You're Dead to Me - Atlantis

Episode Date: March 31, 2023

Greg Jenner is joined by Dr Stephen Kershaw and comedian Sophie Duker to dive into the myth of Atlantis. The Atlantean story has its origins in the writings of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. And literally nowhere else. Yet the enduring appeal of this mythical city and a sophisticated civilisation lost beneath the waves has lasted for thousands of years. It has inspired a huge number of stories and some very ropey documentaries. The myth also has a darker side, as the allegory of Atlantis has been used to try and justify racist philosophies and policies during some of the darkest events in history.

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are jumping in our submarines, supercharging our crystals and boldly going where no one has gone before. Literally, because it never existed. It's Atlantis!

And to help us trace the history of one of the world's most enduring myths, I am joined by two very special guests. In History Corner, he's a lecturer at Oxford University's Department for Continuing Education. His research includes classical mythology and Greek and Roman history. He's the author of several books, including a fantastic illustrated children's encyclopedia of Greek myths called Mythologica. And lucky for us, he's also written A Brief History of Atlantis, Plato's Ideal State. It's Dr Stephen Kershaw. Welcome, Steve. Thank you very much, Greg. I'm delighted to be here. Absolutely delighted. And in Comedy Corner, she's an award-winning comedian. You'll have seen her on all the telly,

Live at the Apollo, Mock the Week, Frankie Bonham's New World Order, and as a glorious champion on Taskmaster. She won the 2021 Funny Women Best Comedy Writer Award. And of course, you'll remember her from our episodes on Ashanti Gana and Ramesses the Great. It's Sophie Duker. Welcome, Sophie. Hey, it's me. I know nothing. I'm so happy to be back. I like the crumbs of knowledge. I feel like an urchin when I come on the show. And you're just like a history benefactor.

And you scatter the crumbs and I like snap them up and like subsist off them for a week. I'm just one of the grateful urchins of history. Grateful urchin. Okay, lovely. I don't know if I'm comfortable being the scatterer of crumbs, but I'm sure Steve can hand out some bread. We're talking here about a subject that I'm assuming you know the name recognition Atlantis, but do you know anything of the story, Sophie? It's got a strong brand, Atlantis. So yeah, I think it's got strong brand recognition. I think there was a Disney slash Pixar movie about Atlantis, but it was one of the ones that I didn't get massively into.

So I can see the visuals for that in my mind, but I didn't dive into Atlantis via that film. Good pun. Thank you. I've got loads. Specific Atlantis feels like a really woolly area for me because I feel like there are lots of underwater world myths. And in the most recent Black Panther, for instance,

and we've been talking about Ashanti Garner and there's lots of stuff about beings and that sort of mysticism to do with the sea. But Atlantis isn't real. My stats on Narnia aren't that good so i don't know that much about atlantis so what do you know all right well that leads us on to the so what do you know this is where i have a guess at what our listener might know about today's subject and let's's be honest, as Sophie says, it's got a great brand.

It is one of the biggest tropes in pop culture. The Wikipedia page for Atlantis in Popular Culture, which is a sub-page of the Atlantis page, is 10,000 words long. So, I mean, this stuff really just is everywhere. Disney has done it twice, really, because they've done The Little Mermaid as well, which is sort of Atlantean vibes. Oh, yeah, of course, yeah. There's also DC's Aquaman, of course.

There's Marvel's Namor the Submariner, which, as you said, showed up in Wakanda Forever. There's the BBC series Atlantis. There's Stargate Atlantis. Do you remember that from a while back? There's Tomb Raider, Uncharted 3 in video games. In cartoons, you've got Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, SpongeBob and DuckTales, all done Atlantis.

Then you've got Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and then Don't Get Me Started and all the documentaries and YouTube sort of things, all claiming to have solved the secrets of Atlantis. So clearly we're all obsessed with Atlantis, but where do these ideas come from? Let's find out, shall we? So right, Sophie, let's throw you in at the deep end. Sorry, another pun. Do you have any idea where does the Atlantean story begin? I want to tie it in with mermaids, but I get a sense that it's probably earlier than that. So I feel like when people started making long sea voyages and seeing like, is a dugong? Is that a thing? Have I made that word up? You're going for sort of sea beasts, are you? Like seeing sea beasts poised on rocks and

being really horny on the boat and thinking, what if that was just like a sort of spectacular person i could have my way with and then they'd float down to the middle of the sea i think probably as long as there has been water okay i feel like there's probably a lot of like in like maybe like the 1500s oh okay so you're going sort of early modern early modern it feels like that's where like those tales would have proliferated but i feel like you you're going to say it's a lot earlier. I am going to say it's a lot earlier. I mean, I enjoyed your guess, the idea of horny sailors just fancying whatever they see.

No, we're going back to ancient Greece to create our story here. And Steve, when I say ancient Greece, we're talking about one man, really, because it's not the Greeks per se. It's one dude. It's Plato. It is, absolutely. So that's where it comes from. Atlantis, it's a Greek Plato. It is, absolutely. So that's where it comes from. Atlantis, it's a Greek word. It means of Atlas. So it's the island of Atlas. And it's first described in a text by the ancient philosopher Plato. So it's about 2,400 years old, I guess, is this tale,

but actually no older than that. And Plato wrote two amazing dialogue texts. There was one called the Timaeus, where he introduced Atlantis and the idea of it. And then another one called the Critias, where he gave a ton of detail, super detail, about what the island was like and what its capital city was like. And it seems that these two dialogues were actually part of an unfinished trilogy that he wrote sometime about 360 BCE. And actually, the Critias dialogue just stops in mid-sentence. Zeus is about to make a huge speech and the dialogue goes, and then Zeus said, and so we're left wondering, I wonder what Zeus said. The dialogues are framed as discussions during a multi-day banquet between a group of

