Author Michael Cuneo—who teaches anthropology and sociology at Fordham University in New York City—delves deeply into modern American beliefs in demon possession and the various practices of demon expulsion. Although his opening chapters focus mostly on exorcism as a Roman Catholic ritual, Cuneo is quick to disabuse readers of the common assumption that the task of expelling demons is limited to priests. His later chapters closely examine the history and current practice of Middle-America exorcism—the deliverance ministries of Baptist, Charismatic, and Pentecostal churches and deliverance groups. Cuneo is also careful to make sure the reader understands that although Protestant deliverance ministry and the resurgent Catholic rite of exorcism are essentially grass-roots practices, the renewed popular belief can be credited almost entirely to Hollywood.

“This conjuncture of commercialism and religious ritual, of profits and piety, should come as no surprise,” Cuneo writes. “Over the course of the twentieth century the popular cultural industry, with its endless run of movies, books, and digital delights, has gained a pervasive influence over the national consciousness. It has become part of the very air that Americans breathe and, as such, it has attained an enormous capacity for shaping everyday beliefs and behaviors. . . . When Hollywood and its allies put out the Word, somebody’s guaranteed to be listening” (p. 50). Cuneo repeatedly reminds the reader of the role of American media in the resurgence of the belief in demonic possession. Only the most willfully naïve reader could overlook the role of motion pictures, TV talk shows, book publishers, and the insatiable appetite for publicity among exorcism authors and self-styled “researchers” after reading Cuneo’s perceptive accounts of the rise of demonic awareness in the land of plenty.

American Exorcism is a remarkable synthesis of interviews, historical research, media studies, and hands-on field research. He interviews the various players in the modern exorcism revival. He offers compelling assessments of desires and motives of the exorcists and the possessed—tempered by objective evidence and judgment. He shows forbearance and sympathy to those who participate in exorcism and deliverance ministry, but he is also skeptical and frank.

Cuneo begins his book with a poignant and timely lamentation of the modern Catholic priesthood: “The past three decades haven’t been particularly kind to the Catholic priesthood. One would be hard-pressed to find another profession that has fallen harder or further from grace in so short a period of time.” He notes the dramatic thinning of the ranks beginning in the 1960s and 70s, the frantic scramble to find relevance in the modern world, and the endless sexual scandals. The image of the Catholic priest, writes Cuneo, “has more often been the priest as pious fraud, the priest as philanderer, the priest as yesterday’s man—equivocating, beleaguered, and thoroughly redundant.”

In one exceptional area, however, the priest remains a cultural hero. “That area,” writes Cuneo, “is exorcism, and it is the priest-as-exorcist that has somehow managed, in defiance of all odds, to retain a heroic grip on the popular American imagination.” Modern Catholic liberals had hoped that exorcism would be relegated to Church history along with the other medieval trappings and customs. What such Catholics never anticipated, according to Cuneo, was the modern media’s role in breathing new life into the ancient rite of exorcism.

In the first four chapters Cuneo deftly sketches out the sundry sources of the exorcism renewal. He begins with the well-know pop Ursprung: William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel, The Exorcist, and the 1973 film of the same title that it inspired. He characterizes Blatty’s work as massive structure of fantasy resting on a flimsy foundation of a priest’s 1949 diary account of the possession of a young boy in Mount Ranier, Maryland.

Cuneo then introduces the reader to fascinating and seldom-cited sources: ex-Jesuit priest Malachi Martin, author of the 1976 book Hostage to the Devil; paranormal authors Ed and Lorraine Warren, and, surprisingly, the grandfather of pop-psychology and self-help, The Road Less Traveled author Scott M. Peck.

Malachi Martin pronounced his final vows as a Jesuit in 1960 and took a position at the Vatican’s Pontifical Biblical Institute. He abruptly left his post in 1964 and the Society of Jesus in 1965, after being granted a provisional release by Pope Paul VI. Nearly forty years later, there are conflicting accounts of why Martin, such a promising scholar, left everything behind. Cuneo writes:

According to the most popular account (which is the one usually favored by Martin himself), he felt morally compelled to leave the priesthood in protest over the new, decidedly more liberal, direction the Catholic Church was taking as a result of the Second Vatican Council. Unfortunately this stricken-soldier-of-conscience version of events hasn’t always squared with the facts. Far from being a tormented conservative during his years in Rome, Martin was actually a theological liberal, and while the council was in full swing, he was closely (and publicly) aligned with such leading liberal lights as Monsignor George Higgins and the eminent American Jesuit John Courtney Murray.

Digging further, Cuneo finds “fairly reliable evidence” that Martin threw away his religious career in the wake of “romantic intrigue”—an affair that occurred in 1964 while he taught theology part-time at Loyola University of Chicago’s Rome Center.

