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I am indebted to Michael Clarke of the UK’s National Radiological Protection Board for this presentation. Michael has for many years, when confronted with the heterodox views I hold about the importance of biological effects from non-thermal electromagnetic fields and radiation (views diametrically opposed to those of NRPB), has attempted to discredit me by commenting "Coghill. Ah yes, he’s a strange chap: believes in Atlantis, you know".
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I wonder whether Michael has actually examined my detailed analysis of this famous story, embedded in two of Plato’s dialogues, the Timaeus and the Critias. He may also be unaware that before commencing my studies as a Senior Exhibitioner in Biological Sciences at Emmanuel College, Cambridge I was an Open Scholar in Classics there, and able to read these texts in their original language. Not many people know that the sole source of the Atlantis story is from those two dialogues, which Plato is at pains to say is not a legend but an actual historical account, handed down to him by his own family, who got it directly from Egyptian historians a few centuries before. Before I offer a review of the prehistory of electricity and the important lessons it may contain for us all today, I will make the general point that all of our modern electro-technology has arisen in less than two hundred astonishing years. In 1805, when Thomas Young was contemplating the sternwaves of swans serenely gliding across Emmanuel College’s lake, (a scene I often shared when in residence there), and was thereby inspired to review the wave-particle theory of light, in another place John Constable, RA, was painting The Haywain, a painting arguably more famous today than Thomas Young’s science. Constable's scene is a story: the hay cart, heavily loaded, and commanded by a young boy, is attempting to cross a ford in the river en route for the safety and cover of the barn, rather than the much longer route across a distant bridge, before the threatening stormclouds ruin the load. The point I make is that this was the principal means of transport, alongside canal boats, also subjects of Constable’s attention in those days. Less than two centuries later as I write, mankind has created the interplanetary manned space vehicle, largely due to our new understanding of the electron, and electronic technology, of which Young’s ideas were a forerunner. My opening argument is therefore that at sometime in mankind’s prehistory there was ample time for a similar period of technological advance; a mere two hundred years in three million years of mankind’s existence on the planet. Plato’s Egyptian priest is not the only historian to tell us about previous technically advanced civilisations. One of those aspects of history we have repeatedly refused to make reference to is the written works of our ancestors the world over who have referred to such periods. Consider, for example, some of the Asian teachings on the subject, such as those in ancient China. Perished ages were called kis by the Chinese, and they number ten kis from the world's beginning until Confucius. The periods between great convulsions of Nature are discussed in the Sing-li-ta-tsiuen-chou, an ancient encyclopedia, and are called the "great year." During this "great year" the entire cosmos "winds up," and then, "in a great convulsion of Nature, the sea is carried out of its bed, mountains spring out of the ground, rivers change their course, human beings and everything are ruined and the ancient traces effaced." The Taoist scriptures speak of a time that "disturbs the regular method of heaven, comes into collision with the nature of things, prevents the accomplishment of the mysterious (operation of) heaven, scatters the herds of animals, makes the birds all sing at night, is calamitous to vegetation, and disastrous to all insects [and] the six elemental influences do not act in concord." There are also Middle Eastern sources. Buddhism has the chapter, "World Cycles," in the Visuddhi-Magga, in which we find that, "There are three destructions: the destruction by water, the destruction by fire, the destruction by wind." The Brahmans of Hinduism called the epochs between two periods, "The Great Days," much like the Chinese. Hinduism expounds on ages, called kalpas or yugas, and about episodes which are called paralayas, in which humankind was nearly put to an end, as found in the Bhagavata Purana and others. Worldwide fire (conflagration), flood and hurricane dominate the devouring forces of each world age. Similar expositions are also found in other sources, as well. In the Near East the picture is similar. Mazdaism, an ancient Persian religion, makes reference to ages in the Zend-Avesta. Seven world ages are discussed in the "Bhaman Yast," a book in the Zend-Avesta. Its prophet, Zarathustra, speaks about the characteristics that are manifested in the world at the end of each age. Likewise, European sources reveal a similar understanding. According to Varro (116-27 BC), a Roman author, there were seven elapsed ages described in the annals of ancient Etruria (the believed predecessor of the Roman civilization). The Greeks had similar traditions related