July 22, 2014 • 29 mins
There's something intoxicating about the notion of a lost continent. Imagine an entire landscape - perhaps even an entire civilization untouched by Western colonialism or perhaps lost beneath ancient, cataclysmic waves. But lost continents are far from mere whimsy and fictional fancy. Amid the dreams and occult whispers, reason and science emerge to dazzle the imagination.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert lamp and Julie Douglas Julie. Isn't
there just something delightfully intoxicating about the notion of a
lost world, a lost continent, a lost city. Yeah, I mean,
(00:24):
especially in this day and age, where everything is mapped out.
You have GPS, you can zoom to nearly any street
and take a gander. The idea that there is this
continent out there, undiscovered or perhaps once known and now
just um unknown to us again, just ripe and ready
to be discovered, is amazing. Yeah, I mean we uh.
(00:46):
When we were talking about HP Lovecraft in a recent episode,
we talked about his um, his novella At the Mountains
of Madness, which which is written in a time when
when man is on the cusp of exploring ing the
last unknown um Antarctica, and Lovecraft injects his fiction and
(01:07):
places some uh, the ancient remnants of a primordial alien
civilization there, and in in a sense he was investing
our our last hopes for something undiscovered on this world
in that place. We love the idea if there's not
something undiscovered out there in the present, then maybe there
(01:28):
was something in the past that we've lost, and failing that,
hey we'll just look to the future and dream something
up there. Well, I feel like he was tapping into
something anyway, and this idea that there are cultures so
very ancient civilization is so very different from us, that
they did seem or might seem alien to us. And
especially if you think about all the artifacts in that
novella that they come across um the ancient writings or
(01:51):
drawings and things that we discover today when we're trying
to figure out how people worked in the past. So
it is this idea that this lost cons and that
could give us another angle and another lens into humanity
and what what ultimately helped to create us and where
we are today. And certainly even just within known history
(02:11):
there there there are plenty of places and times it's
very difficult for us to to wrap our heads around,
like it's it's been pointed out to me before that
the religion of the ancient Egyptians, for instance, Uh, it
never really took off behind the ancient egypt because it
is it is very difficult for an outsider to sort
of wrap your head around, uh, these these concepts and
(02:33):
what exactly they were going for, which I think it
makes makes it even that more romantic, these notions that
these lands could have existed, these these utopias where you know,
people were incredibly strong and and the societies were wealthy,
and and they were technologically advanced. This idea that this
could have existed. And I'm even thinking about El Dorado,
(02:56):
which is, you know a perfect example of the sort
of um romantic version of society, but all through this
idea that all these treasures exists and you just need
to go find them and plunder them. And El Dorado
is the famous city of riches. Seventeenth century European explorers
were trying to find in South America with all sorts
(03:16):
of fantastical stories of you know, this Indian chief covered
in gold and all sorts of gems and rubies just
there for the taking if you can find the city. Yea. Indeed,
one of the sources we both read for this particular
episode an article by else Broad de Camp titled Lost Continents,
which is published in the National History magazine. You can
(03:36):
find it online. Uh. He pointed out that as we've
been saying, we love this idea of utopia. We love
this idea that there's some lost land somewhere that that
captures perfection. Um. Our world sucks, but surely we got
it right at some point, or we will get it
right at some point in the future. He says that
we we used to situate these Eden's and Golden ages
(03:58):
in the remote past or in some unex word portion
of the world, but now we're we're forced to place
them on other planets or in the distant future. So
so one day, one day, maybe we'll get there. But
failing that, of course we we we fill our our
our fantasies, we feel our dream worlds with these various places.
So I think we've already mentioned a few, but just
(04:18):
some of the writers that come to my mind when
we think about lost worlds uh Um Lovecraft, of course,
Clark Ashton Smith wrote whole cycles of short stories set
on the lost continent of Hyperborea, on the future continent
of Zofik, and on the last chart of sunken Atlanta
is known as Poseidonus j R. Tolkien wrote of uh
(04:39):
New Minore, which I made. The Tolken fanetics will probably
correct me on that, and the pronunciation of Tolkien's name,
but I grew up saying Tolkien's though it's grew it. H.
But this world is another one that a fictional world
fell into darkness sank beneath the waves Thomas Moore's Utopia
fifteen sixteen classic. We also in remembering this chapter in
(05:01):
Ken jennings book map Head, in which he talked about
this law professor Austin tap And right, who died in
one but he left behind something like twenty three d
handwritten pages describing and mapping this fictional country in his
mind called Islandia and decades long fever dream for him, right,
(05:24):
you know. And this is beyond the sort of scope
of his work that he did in his daily life.
So this is what he did in the mornings and
when he got home from work, and it detailed, uh everything,
the population, the culture of the languages. And again here's
this idea that we can't help but storytelling, we think
about distant lands, real or imagined. I mean, this is
(05:45):
something that really takes hold of us. I'm glad you
mentioned map Head because because that really cuts down to
two of the key features here. In discussing lost continents
and lost worlds, on one hand, the mapping of our
world us as we will roll out as we continue
in this conversation. UM. A lot of the stems from
our attempt to understand the shape of our world, the
(06:07):
layout of our world, where the where the continents are, where,
where various islands are, and then misinformation theories, hypothesis here
and there, and and a lot of dreaming. We get
into the the the theory of what may exist gets
picked up by the into and transformed into the desire
for something to exist. Yeah, that's a good point because
(06:28):
I was thinking about this. You have maps that are
physical maps, and you have allegorical maps. In the same way,
you have the same kind of stories, right, you have
some of their allegorical stories, and then you have some
stories that may be rooted in historical fact. And I'm
thinking about the city of Troy, which was written about
by Homer in the fictional poems Iliad and Odyssey, and
(06:49):
turns out that the city of Troy is was a
city that is located in modern day Turkey, and the
Trojan Wars may actually have happened. So you have all
of this sort of tinging these ideas of history and
legend and no more so than the idea of Atlantis. Ah. Yes,
(07:13):
And I do want to say a place like Troy,
it instantly makes me think of any number of places
that have an important role both in real history as
well as in fiction, as well as in religion and myth.
And some individuals want to really only take one of
those or want to combine them all into a single thing.