If readers are to believe Martin, Satan was hard at work in New York City in the 1970s. He claims that the possessions and exorcisms described in Hostage are true accounts. Cuneo checks with Catholic experts, including Franciscan Father Benedict Groeschel, the expert Catholic officials turned to in the 1970s and 1980s when they were confronted with the “inexplicable.” Groeschel was not aware of anything on the scale Martin portrays. Furthermore Groeschel and others insist that for the mainstream Catholic Church, exorcism was the last resort; earthly explanations were preferred and pursued first.

In his 1983 book People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, Peck is unequivocal about his belief in demonic possession and remains a staunch believer in supernatural demonic possession to this day. Many in the charismatic deliverance movement see People of the Lie as a mainstream validation of their beliefs. When Cuneo asked Peck in a phone interview whether he thought that exorcism would someday become the serious subject of scientific investigation, Peck expresses doubt for absolutely shocking reasons. He is not pessimistic due to the fact that there is no credible evidence for the reality of demonic possession. Instead he asserts—in the tradition of a dime-a-dozen pseudoscientist rather than a trained psychiatrist—that the “country’s intellectual and religious elites,” are to blame, including “the leadership of the American Catholic Church,” who “have seemed determined to keep the door shut.”

In Part III: “Charismatic Deliverance Ministry,” Cuneo sets Catholicism aside and begins with an account of a fifteen-minute exorcism of a young man named Paul. Paul, plagued by years of aberrant sexual fantasies and violent feelings, had driven 200 miles to Kansas City to obtain an exorcism from Protestant deliverance ministers Ellen and Felix. The rite Cuneo describes is not an all-night vigil of sweating priests dodging projectile vomit. It involved a prayer, a recitation of Psalm 37 and Luke 10:17–19, some speaking in tongues, a prayer of repentance followed by a prayer of exorcism appealing to the power of Jesus Christ, repeated six times for each demon within Paul. Cuneo remarks that “whole business” was “orderly and efficient.” He also includes a postscript stating that six months later, Paul claimed that he had not experienced any of his old symptoms and “for the first time in his life felt truly at peace with himself” (81).

Cuneo then recounts the history of the rise of modern Pentecostal and Charismatic deliverance ministry. Although it dates as far back as the very beginning of Pentecostalism on Asuza Street in Los Angeles in 1906, the modern revival can be traced to the 1960s. At that time, deliverance ministry was a sporadic guerrilla movement, led by mavericks like Disciples of Christ minister Don Basham, Pentecostal minister Derek Prince, and, among Charismatic Catholics, a Dominican priest named Francis MacNutt.

Cuneo’s historical account of the deliverance ministry from the 1960s through the 1980s is filled with quotes out of his interviews, providing an intense human portrait of what both leaders and followers in the movement felt and the role deliverance ministry played in their lives. Readers will also find a continuing interplay between Catholic and Protestant brands of exorcism. For instance, Malachi Martin’s Catholic pulp thriller Hostage to the Devil was a great influence on some of the modern Charismatic deliverance ministers Cuneo spoke with, and many Catholics turned to charismatics in their quest to infuse their faith with renewed fervor.

Cuneo spends time at the Hegewisch Baptist Church in Indiana with Pastor Mike Theirer, “the hardest working exorcist in America.” His account stands in complete contrast to the more private and peaceful affair described above. Theirer’s deliverance sessions are auditorium affairs. “Throughout the auditorium, demoniacs are paired off with exorcism ministers,” writes Cuneo, who himself rushed help wrestle down a particularly violent demoniac to prevent him from further battering Pastor Mike. People belched and (literally) vomited their demons out in an intense charismatic spectacle.

Cuneo’s close involvement with congregations practicing deliverance ministry gives him a compelling inside look and first-hand perspective on the conformist (sometimes cult-like) pressures exerted on members regarding belief and practice.

Considering also the distinctive style of so many charismatic prayer groups: the ecstatic worship the gushing emotionalism, the breathless solidarity. All of this gave rise, as often as not, to an atmosphere of suggestibility, of hothouse conformity. Individual charismatics, even relative newcomers, easily surmised what was expected of them in the way of belief and conduct, and there was no shortage of cues to help them along. Imagine a fairly new recruit to the renewal movement, impressionable, eager to please, seeing two or three, or fifteen or sixteen spiritual brethren writhing and moaning in demon-induced torment. And then seeing the performance repeated time and again. It would take an iron act of will, arguably, for such a person not to go along for the ride.

Cuneo describes how he himself was confronted by an overly zealous charismatic convinced that he was possessed at a 1997 symposium on deliverance. He also describes interview accounts of fascistic group leaders who quashed dissenters by attributing their complaints to demons of willfulness and condemning them to corrective exorcisms. He stresses, however, that such abuses are the exception rather than the rule.