guys. There's Socrates, who'd been Plato's teacher. There's Timaeus and Critias, who the dialogues are named after. There's another guy called Hermocrates, and they were going to name a dialogue after him. What happens, really, is that in the Timaeus text, Socrates wants to know about the ideal state. He wants to see how it will work under stress. And Critias, this guy, responds with a story, this amazing story of an aggressive superpower called Atlantis that attacks ancient Athens and is then defeated and gets destroyed in a massive natural disaster. How does Critias know the story? Well, it's a strange one, really. As a boy,

we're told that he heard it from his grandfather, who'd heard it from his dad, who'd heard it from a famous Greek lawmaker called Solon, who'd heard it from some wise Egyptian priests. Or so the story goes. Yeah. Sophie, when do you think these Egyptian priests say that this war between Atlantis and Athens had happened? This convo is happening in like, what is it, 460 BCE? 360 BCE. 360 BCE. I feel like they're not going to say it was like the other week. I feel like it's going to be sort of distant in time.

Tuesday, yeah. Maybe like 500 years before that? They say it happens 9,000 years before the dinner party. Wow. Which is the Stone Age. When there are no towns, let alone empires or wars, people don't even have bronze. So that's unlikely, I think we can say.

But what else does Plato say, Steve? Because as you say, he gives details. So what is in the story? He describes Atlantis as an island that's situated in front of the pillars of Heracles. That's the Straits of Gibraltar. And it's got a massive empire that encompasses all sorts of other lands and islands as well. And it is huge. It's bigger, he says, than Libya, which is what the Greeks called Africa, and Asia combined. All right,

vast. And it has a wondrous capital city as well that's formed of concentric rings of land and water. And this has developed an economy and a society with amazing engineering. They have bathhouses and canals, and they also have an absolutely humongous army. And apparently this imperial superpower attacked the Athenians with no justification whatsoever. And they, because they are really an embodiment of the ideal state, they're tough and virtuous, so they overcome the odds and they win and they defeat the Atlanteans. And then Atlantis itself suffers this kind of karmic destruction in a literally cataclysmic natural disaster. Cataclysmos in Greek means a flood. Atlantis is flooded and it sinks beneath the waves, never to be seen again. Yeah, again, 9,000 years beforehand, Stone Age, Athens is literally probably three huts and a pig.

It's just, you know, there's absolutely no way there's a town or a city there. But let's say Plato's got his dates muddled up and it actually happened, as Sophie says, 500 years earlier. Why else do you think, Sophie, modern scholars such as Steve do not believe Atlantis was real? What else is lacking, do you think? Any physical artefacts or evidence from a massive city with loads of infrastructure? Absolutely. I suppose the argument would be it's all sunken,

so we couldn't find it. But there's literally zero mention in any other source. All we have is Plato. Yeah, that's really unusual. Greek mythology is like every myth is connected to every other one. Not with this. This is a complete standalone story from Plato. One of the things that happens all the way through is this character Critias is constantly banging on about the fact that it is a fact and not a fiction. He says it 22 times in these dialogues. And the fact there's a missing dialogue, people

are saying, well, what could be a critical lost source? Just no, there isn't. This is Plato's invention. The Critias story where he starts to describe the island, that comes immediately after this story of the son of the sun god riding through the sky on a flying chariot and then getting blasted by a thunderbolt. So we're not exactly bookending the whole thing with serious history anyway. And Plato wouldn't. That's not what he's about. He's a philosopher. He's not a historian anyway.

He's interested in ideas. He utilises bits of Greek mythology. So familiar figures are there. Zeus is there, Poseidon, Athena and Hephaestus. But as you said, no other Greek text references it back. It doesn't reference any others. Yeah, and Plato is an incredibly important political philosopher, Sophie. Have you ever read Plato?

I think the whole cave and like the platonic ideal is something that's like brought up in like pop like it's something like I'd even like to talk about in my stand-up I think I'd talk about like the platonic ideal of a vulva which I won't do at the moment because I know this has to be broadcast in several places but I wouldn't say that I'm a Plato stan but I would say that I definitely I've got a sense of the guy. Just for listeners who don't know the story of Plato's cave is that a man in a cave who never left the cave would believe that the shadows were real right the world that you experience is all that you can perceive and anything beyond your perception is dead to you. He also writes

this book called Republic which is his sort of ideal political manifesto really where he's talking about philosopher kings should rule and he kind of hates democracy he's not really into it so i was going to ask you know do you know roughly what what playton might be getting at here with his analogy of a huge aggressive superpower going to war with a little plucky underdog and then losing any clues on what he might be referencing i think he might be okay i don't know is i'm trying to think who the states might be have you seen the movie 300 i just remember a lot of chiseled thighs is it sparta vibe sparta is spot on for another rival there's also the persian empire so a lot of scholars i think steve would say this is a subtle analogy to the mighty persian empire attacking athens and losing but there's also steve some would say that

this is anti-democracy right this is plato writing a book about why democracy is a bad idea. Absolutely. Plato is worried about the things that are going on in his own days. He's worried that the Athenians are going to go all imperialistic again and things will work out badly. And so he can reference back to the Persian invasions and the 300 and also to wars that Athens has fought in the past as well, actually against the Spartans. He's got these ideas, and as you say, he really doesn't like democracy. He just thinks it's a chaotic mess.

Fair, yeah. I mean, there's all sorts of places he can go to pick up his ideas. We don't need a real Atlantis. He can go to pick up his ideas. We don't need a real Atlantis. You can go back to Homer because he references the palace of Alkinoas in the Odyssey, this amazing palace, which is a bit like Atlantisville, if you like. And Herodotus as well, who gave amazing descriptions of Babylon. And even in his own lifetime, there was a city called Helike that was destroyed in a tsunami. So, you know, he can sort of reference that. And also, if he'd read his Thucydides, which he certainly would have done, Thucydides talks about a town that was inundated in a tsunami as well, which was called, and wait for it, Atalante.

