Catalog of Earthly Wonders, Only

¶ … catalog of earthly wonders, only a few exist in that realm of unsubstantiated rumor upheld by the broadest variety of source. The Lost Continent is, truly, one of these wonders - a city made of both earth and sea, created by Triton, Poseidon, Atlas, or whatever other ancient God created it as a point of union between the earthly and the divine, the surface and the underneath. What is striking, is that within Western culture, Plato is one of the first known mentions of Atlantis in a theoretical discourse - completely fictional account - used to explain the nature of the physical universe. but, the concept of the Lost Continent, whatever the name assigned, is one that has been shared by scientific exploration, philosophical discourse, mythology and legend, religious and spiritual writing, science fiction and film, and remains in our popular culture as is evidenced by the semi-annual announcements that some explorer is believed to have discovered evidence of a city lost beneath the surface of the ocean. While the legend of a Lost Continent, brought low by natural, divine, alien, or other forces, is certainly part of our general popular culture, facts about such a place and evidence of it (or them) is non-existent. However, this does not necessarily indicate a scientific reality that there is truly no Lost Continent. As we will explore, scientific exploration can generally only effectively explain what we know about something, what we can see feel or hear. But science is necessarily mute on things that either have not yet been found or simply don't exist. One cannot prove that something no one find - but at the same time, that is simply not evidence that something does not exist. Rather, that is the realm of faith and of legend, of believing something to be true even when there is no rational reason to do so. Atlantis, Rutas, Lemuria (or whatever the name) truly exists in the imagination of the world - but did it / they ever truly exist? Let us explore this idea and see what we can determine.

One of the most persistent and pervasive legends about the world involve the concept of the Lost Continent. In these legends, and the name is essentially quite unimportant at this point, an island, part of a peninsula, or other land-mass of varying sizes depending upon the account, once existed above the surface of the ocean.

The legends typically say that in ancient history, a civilization of people lived on that land-mass or "continent," they are generally perceived to pre-date written history and, in many accounts were an "advanced" civilization producing works of art, music, philosophy, science above and beyond their time.

At some point a catastrophic natural disaster occurred to the continent reducing it to rubble and either gradually or suddenly, it fell beneath the surface of the water never to be seen or heard from again.

The origins of these tales can be found in both Western and Eastern histories.

Plato, certainly, is among the first of the European world to create the idea of a Lost Continent called Atlantis. In his view, Atlantis existed as a vehicle to express his understanding of the nature of the physical world. Two Platonean dialogues involve accounts of Atlantis, and in both Critias and Timaeus, he refers to Atlantis as the cradle of ancient civilizations. Atlantis is the center of a Socratic demonstration of the "failed society." This society is set up in direct opposition to Athens which, in Socratic thought, is the "Perfect Society."

Atlantis, then, in Plato's dialogue, serves as the theoretical counterbalance to Athens and takes on the role of being the polar opposite to that city, particularly in the nature of the descriptions found in the Republic.

For Socrates, then, who many have argued is a fictional character himself as the only accounts of his existence are provided to us by Plato, Atlantis is the evil foil in his story - the immoral pole against which Athens is measured.

About 9,000 BC, one of the greatest...catastrophes had occurred - a destruction by water. At this time, Solon was told [in Timaeus], Athens already existed, and out of the ocean, beyond the Pillars of Hercules (which we now know as the Straits of Gibraltar), there was an island-continent called Atlantis, 'as large as [North Africa] and Asia combined," (Wilson, Flem-Ath, & Flem-Ath, the Atlantis Blueprint: Unlocking the Ancient Mysteries of a Long-Lost Civilization 4).

Plato's work in Timaeus asserts that Socrates had traveled to Egypt and had received word of the Lost Continent from a translation of an ancient Egyptian/Athenian history tract engraved on a particular set of columns (Joseph, 150). While "students" of Plato, namely Crantor, have claimed to have found and confirmed the existence of said columns - such artifacts either never existed or are lost to history at this point. Because, at least in the Western tradition, while the nature of the Lost Continent legend does not shift much from Plato in terms of broad descriptions, the "known" facts about it do vary widely.

Many authors have sought to support Plato's account of Atlantis on the basis that his accounts are not flowery, not overflowing, and certainly reasonably argued. Ignatious Donnelly wrote,

If Plato had sought to draw from his imagination a wonderful and pleasing story, we should not have had so plain and reasonable a narrative. He would have given us a history like the legends of Greek mythology, full of the adventures of gods and goddesses, nymphs, fauns and satyrs....there is no ideal republic delineated here. It is a straightforward, reasonable history of a people ruled over by their kings, living and progressing as other nations have lived and progressed since their day," (Atlantis: The Antediluvian World 22).

The problem with this take on Plato's account is that Donnelly clearly is mis-reading Plato. Plato's use of Atlantis was to showcase Athens - to provide an ideal counter within the stories of Athens so that his rhetoric would have weight without offending anyone - Socrates may have been killed for his philosophy, for challenging the status quo, but Plato certainly did not.

For philosophers, explorers, religions, and scientists, the concept of Atlantis has spread widely to encompass just about every possible permutation of a societal origin story that one might be able to imagine. The problem, then, is who to believe? The majority of the widely published accounts of a Lost Continent in western history have been by fiction writers, by philosophers, the occasional religion, and the odd scientist. What we can read from the sheer volume of written accounts, theories, and "first hand" experiences with Atlantis is that there are some concepts that simply do not go out of style.

So, if we as a people believe continue to tell each other and ourselves that something existed at some point in history before people wrote such things down, that an entire civilization of human beings lived on this land, and that the whole package - people and land - fell beneath the surface of the ocean never to be heard from or seen again, does that make it true?