Michael Cuneo’s conclusions on the actual existence of demons and the use of deliverance ministry and exorcism will almost certainly disappoint many Skeptical Inquirer readers who feel that the throat of patently unscientific nonsense should be slit wide open. Cuneo reserves judgment on many matters for which skeptics will see a clear verdict. After sitting in on fifty exorcisms, he is unequivocal about the fact that he saw nothing supernatural—certainly nothing out of The Exorcist or Malachi Martin’s salacious pulp-religion paperbacks. However, he remains equivocal about the possibility that demons exist. While his views on the efficacy of exorcism are tempered by documented tragedies of exorcists inadvertently killing their hapless subjects, Cuneo, who conducted follow-up interviews of people whose exorcism he had observed, apparently accepts that exorcism have been a useful “therapy” for some.

Cuneo does emphasize one conclusion that all skeptics will gladly embrace. The Holy Army of priests, ministers, and laity who do battle with demons vying against God for the souls of men itself benefits from the power of one subtle creature which unquestionably influences the hearts and opinions of millions: American mass media. Without Hollywood, ABC, or Malachi Martin’s publisher, the exorcism business would never have gotten off the ground. While Cuneo may in some cases be slow to condemn what is scientifically damnable, I believe that no skeptic’s library on occult or supernatural claims would be complete without American Exorcist. Cuneo has done quality research on all level and from many angles. He opens the door for readers into a strange but amazing world, where people fervently believe that Satan and his minions are at work in a struggle that is simultaneously personal and cosmic. He also does an excellent job tracking the media’s role in popular belief, and he is refreshingly scathing in pointing out those who see religious beliefs as a means to pop fame.

Here’s a quick summary of this year’s crazy cabal of crankery:

“Holy Meter of Zion!”

Amiri Baraka, the New Jersey poet laureate, thinks that the Israeli government had foreknowledge of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center towers. Faced with criticism from several quarters, Baraka circled his wagons rather than surrender to reason. On his Web site he has defended all sorts of bunk, such as the claim of 4,000 Israeli/Jewish absentees from the World Trade Center, citing, of all things, Michael Ruppert’s conspiracy video titled “The Truth and Lies of 9-11.”

In September, Baraka made himself the center of controversy after reading a poem titled “Somebody Blew Up America” at the September 19, 2002, Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Stanhope, New Jersey. In it, he asks who is responsible for a wide variety of current and historical atrocities, including the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. One verse in particular incited outrage among several prominent Jewish groups. The offending verses are as follows:

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed

Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers

To stay home that day

Why did Sharon stay away?

Baraka had been appointed to a two-year term as poet laureate in September 2001 with endorsements from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities and the state’s Council on the Arts. In reaction to the outrage over “Somebody Blew Up America,” New Jersey Governor James McGreevey requested that Baraka apologize and resign from his post; Baraka promptly refused. New Jersey state law makes no provision for removing a poet laureate from the post. However, McGreevey has sought the power to revoke Baraka’s poetic license from state legislators, according an October 7, 2002, New York Times story.

C'est la Conspiracie

Theirry Meyssan rose to worldwide recognition earlier in 2002 as the auteur of one of France’s best-selling books: L'Effroyable Imposture ("The Frightening Deception”). He claims that the destruction at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, was not caused by the impact of hijacked American Airlines Flight 77, but rather a truck bomb. He alleges that the U.S. government covered up this fact from the world as part of a larger scheme by the military-industrial complex to covertly orchestrate the September 11 massacres in order to justify the campaign in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Although sales were brisk, it remains uncertain just how many French readers actually bought into Meyssan’s claims. He jump-started the book’s popularity with an appearance on the French TV infotainment program Tout le Monde en Parle ("Everybody’s Talking About It”). However, the more respectable French media were unwavering in their criticism. According to the weekly journal Le Nouvel Observateur, “The theory suits everyone-there are no Islamic extremists and everyone is happy. It eliminates reality.” Liberation renamed the book A Frightening Confidence Trick and called it “a tissue of wild and irresponsible allegations, entirely without foundation.”

“Number One, Meet Vulcan Ambassador Gumbel on the Bridge!”

In November, the Sci Fi Channel aired two shameless pseudo-documentaries, “Abduction Diaries” and “The Roswell Crash: Startling New Evidence.” These programs were clearly aimed at whetting viewers’ appetites for The X-Files ripoff mini-series drama “Steven Spielberg Presents: Taken,” which aired on ten weeknights, from December 9 to December 13. The drama featured allegations of government UFO cover-ups and other unfounded claptrap, and appears to be aimed at the confused diaspora of displaced X-Files refugees.

