Plato

Looking for Lemuria

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Grove Koger

The seas were once so filled with continents that there couldn’t have been much room for water. Or so some writers, wise and otherwise, would have us believe.

Atlantis, described by Plato (?-348 BC) in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias, comes to mind first. It lay, perhaps, in the Atlantic Ocean. Or was it the Mediterranean after all? Or … Then there’s Mu, created by one Augustus Le Plongeon (1825-1908), who conflated it with Atlantis and confidently placed it in the Atlantic. The concept was subsequently adopted by James Churchward (1851-1936), who described it in Lost Continent of Mu, the Motherland of Man (1926) and a series of equally fanciful sequels. Not to be outdone, he placed his lost continent in the Pacific.

At one time, a near-continent really did exist in the South Pacific and Southern oceans—Zealandia. A large chunk of continental crust, it subsided tens of millions of years ago. Another chunk apparently lay in the Arctic, and its remnants can still be found in Canada’s large (and chilly) Baffin Island.

Which leaves us with the Indian Ocean, thought by some to be the site of a submerged continent that’s been named Lemuria. And ironically enough, it was advances in the fields of geology and paleontology during the nineteenth century that fueled the speculation.

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Melchior Neumayr

The distance between southern Africa, which lies on the western shores of the Indian Ocean, and India is more than three thousand miles. But there are similarities between rock formations in both locations. In addition, lemurs can be found on the large island of Madagascar, off the eastern coast of Africa, and lemur fossils in far-off India. Could the other islands and archipelagoes that dot the Indian Ocean—Mauritius, Seychelles, Reunion, the Maldives, and Sri Lanka—be remnants of a sunken land mass that once linked Madagascar and India? Lacking the knowledge of human evolution that we have available today, paleontologist Melchior Neumayr (1845-1890) and naturalist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) hypothesized that such a continent might have been the ancestral home of Homo sapiens. (The concept is dramatized in the map at the top of today’s post.)

Several groups have since seized upon the concept of Lemuria, including Theosophists, members of a religious and philosophical group who apparently place it in the Pacific Ocean, and Tamils, the indigenous people of southern India and Sri Lanka, who identify it with a mythical homeland known as Kumari Kandam.

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Sumathi Ramaswamy

The need to believe is a strong one, and few of us are immune from it. As you’ll discover if you go looking, hundreds if not thousands of books have been written about lost continents, but an excellent place to start is L. Sprague de Camp’s fascinating Lost Continents, originally published in 1954 and updated in 1970. And for the best book about today’s subject, I recommend The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories (2004) by Sumathi Ramaswamy.

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Thinking about Atlantis

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Grove Koger

I don’t know of any myth in the Western World that has attracted so much ink as that of Atlantis, the great island that supposedly sank into the ocean sometime in the distant past.

However, the word myth can have several different meanings, and it’s important to understand what kind we’re talking about in discussing Atlantis. (That’s it at the top of today’s post in a map by Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, who’s oriented his map with north at the bottom).

Plato’s retelling of the story appears in two of his dialogues, Timaeus and Critias, the latter of which lacks a conclusion. Plato provides the story with a pedigree, claiming to base his information on the works of Athenian statesman Solon, who is said to have visited Egypt in the 5th century BCE. However, we have only Plato’s word for what his source might have learned.

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The truth is that Atlantis seems to have sprung full-blown from the head of Plato (seen above in a Roman copy of a bust by Silanion) in much the same manner that Athena was thought to have sprung from the head of her father, Zeus. Plato’s dialogues constitute the very first mentions of the island, which he described as lying “in front of … the Pillars of Hercules.” These pillars are usually understood to be promontories at the western end of the Mediterranean Sea, but—and this is only one of the many, many buts in the story of Atlantis—ancient authorities placed the pillars in any number of places, and even, on occasion, considered them to be metaphors. (For details, I encourage you to consult the entry in the invaluable online Atlantipedia.)

In any case, it’s important to keep in mind that the story of Atlantis has no precursors. It seems fairly obvious that Plato was teaching a lesson about the ideal state and about what happens when the citizens of that state turn away from the ideals that have sustained it. However, his story has been seized upon by subsequent philosophers, novelists, archaeologists (many of them amateurs), and crackpots, with the result that a small library could be filled to overflowing with their works.

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The most popular location for Atlantis has proven to be the eastern North Atlantic Ocean, largely due to the modern identification of the Pillars of Hercules with Gibraltar in the north and Monte Hacho (or possibly Jebel Musa) in the south. As a result, prime candidates for the remains of the lost island have included three of the archipelagoes of Macaronesia—the Canary Islands, Madeira, and the Azores. A. Samler Brown, for instance, dealt a little too carelessly with the subject in early editions of his guidebooks. More recently, some archaeologists have seized upon the catastrophic eruption of the volcano at the Greek island of Santorini, or Thera, which occurred some 3,600 years ago. However, they overlook the central point that Atlantis didn’t erupt, it sank.  