(07:33):
But I really feel a place like that, like Troy,
it kind of exists in a like a quantum superposition.
You know, it is at once a real place and
it is this fantasy place. And and these things are
not necessarily connected. You can't necessarily overlay them like see
through panels in a book and expect to see a
concise image. It could be dueled with nature. Yeah. Yeah.
And indeed Atlantis, the Big One definitely falls into this
(07:56):
category as well. Well. The thing about Atlantis, though, is
widely seen as an allegorical story. Yes, right in the
time that it was written in the present, but we
just can't help ourselves, right for all the reasons that
we just ticked through. Um, so when we talk about
the story of Atlantis, for talking about the lost city,
and you can't have this actual story about Atlantis unless
(08:20):
you talk about this other city, this Athenian city that
existed in the story at the same time. Um, this
is huge empire that was organized along the lines that
Plato had set forth in his republic, and the state
was ruled by a communistic military cast and everybody was
brave and handsome and virtuous kind of like Garrison Keiller's Yeah,
(08:43):
something like that Lake Wobegone as Atlantis new theory, new theory.
Garrison Killer needs to write that episode for like what
are we gone? Um? But his rival city, of course
was Atlantis. And this is an island west of the
Pillars of Hercules, larger than North after good Asia, Asia
minor combined, right, so just land mass wise huge, right,
(09:05):
And this was just a rehash written and he's saying
this was nine thousand years ago from in was like, hey,
this happened nine thousand years ago, which kind of as
a red flag anyway, Right, we'll discuss why. Um, this
is long ago in a galaxy far far away. Basically, yes,
(09:26):
you're right, but basically this continent had all sorts of
great power, had tried to conquer the eastern Mediterranean, but
had been defeated by the Athenians, and up to this
point in the story, we get all this background on
Atlantis and how it was an advanced society, but there's
no flying planes, no laser guns. There's they have a
(09:47):
really fancy bronze like metal that science shines like the sun,
but that that's pretty much yet place. It doesn't allot
anything else sci fi. But they have fancy architecture and art. Yeah, um,
fancy pants. Okay, But at this point you have a
great earthquake that devastates this Athenian city and Atlantis, and
along with it, uh you know, you you then have
(10:08):
the flood swallowing it, or you have Poseidon mandating that
these floods um swallow these cities whole, right, because it's
also laid out in Plato's work that that Poseidon puts
his ten sons in charge of Atlantis. In the Atlantis
gets gets kicked off with to begin with, Yeah, the charter,
(10:28):
if you will. Josh Clark has an article about this,
this an Atlantis article and has stuff works, and he
says Plato loses some credibility when he mentions that the
city was also populated by blood descendants of the sea
and earthquake god Poseidon. Yeah, I tend to agree with them. Yeah,
I mean, if you're gonna try and take Plato seriously.
But it's it's like if you read J. R. Tolkien
and said, this Middle Earth thing is just completely made up.
(10:51):
I tried to find it on a map. I couldn't
you work really hard. I came close a couple of times,
but it just doesn't pan out. Of course, it doesn't
pan out because Middle Earth does not really exists. It
exists as a fiction. It exists. You could argue as
an allegory for for for Europe during the Second World War, etcetera.
But wait, wait, wait a second, I saw that documentary
(11:12):
Lord of the Rings. Yes it exists. Well, New Zealand exists,
and we'll actually discuss New Zealand a little bit in
part two of this uh this episode, yeah, the perfect
setting really for Lord of the Rings, and um, the
perfect setting as as all lost. The idea of a
lost continent right has all the elements, all right. But
there are two remaining points to hit here, and one
(11:32):
is that the fact that nobody in Greece for nine
thousand years had mentioned a giant battle between Athens and Atlantis,
the except for Plato's tail on various commentaries by his successors.
There's not another surviving word about Atlantis in the Greco Roman,
Egyptian and Babylonian canon of literature, which is a little suspect. Yeah,
(11:53):
and again, everyone knew in Plato's day that this was fiction,
this was allegory. Uh. Those who came after him knew it.
But as els Brague de Camp points out, critical standards
in the later Roman Empire degraded, and some began to
take the tale seriously. And that's kind of the beginning
of what would later pick back up in terms of
(12:13):
re examining Atlantis and thinking or wanting it to be true,
even though and this is the second point, Plato was
a philosopher, not a historian, so he wrote on an
allegorical level. Yeah, but he's Plato. He's a big name,
so you know, especially as the centuries roll by, there
becomes this there's more of a tendency to want to
(12:35):
take what he says really seriously. And if he's talking
about mysteries, all the better. Right, do you think Oprah
will have that sort of power? And I always ask
this Tony in some fashion in two hundred years, Yes, yes,
people will be rereading the works of of Oprah looking
for the lost works of Oprah and her disciples. Dr
phil Across Susie Ormon. All right, let's take a quick break,
(12:58):
and when we get back, we're gonna tell about some
of the people who are trying to get at the
bottom whether or not Atlantis could have ever existed. All right,
we're back. Let's talk about some people who have looked
at this fascinated idea of I guess it's sort of
(13:21):
like archaeology meets history meets geography meets could Atlantis have existed? Yeah, yeah,
this is where it gets, uh, gets even more interesting
because after about the sixth century, you didn't really hear
much about Atlantis for a long time until you reach
the beginning of the European Age of Exploration during the
(13:42):
fifteenth century. So we're out there, we're exploring the ocean,
and we are in fact discovering new lands. But then
of course we're mapping our ways too. But this is
our Our maps were populated by many a non existent creature,
which we've discussed before talking about the science of sea monsters.
So too, do non existing islands pop up throughout the Atlantic.
(14:03):
It's especially the Atlantic. So in some ways you have
you're on the cusp of discovery, right, and you have
these large swaths of undiscovered land in oceans, and so
it would make sense that people would try to say,
I think that I have found where Atlantis went under. Yeah,
and then you have a sect of these people who
(14:27):
you might consider scientific atlantists. Yes, And and this also
picks up a lot when we discover America, because oh
my goodness, here is a world and it has people
living on it who we've never discovered before. So that's
even more fuel for the fire right And and in fact,
some would end up saying, hey, America is the Atlantist
and well it's not. Yes. Els brag de Camp divides
(14:50):
Atlantist enthusiasts or atlantists into three categories, the scientific, the
pseudo scientific, and the occultists. Um, we'll start with the
scientific because that's the reasonable place to start. And really,
they it's kind of a progression, right as you sort
of drift off a little a little more, a little
more from having a firm grasp in reality, but it's
(15:12):
trying to be rooted in in reality, it's trying to
be rooted in data. But then sort of drifting off.