Though overwhelmingly dedicated to the UFOlogists like Stanton Friedman, “The Roswell Crash” producers attempted to cover up a lack of credibility by recruiting former NBC Today Show anchor Bryant Gumbel to host and narrate the show. A further gimmick used to hoodwink viewers involved an “excavation” of the Roswell “crash site.” Assorted bags of junk gathered from the site are now in safekeeping at the Wells Fargo Bank in Roswell, “until,” Gumbel proclaims, “they can undergo extensive testing at a materials lab.” “Startling new evidence,” indeed, of the desperate lengths to which Sci Fi producers will go to squeeze the last drop of snake-oil out of the tired Roswell myth.

Recent polls show an increasing belief in alien visitation among otherwise informed Americans. A 2001 Gallup poll revealed that 33 percent of Americans believe that “aliens have visited the [E]arth at sometime in the past.” That’s up from 27 percent in 1990. A 1996 Gallup poll showed that 71 percent of Americans believed that the U.S. government knows more about UFOs than they have told the public. There is not a single shred of good evidence to support such beliefs.

Nevertheless, cash evidently trumps truth at the Sci Fi Channel.

“Al-'Sieg Heil’ Alaykhum,” or “Happy Rommel-dan”

In Egypt, as elsewhere in the Middle East, there’s a growing belief in an international Zionist conspiracy, which is responsible for everything from pro-Israeli American foreign policy to chronic halitosis. This conspiracy theory has culminated in a turgid thirty-part “documentary” series titled “Horsemen without a Horse,” which aired during Ramadan on state-run Channel 2 and the aptly chosen satellite network “Dream TV.” The series tells the story of a fictional early twentieth-century journalist Hafez Naguib, who goes undercover to “discover” the “truth” behind the venerable hoax conspiracy screed known as the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Mohammed Sobhi, who co-authored the script and plays the role of Hafez Naguib, was quick to defend his magnum opus to Western journalists. Quoted in a November 2 Boston Globe story, Sobhi told Globe correspondent Ashraf Khalil. “I don’t care about the Zionist opposition. We don’t interfere in their work or media, and they also don’t have the right to interfere in our artistic work and media.”

A Shameless Pattern

The most disturbing fact of all of these cases is that the above-mentioned conspiracy claims were not disseminated on poorly printed leaflets at some Idaho White separatist compound. With one exception, these ideas were widely promoted thanks to the ill-formed decisionmakers at major TV networks and publishing houses putting greed over integrity. That said, I’ll leave readers with a quote from Chris Mooney, writing for Slate.com on November 27, 2002:

Suppose that the truth really is “out there,” as The X-Files postulated, but not exactly where you might expect. In other words, rather than a vast government conspiracy to conceal proof that aliens have visited Earth, perhaps the real plot lies elsewhere. The entertainment industry, for instance, is constantly putting out films, TV shows, and pseudo-documentaries suggesting that Americans are being visited or even abducted in droves by gray-skinned, strangely kinky spacemen-and the government wants to keep it all quiet. . . . Could the real conspiracy be on the part of the mass media and designed to make people believe in UFOs because it helps ratings?

Now that’s a conspiracy theory skeptics can believe in!

According to an April 3, 2002, commentary in the Guardian (U.K.), the French daily Liberation cited weekly sales of L'Effroyable Imposture at 100,000 copies. Although sales have been brisk, it is uncertain how many French readers actually buy into Meyssan’s claims. He jump-started the book’s popularity in an appearance on the French TV infotainment talk show Tout le Monde en Parle (Everybody’s Talking About It). However, the more respectable French media have been unforgiving in their criticism. According to the weekly journal Le Nouvel Observateur, “The theory suits everyone - there are no Islamic extremists and everyone is happy. It eliminates reality.” Liberation renamed the book “A Frightening Confidence Trick” and called it “a tissue of wild and irresponsible allegations, entirely without foundation.”

I have not read the book myself (at the time of this writing I am waiting for an English translation of the book). My French-challenged fellows can find an English- language synopsis of Meyssan’s arguments on a Web page titled “Pentagon: Hunt the Boeing and Test Your Perceptions!” at www.asile.org/citoyens/numero13/pentagone/erreurs_en.htm.

The Web page suggests that an early, misinformed report by the Associated Press was the true explanation and that subsequent corrections are actually part of a coverup: “As everyone knows, on 11 September, less than an hour after the attack on the World Trade Centre [sic], an airplane collided with the Pentagon. The Associated Press first reported that a booby-trapped truck had caused the explosion. The Pentagon quickly denied this. The official U.S. government version of events still holds.

