Atlantis

[The following is Episode 3 of my 16-part documentary series entitled Larger than Life, about the role that beliefs play in shaping the events of our civilization.]

            More than two thousand years ago, a visitor to Egypt from the Greek city of Athens heard a remarkable story.  The Egyptian priests told him of an ancient land, where the laws and customs of its people were so perfect that they lived in a virtual Utopia.  The place was none other than Athens, the visitor’s own homeland, as it had existed 9,000 years earlier.  But the power of these ancient Athenians was threatened by another kingdom, situated on an island continent far beyond the Straits of Gibraltar.  As one of the Egyptian priests explained:

Many great and wonderful deeds are recorded of your state in our histories.  But one of them exceeds all the rest in greatness and valor.  For these histories tell of a mighty power which unprovoked made an expedition against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city put an end.

The name of that mighty power was Atlantis.

The priests described how, in the earliest times, the gods had divided the earth between them.  It had been agreed that each god would preside over the land assigned to him, or her, guiding its peoples, and establishing temples of worship.  Athens was the domain of Hephaestus, the god of fire and metalwork, and Athena, goddess of wisdom and war, and to Poseidon, god of the sea, was given the land of Atlantis.  “The island,” according to the Egyptians, “was larger than Libya and Asia put together.”  Poseidon fell in love with a mortal woman who lived on his island, Clito by name, and with her fathered five pairs of twin sons.  Upon the eldest son, Atlas, was bestowed the largest and best tract of land, and he was made king over all of his brothers.  Each of his brothers were also given a share of the island, over which they reigned as princes.  A palace was constructed for the king, which eventually became an architectural marvel:

This palace they originally built at the outset in the dwelling place of the god and their ancestors, and each monarch, as he inherited it in his turn, added beauties to its existing beauties, always doing his utmost to surpass his predecessor, until they made the residence a marvel for the size and splendor of its buildings.

For many generations, the descendents of Atlas and his brothers prospered, living harmonious and virtuous lives.  And Atlantis became a world power without rivals:

Now in this island of Atlantis, there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia.

But as Atlantis extended its power abroad, it began to weaken internally.  Ambition, greed, and cruelty corrupted the minds of its people and kings, whose character had weakened over generations by interbreeding with the population of ordinary mortals.  Its arrogance invited divine punishment.  And Athens was the instrument of that punishment.  As the Egyptians explained to their Greek visitor:

This vast power, gathered into one, endeavored to subdue at a blow our country and yours . . . and then, (Solon,) your country shone forth, in the excellence of her virtue and strength, among all mankind.  She was pre-eminent in courage and military skill . . . . And when the rest fell off from her, being compelled to stand alone, after having undergone the extremity of danger, she defeated and triumphed over the invaders, and preserved from slavery those who were not yet subjugated, and generously liberated all the rest of us . . . . 

The divine punishment, however, was not yet complete, and even Athens was not entirely spared:

But afterward there occurred violent earthquakes and floods, and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. 

            In Atlantis, we have one of the earliest visions of an empire that aspired to conquer the world.  This unbridled ambition would ultimately lead to her downfall.  Of all of the myths and legends that we have discussed so far, it seems this one has had the most enduring hold on the imagination of our civilization.  More than two thousand years after the Greek visitor’s story was recounted, the search for Atlantis continues.  In 1553 a Spaniard, Francesca Lopez de Gomara, suggested that the recently discovered continent of America was none other than Atlantis.  When the English writer Francis Bacon wrote a book describing his utopian vision of the future, he called it The New Atlantis.  In 1675, Olof Rudbeck, a Swede, argued that his homeland was the site of the ancient kingdom.  And in 1881, an American, Ignatius Donnelly, created a revival of interest in the lost continent when he argued for its existence based on facts and observations from geology, botany, anthropology, and linguistics in a book entitled Atlantis: The Antedeluvian World.  Ironically, when the story of Atlantis was put to paper more than two thousand years ago, many thought it was nothing more than a tall tale even back then.  Why, then, does the story attract so many believers in our own day?  Why do we wish to believe that a civilization as great as or greater than our own existed in some distant age?  Is it because we want to believe that there was something noble and magnificent in our past that we lost, and must now regain?  If so, then we are not really so different than the Sumerians and Egyptians, who in their own legends believed that there was a time when they were closer to their gods, walked with them, talked with them, and perhaps even shared in their powers.  Atlantis beckons us, invites us to rediscover and reclaim some earlier glory.