He's living in a tumultuous time, decades before he was born. As you said, Athens had heroically fought off the invading Persian superpower. So it's like a mirror of the Atlantis story. And then the Athenians themselves faced catastrophe and plague as well. In the great Peloponnesian War. They fought against the Spartans. And one of the things they did was they invaded Sicily and they just got their asses kicked royally by the Sicilians and by the Spartans. And Plato himself grew up during the Peloponnesian War. So I think we can see good reasons for why he would make

these warnings against imperialism and bad political judgment and all that kind of thing. There's mythical areas he can go to as well. There's in other cultures. So you think about, I don't know, the destruction of the Tower of Babel and all sorts of flood myths, you know, Noah's Ark. There's a couple of Mesopotamian ones. There's the Epic of Atrahasis, the Greek myth of Deucalion as well. And he loves inventing myths. Myths are good to think with.

You know, they help us think. He invents all these bizarre stories to make his points. The man in the cave, you know, the birth of love, the androgynes plato is well imaginative i was quite depressed when he started talking about how all the greek myths are usually integrated because i was like even in 360 bce there's no new ideas and plato's had the one original thought um but i really like how he's sort of, when you dig into it, it's kind of like, oh, this is sort of an allegory for what's going on. All these things have affected how this myth came to be born.

And it reminded me, and this is a classic, someone with little knowledge thing to do. But it reminded me when you were talking about philosophers telling stories to make a point. to make a point. It reminded me of Voltaire and how he was affected by, like, the earthquake in Lisbon in 1755 and how all these big natural disasters and aggressors feed their way into the fiction. But I don't know if we really do that anymore

because you've basically described, like, a narrativised lads weekend. People don't really kind of hoik up their tunics and jump on the Atlantis bandwagon. Everyone sort of goes, I don't know, it's not really a thing. And it sort of fizzles out a bit, doesn't it? It does really. You go into the Greek and Roman history after Plato and Atlantis is conspicuous by its absence. Plato's most famous pupil is Aristotle, and he's incredibly dismissive about

it. I mean, he knows Plato well. He was studying with Plato probably when Plato wrote these dialogues. He just says, this is not factual. A bit later on, there's a guy called Strabo who wrote a work called Geography, and he described Aristotle as the origin of a phrase, a really nice phrase, its inventor obliterated it. So that's what happened to Atlantis. Plato invented it, and he sank it between the waves, and that was that. So the ancient sources know, the close ones know it's very likely an invented story. And then you get a Roman historian called Plutarch, who wrote A Life of Solon. Remember, he's the guy who goes to Egypt, who gets the story in the first place that

Critias is telling. Eventually, it kind of creeps back in, in early Christian writers like Tertullian, again, who sees it as an allegory. But it wasn't really until about the 5th century CE, so you're talking eight centuries after Plato or so, that there a Neoplatonist philosopher called Proclus who noted early debates starting to break out now with a character called Iamblichus introducing questions about its historicity. Yeah. I mean, Sophie, which of your jokes is most likely to be debated 800 years after you're gone? Oh. Will people think you existed? Maybe you'll be a myth, a legend. Sophie Dukas, she doesn't exist.

She doesn't exist, but very useful politically. So for a thousand years or so after that, people are just not bothering with the story. In the Middle Ages, Atlantis just does not resonate at all. No one cares. But there is this sort of reappearance

after 1492. Sophie, do you know what happened in 1492? No, is the correct answer. In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Oh, God! That guy.

What a sight for sore eyes. Everyone's favourite problematic Italian. He's popped up a lot in this series, actually, but he discovers, inverted commas, the new world, inverted commas. Obviously, people have been living there for tens of thousands of years, but the discovery of a new landmass and a new people obviously creates a ripple effect in European discourse about, well, hang on a minute, who are these people?

And one of the first things that gets asked is, is this Atlantis? Is America Atlantis? Which is a kind of fascinating thing. I mean, Columbus doesn't think that, Steve, but other scholars, other poets, other philosophers are starting to ask that question, aren't they? Yes, they do. And it's a really important question, I think, for them. In inverted commas, they discover the new world. And there was an Italian Renaissance scholar called Marsilio Ficino who translated

Plato's works. He thought that Atlantis was real. And people started to turn to him then to explain, if you like, how this huge populated landmass wasn't mentioned in the Bible. This is such a big deal. Why doesn't the Bible talk about it? It's a big problem. So in a way, if you can get Plato on board and think that somehow he might have alluded to this, then that would be very helpful to them. you end up out there in the Americas. And there's some fantastic works coming in. An Italian physician who's called Girolamo Frascatoro, who writes an epic poem about syphilis. Right, in 1530. Lovely. Good. Just great.

He uses Virgil's epic poem, The Aeneid, as a sort of template, but it's all about syphilis. And it references Atlantis. It's extraordinary. It suggests, it brings in this idea that the indigenous people encountered by the Spaniards in the Americas were actually the descendants of the Atlanteans from one of its imperial territories.

And then you get this other writer, you get Francisco López de Gomera, who agrees with him. He sort of latches on to the Aztecs. And they use, in a lot of their words, atl, A-T-L, atl. And he sort of just puts two and two together and makes 943. And, you know, so they use atl a lot. Oh, it must be Atlantis. That's in Atlantis. And so they've got to be Atlanteans. There's other books by Spanish historians who bring this so-called new world, if you like, into the world of Greek mythology and geography. And they do it through Spain. They want to use these myths. You know, Plato's Atlantis is right by Spain. And this allows the European colonizers now to start to justify the Spanish conquest by suggesting that the indigenous people there were once upon a time Spanish subjects. You know, you can use myths, and people do this all the time, I think,

to justify all sorts of dodgy stuff. People do it all the time, and it can be really dangerous. There's more of that coming later in the episode, Sophie. Yeah. Big yikes. People do it all the time and it can be really dangerous. There's more of that coming later in the episode, Sophie. Big yikes. And the yikes are not over because along comes Queen Elizabeth I of England. You'll have heard of her. You may not have heard of her part-time wizard called Dr John Dee.

