Atlantis, Lost Kingdom of the Andes

Writers on Atlantis tend to fall on one side or another of a great divide. On the one hand are the Rationalists, who try to persuade their readers by logical argument and scientific evidence that they have identified the lost land described by Plato. On the other hand are the Occultists, who draw on knowledge obtained through other means, including mediumship, clairvoyance, and belief in the veracity of religious traditions. The two books under consideration represent both sides: J.M. Allen purports to be a rationalist, while J.S. Gordon adopts the Theosophical point of view.

Now I would never suggest that occultists are irrational people, though the charge has often been levelled at them. Nor do I have much confidence in the efficacy of reason alone to solve the Atlantis problem, because the scientific method runs into difficulties when applied to events of several millennia past. The physical evidence, such as undersea formations or megalithic remains, is poor, its interpretation ambiguous. Carbon 14 dating suffers from regional and temporal variations and the contamination of sources. Documentary evidence is worse: it often comes from sacred or mythological texts with minimal historical credibility. Researchers tend to grasp at any correlation between physical and documentary evidence, and brandish it as proof of their pet theories. Worse yet, there is fierce competition for the glory of being the definitive discoverer of Atlantis. People have argued the case for almost every corner of the globe, including the Arctic and Antarctic. In Europe alone, Atlantis has been 'found' in Sweden, Helgoland, the Irish Sea, Cornwall, Spain, Sicily, Malta, Thera, Crete, and Cyprus. Each discoverer brings up interesting things about prehistoric times, but it seems very unlikely that any of them has hit on the right place, putting all the others in the wrong.

One cannot blame Plato for all the literal-minded people who have treated his account of Atlantis as history, rather than as myth. Nor can one really blame people for their ignorance of John Michell's work (in The Dimensions of Paradise), or Ernest McLean's (in The Pythagorean Plato). These profound scholars have shown how Plato's Atlantis conceals both a geometrical allegory (Michell) and a musical allegory (McClain) that are keyed into the philosopher's other numerical myths. That Plato decorated his allegories with tales and legends current in his time is neither here nor there: the Bible does the same thing.

Yet this leaves unanswered the question of whether those tales and legends had a basis in some real early civilisation. In particular, was there some such civilisation whose memory was preserved in the Egyptian temple culture around 600 B.C., and thence conveyed to Plato? Jim Allen, who has worked interpreting maps for the R.A.F., says that we should be looking at the Bolivian Altiplano, a 'high plain' as the name suggests, south of Lake Titicaca. He first argued this in a self-published booklet in 1982, and now, with his fourth book, has been rewarded with an attractive, full-coloured treatment by Floris Books. Whatever its relation to Atlantis, the area is obviously beautiful, mysterious, and well worth further investigation.

In his zeal to correlate his place of choice with Plato's Atlantis, Allen does the usual fudging. Plato's date of 9,000 years ago is too early, so those years become months to reach an archaeologically acceptable date around 1260 B.C. Plato's measurements in Greek stades of 600 feet are too long to fit the evidence, so a unit of 300 feet is substituted. The destruction of Atlantis by sinking into the sea in a day and a night becomes flooding of the plain whenever Lake Titicaca overflows. The sacrificial bulls of Atlantis become llamas; the plentiful elephants, mastodons, even though they were extinct by then. 'Atl' is Aztec for water; 'antis' is Inca for copper, or for the Andes themselves. Never mind that Aztecs and Incas lived rather far apart: when an Atlantologist starts on etymology, anything goes.

Three coincidences, however, seem remarkable. First, in the local mythology the founder of post-diluvial humanity has ten sons in two lineages of five each; in Plato, Poseidon begets five pairs of male twins. Second, aerial photographs show parts of the Bolivian plain marked by a dead-regular grid of irrigation canals, just as in Plato. Third, a volcanic cone called Pampa Aullagas, near the present Lake Poopo, has the remains of encircling channels resembling the rings of land and water around Plato's citadel. Given these, and the well-known parallels between Old and New World cultures (feathered headdresses in Egyptian representations of the 'Sea People,' cocaine in Egyptian mummies, etc.) there is no reason to doubt that there was transatlantic traffic in the Bronze Age. Of all the locations proposed for Plato's Atlantis, this is one of the most intriguing, and Allen's tabulation of the requirements, if it does not quite prove his own, at least destroys the credibility of rival claims for Thera, Troy, Andalucia, the Azores, Cuba, and Antarctica. But this does not shake anyone's foundations, as a high civilisation in 9600 B.C. would do. Allen's book, though full of local interest, does not contribute to the controversies raised by the 'new archaeologists' who make such claims.

Given that Allen places himself on the Rational side of the divide, I am amused to find him quoting from H.P. Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled on her travels in Peru and the tunnel system beneath the Andes. Did he know that her later Secret Doctrine is the primary source of Occultist Atlantology? As such, it is the backbone of John Gordon's The Rise and Fall of Atlantis, a book by a chartered surveyor that also aspires to acceptance as rational, but which transgresses every dogma of materialistic science. Gordon rejects the objective nature of time, the universality of the laws of physics, the Big Bang, Darwinian evolution and continental drift. He reduces the duration of the geological periods by an order of magnitude, but puts the arrival of humans relatively further back. Besides his Theosophical inspiration, he takes encouragement from the revisionist prehistories of Richard Milton, Michael Cremo, and Richard L. Thompson, and from the astronomers Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramsinghe. In his opinion (if not his words), the sciences have constructed a self-consistent, interlocking house of cards, but once the materialist tablecloth is whisked away, the whole thing collapses.