            But is it possible that there could have been some great civilization, older than Egypt, older than Sumer, which rose to great heights, only to eventually fall and cease to exist?  If so, did it leave to posterity dim legends of its existence, or something even more?  If the Egyptian priests were right, then that civilization met its end 11,000 years ago – long before recorded history as we know it.  Egypt’s great, ancient libraries are gone, and we are forced to conduct our search by examining myths and legends, and then seeing if there is any physical evidence that would help us to find if there is any kernel of truth to them.

            In our search, it is the ancient Greeks, again, who provide us with the most promising clues.  There is an island in the Mediterranean Sea, less than 200 miles away from Athens, called Crete, that looms large in the legends of the Greeks.  According to their mythology, Crete was once home to a great civilization, and one of its most powerful rulers was King Minos, a direct descendent of the god Zeus.  Minos angered the gods when he refused to sacrifice a magnificent white bull that had been provided to him by the God Poseidon, and as punishment, Poseidon cast a spell on his queen, causing her to fall in love with the bull and conceive a child with it, the monstrous Minotaur.  This creature, with the head of a bull and body of a man, was imprisoned by the king in a maze.  But the king had suffered from an even greater tragedy.  His natural son, Androgeus, had been murdered in Athens by agents of the Athenian king because it had been feared that the youth might stir up insurrection against him.  Pitting one tragedy against another, King Minos used the Minotaur to exact a cruel vengeance against the Athenians.  With the help of the God Zeus, who pitied him for the loss of his son, Minos compelled the Athenians to send seven young men and seven young women to him every nine years, and these were cast into his maze, left as human sacrifices for the Minotaur to devour. The Athenian people continued to suffer this wretched fate, hoping that a deliverer might someday rise up to save them from their bondage.

Now it was the turn of Aegeus, the king of Athens, to seek help from the gods.  Although he had had two wives, Aegeus had no children, and it was for this that he prayed.  He was given a magic wineskin, and warned not to drink from it until he returned to his home in Athens, or else he would die one day in grief.  But on the way back, he visited a friend in the land of Troezen, and the two could not resist livening up the evening with a little of the special wine.  Aegeus’s host had a virgin daughter, Aethra, and her father, now intoxicated by the magic wine, urged Aegeus – who was also under the influence of the potion – to visit her in her bed.  But that night the daughter had two visitors, Aegeus, and Poseidon.  The next morning, Aethra was warned by King Aegeus that if she gave birth to a son, she should tell no one that he was the father.  Aegeus’s motives were actually noble ones – he was afraid that if his enemies knew that he had a son, then the boy would die at their hands.

A son was born to Aethra - she named him Theseus, and obeyed the Athenian king’s wishes, keeping his identity a secret.  When the boy reached a suitable age, his mother took him to a large stone, and challenged him to lift it.  The boy lifted the stone, and from underneath it pulled out a sword – the sword that had been deliberately placed there by the King of Athens.  Theseus, of course, was not really the king’s son, he was in fact the son of the god, Poseidon.  But while King Aegeus’s intemperance with the magic wine might have cost him a future son, he did now have a champion to defend his Athenians.  Theseus joined the next band of unhappy youths who were being sent as tribute to King Minos.  Upon seeing him arrive, Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos, fell in love with Theseus instantly, and helped him contrive a plot to kill the Minotaur.  Ariadne gave him a special sword, along with thread to find his way out of the maze, and Theseus defeated the monster and led his fellow Athenian captives out of the labyrinth to freedom.  Theseus and Ariadne left the island together, but as with so many of these ancient tales of superhuman heroes, this one does not have a happy ending.  Theseus abandoned Ariadne before he returned home, and as he approached Athens, he committed a very fatal blunder.  He had promised the king that he would hoist a white sail on his ship, rather than the black sail that was traditionally raised in mourning for the slaughtered youths.  The white sail would assure the king that Theseus had succeeded in his mission, and had returned safely.  But Theseus forgot to change the sails on his ship, and when the King saw that the approaching ship still had black sails, and believed that his son had been killed, he threw himself into the sea in a fit of suicidal despair.

