Finding Atlantis Read online

  Finding Atlantis

  A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World

  DAVID KING

  HARMONY BOOKS

  NEW YORK

  Like a physician dissecting in his anatomy theater, Olof Rudbeck cuts open a map of the modern world and reveals the secret history of Sweden. Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and many other well-known figures of antiquity sit around the dissection table like students. The philosopher Plato strains to take a closer look, and the scholar Apollodorus slaps his head in surprise. Ptolemy, who is so often criticized by Rudbeck for faulty geography, looks away in disgust.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Frontispiece

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  INTRODUCTION

  1 PROMISES

  2 ORACLE OF THE NORTH

  3 REMARKABLE CORRESPONDENCES

  4 A CARTESIAN WITCH HUNT

  5 FOLLOW THE FISH!

  6 GAZING AT THE FACE OF THOR

  7 THE QUEST FOR THE GOLDEN FLEECE

  8 MOUNTAINS DON’T DANCE

  9 TWELVE TRUMPETS, FOUR KETTLEDRUMS, AND A BAG OF GOLD

  10 ALL OARS TO ATLANTIS

  11 OLYMPUS STORMED

  12 HANGING BY A THREAD

  13 ET VOS HOMINES

  14 ON NOTHING

  15 AND THEN THE SNAKE THAWED

  16 THE ELYSIAN FIELDS

  EPILOGUE

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  TO SARA

  If you are ever in a gathering of your friends

  and want to get some attention, wait until a suitable

  pause occurs in the conversation and then toss out the phrase

  “Well, how about Atlantis?”

  —HENRY M. EICHNER

  INTRODUCTION

  May 16, 1702

  MOST OF UPPSALA was in flames. Strong winds had carried the fire swiftly through the winding alleys of wooden houses. Shortly after midnight, it seemed as if fire rained from the heavens. And now, with the brigades unable to reach the old town, the blaze threatened to turn the cathedral, the castle, and the rest of the university into little more than embers and ash.

  As legend has it, a lone figure was seen scaling a building in the path of the ever-rising flames. When he reached the top, the roof already alight, he started to shout orders to the panic-stricken townsmen. His baritone voice rang out over the roar, and his long gray hair blew amid the sparks. There was no doubt about it: this was the seventy-two-year-old professor of the university, Olof Rudbeck.

  Only five years before, the Stockholm royal palace had burned to the ground. Along with it, the country had lost untold treasures. Rallying the terrified below with word and deed, Rudbeck wanted to do everything in his power to prevent a repetition of this catastrophe. But suddenly a messenger arrived with the news that Rudbeck’s own house would soon be engulfed in the flames.

  The professor was advised to make haste to his home; there was still time to remove selected valuables. The townsmen who shared the front lines of the battle also encouraged Rudbeck to go, but the old man refused to abandon his position. Instead, he made his own horses available so that his neighbors might salvage their belongings.

  After fourteen exhausting hours, the unlikely firefighters had managed to control the blaze. Despite the ruined bell tower, the collapsed roof, and a lake of water on the inside, the cathedral had been saved. The castle and the university had also just barely survived the inferno. The old professor, however, was not so fortunate. He had lost almost everything he owned.

  UPPSALA CATHEDRAL WAS one of the oldest and largest of its kind in Scandinavia. It had long served as the site for the coronation of kings, the consecration of archbishops, and the resting home of saints. Above all, it was a beautiful place of worship. It was ethereal and sublime, adorned with lofty spires, pointed arches, elegant stained glass, and an ornately carved altarpiece.

  But there was also something unusual in the cathedral. Reasoning that this was the safest place in town, Rudbeck had chosen it as a repository for his works in progress. Among this vast collection lay one of the most extraordinary theories ever put forth about the ancient past.