Meyssan’s actual arguments are nothing more than cheap and blatant mystery mongering. They are astonishingly sophomoric attempts to take readily explicable facts and twist them into suspicious mysteries.

Meyssan assumes that the impact of a Boeing 757, weighing 100 tons and laden with fuel, would have caused far more damage to the Pentagon. The “hole” from the impact seems too small to him, and the most dramatic devastation didn’t penetrate far enough into the “rings” of the building for his satisfaction. Where Meyssan has acquired the expertise to determine how much damage an aircraft can do to large buildings is an open question. Given the enormous death toll, the collapse of the roof and structure on the outermost ring and the incineration and damage to the outer three rings, a critic can only wonder what degree of damage would seem plausible to Meyssan.

Meyssan also muses about a lack of wreckage from the airliner, ignoring the experts’ explanation that such a high-speed impact and the subsequent explosion and inferno amply explain how the Boeing jet was pulverized and incinerated.

One photo on Meyssan’s Web page shows a truck pouring sand over gravel that has been spread out by a bulldozer on the lawn at the Pentagon crash site. Incredibly, Meyssan questions why this would be done, stating that the lawn was otherwise undamaged after the attack. He takes great pains to ignore the obvious fact that this is a common practice on every construction site to prevent heavy vehicles from churning sod and soil into a morass of mud.

Meyssan shows no inclination to offer an alternative that explains key questions, such as what happened to Flight 77 and high-profile passengers like Barbara Olson, TV commentator and wife of Solicitor General Ted Olson, if they didn’t crash into the Pentagon.

Pentagon spokesman Glen Flood, quoted in an April 1, 2002, story in the Guardian called the book “a slap in the face and a real offence to the American people, particularly to the memory of the victims of the attacks.” Most Americans, I’m sure, will readily agree. It will be interesting to see the reaction here when the English-language edition of L'Effroyable Imposture makes Meyssan’s ideas fully accessible to the American public. Certainly, Meyssan offers much for skeptics around the world to ponder: he should remind us that irrational thinking continues to be, as it has so often been, a tool for dehumanizing victims and deflecting blame from the guilty.

Further Reading:

• The Urban Legends Reference Pages: www.snopes2.com/rumors/pentagon.htm.
• The National Review: www.nationalreview.com/robbins/robbins040902.asp.

The myth is first told in two of Plato’s dialogues: the Timaeus and the Critias. The Timaeus, mostly a supernatural account of Creation, is often included in the canon of sacred works by Hermetists, neo-Gnostics and other occultists, who identify strongly with the speculative philosophies of Plato and later Platonists like the Egyptian Plotinus. Famous psychics and occultists have fastened onto the Atlantis legend itself as a subject of prophecy. Edgar Cayce, the “Sleeping Prophet,” predicted that Atlantis would be uncovered in 1968 or 1969; nineteenth century mystic Madame Blavatsky claimed that she had spent seven years in Tibet studying with Hindu mahatmas who taught her about the lost civilizations of Atlantis and Lemuria.

The legend of Atlantis, after several years’ dormancy in imagination of the broader public, has begun to make something of a comeback in recent years.

Disney Studios has recently released a new animation feature, Atlantis.

Several new books on the legendary submerged civilization-ranging from crackpot to critical-can be found on bookstore shelves. From the fringe-science wing, readers may choose from Gateway to Atlantis by Andrew Collins, The Atlantis Blueprint by Colin Wilson and Rand Flem-Ath, and The Atlantis Enigma by Herbie Brennan.

To readers looking for a more grounded, skeptical discussion, I strongly recommend Imagining Atlantis by Richard Ellis (Vintage, 1999) and Frauds, Myths and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archeology by CSICOP Fellow Kenneth Feder (third edition, Mayfield Publishing Co., 1998). Ellis’s book is a nearly encyclopedic account of speculation on Atlantis. Notable for its critical and thoroughly researched approach, it covers all of the influential personalities and hypotheses-even discussing modern sci-fi and pop culture visions of the lost world. Feder has an excellent chapter on Atlantis that concisely communicates all of the essential (lack of) evidence.

Atlantis: Fact and Fiction

The enduring question, now two millennia old, is whether Plato’s account of Atlantis is a description of an actual civilization that sunk beneath the waves, or a tantalizing tale that rose up wholly from the depths of the Athenian philosopher’s imagination. In general terms there are three possible conclusions to be made for the Atlantis legend:

1. the account is entirely factual and inerrant;
2. it is a blend of fact, fiction, and error; or
3. it is entirely fictional.