to them by Aristotle (384-322 BC) with words such as Kataklysmos, which means deluge, and Epyrosis, which means combustion of the world. Anaximenes and Anaximander spoke of such things in the 6th Century BC, as did Diogenes and Heraclitus in the 5th Century BC, and Aristarchus of Samos in the 3rd Century BC. The Stoics, a school of Greek philosophers founded by Zeno in about 308 BC, generally believed in periodic episodes in which the world would be consumed, and a new world is founded on its ashes. In addition, the ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts give many descriptions of cycles of the removal of civilization. Most of the sources indicate Isis, the Great Earth Mother, was responsible for restoring life. The Egyptians also believed that the precision of the equinoxes triggered the various transitional phases in both civilization and the natural world. Many other sources can be found in this region of the world. What we see here are the prehistoric recorded vestiges of natural devastation cycles. But what caused them? Plato is very clear about that in his own version. The culprit was mankind itself. Having described with startling accuracy the existence of America, the Atlantic Ocean, and the geography of the Lusitanian coast, Plato explains that the great technological civilisation there was destroyed by Poseidon, the powerful God of all waves, in anger at mankind’s overweaning hubris. They believed their own technology would make them equal to the Gods, he explains to his assembled fellows on Mount Olympus. In punishment Poseidon covered the great city of Atlantis with a huge wave, and the mudflats still cover the land outside modern Faro, its equivalent even today. One has to untangle the probable sequence of historical events from this more philosophical account, couched as it is in the religious beliefs of the ancient Greeks. Let us start with an analysis of Poseidon himself. Remember first that the Greeks were polytheists: they had a god or "daimon" (non-material spirit) for almost every material. There were gods of the woods, - nymphae, dryadae etc –of the fields, of the trees, of the rivers, and in fact every part of nature was to the Greeks endowed with a non material equivalent. Not so far from modern quantum mechanics really, which has confused the boundaries of matter and energy. So Poseidon means in Greek The Shaker of the Earth (you will recall seismology, the science of earthquakes). But waves are found on the sea as well, so Poseidon was the also the sea-god who later became identified with Neptune in the Roman era. Had Plato been aware of electromagnetic waves, he would probably have relegated these to the control of Poseidon too. It was Poseidon according to Plato (or rather to the Egyptian historian before him) who educated the inhabitants of a town Poseidon himself founded on the middle of the south-facing coast of the Lusitanian peninsula, to the technologies which eventually led to their ruin. I can already hear some saying that Atlantis was supposed to be an island, not a peninsular town. Wrong! The ancient Greeks, who are generally reckoned to have a word for everything, did not actually ever have a word for peninsula! That is a Latin word (- paene insula, almost an island), and a Latin idea. To the Greeks peninsulae were the same as islands, so the Peloponnesian peninsula was "the island of Pelops" and the Chersonnese was to them "the island of Cherson". Similarly in describing a place found after escaping the Pillars of Hercules (our modern Straits of Gibraltar) Plato quite normally describes the Lusitanian coast as an "island", reached, he clearly says, after passing Cadiz. Anyone who has sailed offshore knows too well the importance of a lighthouse in making a safe landfall, especially onto a lee shore. Imagine for a moment yourself as an sailor fresh from the tideless Mediterranean seeing ahead of you an endless line of beetling cliffs forty metres high, with Atlantic waves the height of which you have never encountered crashing against them. What at that moment would you give for a beacon to guide you into a safe haven?! That beacon is exactly what Faro (Pharos is Greek for lighthouse) I believe provided, at its location in the middle of that otherwise inhospitable coastline, exactly where Plato described it. The question is, if this is right, how could such a primitive civilisation have provided a continuous lamp, bright enough to be seen thirty miles offshore in unsettled weather? (further than 30 miles it would have been below the horizon. Sailing downwind in a real gale one has scarcely time to make a major course correction in thirty miles: you only have one chance! The answer I believe lies not on the coast, but inland. Inland of Faro are to be found the world’s largest and most ancient copper and zinc mines. They lie adjacent to each other, and have given rise to today’s commercially giant RTZ Corporation, which stands for Rio Tinto Zinc. The Rio Tinto flowing down to that part of the Atlantic coast is so called because of its alluvial copper. Any schoolboy today knows that you can make a voltaic battery quite capable of lighting any filament lamp by simply connecting copper to zinc. The first schoolboy ever accidentally to discover this may