  Rudbeck had spent the last thirty years of his life on an adventurous hunt for a lost civilization, and he was convinced that he had found it in Sweden. What a marvelous discovery it was! Celts, Trojans, Etruscans, Amazons, and the inhabitants of Atlantis were all one and the same people, who in the dimmest mists of antiquity had emerged from a land of ice in the far north. In fact, many of the great mysteries of history and mythology could be explained by Rudbeck’s lost civilization. This was perhaps the most spectacular reassessment of the ancient past ever to be accepted by the learned world. It was also, on that night, at the mercy of the flames.

  What follows is the remarkable story of this man and the work he risked everything to protect.

  ALTHOUGH ALMOST COMPLETELY unknown today, the name of Olof Rudbeck once cast a spell over his contemporaries. His vision drew enthusiastic applause not only in the twilight of the Swedish empire, but also in the dawning of the European Enlightenment. Rudbeck was greatly admired at the court of Louis XIV, proposed as a member of the Royal Society in London, and celebrated in cafés, salons, and academies across the cosmopolitan Republic of Letters. Avid readers were Leibniz, Montesquieu, and the famous skeptic Pierre Bayle. Even Sir Isaac Newton wrote to request a personal copy of the work.

  The name of this “wondrous” book was Atlantica. Rolling off an Uppsala press in 1679, it outlined Rudbeck’s discoveries in some nine hundred pages of Latin and Old Swedish. Hidden inside was a curiosity cabinet of dazzling speculation, rigorous argumentation, and commanding erudition. The style mirrors Rudbeck’s own personality: strong, hurried, and full of charm.

  But the project was expensive, and the costs were soon spiraling out of control. Complicating matters further, disgruntled professors formed powerful coalitions to sabotage Rudbeck’s efforts. He would be forced to endure everything from petty humiliations to vi-cious attacks, which included no less than censorship, scrutiny by an Inquisition, and one of the bitterest lawsuits of the day.

  Meanwhile, discoveries continued to pour in at an alarming rate. Rudbeck was finding so many “unbelievable things” that he dreamed of publishing a “small addition.” By 1702, Atlantica had swelled to four and a half colossal volumes, and many scholars believed this work had revolutionized the understanding of the ancient past. Rudbeck was proclaimed the “oracle of the north.”

  So, when I came across these volumes, it was like stumbling upon an enchanted world. It reminded me of my first encounter with ancient myth, many years ago, when my grandmother gave me a copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. Rudbeck’s Atlantica had all the heroic quests, fabulous lands, and endlessly imaginative creatures of Hamilton’s book, and it evoked the same sense of wonder and excitement. But, remarkably, it gave the timeless tales an unforgettable transformation.

  From Mount Olympus to Valhalla, Rudbeck traced almost all Greek, Norse, and Egyptian traditions back to an original home in the far north. Chasing down clues to this lost golden age, he brought to his work the deductive reasoning of Sherlock Holmes and the daring spirit of Indiana Jones. He excavated what he thought was the acropolis of Atlantis, and sent students on scientific expeditions to the land he believed was the Kingdom of Hades. He retraced the journeys of classical heroes, opened countless burial mounds, and consulted the rich collections of manuscripts, monuments, and artifacts streaming into his country as a result of Swedish victories on the battlefield.

  Now, three hundred years later, the story of Rudbeck’s adven
ture appears in English for the first time. It is an epic quest that at every turn shows a bizarre combination of genius and madness. The book takes us back not only to the castles, courts, and peasant villages of the seventeenth century, but also to a world of lively imagination. Rudbeck’s vision is as stunningly bold as it is beautifully surreal.

  Yet it is much more than just a journey through a dreamy landscape. As I came to understand, this story has much to teach us about our own search for enlightenment. It dramatically illustrates how our greatest gifts of mind and spirit can become unexpected perils—and lead us to create our own spectacular monstrosities. At the same time, it is an inspirational tale that affirms the enormous potential for human achievement in the face of staggering obstacles. There is indeed much to learn from entering the strange world of Olof Rudbeck, the last of the Renaissance men and the first of the modern hunters for lost wisdom.

  1

  PROMISES

  My dear fellow, life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.