Most cranks and all legitimate scholars alike have jettisoned the first conclusion. Unfortunately these cranks and several scholars agree on the second possibility, but the great pitfall is that each detail of Plato’s Atlantis that is cast aside so that it will fit a theory weakens the very premise of having solved the question of whether Atlantis existed. Librarian Rand Flem-Ath thinks Atlantis is really Antarctica; Swiss geoarcheologist Eberhard Zangger thinks Atlantis is Troy. But the more that Plato’s dates, location, and other details are changed, the less stands to be proven about the truth of Atlantis. It becomes as ridiculous as arguing that a missing Victorian house in Hackensack, New Jersey was really a Spanish Villa in Mexico City all along, QED.

Scholars who would concede that there is any fact at all behind the Atlantis legend usually argue that Plato has only dimly recalled a Bronze cataclysm in the Aegean Sea, either on Crete or Santorini, but that his account is largely fictional. Yet all the evidence shows, I will argue, that Plato’s Atlantis account is beyond a reasonable doubt entirely fictional-a utopian myth concocted to vividly illustrate Plato’s political philosophy. Invoking Ray Hyman’s categorical imperative of first making sure an explanation is needed before trying to explain a mystery, we can then dispense with any discussion of "explanations” or “sources” for the Atlantis legend.

Most people are superficially aware that “Atlantis” refers to an ancient civilization submerged in a cataclysm. Hardly anyone, however, is aware of the origins, details, or context of the Atlantis myth itself. We first need to closely examine all of these and pin down exactly what Plato claims as fact, whether or not he intended us to suspend our disbelief. Then we need to examine the legend in the context of its literary source: as the sequel dialogue to the Republic of Plato. Finally, I believe, we can make a judgment on the credence that the Atlantis legend deserves.

Origins

As mentioned above, Atlantis is first mentioned in two dialogues written by Plato: the Timaeus and the Critias. Before Plato, there are absolutely no references in any literature anywhere to the alleged civilization-an absence from the literary and mythological traditions of ancient Greece that speaks volumes.

Cranks who argue that the Atlantis tale is a sort of treasure map to some undiscovered country beneath the waves often identify with the nineteenth century German businessman-turned-archeologist Heinrich Schliemann. Schliemann discovered the ruins of the lost city of Troy-scene of Homer’s epic poem, the Iliad, in Turkey in 1872.

Before Schliemann the majority of classical scholars held the opinion that the Iliad was a poetic masterpiece woven entirely out of myths and imagination; Troy simply never existed. Schliemann, however, took Homer’s poems as seriously as a fundamentalist Christian takes the Bible, and was convinced that Troy was indeed somewhere in the Troad, the district in the northwest corner of Turkey along the Bosporus straits leading from the Aegean Sea to the Black Sea. After consulting the geological descriptions in the Iliad and observing the Turkish landscape, he was convinced that Troy lay beneath a hill called Hissarlik (a location first suggested by Charles MacLaren in 1822). Schliemann excavated the hill by digging a deep trench-a destructive hack job that was common even to professionals during the nineteenth century infancy of archaeology. He found not just one Troy, but several. There are remains of seven distinct settlements on Hissarlik, with a record of human occupation beginning in the third millennium b.c.

Schliemann’s archeological verification of Homer’s Trojan War is an inspiring example of how an intelligent layperson can make a significant contribution to professional scholarship. Unfortunately Schliemann often serves as the poster child for isolated cranks who draw hope from his success.

There are important distinctions between Homer’s Troy and Plato’s Atlantis: the obvious one is that the ruins of Troy have been found where Homer said they were: the proof is in the pudding. Also, the Iliad and its heroes are part of a mythic tradition that suffused Greek art and culture. Pottery shows scenes from the Trojan War and depicts heroes like Achilles, Ajax, and Odysseus. Long-standing local legends and religious myths also allude to many of the characters. Many of the places mentioned in the Iliad were recognized by Greeks of Plato’s time. There is even solid evidence that Iliad (and its companion work, the Odyssey) themselves have deep roots into the past. Milman Parry’s landmark work in the 1930s analyzing the structure of Homeric poetry and comparing it with oral poetry among the Serbs, demonstrates that the Iliad is essentially an oral poem woven from conventional phrases and lays handed down through generations of Greek bards. Though committed to writing, the poetry itself is a product of oral mnemonic and metric composition.

Plato’s Timaeus and Critias, by contrast, are non-traditional: his dialogues are original prose compositions. Atlantis is mentioned by no one before Plato, and was never part of the broader interconnected traditions of ceramic art, poetry, literary allusions, local legends, or monumental architecture. There is no evidence to show that tales of Atlantis were handed down through generations from an age long before Plato.