It's good to have a part-time wizard. That is such a wizard's name. Yeah, it is, isn't it? He was a Welshman. And what do you think he said about the discovery of the New World and Atlantis? I think probably sort of the key to Queenie's success, as in like a bad influence that should be sort of controlled by Britain. Well, not Britain, but... No, no.

So John Dee invents the phrase British Empire. Oh, does he? Yes, this is in the 1500s. Oh, that's who we have to thank. That's who we have to thank. And he talks about this new territory, this is in the 1500s. Oh, that's who we have to thank. That's who we have to thank. And he talks about this new territory, this new land. Because obviously at this point, the Virginia colony is in North America, not South America. He talks about a Welsh Indian's heritage, which is a very strange idea, Steve.

Because he's a Welshman. And Elizabeth I is a Tudor who was sort of a Welsh family. So what's the Welsh Indian's, inverted commas, story? Yeah, it's extraordinary. Again, it's this sort of deep politicisation of it. And people love to move Atlantis around. You find it all over the place now. So he just relocates it, as you said, further north.

We're going to shift Atlantis into North America now. And he talks about, yeah, this British empire, which has a Welsh Indians heritage. This is utterly bizarre because the, he says, the legendary Welsh explorer, Madoc, had supposedly sailed over to the West and settled in North America. And for ages and ages afterwards, there was this sort of kind of bonkers theory, really,

that some indigenous Americans were actually speaking Welsh. And it all follows on. If the Tudors were also a Welsh family, then obviously it stood to reason that Britain should rule North America. Yes, the Welsh Indians of North America. Absolutely. The Welsh Indians of North America. Absolutely. So Britain needs to rule it. Yeah.

I'm very worried about getting cancelled for this episode. So let's move on past that strange story. Unfortunately, the next thing in my script is equally problematic because then along comes Sir Francis Bacon, who talks about New Atlantis versus Old Atlantis, Steve. And this is also pretty yuck. Yes, another strange one. So Bacon's New Atlantis comes out in 1627, actually after he died.

But he identified some old Atlanteans. And he thought that the old Atlanteans were the indigenous Mexicans. And he felt that because they'd almost been destroyed, they were sort of survivors from Atlantis, and because they'd almost been destroyed, then that's why they were so uncivilized as he saw them. While the new Atlanteans that he brings on the scene are Christians, and they are boldly resisting the decadent imperialism of Plato's old Atlanteans.

It's strange stuff. I'm going to get cancelled. I'm so worried. Sophie, so we're into the 1600s now, and it's a long way from Plato, right? It's quite icky. Yeah, I think we can agree. Yeah. But this is probably me back explaining why I thought that Atlantis started in the 1500s.

Because, watch me talk my way out of anything. It seems like for a while, as you said, it was just sort of like an intellectual curiosity for a lot of people. But with this movement over the seas and colonising, it becomes like a politically useful, motivating tool. Just to get people to think that other people are inferior. I mean, the stories don't end there. There's another story about this might, you know, Atlantis must clearly be Palestine before the Great Flood. So people are now starting to apply it to kind of, you know,

the religious origin stories. And then a surprise entry from Sweden. Wow. We've got a chap called Elias Rudbeck. Great name, obviously. What's he claiming, Steve? So he's in the late 1600s. He kind of just shifts the focus completely away from Plato

and kind of away from the Bible. And he argues, again, based on a very nationalistic reading of the 13th century Icelandic Eddas, he argues that Atlantis is situated in Sweden. And then his theory gets challenged by another really nationalistic project in the 18th century by Comte Jean-Rinaldo Carli, who wants to prove that Atlantis is the ancestor of Italy. And then France's entry into this sort of Eurovision Atlantis thing is a guy called Jean-Sylvain Bailly, who puts Atlantis in the Arctic now. So it's in a place called Hyperborea or Thule. But he says, it was okay because it was much warmer back then. So it wasn't quite as cold.

He's a contemporary of Voltaire, right? And Voltaire's a bit sceptical, although he says, you know, Madeira might make more sense, you know, so he goes down that line. They come thick and fast, so I guess the British entry is William Blake, who is eliding the Atlanteans with the ancient Hebrews,

and it becomes really fashionable at this point as well. You get Egyptomania coming in, and there's a French occultist called Antoine Fabre d'Olivier, who says that Egypt now is the last domain of the Atlanteans. And he very disturbingly asserts that the white race owed their existence to the destruction of Atlantis. So we've got Sweden, Arctic, Egypt, Palestine, Mexico, North America, all being thrown into the hat now, Sophie. I mean, do you want to contribute? I mean, you might as well, Sophie, do you want to add in your own? Oh, spin a globe, pick a point on the map. Where's Atlantis? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Where's Atlantis?