I was thinking about this, that that cognitive bias that
we sometimes experience when we're trying to create that picture
that we want to see. Yeah, he's sort of like
the scientists, the scientific atlantists are saying, could it be true?
Let me see, here's my theory about how it could be,
(15:34):
And then the pseudo scientific the the the desire for
to be true takes over. And then with the occultists,
just any other nonsense you might have lying about the
house gets thrown into it, your fantasy. They're the most fun. Yes,
so yes for scientific atlantists, Uh, they are again they're
looking for an ancient culture that could have possibly inspired Plato.
(15:57):
And and they're not necessarily even getting into the whole
uh worry over an actual Atlantic island or some sort
of large land mast sinking into the ocean. So in
the sixteen seventy nine, Olaf Rudbek Uh supposedly found Atlantis
in Sweden, and then subsequently other individuals found Atlantis and
(16:18):
Uh in the Tunisia and Nigeria and South Africa, uh,
just about everywhere else. Right, Um, the best theories that
have been put forth regarding the location of Atlanta tend
to put it in Minoan crete or in tar TESSAs,
which is a harbor city and the surrounding area on
the southern coast of the Iberian Peninsula that was abandoned
(16:42):
to floodwaters, most likely before the Common Era. Meanwhile, the
Eastern Mediterranean Minoan Empire I really did suffer overwhelming disaster
around fift dred BC. And this was a Bronze Age
power that flourished from the twenty seven century BC to
around the fifteenth century BC. Oh, that's an example of
scientific Atlantis. Now you have pseudo scientific Atlantis, and a
(17:05):
good example is Augustus Leclegan. I'm glad you tackled that.
When you have more of the French tongue. Anyone who
is proficient in French may take issue with that, but
I tried. Let it be known, I tried. Um. He
spent a lot of years in the Mayan ruins of
the Yucatan. He became quite an expert. He claimed to
(17:26):
understand the Mayan alphabet, and he considered Egyptian higher growth
like hieroglyphics similar to the Mayan. And he claimed to
be able to to sort of sort all of this
by using a modification of something called rascille de Bobuls's
modification of a de Landis alphabet. So all of those
(17:49):
words just falling out of my mouth, I think already
gives you an idea that this guy was completely obsessed.
No doubt he was a scholar, but he is uh
carving things together in such a way that he was
really really was world building and doing it with language. Yeah,
(18:09):
and I think world building is key here, Yeah, because
he's taking what he knows about mind culture and then
he's connecting it. He's forming connective tissue to not only
the real ancient Egypt, but to this imagined Atlantis and
just stitching together a world anew. Can you imagine him
living today and tackling like the moon landing hoax? Oh yeah,
(18:30):
he would have a huge following online, I'm sure you know.
That's one of the things that continually amazes me looking
around at a variety of topics, not just this one online,
is just how much material there is out there supporting
just bad theories, bad ideas about say, uh, how recently
the dinosaurs, uh when extinct, or where Atlantis is or was,
(18:55):
or just it's it's it's a little depressing at times. Well,
I think it speaks to this idea that humans have
to chew on something and sometimes and a lot of
the problem here is that our experience is so subjective
that it's hard to say, well, this is the thing
all that. It's actually not that hard. In fact, you
can take scientific data and help yourself guide yourself into
(19:17):
the right area of exploration. Nonetheless, we are world builders,
we are storytellers, and we gotta chew on something. I
found an hour long h amateur documentary on YouTube the
other day where a man was arguing for the recent
existence of dinosaurs based on evidence in the Bible. But
(19:38):
here's the thing. He wasn't trying He didn't seem to
have any other point, but there are dinosaurs in the Bible.
He wasn't trying to push any kind of like new
uh you know, Young Earth kind of a model. He
wasn't trying to disprove evolution. He was just saying, hey,
there are dinosaurs in the Bible, and here's an hour
of me talking about it. Because for him, that is
the thing that obviously is problematic, and if he could
(20:03):
just figure out how dinosaurs fit into this, then all
of it would make sense. Again, you have the cognitive
bias at play that when you are faced with something
that really refutes the data in front of you, you
will double down and find a way to make it fit.
Speaking of pseudo scientific atlantist, another individual worth mentioning is
(20:24):
Paul Schlieman. And Paul Schleiman was actually the grandson of
Heinrich Schleiman, who actually dug up Troy. We mentioned earlier
about the finding of Troy, and really Troy is a
real place in addition to you know, whatever else it
might be in the in in the popular mindset of man.
But yeah, nineteen twelve, Paul Schleiman um gave the New
(20:46):
York American magazine a sensational tale about how his grandfather
had left secret papers instructing him not to instruct him
to break open an owl headed vase and supposedly they
were Atlantis secrets in side. But nothing ever came of that,
no vase was ever presented, no documents, so um, but it.
But it added just a little more fuel to the fire,
(21:09):
all right, Um. The last category here would be, as
you mentioned before, the occult atlantis, and this these really
are the people that are going to bring the life
to the party. Here yeah, with occultist Atlantists, and occultist
doesn't just mean I know it brings to my mind, uh,
images of individuals and dark cloaks meeting in secret rooms
(21:31):
and discussing Atlantis. But really, um, we're talking about here
is just any additional crazy idea, conspiracy theories, fictional imaginings. Um,
you know, the same kind of energy that would go
into rectifying the Old Testament with with with modern um paleontology,
that's the kind of energy you're getting here. So you're
(21:51):
getting everything from uh you know, ancient airplanes sailing through
the skies of Atlantis, to know magical powers, um, bisexual
Lemurian's astral bodies, you name it. It's gonna wind up
in this version of Atlantis and Atlantis thought, Yeah, it
gets super cosmic on this level. You could trace some
of this new life breathed into the legend to someone
(22:15):
named Ignatious Donnelly, who penned Atlantis the Antediluvian world elishments
before the flood, before the flood, the flood, because there
have been many flood in the Big Flood, the Big
Biblical flood, Yeah, that one. Uh, so we're talking about
eighteen eighty two and donally argued that small islands have
disappeared in eruptions, so why not a continent. So this
is his place of logic that he's beginning at, right,
(22:36):
which doesn't really hold out because it's of course it's
one thing for an island to sink, but for a large,
massive piece, so an actual continent to sink, it just
doesn't hold up with our our modern understanding of geology. Now.
