Winter 1992
Volume 18, Number 2

Now we must tackle a question of considerable importance: what became of the myth of Atlantis during the Enlightenment, that is to say from about 1670, the beginning of what Paul Hazard has called la crise la conscience européenne, down to the French Revolution? The early yea of those extremely troubled times saw the appearance of the work of t} man who, following Sarmiento but with infinitely more brilliance, was ti real creator of the nationalistic Atlantis myth: Olof Rudbeck.53

A few rules of interpretation need to be sketched in at this point. What I shall refer to as the Enlightenment was faced with a huge problem, just the opposite of that which had faced the Greek Fathers of the second to the fourth centuries and which, by and large, had been retackled by the men of the Renaissance. The task of the Fathers was to reconcile Greek historiography and the biblical tradition as best they could. The men the Enlightenment had, on the contrary, to put paid to using the Jewish people as a vector of universal history, a role in which they had been most splendidly confirmed by Jacques Bénigue Bossuet's Discours sur l'histoire universelle as late as 1681. What now needed to be done was to find a new chosen people, even if--provisionally--this meant resuscitating some form of paganism.54 And of course, the men of the Enlightenment were not alone. There were rivals to be contended with, who knew how to turn the tables. In the eighteenth century, one was just as likely to discover a Jewish prophet behind Plato or Homer as to find a pagan god behind the sacred figure of Jesus Christ. The Enlightenment was--it need hardly be said--not a conscious movement at all levels nor where all its participants were concerned. Many helped in practice,to "crush the beast," quite unaware that they were collaborating in that endeavor.

At the time of the Enlightenment, Atlantis was a kind of substitute for the Jewish people in the economy of universal history. But what I should like to discuss, more specifically, is Atlantis used as a national substitute. The people who once constituted Atlantis were a chosen people and, as such, deserved the primacy that every imperial power believes itself to possess.

Admittedly, Atlantis as a national substitute was not the only function of the myth in the Enlightenment. Quite apart from any particular national ancestry, Atlantis could be considered as the origin of all the nations, or as a golden age, which is indeed how the astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly regarded it. Beyond humanity and above it, Atlantis, for Vicolas Boulanger, was a cosmic episode, one particular moment in the universal floods that, he believed, punctuate history.55 But Atlantis also always functioned as a substitute.

[...]

The time has come to bring this inquiry to a close. The successive nationalistic versions of Atlantis that we have examined represent but one aspect of a widespread ideological phenomenon: the quest for Origins, which is to be found among proud and humiliated peoples alike. It draws on monuments, ancient texts, unknown or little-known peoples, and even, as in the case of Atlantis, imaginary peoples. Seven Greek cities all claimed the honor of being the birthplace of Homer. But where was Troy? One theory, which has recently enjoyed considerable success in Yugoslavia, is that Homer's Troy was situated not at Hissarlik, in Turkey, but between Split and Dubrovnik, at the mouth of the Neretva.85 This theory has not crossed the Albanian border; but in Albania, which passionately claims descent from the ancient Illyrians,86 serious consideration has apparently been given to the idea that, during the Trojan War, the Illyrians played a role of crucial importance.87 As for the Etruscans, is it not obvious that they were Turks?88 That is one way of settling a few old scores with the Greeks.

Faced with so many fantasies, what is to be done with Atlantis? In the first place, we should study its history as a history of human imaginary representations, and that, indeed, is what I have briefly attempted to do here. But also--why not?--we can make pictures of it, setting down on paper drawings of the geometric colony precisely imagined by Plato.89 Perhaps that is the best use to which Atlantis can be put in this day and age.

53. For a more detailed account of the Atlantis myth in the Enlightenment, see my "Hérodote et l'Atlantide."

54. The literature on this subject is, of course, extensive. Outstanding for their clarity are Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York, 1966-69), and Frank E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (1959; New York. 1967). See also Jean Starobinski, "Le Mythe au XVIII siècle," review of The Rise of Modern Mythology, 1680-1860, by Burton Feldman and Robert D. Richardson, Critique 33 (Nov. 1977): 975-97.

55. These points are developed fully in my "Hérodote et l'Atlantide."

86. See Les Illyriens, ed. S. Islami (Tirana, 1985). Although this book is not free of retrospective nationalism, it is a worthy work of serious scholarship.

87. See Engjëll Sedaj, "Les Tribus illyriennes dans les chansons homériques," Studia Albanica 23 (1986): 157-72.

88. See Adile Ayda, Les Etruscans étaient des Tures (Ankara, 1985). Other examples from the Middle East may be found in my "Flavius Josèphe et les prophètes," Cahiers du Centre d'études du Proche-Orient ancien (Geneva, 1989): 11-31.

89. See the splendid collection made by the architect H. R. Stahel, Atlantis Illustrated (New York, 1982). I am most grateful to Alain Schnapp for bringing this work to my attention, and I have borrowed figure 3 from it. Unfortunately, in his preface to Stahel's book, Isaac Asimov echoes Marinato's theory on Santorini, as does Kater in his Das "Ahnenerbe" der SS 1935-1945, p.372 n. 119. Jean-Pierre Adam (in his Passeé recomposé: Chroniques d'archéologie fantasque [Paris, 1988], esp. pp. 38-64) certainly puts a number of mad theories in their place but only to replace them with a hypothesis that is neither new nor convincing. But then, clearly, one can't expect everything.