Oh, Indonesia? Okay, sure. Yeah, Indonesia. Atlantis? Oh, Indonesia? Okay, sure. Yeah, Indonesia. Or maybe Stevenage, I think. Has anyone ever volunteered anywhere landlocked for it to be? I don't know about Stevenage. Yeah, it's good. I mean, there are literally dozens of places

where Atlantis has been located by various people. Yeah, but there are some sceptical voices in the 18th and 19th century sort of saying, come on, come on. Bartoli, I think, is perhaps the sceptic I'm thinking of. That's right. Giuseppe Bartoli. You're kind of going against orthodoxy now, in a sense. So Bartoli is an 18th century professor of Greek and Italian literature. And in 1779, he wrote a book in which he made it very clear that Atlantis and its war with Athens was a metaphor for Plato's Athens and its own internal struggles. But everyone said, oh, dude, you're just mistranslating Plato. You don't know what you're talking about. But he was followed up then by a French Platonist in the 19th century called Thomas Henri Martin,

who, again, similarly stated unequivocally that Atlantis was real in thought only. Oh, poor Giuseppe and Thomas Henri. You could see them in a room sort of going, guys, I think it's just all in our hearts, right? Atlantis is just, you know, it's the journey, it's the friends we make along the way. And everyone going, boo, get out.

So, I mean, Steve, by the late 19th century, are people coming around to Team Giuseppe? Are they, you know, are the sceptics in the ascendance? Of course not. No, you get more revivals now of the Atlantis America theories, and they're boosted by the suggestion that a lost continent, so the land of Mu, might be found. This is proposed by another guy who's called Charles Brasseur de Bourbourg, and he kind of gets there via a mistranslation of a Mayan text as well. His idea is then taken up by another sort of amateur archaeologist

called Augustus Le Plongeon. What a fine name that is. Well, he's American-British, so he's probably Augustus Le Plongeon. Yeah, even better. Hi, I'm Le Plongeon. I was going to say, if he's got a French name, his name sounds like diving. Oh, yeah, that's true.

Augustus the Diver. Diving down to Atlantis. Oh, boy, does he hate proper scholarship. He really detests it. There's another notable source for Atlantis mania as well that's really important, which was when Jules Verne published 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Sort of alongside that almost, this Atlantis pseudoscience really dives into the deep end of the whole thing with the publication of a book by Ignatius Donnelly called Atlantis, the Anti-Diluvian World in 1882. Donnelly's a fantastic, a very interesting character, I think. He's an American congressman, and he borrowed from de Boerburg and Le Plungin, and he asserted that Atlantis is real, that Plato is factual, and, more disturbingly, I think,

that various global cultures can all trace their roots back to a shared Atlantean origin story, kind of what they call hyper-diffusionism now. Now, you've got to give Donnelly his due, I think. He himself was in favor of equal rights for black and indigenous Americans. This sort of hyper-diffusionist vision of Atlantis is essentially racist. I mean, a lot of the Atlantis theories are racist, I think. What he's doing is reducing the achievements of all these non-Western cultures, including those across Africa and the Americas, to their subjugation by the Atlantis empire. Quite disturbing, I think. And Donnelly's a big deal. We're quite used to American Congress people saying weird, bizarre things now. Unfortunately, that's become the norm. He's a popular writer, Sophie. He's got a big readership. He has a sequel book as well. It sells so well, he's like, oh, I'll do another one. How do you think people take to these ideas,

Sophie? Do you think they're jumping aboard? I think it seems like a pretty sexy idea. Everyone coming from the same place, everything been spread about. I think people would, yeah, lap because Plato died nearly 2,300 years ago at this point. So Donnelly is now the guy that everyone turns to. He says it's destroyed from an astronomical event. Do you want to guess what? An astronomical event? A big comet? Yeah.

He says a comet hits the Earth, causes flooding. And that's because of gay people. It's just a comet. It's not a gay people. It's just a comet. It's not a gay comet. It's just a comet. It's a comet that hits the earth and causes a tsunami. And that is what sinks the great sort of superpower of Atlantis. I mean, Steve, his book is full of detail. I mean, that's sort of the thing, isn't it? Donnelly, he's into his research. Oh, totally. Yeah. It's an overwhelming detail fest, is Donnelly's book. And he draws on all sorts of scientific and historical stuff of his time.

Of course, like lots of these guys, he kind of just omits or ignores whatever he doesn't like and what might be inconvenient to his comets and everything else. But the overwhelming amount of info that he gives in the books kind of convinces people. He gives it this veneer of credibility. And there's so much of it, you can't argue against it because it's just this overwhelming tsunami of pseudo-archaeological stuff.

Are his facts invented or is it just so much loosely drawn together information that it's impossible to dissect? Some stuff he's not making up, but most of it he's making up. To be honest, he's kind of the father of the whole Atlantis thing. I think the reason that we're having this conversation right now is because of Ignatius Donnelly. Not everyone's a fan though, Steve. I mean, his nickname's Sophie.

Do you want to guess his nicknames? Some of the insults that have flung his way. Aquaman SpongeBob Twatlandus Amazing. His detractors call him the ignominious Donnelly the prince of the crackpots and

my favourite the wild jackass of the prairie I don't know what that's about, That seems quite specific. And he's sort of claiming, Steve, that there'll be a museum full of Atlantis archaeology soon one day. And that's one of the reasons he sort of gets in trouble. Yes, he does. Because there isn't one yet. But he was very confident that there would be. All this stuff from Atlantis would be there be there but uh no unfortunately i'd love it to be i would so love it to be but it's not and sophie you might be thinking well this is a lot of men here we've had a lot of chaps we've had you know what is this at mantis we do have a lady theorist she's quite famous actually she's called madame helena petrovna blavatsky better known as madame

blavatsky she ramps it right? She takes Donnelly and she goes further. Oh, we're going stratospheric now. Madame Blavatsky was a Russian and she was involved in the creation of the Theosophical Society, which was a religious movement blending European philosophical tradition with South and East Asian religious beliefs. Blavatsky wrote about Atlantis in two theosophical works, Isis Unveiled in 1877. And we have to be clear that Isis is a reference to the Egyptian goddess Isis. It's got nothing to do with the modern Isis. And she also wrote The Secret Doctrine in 1888. And in The Secret in the secret doctrine she sort of sets forward her beliefs about the origins and development of the universe and of

humankind and what she gives us is this kind of occult Atlantis as the origin of what she calls the fourth root race which is the fourth of seven distinct races that are associated with seven eras of world history. So the root races idea is that the races have evolved physiologically as well. So she's giving Atlantean superpowers, Sophie. So do you want to guess what powers she describes them as having? I'm not going to go for the obvious one. Maybe not the obvious one. I think they have visions. Ah.