Among novelists, Jules Verne described how his travelers visited the ruins of Atlantis in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1869-70), and Pierre Benoit placed his character Antinea, a descendant of the rulers of Atlantis, rather ingeniously in a cave in the Sahara Desert in his 1919 novel Atlantida. More recently, Lawrence Durrell suggested in his 1953 travel memoir Reflections on a Marine Venus that “islomanes”—those “who find islands somehow irresistible”—are “direct descendants of the Atlanteans, and it is towards the lost Atlantis that their subconscious yearns throughout their island life.” And on and on …

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Several years ago, realizing that few writers of any stripe have dealt Plato’s inner life, I wrote a modest story I called “An Incident from the Childhood of Plato.” But when I submitted it to a market I thought I had a good working relationship with, I received a remarkably obtuse response. The editor suggested that I was trivializing Plato’s use of the myth, and that the physical actions I describe were simply unrealistic. It hadn’t occurred to me that I was trivializing anything at all, since, quite the contrary, I had connected the myth with what I thought could have been a profoundly important childhood experience. In addition, the physical events I describe in the story were perfectly consistent with reality, as I proved to the editor when I provided him with links to several news reports of similar events. In any case, I went on to submit the story to the publication Altered Reality, whose perceptive editor accepted it within a couple of days. You can read it here.

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News from Nowhere

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Grove Koger

Those of us fascinated by imaginary places are surely akin to “islomanes”—individuals who, in Lawrence Durrell’s classic formulation in Reflections on a Marine Venus, “find islands somehow irresistible.” They “are the direct descendants of the Atlanteans,” Durrell continues, “and it is towards the lost Atlantis that their subconscious yearns throughout their island life.” Which leads us quite naturally to …

Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi, The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. Newly updated and expanded. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 2000.

On a small enough island, you can enjoy the fantasy that you might well be the master of all you survey. But in the case of an imaginary one, you are the master. You share your kingdom with a writer and a few of his or her characters, of course, but if they behave tediously, they run the risk of being put back on the bookshelf.

In honor of this fascinating phenomenon, Manguell and Guadalupi published the first edition of their Dictionary in 1980 and new edition in 2000. It’s more than 750 pages in length—a testament to the hold that the concept’s possibilities have exercised on the minds of writers for millennia.

The earliest place I find discussed in the book is—no surprise—Plato’s perennially intriguing invention, which the famous philosopher described in the 4th century BCE. We read that Atlantis was “a vast island-continent submerged under the waters of the Atlantic towards the year 9560 BC; parts of it are still inhabited and can be visited.” The entry runs to three pages, thanks in part to a diagram of the island continent’s obsessively circular capital, and mentions that one Professor Maracot discovered Atlantis’s remains underwater in 1926, and that, what’s more, a party of Frenchmen happened upon other remains of Atlantis in 1897 in—the Sahara! A bibliography at the end of the entry helpfully identifies the specific dialogues in which Plato described his legendary concept, as well as two other works: L’Atlantide by Pierre Benoit, and The Maracot Deep by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. (I’ll be writing about both, along with Atlantis itself, down the line.)

Here also are Norman Douglas’s Nepenthe (from South Wind), Jan Morris’s Hav (from Last Letters from Hav and Hav of the Myrmidons), Anthony Hope’s Ruritania, etc., etc.

In describing their method, Manguel and Guadalupi write that “we would take for granted that fiction was fact, and treat the chosen texts as seriously as one treats the reports of an explorer or chronicler, using only the information provided in the original source, with no ‘inventions’ on our part.”

But why some entries and not others? “We can present no convincing excuse,” explain the two. “Ultimately we admit to having chosen certain places simply because they aroused in us that indescribable thrill that is the true achievement of fiction, places without which the world would be so much poorer.”

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According to information I find online, Alberto Manguel grew up in Buenos Aires, where he’s said to have met the great (but nearly blind) Jorge Luis Borges and become one of several people who read aloud to him regularly. Later in life, runs the account, he made the acquaintance of Gianni Guadalupi, who’s credited with books such as The Discovery of the Nile and Latitude Zero: Tales of the Equator. So far as I can determine, neither man is imaginary.

News from Nowhere, by the way, is the title of a socialist fantasy by noted English designer and writer William Morris (1834-1896). A number of his inventions show up in the Dictionary, but not this one, as it’s set in the future—an admittedly imaginary realm that nevertheless lies far beyond our authors’ otherwise wide-ranging explorations.