Über Atlantis
Dieser Beitrag ist noch in Arbeit!
von unserem Gastautor Colin Wilson und Damon Wilson
Atlantis hat man als größtes aller historischen Rätsel beschrieben. Plato, der um 350 v. Chr. darüber schrieb, war der erste, der über diese große Insel im Atlantischen Ozean berichtete, welche which had vanished "innerhalb eines Tages und einer Nacht" verschwunden sei, und von den Wogen des Atlantik verschlungen wurde.
Platos Bericht in den beiden Dialogen Timaeus und Critias has the absorbing quality of good science fiction. The story is put into the mouth of the poet and historian Critias, who tells how Solon, the famous Athenian lawgiver, went to Sais in Egypt about 590 BCE, and heard the story of Atlantis from an Egyptian priest. According to the priest, Atlantis was already a great civilization when Athens had been founded about 9600 BCE. It was then "a mighty power that was aggressing wantonly against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city [Athens] put an end." Atlantis, said the priest, was "beyond the pillars of Hercules" (the Straits of Gibraltar), and was larger than Libya and Asia put together. It was "a great and wonderful empire" which had conquered Libya and Europe as far as Tyrrhenia (Etruria in central Italy). Deserted by their allies, the Athenians fought alone against Atlantis, and finally conquered them. But at this point violent floods and earthquakes destroyed both the Athenians and the Atlantians, and Atlantis sank beneath the waves in a single day and night.
In the second dialogue, the Critias, Plato goes into far more detail about the history and geography of the lost continent. He tells how Poseidon (Neptune), the sea god, founded the Atlantian race by fathering ten children of a mortal maiden, Cleito, whom he kept on a hill surrounded by canals. The Atlantians were great engineers and architects, building palaces, harbors, temples and docks; their capital city was built on the hill, which was surrounded by concentric bands of land and water, joined by immense tunnels, large enough for a ship to sail through. The city was about eleven miles in diameter. A huge canal, 300 feet wide and 100 feet deep, connected the outermost of these rings of water to the sea. Behind the city there was a plain 230 by 340 miles, and on this farmers grew the city’s food supply. Behind the plain there were mountains with many wealthy villagers and with fertile meadows and all kinds of livestock. Plato goes into great detail about the city, suggesting either that he had been told the story at length or that he had the gifts of a novelist. The long account of magnificent buildings with hot and cold fountains, communal dining halls and stone walls plated with precious metals has fascinated generations of readers for more than two thousand years.
But eventually, says Critias, the Atlantians began to lose the wisdom and virtue they inherited from the god, and became greedy, corrupt and domineering. Then Zeus decided to teach them a lesson. So he called all the gods together...
And there, frustratingly, Plato’s story breaks off. He never completed the Critias or wrote the third dialogue that would have completed the trilogy, the Hermocrates. But we may probably assume that the final punishment of the Atlantians was the destruction of their continent.
Many later scholars and commentators assumed that Atlantis was a myth, or that Plato intended it as a political allegory: even Plato’s pupil Aristotle is on record as disbelieving it, yet this seems unlikely. The Timaeus, the dialogue in which he first tells the story, is one of his most ambitious works; his translator Jowett called it "the greatest effort of the human mind to conceive the world as a whole which the genius of antiquity has bequeathed to us." So it seems unlikely that Plato decided to insert a fairy tale into the middle of it; it seems more likely that he wanted to preserve the story for future generations.
For more than two thousand years the story of Atlantis remained a merely interesting curiosity. But in the late nineteenth century an American congressman named Ignatius Donnelly became fascinated by it, and the result was a book called Atlantis, the Antediluvian World (1882), which became a bestseller and has been in print ever since. Even a century later, the book remains surprisingly readable and up to date. Donnelly asks whether it is possible that Plato was recording a real catastrophe, and concludes that it was. He points out that modern earthquakes and volcanic eruptions have caused tremendous damage, and that there is evidence that the continent of Australia is the only visible part of a continent that stretched from Africa to the Pacific, and which scientists have named Lemuria. (Lemuria was named by the zoologist L.P. Sclater, who noted that lemurs existed from Africa to Madagascar, and suggested that a single land mass had once connected the two.)
Donnelly also studied flood legends from Egypt to Mexico, pointing out their similarities, and indicated all kinds of affinities connecting artifacts from both sides of the Atlantic. He notes that there is a mid-Atlantic ridge, and that the Azores seem to be the mountain-tops of some large submerged island. Donnelly’s knowledge of geology, geography, cultural history and linguistics appears encyclopedic. The British prime minister Gladstone was so impressed by the book that he tried to persuade the cabinet to allot funds to send a ship to trace the outlines of Atlantis. (He failed.)
Writing seventy years later in his book Lost Continents, the American writer L. Sprague de Camp commented on this impressive theory: "Most of Donnelly’s statements of facts, to tell the truth, either were wrong when he made them, or have been disproved by subsequent discoveries." And he goes on to say: "It is not true, as he stated, that the Peruvian Indians had a system of writing, that the cotton plants native to the New and Old Worlds belong to the same species, that Egyptian civilization sprang suddenly into being, or that Hannibal used gunpowder in his military operations..." De Camp demonstrates that Donnelly’s scholarship is not as reliable as it looks; but there is still a great deal in the 490-page book that he leaves unchallenged.
