In 1952, a German pastor with a historian and a Swiss archaeologist spent four days anchored in the North Sea a few miles off the coast of Heligoland. Over a carefully selected site, a diver brought back reports of a series of man-made walls and ditches just twenty-five feet below the surface but six miles out to sea. The pastor, Jurgen Spanuth, summed up his claim: “During my studies of Egyptian antiquities, I found in the Temple Medinet Habu of Pharaoh Rameses III, the old Egyptian writings and documents which the Egyptian priest used as proof of Atlantis’ existence when talking to Solon so long ago. These old Egyptian originals are documents of the highest historical value. They alone contain the key to the solution of the Atlantis mystery . . . The documents contain the exact information of the location of the island country, and also of the king’s island which sank during the natural catastrophes. With the help of this information I found the ruins of the sunken fort exactly on the indicated spot—and in three different expeditions thoroughly examined it. In upper Egypt, I photographed the inscriptions and wall pictures (one showing a sea battle between the invading Atlanteans and the Egyptian defenders) which served as proof for Solon’s Atlantis story.”
In 1966, a Greek-American scientific expedition spent two weeks on the Aegean Island of Santorini. They returned to Athens full of hope. Dr. James Mavor, of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, who headed the team, reported: “Although we have not discovered Atlantis, there are shreds of evidence, which, if put together, point towards a confirmation of the theory that the lost continent should be identified with the Minoan Empire which ruled the Aegean Archipelago and Crete about 1500 B.C.” The group continued its search and uncovered what some believe to be Atlantis, although the date is much too recent.
Other scientists have recently begun to give weight to the Atlantean theory. Maurice Ewing, of LaMont Observatory and a leading authority on the Atlantic Ocean bottom, is one. His expedition found that an abrupt change took place about 11,000 years ago in the Caribbean Sea from cold-water-type plants to warm-water types, and 17,000 years before that there were widespread earth changes. Other U.S. oceanographers, Walter Sproil and Robert S. Dietz of the Environmental Science Services Administration, have theorized that Australia and Antarctica are parts of a once super-continent. They constitute the lands of the continental drift theory—broken off chunks of the present continents, they believe.
Recent discoveries reveal the exclusive presence of fresh water plants in the sedimentary material along the mid-Atlantic submarine ridge, indicating it was once above water. In the Azores, a prominent Russian geologist, Dr. Maria Klionova, reported to the Academy of Sciences of the USSR that rocks dredged up from depths of 6,600 feet showed evidence of having been exposed to the atmosphere about 15,000 B.C. Simlar evidence came to light as long ago as 1898, when pieces of lava were found to have a glassy structure, meaning it could only have solidified in the open air.
The ocean bed is known to be unstable, rising and falling unpredictably. Volcanic islands have suddenly appeared, disappeared, and reappeared. Depth soundings in the Straits of Florida show a series of bumps intriguingly about the size of houses, two thousand feet below the surface. And recent research reveals the sinking of large land areas near Florida and the Bahamas at least eight thousand years ago.
So the circumstantial evidence in favor of the Atlantean theory continues to accumulate. Men of science are beginning to give more credence to the idea. There is every reason to believe that modern technology can eventually resolve the problems and questions that to date have proved insoluble.
We can therefore look forward to some exciting revelations in the years immediately ahead. For the Atlanteans were a unique people, and they may be influencing American life today in unexpected ways.
But let us begin at the beginning.
2
Creation
When man first began to think, he began to ask questions. Among his first questions were these: “Who am I? . . . Where did I come from? . . . What is the purpose and meaning of life? . . . Why do we die—where do we go?” But man’s capacity for asking questions has always been greater than his ability to answer them, and this has served as an intellectual prod—having its role in mental development. Man has not yet satisfied his thirst for knowledge, although deep within himself—unknowingly—lie the answers.
Over the centuries the mystery of man’s origin and that of the universe has provoked the imagination, and the world’s greatest thinkers have devoted themselves to such questions, each building his theories from the work of those who have gone before. The nature of man and the origin of the universe are therefore two of the principal problems of philosophy. Did the earth come into begin through an act of divine creation? Or is it the result of an accidental evolution and growth? Of what basic substance is it made and why is it so diverse? What role does man play in the universe? Is he a mere speck of unimportant matter in an ungoverned, unlimited expanse of space? Or is he the crowning achievement of a Supreme Intelligence?
The first known philosopher to attack these problems was Thales, who lived in Ancient Greece about 600 B.C. He decided that water must be the original stuff of which man and the world were made. For when it was frozen it was solid, and when heated it was mist and air. Therefore, he reasoned, everything came originally from water and must eventually return to water. Thales never knew how close he came. If he had meant and used the word spirit instead of water, he might one day yet be lauded for his vision and inspiration. But he didn’t; and now Thales is all but forgotten.
A little later another Greek thinker, Anaximander, suggested that the universe was a living mass filling all space. He called it the “infinite” and said that it contained motion. This was a step forward, even though some of Anaximander’s other ideas were strange ones indeed.
This line of thought paved the way for the Atomists, another group of early Greek philosophers. They agreed with some of their predecessors that change and diversity were due to the mixing and separating of tiny units, but said that these units or atoms were not as different in substance as previously thought. Each atom has motion, they declared, and by uniting in different ways and numbers, matter was formed. The atoms themselves never changed but were eternal and minutely small. Changes in form of life were accounted for by the coming-together of atoms; conversely, death resulted from the separation. Although some of their conclusions were far afield, the Atomist’s general concept may be viewed as another move in the right direction.
While the Apologists were attempting to defend and reconcile the Genesis version of creation with philosophy, the Skeptics on the opposite side were busy refuting their conclusions. This school of thought, founded by Pyrrho in about 300 B.C., contended that all so-called explanations of the nature of the universe were futile and a waste of time. It was in favor of giving up the search of despair; man did not know, could not know the nature of things. All man knew was what he could see and measure, and he should accept nothing else. Such a pessimistic point of view offered little in place of what was rejected.
It was Philo, the Jewish philosopher who lived during the time of Jesus, who first attempted to merge the Mosaic Bible version of creation with Greek philosophy. He taught that there were many powers or spirits that radiated from one source, God; and one of these, called the “Logos” was the creator of the world. Further, he taught everything in the universe is an expression or copy of an idea in the mind of God.
His teachings had a profound influence on religious writers, both Jewish and Christian. The early Christian scholars quickly identified Philo’s Logos with Jesus, who was the Christ, the Word—the agent of God in the creation of the world.
Then came Plotinus, in the third century A.D. His views were much like those of Philo. He concluded that from a pure God came beings, or emanations, flowing as light flows from a sun, without