The Atlantis Legend in Detail and Context

There is an established chronology to Plato’s dialogues, based on stylistic and other evidence. The philosopher’s last dialogues were the Republic, the Timaeus, and the Critias, the latter two named for the characters who contribute the most significant part of the dialogue. It is worth noting here that while I call the participants in these dialogues characters, they in fact portray real contemporaries of Plato and Socrates. In the Timaeus, Plato records a dialogue between Socrates, Critias, Hermocrates and Timaeus. The latter three are obligated to repay Socrates for his masterly discussion of the ideal society in the Republic by giving accounts of their own. The character Timaeus describes the creation of the world, but only after Critias retells a story of Atlantis he claims to have heard when he was ten years old. His grandfather-the elder Critias-relates this story to the younger Critias and others at a poetry recital competition on Koreotis-"Children’s Day"-during the Athenian festival of Apatouria. On the last day of Apatouria, babies, young men, and newly married wives were enrolled into their phratriai-"brotherhoods” of related families. I will come back to the significance of this festive occasion for the Atlantis legend later. In the dialogue Critias, Critias continues his account of Atlantis, giving details about the origins of the society, the geography and the culture. The dialogue then cuts off abruptly. This break is taken to coincide with Plato’s death. The philosopher, of course, never got around to writing a Hermocrates dialogue.

In the Timaeus, Critias claims that his grandfather, the elder Critias-by then ninety years old-heard the story from his own father, Dropides. Dropides in turn heard the story from the revered Athenian poet and statesman Solon, which places the provenance back to the sixth century b.c. Ultimately, the character Critias attributes the story of Atlantis back to priests of the Egyptian city of Saïs. He alleges that Solon, during his travels in Egypt, met with these clerics. They ridiculed Solon and his Greek compatriots for their lack of historical knowledge. The sages then astounded him with an account from hoary antiquity about the lost Atlantean civilization. They told Solon that Athens’s history reached back further than any Athenian remembered, and that the city waged war with Atlantis thousands of years ago. Even during Solon’s lifetime, Egyptian civilization was ancient, already holding claim to more than two thousand years of history, so this part of the story would be entirely plausible. However, the priests of Saïs-as Plato’s character Critias tells-insisted that the Atlantean-Athenian war was waged some 8,000 years before Solon’s lifetime-circa 9,000 b.c.: far older than any evidence modern archeologists have thus far found for civilization in the Mediterranean Basin, or anywhere in the world for that matter.

Plato’s account is unambiguous: it clearly places the existence of Atlantis at circa 10,000 b.c. It also clearly accounts for the alleged provenance of the Atlantis story up to Plato: priests at the Egyptian city of Saïs keep the historical written records (gegrammena) of Atlantis lore for 8,000 years before Solon hears the tale. Beyond any doubt, there simply were no Egyptian writing, no Egyptian priests, nor any Egyptian civilization 11,000 years ago. However, assuming for the sake of argument that this claim is possible, it is then a matter of a tenuous thread of hearsay: 1) the priests tell Solon about the legend; 2) Solon tells Dropides; 3) Dropides tells his son, the elder Critias, who 4) tells his ten-year-old grandson, the younger Critias; 5) and finally this Critias, now a grown man, recounts the tale for Socrates and his guests in a semi-fictional dialogue recorded by Plato. The Atlantis legend-if you believe Plato’s provenance-seems quite a stretch to lend credibility to a story about the distant past.

In 1969, Greek seismologist Angelos Galanopoulos first proposed that the catastrophic eruption of the volcanic island of Santorini (Thera) in 1500 b.c. was the source of Plato’s Atlantis. After all, Santorini is a half-sunken caldera, and a buried city that perished in the catastrophe-Akrotiri-was uncovered on the island by Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos in 1967. Unfortunately, Galanopoulos forced the date of the ancient Santorini eruption to jibe with the story of Atlantis by arguing that Plato had his dates wrong by a factor of ten: the lost civilization was submerged 900 years, not 9000 years, before Solon. The confusion of hundreds and thousands was, he argued, a mistake of translation between Egyptian and Greek. Yet the fact remains that Egyptologists have never found any Egyptian texts that record the Atlantis legend, regardless of its alleged age, in Saïs or anywhere else. Furthermore, Galanopoulos has placed his first foot in the pitfall I mentioned earlier. He is changing part of the definition of Atlantis in order to prove its existence. By equating Atlantis with Santorini, Galanopoulos fiddles with the location and the date, begging the very question of whether Plato’s, rather than Galanopoulos’s, Atlantis really existed. In his book, Richard Ellis aptly quotes late CSICOP Fellow L. Sprague de Camp: “You cannot change all the details of Plato’s story and still claim to have Plato’s story. That is like saying the legendary King Arthur is ‘really’ Cleopatra; all you have to do is to change Cleopatra’s sex, nationality, period, temperament, moral character, and other details, and the resemblance becomes obvious.”