He also cited many alleged resemblances between the appearance and
cultures of the peoples of America, Europe, and the Near East,
and insisted that therefore the civilizations of all must have
(22:59):
come from m Atlantis. It's like they're all humans. So well,
he starts with a good observation, there's something universal here
there there are there are aspects of various cultures that
seemed to be connected. There's some sort of connective tissue here.
What could the reason be? Answer Atlantis Atlantis instead of
(23:21):
saying like maybe genetics, but of course there's not a
great understanding of genetics at that time anyway, so you
gotta give him a little room. But the problem here
is that he completely besides coming from this place of logic,
he completely ignores Plato Smith and he replaces it with
a variation on the biblical myth of the flood that
wiped out everything except for Noah his family into his
(23:42):
menagerie of animals. He wrote that Atlantis was sunk in
the middle of the Atlantic Ocean during the flood, but
before all this it had given rise to the Egyptian
and Mayan civilizations, and too, blue eyed, red haired arians
of Ireland. Here you're going there only so he pulls
in a lot of ideas in this theory. He's bringing
(24:03):
in the Biblical theories, bringing in some Irish myth he's
bringing in um discoveries about ancient Egyptian beliefs, and uh
about mind beliefs, and just sort of again world building
at all into this version of reality that doesn't actually
match up with with what we know to be true. Yeah,
and think about this time period too. You have a
ton of excavations going on in the late eighteen hundreds,
(24:27):
and you also have the occultists exploring these more cosmic
ideas of how we came to be in these more
fantastical ideas. So it was sort of like the perfect
story to Ussher in an expression of all of this
the ziente gist of the moment. All right, So let's
let's back up just a little bit then, So we've
(24:49):
we've ventured head first all the way from scientific to
pseudo scientific and into the occult and considering Atlantis, and
at that point we're just lost. We we reached. It
just turns into pop culture and fiction and uh and
uh indeed, uh old I think like nineteen eighty two
Atari game called Atlantis that I remember seeing the trailers
(25:10):
for in which alien Gorgon's battle the Atlanteans and it
was an amazing TV commercial for it. Um. But but
but to back up, let's let's go back to this
h this period of time in which we are actually
exploring the world. We are exploring the oceans, and we
are in fact looking for and expecting to find undiscovered continents.
(25:34):
Particularly we're looking in the Southern Ocean, all right, in
the Southern hemisphere. Um. A lot of the early explorations
of this area were actually an attempt to find what
was called Tara Australis incognita, not really to explore the
ocean itself as much. I mean, we we did that,
but it was simply uh, because there were there had
(25:56):
to be this great undiscovered continent out there. And there
are a couple of reasons for this. Um For instance, Uh,
there's a religious one, and that is that you have
there's so much land in the northern hemisphere. The truly
a divine creator would not have created an asymmetrical Earth.
I mean, forgetting the fact that he apparently created asymmetrical humans,
because we're not perfectly symmetrical, but surely he would have
(26:18):
made the Earth symmetrical. So I get it from a
geographical standpoint and from a sort of god worldview standpoint.
They're sitting there and they're looking at this land mass,
and they've they've mapped what they know, and they think
that symmetrically there should be something on the other side. Yeah.
I mean, it's like when we look into the night sky,
and based on our model of what we know, it's
(26:38):
not unbelievable to think, well, there must there might be
other planets out there that have life on them. We
we we just have to sort of fill in the
blanks based on the existing model. So and this all
boils down to Plato in his Platonic ideal. Yet again.
Oh wow, Plato emerges once more to populate our world
with fictional continents. Um. Now scientifically you can there's also
(27:01):
the it's not all just completely based in religion and philosophy,
but scientifically. It was also thought that if you had
all this land in the north, then there must be
land in the south, because otherwise the planets of balance
would be disrupted and uh, and it would spin off
out into the void of space, and so much of
the so much of the Earth was unknown. It was
(27:22):
simply assumed that there was more land in the south. Um.
And again this doesn't completely line up with the Obviously,
this doesn't line up with the way uh, the planetary
science works, because we haven't spun off into the void
and there is in fact less continental mass in the
southern hemisphere. But the idea that they even understood that
(27:43):
there was a kind of mass at play is really interesting.
And trying to extrapolate that in a in a larger
view of things. So in other words, that maybe you
have a weight, um, you know that on one side
it's got a bunch of rocks and nothing on the
other side. But to get that concept and to to
try to apply it to geography is really interesting. Yeah,
So we ended up setting out into the into into
(28:06):
the Southern Ocean. We eventually discover Antarctica, and we we
explore all the waters in between, and there is a
lot of nothing out there. Um. There's a really great
episode of Ideas with Paul Kennedy title of the God
for sacon See that really gets into depth about about
some of our early explorations of of of the Southern Ocean,
(28:27):
but also uh, people who've sailed there, people who have
tried to set records sailing around the globe down there.
And one of the points was made in that episode
that that keeps resonating with me pointed out that, uh,
you're so far away from civilization down there in the
Southern Ocean. Uh. In fact, you're further from human habitation
(28:47):
than an astronaut on the International Space Station. So think
about that the next time you stare at the globe
and get this false idea of of how how well
we know everything and how civilized our planet is, or
if you just feel isolated, yes you know, all right,
So there you go. That is part one of our
(29:08):
two part series on the idea of the Lost Continent.
This one was very Atlantis heavy. The next one will
be less so, but we'll get into some uh some
equally wonderful content, and we will set out for the
lost continent of Limuria. Namers. Hey, do you guys have
any thoughts so far? Let us know. You can find
(29:29):
this at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Yes,
that's where you'll find all the podcast episodes, all the videos,
all the blog posts. And you know there's an old
fashioned way to get in touch with us as well.