            This is just one of the many fabulous tales that revolve around King Minos, his family, his kingdom, and his adversaries.  We are told, for example, that his daughter Ariadne went on to marry Dionysus, another half god, half mortal, and bore him many children.  We learn that King Minos eventually became one of the judges of the dead in the underworld.  And there are the stories of Daedelus, the king’s craftsman who constructed the labyrinth that imprisoned the Minotaur.  Daedelus went on to master the art of flying with the aid of artificial wings, but then watched in horror as his son, Icarus, plunged to his death after flying too close to the sun, because the heat of the sun’s rays had melted the wax that held the artificial wings together.  In the land of King Minos, then, we find gods, sons of gods, monsters, great feats of architecture and invention, and hero’s quests worthy of a Gilgamesh.

            But is it possible that these legends have any basis in fact?  Was there ever a great kingdom on the island of Crete, so powerful that its neighbors submitted to even its most frightening demands?  Once again, we have to turn to the records of stone, buried in the earth, and whatever testimony they might provide.  And when we do, we find that there is evidence of a great civilization that existed on this island, many thousands of years ago.

            Archaeologists have named it the Minoan civilization, after King Minos of the Greek legends.  They tell us that, like Egypt, there seems to have been three great ages, or kingdoms, in Minoan civilization, which they call the old, the middle and the new.  The evidence suggests that the earliest civilization came into being on Crete about five thousand years ago, or around the same time that Menes united Egypt into a single kingdom.  In fact, there is even evidence that sometime during the period of this earliest civilization, the people of Crete had come into contact with Egyptians.  But it is during the middle kingdom, which lasted from about 2000 B.C. to 1600 B.C., that the Minoans seemed to have become a truly great people.  During this time, the city of Knossos, the legendary homeland of King Minos, became capital, and a magnificent palace was constructed there, with labyrinth-like passages and chambers, that live up to the legend of its king.  The palace was a true architectural marvel, with systems of plumbing and ventilation that were not equaled by any other country until centuries later.  The cities of that time were well planned, and it was not uncommon to find two-story buildings lining their streets.

            In this “Golden Age” of Crete, the arts flourished, as evidenced by the metal works, pottery, and wall paintings that survive.  Frescoes have been unearthed that show a people who lived a peaceful and comfortable life.  The citizens of this kingdom appeared to be happy and content, eating, drinking, laughing together, enjoying good music and dancing.  The aristocrats wore expensive jewelry, and ate at lavish banquets – a reflection of the unparalleled wealth that the Minoans had attained.  Men and women mixed freely together in the society – not a common thing in those days - and seemed to even take part in sports competitions together.  There are murals depicting young men and young women somersaulting over bulls, hinting at some type of athletic event or religious ritual that was popular at the time.  Pictures of bulls show up frequently in these artifacts, which suggests that the Greek legends had at least some basis in fact.  But unlike the legendary depictions of Crete as a militant, warlike kingdom, there is no evidence that the ancient peoples of Crete ever engaged in any kind of military conflicts.  Her cities were completely undefended, as if the Minoan peoples were not even afraid of invasion.  It seems that the Minoans obtained their wealth and affluence by becoming a great seafaring and trading people, exchanging their wares and produce with other nations bordering the Mediterranean Sea, and maybe even beyond.  The source of Crete’s great power came from merchants, not soldiers.

            But just as Minoan civilization was reaching its peak, around 1750 B.C., disaster struck, in the form of a violent earthquake.  Nevertheless, the resourceful people immediately set about rebuilding their kingdom, making its palaces and buildings even more magnificent than the ones that had been damaged or destroyed.  When another destructive earthquake shook the island in 1570 B.C., the people again set about rebuilding what had been struck down.  As it moved into its third and final age, the land of Minos continued to be a great power, rivaling that of Egypt, with dominion over islands and colonies throughout the region of the Mediterranean.  But then, some time around 1450 B.C., Crete was once again overcome by disaster, and by 1400 B.C. the kingdom was completely destroyed.  Was it another earthquake that brought the Minoan civilization to its final end, or invasion from abroad?  We may never know for sure.

