community deemed his work worthwhile, then he was confident that someone would come along to translate it into the more accessible Latin or French “just as often happens to other men’s books.”

  Verelius, however, had insisted that Rudbeck adorn the work with a Latin translation, and other scholars at Uppsala who read the drafts agreed. “A good friend,” Rudbeck said, was recruited for the task. Rudbeck hardly had the time for this translation himself, not to mention the fact that he had “long since stopped worrying his head with such grammatical curiosities.”

  The unnamed friend who would assume the task of translating this unwieldy volume was most likely the classical scholar and professor of eloquence Anders Norcopensis. A child prodigy with a wonderful grasp of Latin, he certainly added much with his translation of the work. By all accounts, it was a stellar performance. Few have failed to notice how Norcopensis sometimes “cleaned up” Rudbeck’s rather hurried and idiosyncratic text, written as it was in an almost stream-of-consciousness style under great pressure of time.

  Within a few years this choice of translator would in another respect be of no small consequence. In the 1680s, Norcopensis would be appointed personal tutor to the Swedish crown prince, the future king Charles XII, the romantic and quite controversial ruler who would be the last of Sweden’s warrior kings.

  In the meantime, however, if Verelius’s advice about fitting the text with a Latin translation helped ensure a much wider readership, it also significantly increased the strains in an already monumental undertaking.

  LOOKING INTO THE intricate genealogies of ancient mythology, one of the most promising leads in the search for the Olympians was the god Apollo. Armed with golden lyre and silver bow, shining Apollo was the healing, music-loving god of reason and archery. To many scholars today, he seems the “most Greek” of the classical pantheon. To Rudbeck, on the other hand, Apollo looked as Swedish as Gustavus Adolphus.

  Rudbeck already knew that this god was held in special reverence among the Hyperboreans. Virtually every ancient source touching on the legendary northerners agreed on this fact, and many told the story that Apollo’s mother, Leto, had actually been a Hyperborean. In his book The Nature of the Gods, the first-century Roman prince of orators, Cicero, was still aware of this tale, writing, “This is Apollo who tradition says came to Delphi from the land of the Hyperboreans.”

  Whether he was born on the Greek isle of Delos or came into the Mediterranean from a distant land “beyond the north wind,” the conclusion was essentially the same. Would this not make Apollo seem, in Rudbeckian logic, at least partially Hyperborean, or Swedish, indeed Atlantean, since Diodorus’s tradition had said that the gods came from there anyway?

  Yet, aside from this string of hypotheticals, were there any possible reasons to believe that Apollo had actually been Swedish? For Rudbeck, the answer was obvious, almost instantaneously showing itself in the old manuscripts through the Norse god Balder. The similarities, at least at first glance, were many.

  Just as the ancients praised Apollo for his justice and beauty, a child “lovely above all the sons of heaven,” Balder was noticeably hailed in Norse accounts as the most just and the most beautiful of the gods. Both were known for their gift of prophecy. When Homer sang in the Iliad that “the past, the present, and the future held no secrets” for Apollo, Balder the Good “dreamed great dreams” about future dangers, terrible premonitions that prompted his mother Frigg to fear for his life and seek the oath of every living thing not to harm her child (again perhaps the basis for the fears that forced Apollo’s mom, Leto, to travel around seeking a safe haven to give birth to her c
hildren).

  Additionally, both figures were related in other fundamental ways. While Apollo was the god of light, and some later traditions even associated him with the sun, Balder was “so fair in appearance and so bright that light shines from him.” Apollo’s justice, reasoning, and clear logical thought were echoed in Balder’s fame as “the wisest of the Aesir,” and Apollo’s eloquence likewise made its appearance when the Edda knew Balder as “the most beautifully spoken.” As for Apollo’s celebrated magnificence, attested to by the number of his shrines and sanctuaries, Balder was also “the most merciful,” and as the Edda put it, the “best and all praise him.” And so on.

  Despite the obvious lack of correspondence in every possible tradition, Rudbeck saw enough key similarities between the classical and Norse figures to think that he was on the trail of the original Olympian that, as Diodorus’s lost sources allegedly claimed, came from Atlantis to the Mediterranean. Besides, the oldest and most complete genealogies available about the classical gods made the question even more provocative.

  Apollo’s reputed Hyperborean heritage could be found to have deeper roots. His mother, Leto, it turned out, not only was regarded as a Hyperborean, but also was the daughter of a Titan—a Titan who lived in dark, “misty gloom … at the ends of the huge earth,” and actually a brother of Tethys, whose name Rudbeck thought had survived in the name of Tethis Fiord, which is located at the actual dark “ends of the huge earth.” With the testimony of the oldest known works in classical mythology, all these coincidences could only reinforce Rudbeck’s suspicion, indeed his conviction, that he was on the right track. The classical Apollo was merely a pale reflection of an original Balder cult that came from the far north.

  “I could still put forth endless reasons,” Rudbeck said, “but I will save them for another place.” Given Rudbeck’s tremendous ability to make connections, no matter how far removed, this was no idle boast. Elaborations about the northern elements surviving in the classical myth of Apollo would indeed be plentiful, but they would have to wait. So much else was on the agenda in this bizarre hunt for the Swedish Olympians.