Seekers for Atlantis will find no nonsense here about trying to locate Plato's island somewhere on the globe, for the story of Poseidon and Cleito in the Critias is read as an allegory of metaphysical principles. Specifically, it concerns the actions of cosmic beings and energies at various levels of manifestation, and the production of corresponding levels of consciousness. By way of clarification, the author plunges into areas of The Secret Doctrine where most Theosophists fear to tread, namely the system of planetary Rounds and the successive evolution of the various kingdoms of nature. By this time he will have lost most of his readers, which is a pity, for there is a parallel exposition going on concerning the physical universe. This connects with the current interest in galactic alignments, their cycles, and their effect on consciousness, fostered by such writers as John Major Jenkins, Walter Cruttenden, and Jay Weidner.

Gordon's version posits that the precession of the equinoxes has been misinterpreted: it is not caused by gravitational pulls from the sun and moon, but is an illusion caused by the orbit of the solar system around a parent star called Alcyone. This provides a hitherto wanting explanation of the supposed physical effects of precession and the special quality of certain 'ages.' The various orbital planes, all tilted relatively to each other, intersect at two points; the earth's equatorial plane, as we know, meets the ecliptic at the equinoctial points. At higher levels, such as the intersection of the solar system's plane with that of its orbit around Alcyone, Gordon believes that when the crossing-points occur, tremendous forces are exerted. For example, he suggests that the fact that the major fault lines between the continental plates cross the equator at a NW-SE angle could have been caused by torque, twisting the two hemispheres in opposite directions.

Like The Secret Doctrine, the first half of Gordon's book is mostly cosmology, the second mostly anthropology. For fifty pages, he summarises Blavatsky's teachings about early human development up to the end of the Third or 'Lemurian' Root Race. This turns scientific paleontology on its head, for the Lemurians emerged 45-50 million years ago (MYA), along with the dinosaurs, and probably died with them. However, Gordon is generally against cosmic causation, so he does not accept the asteroid theory of dinosaur extinction, nor the date for it of 65 MYA. Instead, he suggests that the earth was becoming smaller, denser, and its axial rotation was slowing down. This made the great dinosaurs relatively heavier, putting an intolerable strain on their hearts, and they gave up the ghost about 9 MYA.

Humans, too, were shrinking. The Lemurians started out as semi-ethereal giants 60-70 ft. tall, but by the end of their race were a mere 30 ft. By this time they were building in stone, using sonic levitation, and we can admire the results of their labours at Ollantaytambo, Sacsayhuaman, Commagene and Tiryns. The Atlantean race that followed occupied parts of Lemuria that were left intact in the present Atlantic Ocean. A fresh series of catastrophes began 4.5 MYA and ended with the disappearance of the last Atlantean island at Plato's date of around 11,600 BP. In the meantime the human race had achieved its present physical form, and around 1 MYA the Fifth or 'Aryan' Root Race began with a group of Atlantean exiles in Central Asia. There is all the Theosophical lore about the 'sin of the mindless' when early humans mated with animals and sired the apes, and about the battles between white and black magicians, whose meddling with the forces of nature eventually led to Atlantis's destruction.

There is no point in summarising more of Gordon's story, because it is Madame Blavatsky's story and better read in her words, with due attention to the state of science and religion in the later nineteenth century. The only other occult source briefly cited is Edgar Cayce, and that raises a similar problem of Cayce's history, sources, and methods. One cannot just pick something from his readings that happens to agree with Blavatsky, and ignore the rest. What about Rudolf Steiner, Charles Leadbeater or Alice Bailey, all of whom had much to say about Atlantis? After three decades of study, claimed on the book's cover, Gordon must know of them, and might have reminded the reader of the existence of other points of view. Instead, he gives us The Secret Doctrine on one side, and science on the other, and when there is disagreement, science has to give way. In the process he tolerates all manner of absurdities, e.g. ignoring the careful work of archaeologists who, for all their faults, have good reasons not to believe Tiryns or the Inca sites to be millions of years old. His best evidence for the existence of the Lemurian giants is some nineteenth-century report of a skeleton twelve feet tall with six toes on each foot.

It is risky for one autodidact to criticise another, but there is a certain syndrome recognisable in both these books. It is the numinous discovery that breaks into a workaday existence, often involving technical expertise in a limited field, then becomes a lifelong obsession: in one case, that Plato's Atlantis was on the Bolivian Antiplano; in the other, that Blavatsky had access to the absolute truth about the origins and development of the earth and its inhabitants. As John Michell pointed out somewhere, the universe obligingly reflects whatever beliefs we project onto it, supplying us with proofs of our own theories. But to step outside that feedback system and consider that one might possibly have the whole thing completely wrong: hoc opus, hic labor est.

Questioning current dogmas is a valuable service, and I agree that it is time for a new paradigm. Blavatsky herself was offering one a century ago, already well aware of the myopia of scientism and the sheer idiocy of religious fundamentalism. Yet to use her Secret Doctrine as an infallible oracle is no different from what the Creationists do with their Bible. The rest of us know that the Bible is a compilation with its roots in manifold historical circumstances, and that anything it says should be read in that broader context. Likewise, any admirer of Blavatsky (and I am certainly one of them) does well to know something about her circumstances and sources, and to have thought about the nature of her mediumistic and psychic abilities. It is surely relevant to the present case that the first revelations about the Root Races and their chronology appeared not in The Secret Doctrine but in letters to a newspaper editor, A.P. Sinnett, from the Mahatmas Koot Hoomi and Morya. Who, or what, were the Mahatmas, that they should know such things? Theosophists need to study their own history, which is full of enigmas and deceptions, both of self and others. To take them at face value is only to build one's own house of cards.