            And was the land of Minos the basis for the legends of Atlantis?  After all, we have here an island kingdom, so powerful that it kept the rival land of Athens subdued, until heroes rose up from that place to break the hold that the mighty empire had over it, just as the Egyptian storyteller said the Athenians did to Atlantis.  Its first king, according to legend, had a god for a father and a mortal mother, just as the first monarch of Atlantis did.  And the kingdom met its final end after a series of natural disasters – in this case devastating earthquakes that reduced it to rubble, leaving it vulnerable to conquest from foreign invaders – perhaps even the Athenians themselves.  Even the bull, which plays such a prominent place in the legends associated with Crete, and in the pictures that were painted on its walls, has always been the symbolic animal of the god Poseidon, who in the story of Atlantis was the presiding god of that kingdom, and even the ancestor of its royal family.  The parallels are intriguing, but there are some significant differences between the story of Atlantis and the story of the land of Minos.  First, Atlantis supposedly perished some time between 9,000 and 10,000 B.C., while the Minoan civilization met its final end in 1400 B.C., some 8,000 years later.  And although the civilization of Minos collapsed after a series of natural disasters, the island of Crete never actually sank into the sea, as the land of Atlantis supposedly did.  A volcano on the island of Thera, which was located about 75 miles north of Crete, did erupt in 1600 B.C., with an explosion so violent that it caused the whole center of the island to sink, and tidal waves from the explosion might have flooded the land of the Minoans, but this can’t account for the fall of their civilization nearly two hundred years later.  Finally, according to the Greek legends, it was Zeus, not Poseidon, who was the divine ancestor of the first earthly king on the island of Crete.  In fact, Poseidon was the perennial adversary of the Minoans: the Minotaur, remember, came into being because of Poseidon’s anger at the king.  So while it is tempting to think that the mystery of Atlantis can be solved by assuming that the Greek storytellers stretched some facts and dates about events in the kingdom of their rivals, the Minoans, we cannot be completely sure that this solution is the correct one.

            Still, the story of Crete and its semi-mythical kingdom is a fascinating one, and can’t be lightly tossed aside.  The artifacts, legends, and writings that we have been able to translate hint at a great civilization that, like Atlantis, left an enduring legacy even after it vanished from the earth.  Let’s take a closer look at what has survived from the age of Minos.

            We have already talked about the prominent place that the bull seems to have held for the Minoan people.  From the Greeks we have the legend of the Minotaur, half-man, half-bull, and in another famous legend we are told that Zeus appeared to a human female on the island in the form of a great white bull, and as a result of this meeting the first of the great Minoan kings was born.  Then there is the tale of Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, who, after being abandoned by the hero Theseus, married Dionysus, another son of a divine father.  Dionysus is often represented as having the horns of a bull.  Like the first king of Crete, his father was Zeus, his mother, a mortal.  He was later revered as the god of wine and agriculture, and stories were told of how he was killed by Hera, the jealous wife of Zeus, who had him torn to pieces and devoured by gods in her service.  But, just as the Egyptian god Osiris was restored to life by other gods when the parts of his dismembered body were gathered up, Dionysus was also reborn, after Zeus retrieved his heart and planted it into the womb of a mortal woman.  Cults arose that were dedicated to the worship of Dionysus, celebrating the mystery of his death and rebirth, whose practitioners also indulged in a form of religious ecstasy, often with the help of wine or other intoxicating drinks.  In some accounts of the death of Dionysus, he was in the shape of a bull when the other gods dismembered him, and the people of Crete may have actually killed bulls during religious festivals in his honor to commemorate the event.  If so, this is another interesting link to Atlantis, whose kings, according to legend, sacrificed a wild bull every five or six years.  Centuries after the Minoan civilization had passed from existence, cults dedicated to Dionysus still existed.  During their festivals, which they practiced at night, his followers entered a religious frenzy as they danced by firelight, and believed themselves to possess occult powers as they were possessed by their god and actually felt that the god had entered their bodies.  The Greek word “entheos”, which means, “having the god within” is where our own word “enthusiasm” comes from.  The Dionysians’ secret ceremony reached a climax with the killing of an animal.  The worshipers, by eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the victim, believed that they were partaking of the body and blood of their god.  Again, this practice hearkens back to the rituals of the kings of Atlantis, who, we are told, mixed some of the blood of their sacrificed bull with wine, and poured it into golden cups.  After each king drank from his cup, and made an oath to enforce the laws of the kingdom, he dedicated the cup in the holy sanctuary of Poseidon.