  —ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES

  SOME FIFTY YEARS before the great fire, Olof Rudbeck had arrived as a young student at Uppsala University. This was in the cold and dark winter of 1648, just in time for the enthusiastic celebrations that would soon erupt on the Continent, marking the signing of the Peace of Westphalia and an end, it was hoped, to thirty years of the most vicious fighting that Europe had ever known. War, famine, plague, and plunder had decimated the populations, spreading misery everywhere the armies marched. Now the clang of church bells and the clatter of court banquets might replace the roar of cannon and the cries of suffering. Musketeers fired joyous salvoes into the air, and soaring bonfires were lit to commemorate the news. The festivities were especially lively in Sweden, already “drunk with victory and bloated with booty.”

  Uppsala University was at this time the jewel in the crown of the Swedish kingdom. Although the university had fallen into disuse a few years after its establishment in 1477, the state had realized its enormous potential as a training ground for the new Protestant Reformation and reopened it with royal flair. Young people came from all corners of the realm to learn the theology and acquire the intellectual rigor required to enter the Church. The university also attracted the scions of the great aristocratic houses, sons of the landed and titled families who waged Sweden’s wars, administered the empire, and served the Crown in countless other capacities. King Gustavus Adolphus, the famed “Lion of the North,” had envisioned just such a role for Uppsala University. He had endowed it with the means to realize it as well, even filling its empty bookshelves with many magnificent collections looted from an almost unbroken string of victories on the battlefield.

  Bird’s-eye view of seventeenth-century Uppsala, with its castle, cathedral, and university.

  Rudbeck was neither a nobleman nor an aspirant to a career in the Church, though he was thrilled all the same to enter the halls of Scandinavia’s oldest university. This was understandably an exciting place for a young man. Despite repeated efforts of the authorities, students flocked to the taverns as much as to the lecture halls. Entertainment options ranged from dice to duels. It was already becoming common for students to carry swords, and sometimes even pistols. New brothels opened to meet the increasing demand, and other institutions emerged to serve the changing times, such as the university prison. Housed in the cellars of the main university building, the prison was rarely unoccupied.

  Rudbeck’s interests, however, lay elsewhere. Ever since he was a boy, he had enjoyed finding his own way. He sang, he drew, he played the lute, he even made his own toys, including a wooden clock with a bell to strike the hour. Adventurous and independent, Rudbeck yearned to experience the world for himself. In fact, as a ten-year-old, Rudbeck had eagerly tried to follow his older brothers to Uppsala. His father, however, would not allow it, convinced that he was not mature enough to handle the freedom of the university.

  Standing tall and giving the impression of no small confidence, Rudbeck was a spirited, highly impressionable youth with short dark hair, broad shoulders, and a barrel chest. He walked, or rather strode, with the air of someone who fearlessly plunged into his latest passion. His imagination, at this time, was fired by the study of anatomy. This was an especially attractive subject for bright, ambitious students. Kings and queens had showered favors on the talented few they chose as royal physicians, and indeed the newly established post of court physician had raised the status of the doctor from its previously undistinguished connotations. Enthusiasm for medicine as an intellectual pursuit peaked when an Englishman named William Harvey published a small Latin treatise in 1628.

  Harvey was one of those elite court physicians, serving King James I of England. In his classic De Motu Cordis et Sanguinis (Dissertation on the Movement of the Heart and Blood), Harvey claimed that the heart was a muscle that pumped the blood at regular intervals, or pulses. The vital fluid circulated throughout the body, with the arteries carrying it away from the heart and the veins returning it there. With these propositions, Harvey had revolutionized the study of medicine. One Oxford doctor and fellow of the Royal Society claimed that these findings were more significant than the discovery of America because they threw centuries of medical belief into uncertainty. Great physicians everywhere now wanted to confirm, refute, or refine Harvey’s propositions.