I think they're psychic in some way. They are psychic. Very good guess, yeah. I think they have maybe sort of elemental, so like water, like dominion over water. These are good guesses. Maybe they've got a thing where if they don't like a certain flavour in a dish, they can change it from sweet to or like umami to sour.

So they're like culinary specialists. If only that were true. You're right with psychic. Yeah. So Blavatsky describes Atlanteans as giants. She says they're much, much bigger than we are. They have a magic third eye, which allows them to have psychic powers. They are able to wield electricity.

Bear in mind, this is in the late 1800s when electricity is a new thing coming in, but they can possess it in the ancient world. They also have flying airships. A bit of sci-fi and a bit of theosophical at the same time. And also some sort of 19th century race science. And she says that, yes, the fifth root race are called Aryans. Oh. She says that, yes, the fifth root race are called Aryans. Oh.

And you can probably guess where we're going next when that word rears its ugly head. Sophie? Yeah, I don't really want to say this because I don't want it to be clipped up, but is it Nazi time? It is Nazi time. Nazis have entered the chat. Everyone else very quickly leaves the chat. And here we go, Steve. To her defence, I don't think we're going to call madame blavatsky a nazi she's not a sympathizer but her ideas are appropriated and twisted and

contorted and and sort of folded in to this new emergent occultist philosophy that explains the world through an aryan lens is that right that's So, you know, her Aryan race refers to people who share the Indo-European language group. That's what the Aryans really are. So it doesn't have all those, you know, horrifying and sinister modern meanings. But as you say, her ideas were sort of picked up and put in that horrible festering cauldron of occultism and pseudo-science that was Third Reich thinking. Yeah. And we start to get some quite oddball characters with some pretty weird ideas. Have you ever heard of Hans Herbiger?

Yes. Really? I think I have, but I don't know who he is. Oh, cool. I'm glad you've heard of him. I mean, he's a strange man. He has no astronomical training whatsoever. He's an Austrian engineer, but he proposes a theory called glacial cosmogony. Glacial cosmogony?

Yeah. Do you want to guess what that is? I'll give you a clue. Think ice. Yeah, no, I was going to think ice. I'm thinking ice. I'm thinking stars. It sounds niche. I'll give it that if i saw it on a hinge profile i wouldn't immediately swipe right i'm trying to think about like the movement of the ice like icebergs and stuff like that i don't really know how ice can affect the stars something to do with the poles i don't know ice and stars is as far as i got given that we've flung a weird phrase at you, I think you've done really well there.

So Hans Herbinger argued that the universe's primary element was ice and that Earth was struck by a giant ice moon that smashed into the Earth and melted. And that caused all the flooding. And that's what sunk Atlantis. He sort of folded into the Nazi ideology. And there's other people as well to mention. folded into the Nazi ideology. And there's other people as well to mention. I think, Steve, I mean, unfortunately, the one I have to mention really is Himmler,

Hitler's right-hand man, who sort of is leading a kind of large organisation, really. Yeah, they've got this thing called the Ahnenerbe. It's the Institute of Ancestral Heritage. And he kind of sent out archaeologists and scientists and anthropologists, you know, all over the place to find proof of Aryan culture in places outside of Germany. There's a character called Albert Herrmann, who is the professor of historical geography at the University of Berlin, who's using all sorts

of, you know, dodgy methods to claim that Atlantis was in the salt lakes of Tunisia, but also that Atlantis itself had been a colony of Germanic Friesland. So essentially what's now the Netherlands. And that supposedly granted Germany an ancient heritage predating other notable European civilizations. People are really big in this on my culture is older and therefore better than yours. And from his point of view, that justified military invasion to reclaim those lands for the Third Reich. That's why this is so dangerous, I think. And use the same kind of methods to claim that actually Homer was writing about Germans when he wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. Yeah, okay.

It's a reach. Right. It's a definite reach. It's a reach for the Reich, but they did it. Oh, God. This is the big debate at the moment is to what extent this was mainstream ideas or whether this was strange men on the edges. Yeah, sort of like Nazi side quest. Yeah, exactly strange men on the edges. Yeah, a sort of like

Nazi side quest. Yeah, exactly. While you're out. Yeah. But what's really interesting is it's all come back into pop culture now

through Marvel and, you know, DC, you know, you've got Aquaman, obviously, and SpongeBob and everyone's having fun

with Atlantis myths but actually in the Marvel movies we've got the bad guys being Nazi scientists. You know, we're a comedy show but all joking aside this is being Nazi scientists. You know, we're a comedy show. But all joking aside, this is super serious stuff. You know, Heinrich Himmler wasn't just Hitler's right-hand man.