If we accept that the earliest recorded history of Atlantis comes from Plato, then it stands to reason that all western accounts of that place stem in some or great part from the Dimaeus and Critias dialogues.

As such, all post-Platonic accounts of Atlantis have been written or concocted in direct relation to a work of very questionable factual basis. Again, we have to question Plato's science and knowledge of the natural world before any histories were written. What makes more sense, that Atlantis actually existed as a land-mass and fell kit and kaboodle into the ocean? Or that it was a creation of Plato or any number of his predecessors as a device to help establish a sense of moral balance, to have a Devil's advocate, within their rhetoric designed to convince the world of a particular social ideal? If we take the following into consideration, the answer to this question seems relatively easy: 1) there is no physical evidence that any such continent ever existed, no geographic, archaeological, or other tangible proof, 2) the first major western account is in Plato, who was not a historian, geologist, archaeologist, or scientist for that matter - he was a philosopher specializing in rhetorical arguments using completely fictional characters to act out his moral plays, 3) all following accounts in Western thought are derived from Plato.

If the Lost Continent ideal existed only in this line of thought, then it would be easy to simply debunk the theory as popular legend designed precisely to catch the imagination and to be used in certain moral or cautionary tales. However, there have been records found throughout the known world, some of which predate Plato and would have had absolutely no contact with him, of lost continents, civilizations, and islands. Perhaps within the myths and legends of other cultures and civilizations it might be possible to winnow out the truth about this problem.

The Mayans believed that a land called Mu once existed above the waves and that when that civilization fell below the surface, the survivors created the Mayan people (Hancock, Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization 73). In their creation story, the Mayans place Mu in the Pacific as a continent that pre-dates the Atlantis story. According to a translated Mayan Codec, the Land of Mu, like Atlantis, had been the center of significant social, scientific, religious, and cultural thought - it was, unlike Atlantis, an ideal place. When Mu fell during a massive geological upheaval, its people were able to escape to the continent of what is now South America and created the Mayan civilization - one of the most complex and significant of the ancient civilizations on the Americas.

Mu has been since taken up by what can only be loosely called New Age writers using it to link present day life to ancient and possibly alien origins.

In the Tamil (Indian) traditions, an island strikingly similar to Mu and Atlantis existed in what is now called the Indian Ocean, called Lemuria. Interestingly, while Lemuria is part of Tamil legend, the idea of it was actually popularized by English biogeologists taking up Darwin's work and using this legendary island as the explanatory place between the existence of particular species throughout the entire oceanic region. Again, though, Lemuria's original existence was as a human civilization - one that, along with another sunken land in Tamil legend "Kumari Kandam," were lands that had been part of the Indian sub-continent that over time became flooded by the ocean (Hancock 18). These histories claim an ancient landmass that connected Australia to India.

The problem with these geographical and geological tales, however, is that they simply fail to stand up to our modern understanding of Plate Tectonics - a debunking argument that will be made later.

In addition to the Greek, Mayan, and Indian legends of the Lost Continent, other mythological lands have been promoted throughout human history. But in this last category, mostly the idea of a lost or "undiscovered" civilization is little more than an intellectual exercise (Hope 17). In trying to explore the ideas that shape and create tales of the Lost Continent, using modern fiction is a completely useless exercise - anyone can make up a story, anyone can assert anything if they use the right words in the right way.

What we need to establish is this, can we trust ancient accounts of a land and people that no one can prove exists, that there is no true historical record of, that exists only within the context of legend and supposition?

Let us take myth and legend for what they are - unsubstantiated ideas that are used to explain a particular aspect of human life. Many Lost Continent myths are creation myths - this is how our people got here stories. As such, they are easily debunked when we understand the very tangible science of plate tectonics. Geologists have some rather to-the-point things to say on this topic- "let me just briefly mention that there is no such thing as a sunken continent," (Erlingsson & Karlen, Atlantis from a Geographer's Perspective 27). Wait, it can't be that simple. Just because a geologist says that there is no sunken continent does that make it so? Does that simply debunk the millennia of popular thought on the subject? Perhaps a further explanation is necessary:

After the advent of deep sea research...there is no longer any room for hesitation. We know no how ocean bottoms are formed through plate tectonics, and we know the morphology of the oceans in significant detail. There is simply no room for any sunken continent in the oceans. A lost continent, though, is quite another cup of tea," (Erlingsson & Karlen, 27-28).

What these two geologists are referring to is the basic tenet of plate tectonics, that at one time nearly all of the land of the earth that stood above water was one massive continent -a central island upon which existed nearly every part of the known geological world. Over billions of years, the tectonic plates (large overlapping puzzle pieces of the Earth's curst that move and shift in response to pressures of rising and falling temperatures, magma, and other forces) caused the breakup of Pangaea (Joseph 112). In this account, a continent that would have been once part of another, that broke off and shifted below the surface of the ocean in a series of events taking place over millions of years, could be possible - one such place is the southern and western parts of California, west of the San Andreas fault, which, it is theorized, will one day split the majority of that state off from the rest of the United States (Colins, 3).

Charles Pellegrino's work Unearthing Atlantis: An Archaeological Odyssey to the Fabled Lost Civilization, wrote that evidence of the possibility of burying entire places under mudslides, volcanic ash, and other such eruptions is quite possible (Pellegrino 249). In tracking geologic events between known effects of flowing magma (which can make massive tunnels under ground as it bores through or just under the surface) and the force of volcanic eruptions, and the example of Pompeii, it becomes entirely possible that an entire city could be buried or even sink below the surface of the water. This however, does not prove the existence of Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu or any other Lost or Sunken continents. What it succeeds in doing is creating the possibility for part of a continent to have broken off or shifted below the surface as the tectonic plates tilt, or for the burying of a city - but is not itself evidence or proof.