  It was in this climate that Olof Rudbeck entered the medical school at Uppsala. His head was full of ideas, his curiosity almost boundless. He could not wait to be turned loose to investigate for himself the mysterious invisible world underneath the skin. But unfortunately the university had very little to offer. Rudbeck’s supervisor was too busy for him, preferring instead to spend time in the alchemy lab, trying to change various substances into gold. More challenging still, it was difficult to gain access to the necessary equipment. When acquiring human bodies for observation and dissection was a difficult task even for a professor, what could a student do?

  One crisp autumn day in 1650, Rudbeck strolled down to the market, a bustling square jammed with carts, stalls, and stands. There were stacks of cheese, slabs of butter, and fish, gutted and stretched out. Gloves of fine goat-hair and warm wolfskin coats also competed for attention. Rudbeck’s eye, however, fell on two women, rough and splattered with blood, as they butchered a calf. There, in the raw dead flesh, Rudbeck saw something peculiar. There was a milklike substance that seemed to emanate from somewhere in the chest, not so delicately split open on the old bench. His curiosity was piqued, and an idea suddenly struck him. With the enthusiasm of someone who had long enjoyed taking things apart and tinkering to see how they worked, Rudbeck asked if he could cut on the carcass.

  The women must have been surprised, to say the least, at this young man’s request. With their permission granted, Rudbeck borrowed the knife, forced the thick, lifeless aorta to the side, and then separated it from the surrounding red mess of muscle and tissue. He followed that curious milk-like substance along, finding a sort of vessel or duct that carried a colorless liquid. By the time he traced it back to the liver, the dark purplish brown organ undoubtedly destined for dinner fare, he knew he was onto something big.

  Rudbeck had discovered nothing less than the lymphatic system. The colorless liquid was lymph, a tissue-cleansing fluid vital to the functioning of the body’s immune system. Among other things, it absorbs nutrients, collects fats, and prevents harmful substances from entering the bloodstream. He not only discovered this system but also correctly explained its functions in the body.

  This episode clearly shows a resourcefulness that would long be a hallmark of Rudbeck’s approach to problem-solving. As William Harvey improved his knowledge of anatomy by investigating the deer bagged by King James and the royal hunting parties, Rudbeck the student relied on the successful meat trade of Uppsala’s butchers. Over the next two years, probably working in a dingy makeshift shed by the river, Rudbeck set his dissection table with a veritable
smorgasbord of discarded delicacies. He cut, nipped, hacked, and examined, performing hundreds of dissections and vivisections to refine his practical understanding of the body’s cleansing mechanisms.

  Rudbeck’s explanation of the lymphatic system was indeed a major discovery in the annals of modern medicine—the first, in fact, to come from a Swedish scientist. It was also a fulfillment of William Harvey’s theories of the circulation of the blood, which were then still fiercely contested. In distant Uppsala, the young Rudbeck, not even twenty years old, had confirmed one of the greatest medical discoveries of the day.

  WORD OF THIS remarkable student spread quickly through the Swedish kingdom, and soon reached its colorful queen. Like Greta Garbo, who played her in the film, Queen Christina has intrigued historians just as she fascinated her contemporaries. She was young, barely twenty-six years old, and somewhat shorter than medium height, with thick, curly, dark brown hair often tied with a simple black ribbon. Her voice was soft but deep, and her eyes piercing. Whenever she was displeased, it soon became abundantly clear, the queen’s face darkened like a “thunder cloud.” Eight years of power had accustomed her to doing exactly as she wished. Controversy, though, was never far away.

  Rumors had long circulated that the Swedish queen was a nymphomaniac, a lesbian, a man in disguise, or perhaps a hermaphrodite. After all, when she was born, the midwife first took her for a boy, and even told the king that he had a new son. The hermaphrodite belief was dispelled only when a team of international experts, restoring her grave in the 1920s, decided to take a look. The queen, they confirmed, had indeed been a woman.

  Despite all differences of opinion, her admirers and critics agreed on one point: Queen Christina attracted some of the best and brightest of the day. During her short reign, a motley collection of cavaliers, ladies, libertines, and scholars streamed to her court. Perhaps the most famous of these was René Descartes. There was probably no thinker of the day more idolized than this French philosopher.