Send an email to boil the mine at how stuff
work dot com for more on this and thousands of
(29:50):
other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert lamp and Julie Douglas Julie. Isn't
there just something delightfully intoxicating about the notion of a
lost world, a lost continent, a lost city. Yeah, I mean,
(00:24):
especially in this day and age, where everything is mapped out.
You have GPS, you can zoom to nearly any street
and take a gander. The idea that there is this
continent out there, undiscovered or perhaps once known and now
just um unknown to us again, just ripe and ready
to be discovered, is amazing. Yeah, I mean we uh.
(00:46):
When we were talking about HP Lovecraft in a recent episode,
we talked about his um, his novella At the Mountains
of Madness, which which is written in a time when
when man is on the cusp of exploring ing the
last unknown um Antarctica, and Lovecraft injects his fiction and
(01:07):
places some uh, the ancient remnants of a primordial alien
civilization there, and in in a sense he was investing
our our last hopes for something undiscovered on this world
in that place. We love the idea if there's not
something undiscovered out there in the present, then maybe there
(01:28):
was something in the past that we've lost, and failing that,
hey we'll just look to the future and dream something
up there. Well, I feel like he was tapping into
something anyway, and this idea that there are cultures so
very ancient civilization is so very different from us, that
they did seem or might seem alien to us. And
especially if you think about all the artifacts in that
novella that they come across um the ancient writings or
(01:51):
drawings and things that we discover today when we're trying
to figure out how people worked in the past. So
it is this idea that this lost cons and that
could give us another angle and another lens into humanity
and what what ultimately helped to create us and where
we are today. And certainly even just within known history
(02:11):
there there there are plenty of places and times it's
very difficult for us to to wrap our heads around,
like it's it's been pointed out to me before that
the religion of the ancient Egyptians, for instance, Uh, it
never really took off behind the ancient egypt because it
is it is very difficult for an outsider to sort
of wrap your head around, uh, these these concepts and
(02:33):
what exactly they were going for, which I think it
makes makes it even that more romantic, these notions that
these lands could have existed, these these utopias where you know,
people were incredibly strong and and the societies were wealthy,
and and they were technologically advanced. This idea that this
could have existed. And I'm even thinking about El Dorado,
(02:56):
which is, you know a perfect example of the sort
of um romantic version of society, but all through this
idea that all these treasures exists and you just need
to go find them and plunder them. And El Dorado
is the famous city of riches. Seventeenth century European explorers
were trying to find in South America with all sorts
(03:16):
of fantastical stories of you know, this Indian chief covered
in gold and all sorts of gems and rubies just
there for the taking if you can find the city. Yea. Indeed,
one of the sources we both read for this particular
episode an article by else Broad de Camp titled Lost Continents,
which is published in the National History magazine. You can
(03:36):
find it online. Uh. He pointed out that as we've
been saying, we love this idea of utopia. We love
this idea that there's some lost land somewhere that that
captures perfection. Um. Our world sucks, but surely we got
it right at some point, or we will get it
right at some point in the future. He says that
we we used to situate these Eden's and Golden ages
(03:58):
in the remote past or in some unex word portion
of the world, but now we're we're forced to place
them on other planets or in the distant future. So
so one day, one day, maybe we'll get there. But
failing that, of course we we we fill our our
our fantasies, we feel our dream worlds with these various places.
So I think we've already mentioned a few, but just
(04:18):
some of the writers that come to my mind when
we think about lost worlds uh Um Lovecraft, of course,
Clark Ashton Smith wrote whole cycles of short stories set
on the lost continent of Hyperborea, on the future continent
of Zofik, and on the last chart of sunken Atlanta
is known as Poseidonus j R. Tolkien wrote of uh
(04:39):
New Minore, which I made. The Tolken fanetics will probably
correct me on that, and the pronunciation of Tolkien's name,
but I grew up saying Tolkien's though it's grew it. H.
But this world is another one that a fictional world
fell into darkness sank beneath the waves Thomas Moore's Utopia
fifteen sixteen classic. We also in remembering this chapter in
(05:01):
Ken jennings book map Head, in which he talked about
this law professor Austin tap And right, who died in
one but he left behind something like twenty three d
handwritten pages describing and mapping this fictional country in his
mind called Islandia and decades long fever dream for him, right,
(05:24):
you know. And this is beyond the sort of scope
of his work that he did in his daily life.
So this is what he did in the mornings and
when he got home from work, and it detailed, uh everything,
the population, the culture of the languages. And again here's
this idea that we can't help but storytelling, we think
about distant lands, real or imagined. I mean, this is
(05:45):
something that really takes hold of us. I'm glad you
mentioned map Head because because that really cuts down to
two of the key features here. In discussing lost continents
and lost worlds, on one hand, the mapping of our
world us as we will roll out as we continue
in this conversation. UM. A lot of the stems from
our attempt to understand the shape of our world, the
(06:07):
layout of our world, where the where the continents are, where,
where various islands are, and then misinformation theories, hypothesis here
and there, and and a lot of dreaming. We get
into the the the theory of what may exist gets
picked up by the into and transformed into the desire
for something to exist. Yeah, that's a good point because
(06:28):
I was thinking about this. You have maps that are
physical maps, and you have allegorical maps. In the same way,
you have the same kind of stories, right, you have
some of their allegorical stories, and then you have some
stories that may be rooted in historical fact. And I'm
thinking about the city of Troy, which was written about
by Homer in the fictional poems Iliad and Odyssey, and
(06:49):
turns out that the city of Troy is was a
city that is located in modern day Turkey, and the
Trojan Wars may actually have happened. So you have all
of this sort of tinging these ideas of history and
legend and no more so than the idea of Atlantis. Ah. Yes,
(07:13):
And I do want to say a place like Troy,
it instantly makes me think of any number of places
that have an important role both in real history as
well as in fiction, as well as in religion and myth.
And some individuals want to really only take one of
those or want to combine them all into a single thing.
(07:33):
But I really feel a place like that, like Troy,
it kind of exists in a like a quantum superposition.