plausibly have lived a little inland from modern Faro, since the two component materials were plentiful and to hand. It is my speculation that here in this fertile cradle of civilisation was first discovered the ability to make elctrons flow and thereby create primitive electrical energy. Plato helps us into this belief: he explains how the city was built as a city with three concentric rings, each ring being clad with a different metal. And in the centre a beacon "shone like a torch". It is important for scholars to note that the words Plato used are not those suggesting reflected light, as in a mirror, but of intrinsic light, self generated. What Plato is describing then is a city built as a huge lighthouse, and plausibly powered by the electrical current flowing between copper and zinc cladding, separated by huge walls There were obvious commercial reasons for attracting the Egyptian or Phoenician traders to the city. The Bible describes "distant Ophir", whose location has never been ascertained. Some place it in the persian Gulf, but Ophir was the name given to Faro, in my view. We know only too well how, once the Wimshurst machine was invented, - a machine generating crude electric current - it led to the discoveries of Galvani, and of Volta, and thence to Heinrich Hertz, Tesla, Edison, and finally Marconi, and - e presto – modern electronics and telecommunications was established in less than a century and a half. Maybe the same happened at Faro. In the vaults of RTZ in London lies evidence of an amazingly advanced civilisation based along that coast, and excavated in the 1930s by an English lady Mrs. Elena Wishaw, whom RTZ supported financially. She wrote about it in her book Atlantis in Andalucia, recently reprinted. Similar accounts were made by a tenth century archaeologist Raziz, and by a former structural engineer of my acquaintance who built several of Faro's skyscrapers. He took his secret with him to the grave. but not before he had showed me a secret room in his office on the eighth floor of one of his own buidlings there, containing some of the artefacts he had found. He documented all these in his own careful hand, fearful of entrusting the task to any loquacious typist, or of the cold hand of the planning authorities. All along that coast are found fragments of a writing noone has ever decoded. You can see examples of it in the Museum at Faro, where there is also a huge mosaic of Neptune, laid in Roman times. The characters look a bit like runic characters, but there is a sequence repeated with great frequency: ATLANTS. Plato says, I don’t know what that civilisation might have been called but if we were to speak it as Greeks today we would say "ATLANTIS".. I have much more to say about this. In time I hope I shall be able to set down the entire "legend". Meanwhile, the lesson that this long extinct civilisation has for us is that somehow their technology got out of hand, and they did not seem to care. In the end the natural invisible forces of nature took over and provided a stern correction, by a catastrophe which "occurred in a single dreadful day and night", according to Plato. I can identify several possible candidates, all springing from our profligate use of electrical energy. For example that part of Portugal is long overdue for another terrible earthquake, since it is the nearest to the principal faultline running down the Atlantic seaboard of Europe. The last major quake there killed sixty thousand in Lisbon in 1755 and inspired Voltaire to write Candide. As I write, global warming (the infra red radiation problem) has meant the detachment of a iceberg the size of Portugal from Antarctica which is now drifting northward, melting as it goes. This in turn will increase the weight of water pressing down on that and other faultlines...from which there is only one consequence. As I write, the level of RF/MW energy reflecting off the Kennelly Heaviside layers of the ionosphere has increased exponentially since the 1950s, and it is in my view continuously depleting the ozone layer from underneath, until then the sole and half-daily prerogative of the sun alone, and from above. This RF/MW radical effect stops re-formation of ozone (since the Chapmen reactions O3 + O = O2 + O2 are irreversible). Magnetic fields even very weak ones, can affect chemical reactions of this sort. Keith McLaughlan said as much in 1992 in his Physics World article. With ozone depletion (the ultra violet problem) comes increased levels of skin and related cancers and general immunosuppression. These two major problems facing the planet today are both wave-related, and in Plato’s mind would have been within the province of Poseidon. So dear Michael, you may now have a better insight as to why I respect one of the world’s greatest philosophers when he says the Atlantis legend was an actual pre-historical event, and not simply a legend. And why I see it as an important message for this civilisation too. Neither the NRPB nor ICNIRP nor the western civilisation generally are heeding the message. There are more patches of prehistoric evidence for man’s previous use of electricity which I will add to this subpage in due course. The Baghdad battery and the Ark of the Covenant for example. But that’s another story. |