He is the guy who weaponizes Atlantis to promote Aryan racial ideas. And he is the architect of the Holocaust. We have to be aware there is this hidden sinister heritage also lurking in the Atlantis myth. So let's pivot away from the horrors of the Third Reich. Let's instead look at another slightly stranger fellow. Have you ever heard of Edgar Cayce? No. In the 1960s, he was hailed as a celebrity prophet and psychic. Do you know how he might be fitting into the Atlantis story, Sophie? I'm getting very strong cult vibes from him. He's definitely got followers and he definitely

has a bit of clout, Steve. And he's got some interesting ideas, inverted commas. I'll say. Yeah, he got famous for providing, if you like, psychic medical diagnoses when he'd go into a trance and deliver these. And he believed in reincarnation as well. And he claimed that he was able, through his powers, to access the past lives of his patients who he was diagnosing. And, of course, some of those were Atlanteans in their previous lifetimes. He died in 1945, but it was in the 60s that his sons, who were called Hugh and Edgar, they edited and released

what they called these life readings. And what happened was that they sort of built up a history of Atlantis through the personal testimony of those who had lived there in the psychic past, if you like. The personal testimony that was read by their deceased father. Yeah, absolutely. One of the things, though, is that they claim that Cayce himself never read Plato or any other books on Atlantis. There was no way he could possibly know anything about this. So Atlantis had to be real, and he was kind of telepathically

receiving texts from these ex-Atlanteans. And the record that he left behind, we're told, charted Atlantean history from before 50,000 BCE right through to its destruction. Of course, you know, he said that Atlantis was, again, highly advanced. It had a, particularly particularly in it had a technology that was powered by crystals. Marvellous. Yeah, I mean, 50,000 BCE is deep Stone Age, Sophie. I mean, we're not even, you know, when we talked earlier about 9,000 years before Plato, that is Stone Age. But this is like caves Stone Age. So it seems unlikely. There's some credibility in it.

A lot of millennial women are powered by crystals. I don't see why. Sure, why not? You know, there'll be people listening into this saying, well, hang on, Greg, you haven't talked about

the Minoans and, you know, the volcanoes and eruptions and all that, you know, the geology of the Atlantis stuff. There is a huge amount of 20th century and 21st century investigation into the geology of whether there was a real Atlantis story. So, Steve, could we at least have a little quick summary of maybe the leading theory, which I guess would be the Minoan destruction idea? Yeah, that's right. In the late

Bronze Age, there was a humongous volcanic eruption on the island of Santorini or Thera in the Aegean Sea that blew the island apart and destroyed a sort of Minoan-looking town of Akrotiri there and caused very likely coastal flooding with tsunamis that may well have affected the Minoan power base in Crete. There were archaeologists in the early 20th century, so it was a guy called K.T. Frost and Spyridon Marinatos, and they claimed that they could find similarities between Plato's Atlantis and the Bronze Age culture of the Minoans based on Crete. And this volcanic eruption was staggeringly huge. There hasn't been a bigger one since. So it happened roughly 1600 BCE. It's a nice theory, I think, at least, and it gets us away from all the pseudo-archaeology stuff. But when you

actually stack up the evidence, it suggests that maybe, yes, the Minoans took a fairly hefty blow from this. But there are too many inconsistencies, I think, with Plato's story. It may have played a part, may have played a part in inspiring some of the sort of flood literature. But we're not talking about a sunken city. And actually, we're not certainly on Santorini itself. We're not talking about a sunken city. And actually, we're not, certainly on Santorini itself, we're not talking about flooding either. We're talking about a volcano. There isn't a volcano in Plato. And Santorini is not out in the Atlantic. And the Minoan cultures lasted for really quite a long time after the eruption in any case. I mean, Sophie, if you Google Atlantis, you will get 233 million results.

I find that fascinating that we cannot stop thinking about this thing that Plato invented two and a half thousand years ago. Why do you think people are so drawn to it? And there will be people listening to this who probably are disappointed that we're saying this is not true. Why do you think that might be? I think it's a sense of something that was perfection and that is lost and that can be reclaimed if you only sort of access those superpowers, try hard enough, trace your lineage, is a very attractive idea.

I think in a lot of the myths of lost cities and like in popular fiction, I'm talking obviously about the film, The Road to El Dorado. Whenever a city is lost, there's always a sense that after like the cave falls in or the volcano erupts, that there is a chance that you could once again access that land that you've been to before. I feel like in the initial myth, when was it Critias? Yeah, the Critias and the Timaeus.

Critias and Timaeus kept insisting this is fact, not fiction. This is fact, not fiction. I feel like conspiracy theorists would look at, for instance, this podcast and be like, they're really stressing that it's fiction. They must know something that we don't. These are credible, credible men. And they're really keen to stress that this is fiction. Are you in the pocket of Big Atle?

Yeah, I'm in the pocket of Big atl yeah i'm in the pocket of big atlas i would love atlantis to be real genuinely if someone found it next week i'd be the first person out there to go and jump up and down and go oh plato you know didn't make it up but it's just such a flimsy story because it's just plato there's just nobody else talking about it in the ancient world it's baffling to me that there would be any superpower that no one else even remembers. The nuance window! This is where Sophie and I fetch our scuba gear and seismograph as we go hunting maybe for what might be Atlantis, but probably is more likely not.

We let Dr Steve tell us something we need to know for two minutes. So Steve, could we have the nuance window, please? Yeah, with pleasure. Did Atlantis ever really exist? Well, as we said, Plato's star student Aristotle didn't think so. But many others who, interestingly to me, are almost exclusively male, have set out on this quest of discovery to find it. There's literally hundreds of these different theories pretty well in every corner of the globe, you know, from Antarctica to Yuta Khan. But the theories which tend to be the stuff of the psychic and the pseudo-archaeologist and the pseudo-scientist are often very, very popular in our post-truth world. Should we be looking beyond the world of Plato's imagination? You know,

seeking Atlantis is a bit like trying to find Hogwarts in the Harry Potter novels on the basis of this veneer of reality that it has. But actually, there's no need to do that. It's all about the message of the story. The Atlanteans seem like a super-civilisation living on an island paradise. But although they've got everything they could ever possibly want, they still yearn for more. And although they seem to be happy and blessed, once you scratch their glossy surface, you'll find a nasty, decadent, morally debased dystopian nightmare. Essentially, Atlantis is Plato's anti-ideal state. It's hubristic, excessive, imperialistic,

and its ambitions end in catastrophic defeat. So Plato's message to us is this, really. Keep it simple. Keep it modest and organized and unified. Don't overreach yourselves. Don't be like those imaginary Atlanteans. It can only end badly. All you have to understand is that Atlantis style over the top luxury and aggressiveness can only lead to decay and disaster. And that's why I think Plato's story should be prescribed reading for every