You know, it is at once a real place and
it is this fantasy place. And and these things are
not necessarily connected. You can't necessarily overlay them like see
through panels in a book and expect to see a
concise image. It could be dueled with nature. Yeah. Yeah.
And indeed Atlantis, the Big One definitely falls into this
(07:56):
category as well. Well. The thing about Atlantis, though, is
widely seen as an allegorical story. Yes, right in the
time that it was written in the present, but we
just can't help ourselves, right for all the reasons that
we just ticked through. Um, so when we talk about
the story of Atlantis, for talking about the lost city,
and you can't have this actual story about Atlantis unless
(08:20):
you talk about this other city, this Athenian city that
existed in the story at the same time. Um, this
is huge empire that was organized along the lines that
Plato had set forth in his republic, and the state
was ruled by a communistic military cast and everybody was
brave and handsome and virtuous kind of like Garrison Keiller's Yeah,
(08:43):
something like that Lake Wobegone as Atlantis new theory, new theory.
Garrison Killer needs to write that episode for like what
are we gone? Um? But his rival city, of course
was Atlantis. And this is an island west of the
Pillars of Hercules, larger than North after good Asia, Asia
minor combined, right, so just land mass wise huge, right,
(09:05):
And this was just a rehash written and he's saying
this was nine thousand years ago from in was like, hey,
this happened nine thousand years ago, which kind of as
a red flag anyway, Right, we'll discuss why. Um, this
is long ago in a galaxy far far away. Basically, yes,
(09:26):
you're right, but basically this continent had all sorts of
great power, had tried to conquer the eastern Mediterranean, but
had been defeated by the Athenians, and up to this
point in the story, we get all this background on
Atlantis and how it was an advanced society, but there's
no flying planes, no laser guns. There's they have a
(09:47):
really fancy bronze like metal that science shines like the sun,
but that that's pretty much yet place. It doesn't allot
anything else sci fi. But they have fancy architecture and art. Yeah, um,
fancy pants. Okay, But at this point you have a
great earthquake that devastates this Athenian city and Atlantis, and
along with it, uh you know, you you then have
(10:08):
the flood swallowing it, or you have Poseidon mandating that
these floods um swallow these cities whole, right, because it's
also laid out in Plato's work that that Poseidon puts
his ten sons in charge of Atlantis. In the Atlantis
gets gets kicked off with to begin with, Yeah, the charter,
(10:28):
if you will. Josh Clark has an article about this,
this an Atlantis article and has stuff works, and he
says Plato loses some credibility when he mentions that the
city was also populated by blood descendants of the sea
and earthquake god Poseidon. Yeah, I tend to agree with them. Yeah,
I mean, if you're gonna try and take Plato seriously.
But it's it's like if you read J. R. Tolkien
and said, this Middle Earth thing is just completely made up.
(10:51):
I tried to find it on a map. I couldn't
you work really hard. I came close a couple of times,
but it just doesn't pan out. Of course, it doesn't
pan out because Middle Earth does not really exists. It
exists as a fiction. It exists. You could argue as
an allegory for for for Europe during the Second World War, etcetera.
But wait, wait, wait a second, I saw that documentary
(11:12):
Lord of the Rings. Yes it exists. Well, New Zealand exists,
and we'll actually discuss New Zealand a little bit in
part two of this uh this episode, yeah, the perfect
setting really for Lord of the Rings, and um, the
perfect setting as as all lost. The idea of a
lost continent right has all the elements, all right. But
there are two remaining points to hit here, and one
(11:32):
is that the fact that nobody in Greece for nine
thousand years had mentioned a giant battle between Athens and Atlantis,
the except for Plato's tail on various commentaries by his successors.
There's not another surviving word about Atlantis in the Greco Roman,
Egyptian and Babylonian canon of literature, which is a little suspect. Yeah,
(11:53):
and again, everyone knew in Plato's day that this was fiction,
this was allegory. Uh. Those who came after him knew it.
But as els Brague de Camp points out, critical standards
in the later Roman Empire degraded, and some began to
take the tale seriously. And that's kind of the beginning
of what would later pick back up in terms of
(12:13):
re examining Atlantis and thinking or wanting it to be true,
even though and this is the second point, Plato was
a philosopher, not a historian, so he wrote on an
allegorical level. Yeah, but he's Plato. He's a big name,
so you know, especially as the centuries roll by, there
becomes this there's more of a tendency to want to
(12:35):
take what he says really seriously. And if he's talking
about mysteries, all the better. Right, do you think Oprah
will have that sort of power? And I always ask
this Tony in some fashion in two hundred years, Yes, yes,
people will be rereading the works of of Oprah looking
for the lost works of Oprah and her disciples. Dr
phil Across Susie Ormon. All right, let's take a quick break,
(12:58):
and when we get back, we're gonna tell about some
of the people who are trying to get at the
bottom whether or not Atlantis could have ever existed. All right,
we're back. Let's talk about some people who have looked
at this fascinated idea of I guess it's sort of
(13:21):
like archaeology meets history meets geography meets could Atlantis have existed? Yeah, yeah,
this is where it gets, uh, gets even more interesting
because after about the sixth century, you didn't really hear
much about Atlantis for a long time until you reach
the beginning of the European Age of Exploration during the
(13:42):
fifteenth century. So we're out there, we're exploring the ocean,
and we are in fact discovering new lands. But then
of course we're mapping our ways too. But this is
our Our maps were populated by many a non existent creature,
which we've discussed before talking about the science of sea monsters.
So too, do non existing islands pop up throughout the Atlantic.
(14:03):
It's especially the Atlantic. So in some ways you have
you're on the cusp of discovery, right, and you have
these large swaths of undiscovered land in oceans, and so
it would make sense that people would try to say,
I think that I have found where Atlantis went under. Yeah,
and then you have a sect of these people who
(14:27):
you might consider scientific atlantists. Yes, And and this also
picks up a lot when we discover America, because oh
my goodness, here is a world and it has people
living on it who we've never discovered before. So that's
even more fuel for the fire right And and in fact,
some would end up saying, hey, America is the Atlantist
and well it's not. Yes. Els brag de Camp divides
(14:50):
Atlantist enthusiasts or atlantists into three categories, the scientific, the
pseudo scientific, and the occultists. Um, we'll start with the
scientific because that's the reasonable place to start. And really,
they it's kind of a progression, right as you sort
of drift off a little a little more, a little
more from having a firm grasp in reality, but it's
(15:12):
trying to be rooted in in reality, it's trying to
be rooted in data. But then sort of drifting off.