Of all of the gods that we have encountered, in Sumer, in Egypt, in Greece, and in Crete, Dionysus may very well be the strangest of them all.  In many ways, he represents virility, with the horns of the bull and the wild frenzy that he could incite among his devotees.  But in human form, he is usually portrayed as young, beautiful, even effeminate.  His power is great and awesome, but it is not the power of a warrior, or a conqueror, or even a rebel.  It is the limitless, mysterious power of nature herself.  It is the chaos of life confronting death in a regular cycle of decline and rebirth, of unbounded spirit, of an ecstasy that both liberates and ravages, like the ecstasy of a drunkard, a genius, or a madman.  Is it any surprise, then, that Dionysus was also the patron god of music, poetry, and drama?  But it is also interesting to note that his earliest followers were all women.  To some, Dionysus was a terrifying figure, to others, a key to the union of the mortal with the divine.

And there is another image that appears frequently in the art of the Minoans, that of the goddess.  She is shown in the company of animals, or of young men, or as a Divine Mother holding an infant.  In fact, male gods are rarely seen; it is the feminine aspect of divinity that is most common.  The religion of Crete, more than of any other society that we have so far encountered, was a nature religion, embracing and revering the mysteries of death and rejuvenation, and of intimate spiritual communion with the divine.  The Tree of Life is another symbol that appears in the art of its people.  Even if this reverence for the feminine power of life and creation did not originate in Crete, it appears that its civilization was one of the earliest to have practiced it.  And, through their wide commercial contacts with the rest of the world as a great seafaring people, the Minoans may have been primarily responsible for spreading this religion to distant peoples and cultures, perhaps as far away as Britain.  In Sumer, in Egypt, and in Greece, there are legends of ambitious gods overthrowing older gods – or goddesses – that had ruled for an eternity before them.  The new gods were masculine in character – ambitious, combative, egotistical, and not content with the established order of the universe.  Their human followers emulated their character – conquering, pillaging, and overrunning the lands of their more peaceful, agrarian neighbors.  But the old ways survived, as cults and mystery religions, practiced in secret by devotees who sought to commune with a greater power and, through direct participation in rites and ceremonies that brought them into direct contact with the forces of nature – of death, resurrection, ecstasy, and inspiration – could find personal revelation, transformation, and liberation from the societies and other hostile realities that oppressed them.

One of the ideas that makes the legend of Atlantis so endearing to many, even today, is that there was once a great civilization, more advanced or enlightened in some ways than our own, that, while disappearing from existence, somehow managed to leave a great legacy behind.  We would like to believe that some of the citizens of Atlantis survived, and carried with them, to distant lands, remnants of their wonderful civilization, perhaps in the form of subtle truths or revelations, and that these are hidden in the ancient records of the societies where they took refuge.  The search for Atlantis continues, and may never end.  Perhaps, even if it had existed, it had already vanished thousands of years before King Minos reigned.  But in Crete, we find the nearest tangible expression of the legend of Atlantis, the record of a powerful and enlightened people who met an untimely end, but who left traces of a golden age in the many lands with which they had come in contact.  The Minoan sages, priestesses, and heroes survived the destruction of Crete, and in many ways they may still be with us to this day.

            If the great battle between Athens and Atlantis really did take place, as the ancient Egyptian historian claimed that it did, then the war and its catastrophic aftermath was of a scale unrivalled until the modern age.  But for the ancient Greeks, another great war loomed even larger in their past.  It was a war in which gods fought alongside mortals, and where the existence of an entire kingdom lay in the balance.  The war was fought in another distant land, where its people, like those of Atlantis, would fall to the Greeks and see their kingdom completely destroyed.  That land was Troy.