21st century political leader. Lovely. Thank you, Steve. Sophie, should we be handing this out to MPs in Parliament? I mean, I kind of want that Atlanta soft life. Me too, me too. Decadent duker. It feels like definitely the Nazis, if that's Plato's hidden warning, kind of missed the point,

being like, you're not meant to relate to these characters. These are the bad guys. I think in all seriousness, that is something that probably could be more useful for us to remember. But I think the glamour of Atlantis is something that outshines, at least for me, the sort of cautionary tale that's embedded there as well. Yeah, I mean, that's the problem. Jason Momoa looks incredibly great. He looks great.

That guy's a good looking dude. So what do you know now? So what do you know now? All right, it's time now for the So What Do You Know Now? This is our quickfire quiz for Sophie to see how much she has learned. Sophie, you have an excellent track record on the show. You have a score of 9.33 recurring so far. Oh, no! Do you feel like you've got the overall story here or was there too much detail?

There was a lot of detail. And because so many people have used the Atlantis myth, I don't know if I've got a sort of coherent idea of it. But I do think I have managed to, with you two, track it through time. Okay. So I'm hoping I've retained some. All right, we've got 10 questions for you. Here we go.

Question one. Atlantis is first described by which ancient Greek philosopher? Plato. The goat. It is Plato. Question two. Which real city did Plato describe as defeating Atlantis way back 11,400 years ago? Athens.

It was Stone Age Athens. Question three. Spanish writer Francisco López de Gamara gave what linguistic reason for wrongly claiming the Maya and Aztecs of Mexico were descendants of Atlanteans? Because they use atoll all the time. Question four. Where did Dr John Dee, the astrologer and part-time wizard to Queen Elizabeth I, relocate Atlantis to based on the legendary voyage of Madoc? Oh, he relocated it in North America because of the Welsh-Indian connection.

Question five. Proud patriot Olaus Rudbeck used Icelandic Eddas, so Norse Viking literature, to argue that Atlantis could be found in which northern country? Oh, Sweden. No. Sweden, Sweden, Sweden, Sweden, Sweden. Sweden. Yeah, Sweden, Sweden. Sweden, Sweden, Sweden. Sweden. Yeah, Sweden, Sweden.

Sorry. If Sweden always sounds wrong, which is why I hesitated. Question six. Can you remember one of the nicknames, insults, given to Ignatius Donnelly by his detractors? Yes. The wild jackass of the prairie. Which sounds a bit like a honorific to me. I think it's a cool...

Yeah, it makes them sound quite cool yeah also prince of crackpots ignominious donnelly question seven what was 1960s occultist edgar casey's connection to atlantis he accessed the past lives of his patients some of whom were atlanteans through like fun trances and then his kids were basically, in his defence, he cannot read, so he would not have known about Plato. Yep, question eight. Name one of the books by Madame Blavatsky that featured Atlantis and talked about their superpowers. OK, it was the Channel 5 documentaries.

They were Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine. Very good. Question nine. Weirdo Austrian theorist Hans Herbinger believed Atlantis was flooded by what frozen galactic disaster? The ice moon, which sounds like a prank that you would play in a sauna. And this for a perfect ten. Which superpowers did Madame Blavatsky claim that Atlanteans possessed? Okay.

So they possessed psychic powers. They could control electricity, like Storm from the X-Men, and they also had floating airships and giants. They were really big. That's 10 out of 10. Perfect score. Sophie Duker, decadent Duker, nails it again. It should not mean that much to me. It's good that you care.

Thank you so much, Sophie. Thank you, Steve. And listener, if you've enjoyed today's episode and desperate for more Duker, then why not listen to our episode on the charismatic Chevalier de Saint-Georges? He was quite the chap. And there's a movie coming out.

So, you know, listen to the show. Go watch the movie. Or if you want to learn more about the Icelandic Eddas we mentioned with the Sweden theory, go listen to our Old Norse Literature episode with Kay Curd and Nina Ramirez. You'll find them all on BBC Sounds. And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast,

please leave a review, share the show with your friends. Make sure to subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds so you never miss an episode. But all that's left for me to do is say a huge thank you. In History Corner, we had the magnificent Dr Stephen Kershaw from Oxford University. Thank you, Steve. My absolute pleasure, Greg. And in Comedy Corner, we had the sublime Sophie Duker.

Thank you, Sophie. Thank you. This little urchin has feasted on so many crumbs. And I feel like even though Atlantis is arguably not real, we're all going to be underwater soon. So this feels like a very timely topic for you're dead to me oh that's that's a pretty bleak way to finish but yeah and you lovely listener join me next time as we sink beneath the waves of another historical tsunami but for now i'm off to go and yell at some highly dubious documentaries on netflix bye you're dead to me was a production by the athletic for Netflix. Bye! From BBC Radio 4 from bbc radio 4 this is breaking mississippi the explosive inside story of one man's war

against racial segregation in 1960s america i knew the state of Mississippi, would stop at nothing, including killing me. James Meredith's mission to become the first black student at the University of Mississippi triggers what's been described as the last battle of the American Civil War. It's a fight that draws in the KKK and even President Kennedy himself. Can you maintain this order? Well, I don't know. That's what I'm worried about. And we must fight! I thought, wow, this could be it. This could be the beginning of World War III. Now aged 89, James Meredith tells his story. I'm public radio journalist Jen White,

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