Five years before the publication of Donnelly’s book, the subject of Atlantis has been raised in an immense two-volume work called Isis Unveiled by the Russian occultist Helena Blavatsky, who had dashed off its fifteen hundred pages at a speed that suggests automatic writing. But her comments on Atlantis occupy only one single page of Volume One (593), in which she explains that the inhabitants of Atlantis were the fourth race on earth, and that they were all natural "mediums." Having acquired their knowledge without effort, this people was an easy prey for "the great and invisible dragon" King Thevetat, who corrupted them so that they became "a nation of wicked magicians." They started a war which ended in the submersion of Atlantis...
After a shattering expose in which she was declared a fraud, Blavatsky returned to London and died of Bright’s disease at the age of 60 in 1891. She left behind a manuscript that was even larger and more confusing than Isis Unveiled, a book called The Secret Doctrine. This is a commentary on a mystical work called The Book of Dzyan, allegedly written in Atlantis in the Senzar language, and it explains that humans are not the first intelligent race on earth. According to Madame Blavatsky, all knowledge of the past is imprinted on a kind of psychic ether called Akasa, and this knowledge is called the Akasic (alternatively, Akashic) records. She also claims that the survivors of Atlantis peopled Egypt and built the pyramids about a hundred thousand years ago.
A rather more credible theory of Atlantis was propounded in the late 1960s by a Greek archaeologist, Angelos Galanopoulos, based on the discoveries of Spyridon Marinatos on the island of Santorini or Thera, in the Mediterranean. Around the year 1500 BCE a tremendous volcanic explosion ripped apart Santorini, and probably destroyed most of the civilization of the Greek islands, the coastal regions of eastern Greece, and of northern Crete. This, Galanopoulos suggests, was the catastrophe that destroyed Atlantis. But surely the date is wrong? The destruction of Santorini took place a mere nine hundred years before Solon, not nine thousand. This is the essence of the argument -- Galanopoulos believes that a scribe accidentally multiplied all figures by ten. He points out that all Plato’s figures seem far too large. The 10,000 stadia (1,150 mile) ditch around the plain would stretch around modern London twenty times. The width and depth of the canal 300 feet wide and 100 feet deep seems absurd; surely 30 feet by 10 feet would be more likely? As to the plain behind the city, 23 by 34 miles would be a more reasonable size than 230 by 340 miles. If all Plato’s figures are reduced this way, then Santorini begins to sound altogether more like Atlantis, although Galanopoulos suggests that the Atlantian civilization stretched all over the Mediterranean, and that Crete itself was probably the Royal City. And how could such a mistake come about? Galanopoulos suggests that the Greek copyist mistook the Egyptian symbol for 100 -- a coiled rope -- for the symbol for 1,000 -- a lotus flower.
There is only one major objection to this theory: Plato states clearly that Atlantis was beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Galanopoulos argues that Hercules performed most of his labors in the Peloponnese, and that the Pillars of Hercules could well refer to the two extreme southern promontories of Greece, Cape Matapan and Cape Maleas. But Plato says clearly: "They [the Atlantians] held way... over the country within the pillars as far as Egypt and Tyrrhenia." And no amount of revisionary geography can place Egypt and Etruria within the promontories of Greece. So another fascinating theory must be reluctantly abandoned.
According to Edgar Cayce, Atlantis extended from the Sargasso Sea to the Azores, and was about the size of Europe. It had experienced two periods of destruction, in the first of which the mainland had divided into islands. The final breakup occurred, as Plato said, about 10,000 BCE, and the last place to sink was near the Bahamas. He claimed that archives dealing with Atlantis now exist in three places in the world, one of these in Egypt. In June 1940 Cayce predicted that the island called Poseidia would rise again, "expect it in ‘68 or ‘69." It would happen in the area of the Bahamas.
Early in 1969 a fishing guide called Bonefish Sam took the archaeologist Dr. J. Manson Valentine to see a line of rectangular stones under twenty feet of water in North Bimini, in the Bahamas. Valentine was startled to find two parallel lines of stones about 2,000 feet long. They became known as the Bimini Road. But scientists disagreed from the beginning. John Hall, a professor of archaeology from Miami, said they were natural formations; John Gifford, a marine biologist, thought that if the stones were produced by "geological stress" then there would be far more of them over a wider area. He concluded that "none of the evidence conclusively disproves human intervention." One of the investigators, David Zink, wrote a book called The Stones of Atlantis, and had no doubt whatsoever that some of the stones were handmade. In fact, one object was a stone head. But even if the Bimini Road could be shown to be part of a temple, this would still not prove that it was built more than ten thousand years ago; it could be the product of a much more recent culture.
Anmerkungen und Quellen
Dieser Beitrag von Colin Wilson und Damon Wilson erschien online zuerst in englischer Sprache unter dem Titel "Atlantis" bei Morgana´s Observatory (Original-Quelle: The Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries). Übersetzung ins Deutsche und redaktionelle Bearbeitung durch Atlantisforschung.de (2010)
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