I was thinking about this, that that cognitive bias that
we sometimes experience when we're trying to create that picture
that we want to see. Yeah, he's sort of like
the scientists, the scientific atlantists are saying, could it be true?
Let me see, here's my theory about how it could be,
(15:34):
And then the pseudo scientific the the the desire for
to be true takes over. And then with the occultists,
just any other nonsense you might have lying about the
house gets thrown into it, your fantasy. They're the most fun. Yes,
so yes for scientific atlantists, Uh, they are again they're
looking for an ancient culture that could have possibly inspired Plato.
(15:57):
And and they're not necessarily even getting into the whole
uh worry over an actual Atlantic island or some sort
of large land mast sinking into the ocean. So in
the sixteen seventy nine, Olaf Rudbek Uh supposedly found Atlantis
in Sweden, and then subsequently other individuals found Atlantis and
(16:18):
Uh in the Tunisia and Nigeria and South Africa, uh,
just about everywhere else. Right, Um, the best theories that
have been put forth regarding the location of Atlanta tend
to put it in Minoan crete or in tar TESSAs,
which is a harbor city and the surrounding area on
the southern coast of the Iberian Peninsula that was abandoned
(16:42):
to floodwaters, most likely before the Common Era. Meanwhile, the
Eastern Mediterranean Minoan Empire I really did suffer overwhelming disaster
around fift dred BC. And this was a Bronze Age
power that flourished from the twenty seven century BC to
around the fifteenth century BC. Oh, that's an example of
scientific Atlantis. Now you have pseudo scientific Atlantis, and a
(17:05):
good example is Augustus Leclegan. I'm glad you tackled that.
When you have more of the French tongue. Anyone who
is proficient in French may take issue with that, but
I tried. Let it be known, I tried. Um. He
spent a lot of years in the Mayan ruins of
the Yucatan. He became quite an expert. He claimed to
(17:26):
understand the Mayan alphabet, and he considered Egyptian higher growth
like hieroglyphics similar to the Mayan. And he claimed to
be able to to sort of sort all of this
by using a modification of something called rascille de Bobuls's
modification of a de Landis alphabet. So all of those
(17:49):
words just falling out of my mouth, I think already
gives you an idea that this guy was completely obsessed.
No doubt he was a scholar, but he is uh
carving things together in such a way that he was
really really was world building and doing it with language. Yeah,
(18:09):
and I think world building is key here, Yeah, because
he's taking what he knows about mind culture and then
he's connecting it. He's forming connective tissue to not only
the real ancient Egypt, but to this imagined Atlantis and
just stitching together a world anew. Can you imagine him
living today and tackling like the moon landing hoax? Oh yeah,
(18:30):
he would have a huge following online, I'm sure you know.
That's one of the things that continually amazes me looking
around at a variety of topics, not just this one online,
is just how much material there is out there supporting
just bad theories, bad ideas about say, uh, how recently
the dinosaurs, uh when extinct, or where Atlantis is or was,
(18:55):
or just it's it's it's a little depressing at times. Well,
I think it speaks to this idea that humans have
to chew on something and sometimes and a lot of
the problem here is that our experience is so subjective
that it's hard to say, well, this is the thing
all that. It's actually not that hard. In fact, you
can take scientific data and help yourself guide yourself into
(19:17):
the right area of exploration. Nonetheless, we are world builders,
we are storytellers, and we gotta chew on something. I
found an hour long h amateur documentary on YouTube the
other day where a man was arguing for the recent
existence of dinosaurs based on evidence in the Bible. But
(19:38):
here's the thing. He wasn't trying He didn't seem to
have any other point, but there are dinosaurs in the Bible.
He wasn't trying to push any kind of like new
uh you know, Young Earth kind of a model. He
wasn't trying to disprove evolution. He was just saying, hey,
there are dinosaurs in the Bible, and here's an hour
of me talking about it. Because for him, that is
the thing that obviously is problematic, and if he could
(20:03):
just figure out how dinosaurs fit into this, then all
of it would make sense. Again, you have the cognitive
bias at play that when you are faced with something
that really refutes the data in front of you, you
will double down and find a way to make it fit.
Speaking of pseudo scientific atlantist, another individual worth mentioning is
(20:24):
Paul Schlieman. And Paul Schleiman was actually the grandson of
Heinrich Schleiman, who actually dug up Troy. We mentioned earlier
about the finding of Troy, and really Troy is a
real place in addition to you know, whatever else it
might be in the in in the popular mindset of man.
But yeah, nineteen twelve, Paul Schleiman um gave the New
(20:46):
York American magazine a sensational tale about how his grandfather
had left secret papers instructing him not to instruct him
to break open an owl headed vase and supposedly they
were Atlantis secrets in side. But nothing ever came of that,
no vase was ever presented, no documents, so um, but it.
But it added just a little more fuel to the fire,
(21:09):
all right, Um. The last category here would be, as
you mentioned before, the occult atlantis, and this these really
are the people that are going to bring the life
to the party. Here yeah, with occultist Atlantists, and occultist
doesn't just mean I know it brings to my mind, uh,
images of individuals and dark cloaks meeting in secret rooms
(21:31):
and discussing Atlantis. But really, um, we're talking about here
is just any additional crazy idea, conspiracy theories, fictional imaginings. Um,
you know, the same kind of energy that would go
into rectifying the Old Testament with with with modern um paleontology,
that's the kind of energy you're getting here. So you're
(21:51):
getting everything from uh you know, ancient airplanes sailing through
the skies of Atlantis, to know magical powers, um, bisexual
Lemurian's astral bodies, you name it. It's gonna wind up
in this version of Atlantis and Atlantis thought, Yeah, it
gets super cosmic on this level. You could trace some
of this new life breathed into the legend to someone
(22:15):
named Ignatious Donnelly, who penned Atlantis the Antediluvian world elishments
before the flood, before the flood, the flood, because there
have been many flood in the Big Flood, the Big
Biblical flood, Yeah, that one. Uh, so we're talking about
eighteen eighty two and donally argued that small islands have
disappeared in eruptions, so why not a continent. So this
is his place of logic that he's beginning at, right,
(22:36):
which doesn't really hold out because it's of course it's
one thing for an island to sink, but for a large,
massive piece, so an actual continent to sink, it just
doesn't hold up with our our modern understanding of geology. Now.
He also cited many alleged resemblances between the appearance and
cultures of the peoples of America, Europe, and the Near East,
and insisted that therefore the civilizations of all must have
(22:59):
come from m Atlantis. It's like they're all humans. So well,
he starts with a good observation, there's something universal here
there there are there are aspects of various cultures that
seemed to be connected. There's some sort of connective tissue here.
What could the reason be? Answer Atlantis Atlantis instead of
(23:21):
saying like maybe genetics, but of course there's not a
great understanding of genetics at that time anyway, so you
gotta give him a little room. But the problem here
is that he completely besides coming from this place of logic,
he completely ignores Plato Smith and he replaces it with
a variation on the biblical myth of the flood that
wiped out everything except for Noah his family into his
(23:42):
menagerie of animals. He wrote that Atlantis was sunk in
the middle of the Atlantic Ocean during the flood, but
before all this it had given rise to the Egyptian
and Mayan civilizations, and too, blue eyed, red haired arians
of Ireland. Here you're going there only so he pulls
in a lot of ideas in this theory. He's bringing
(24:03):
in the Biblical theories, bringing in some Irish myth he's
bringing in um discoveries about ancient Egyptian beliefs, and uh
about mind beliefs, and just sort of again world building
at all into this version of reality that doesn't actually
match up with with what we know to be true. Yeah,
and think about this time period too. You have a
ton of excavations going on in the late eighteen hundreds,
(24:27):
and you also have the occultists exploring these more cosmic
ideas of how we came to be in these more
fantastical ideas. So it was sort of like the perfect
story to Ussher in an expression of all of this
the ziente gist of the moment. All right, So let's
let's back up just a little bit then, So we've
(24:49):
we've ventured head first all the way from scientific to
pseudo scientific and into the occult and considering Atlantis, and
at that point we're just lost. We we reached. It
just turns into pop culture and fiction and uh and
uh indeed, uh old I think like nineteen eighty two
Atari game called Atlantis that I remember seeing the trailers
(25:10):
for in which alien Gorgon's battle the Atlanteans and it
was an amazing TV commercial for it. Um. But but
but to back up, let's let's go back to this
h this period of time in which we are actually
exploring the world. We are exploring the oceans, and we
are in fact looking for and expecting to find undiscovered continents.
(25:34):
Particularly we're looking in the Southern Ocean, all right, in
the Southern hemisphere. Um. A lot of the early explorations
of this area were actually an attempt to find what
was called Tara Australis incognita, not really to explore the
ocean itself as much. I mean, we we did that,
but it was simply uh, because there were there had
(25:56):
to be this great undiscovered continent out there. And there
are a couple of reasons for this. Um For instance, Uh,
there's a religious one, and that is that you have
there's so much land in the northern hemisphere. The truly
a divine creator would not have created an asymmetrical Earth.
I mean, forgetting the fact that he apparently created asymmetrical humans,
because we're not perfectly symmetrical, but surely he would have
(26:18):
made the Earth symmetrical. So I get it from a
geographical standpoint and from a sort of god worldview standpoint.
They're sitting there and they're looking at this land mass,
and they've they've mapped what they know, and they think
that symmetrically there should be something on the other side. Yeah.
I mean, it's like when we look into the night sky,
and based on our model of what we know, it's
(26:38):
not unbelievable to think, well, there must there might be
other planets out there that have life on them. We
we we just have to sort of fill in the
blanks based on the existing model. So and this all
boils down to Plato in his Platonic ideal. Yet again.
Oh wow, Plato emerges once more to populate our world
with fictional continents. Um. Now scientifically you can there's also
(27:01):
the it's not all just completely based in religion and philosophy,
but scientifically. It was also thought that if you had
all this land in the north, then there must be
land in the south, because otherwise the planets of balance
would be disrupted and uh, and it would spin off
out into the void of space, and so much of
the so much of the Earth was unknown. It was
(27:22):
simply assumed that there was more land in the south. Um.
And again this doesn't completely line up with the Obviously,
this doesn't line up with the way uh, the planetary
science works, because we haven't spun off into the void
and there is in fact less continental mass in the
southern hemisphere. But the idea that they even understood that
(27:43):
there was a kind of mass at play is really interesting.
And trying to extrapolate that in a in a larger
view of things. So in other words, that maybe you
have a weight, um, you know that on one side
it's got a bunch of rocks and nothing on the
other side. But to get that concept and to to
try to apply it to geography is really interesting. Yeah,
So we ended up setting out into the into into
(28:06):
the Southern Ocean. We eventually discover Antarctica, and we we
explore all the waters in between, and there is a
lot of nothing out there. Um. There's a really great
episode of Ideas with Paul Kennedy title of the God
for sacon See that really gets into depth about about
some of our early explorations of of of the Southern Ocean,
(28:27):
but also uh, people who've sailed there, people who have
tried to set records sailing around the globe down there.
And one of the points was made in that episode
that that keeps resonating with me pointed out that, uh,
you're so far away from civilization down there in the
Southern Ocean. Uh. In fact, you're further from human habitation
(28:47):
than an astronaut on the International Space Station. So think
about that the next time you stare at the globe
and get this false idea of of how how well
we know everything and how civilized our planet is, or
if you just feel isolated, yes you know, all right,
So there you go. That is part one of our
(29:08):
two part series on the idea of the Lost Continent.
This one was very Atlantis heavy. The next one will
be less so, but we'll get into some uh some
equally wonderful content, and we will set out for the
lost continent of Limuria. Namers. Hey, do you guys have
any thoughts so far? Let us know. You can find
(29:29):
this at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Yes,
that's where you'll find all the podcast episodes, all the videos,
all the blog posts. And you know there's an old
fashioned way to get in touch with us as well.
Send an email to boil the mine at how stuff
work dot com for more on this and thousands of
(29:50):
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