Critias was quite clear about date of Atlantis; he was also clear about the location: it lay in the ocean outside of the Pillars of Hercules (Benjamin Jowett translation):

[24e] . . . For it is related in our records how once upon a time your State stayed the course of a mighty host, which, starting from a distant point in the Atlantic ocean, was insolently advancing to attack the whole of Europe, and Asia to boot. For the ocean there was at that time navigable; for in front of the mouth which you Greeks call, as you say, ‘the pillars of Heracles,’ (i.e., Hercules) there lay an island which was larger than Libya and Asia together; and it was possible for the travellers of that time to cross from it to the other islands, and from the islands to the whole of the continent

[25a] over against them which encompasses that veritable ocean. For all that we have here, lying within the mouth of which we speak, is evidently a haven having a narrow entrance; but that yonder is a real ocean, and the land surrounding it may most rightly be called, in the fullest and truest sense, a continent.

“[25b] of the lands here within the Straits they ruled over Libya as far as Egypt, and over Europe as far as Tuscany. So this host, being all gathered together, made an attempt one time to enslave by one single onslaught both your country and ours and the whole of the territory within the Straits. . . .

The claim of Atlantis’s location is fairly precise: The Mediterranean is the "haven” with a “narrow entrance,” i.e., the pillars of Hercules. Atlantis lies outside of the Mediterranean “at a distant point” in the Atlantic ocean. Legitimate scholars like J.V. Luce follow Galanopoulos in claiming that the Atlantis legend really refers to Akrotiri on Santorini. In 1992, Eberhard Zangger, of the German Archaeological Institute in Athens, Greece, announced his theory that Atlantis was really Troy, which, as already noted, lies in northwestern Turkey. It is quite a stretch to say that a story about a large island in the Atlantic Ocean is really about a small island in the Aegean Sea or a citadel in ancient Turkey, yet serious scholarship is funded arguing this very point. According to Richard Ellis, Stanford University and the German Archaeological Institute supported Zangger’s efforts from 1984 to 1988.

Cranks, however, are guilty of far greater crimes: they take the description of an island outside of the pillar of Hercules even more loosely. For them, it is carte blanche to place Atlantis nearly anywhere on the surface of the planet. Rand Flem-Ath correlates Atlantis with Antarctica. John M. Allen, in his book Atlantis: The Andes Solution, places Atlantis in modern-day Bolivia, or, more specifically, a submerged volcanic island in Lake Poopo on the Bolivian altiplano. For more information on this theory, see www.geocities.com/webatlantis/.

To correlate Atlantis with a lost civilization-real or imagined-anywhere other than the Atlantic Ocean requires ignoring a key part of Plato’s description:

[25d] and one grievous day and night befell them, when the whole body of your warriors was swallowed up by the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner was swallowed up by the sea and vanished; wherefore also the ocean at that spot has now become impassable and unsearchable, being blocked up by the shoal mud which the island created as it settled down (Benjamin Jowett translation).

Neither Antarctica nor Lake Poopo are impassable muddy shoals in the Atlantic Ocean.

The power of any possible proof that Atlantis existed depends on sticking to definitions, especially Plato’s. He is clear about the Atlantis he is talking about, and until a large submerged island is found in the Atlantic with ruins of an ancient seafaring civilization that existed 11,000 years ago, the skeptic can comfortably assume that Atlantis never existed.

Plato’s Purpose in Writing the Atlantis Myth

Plato’s dialogues expound his philosophy and have some peculiar features. One of these features is the use of extraordinary tales asserted as truth in order to vividly express his ideas. Towards the end of the Gorgias, for example, Socrates retells a story of the Isles of the Blessed and Tartarus (Greek versions of Heaven and Hell), and prefaces it thus: “Listen, then, as story-tellers say, to a very pretty tale, which I dare say that you may be disposed to regard as a fable only, but which, as I believe, is a true tale, for I mean to speak the truth” (Benjamin Jowett translation).

At the end of the Republic, Socrates tells the story of Er, who, severely wounded in battle, has a near-death experience. He comes to, finding himself on a funeral pyre (fortunately unlit). “And thus, Glaucon, the tale has been saved and has not perished, and will save us if we are obedient to the word spoken; and we shall pass safely over the river of Forgetfulness and our soul will not be defiled” (Jowett). Plato uses the device of the “true” amazing tale in other dialogues, including the Meno and Laws. The Timaeus, as mentioned above, is the sequel to the Republic-Plato’s major dialogue on the nature of the ideal society and its governance. In laying out the practices of forming the ideal state and citizenry, Plato discusses the tools to be employed in education of the youth. One tool is the use of totally fabricated stories, presented to the youth as true history.

[Republic 376] In this education, you would include stories, would you not? These are of two kinds, true stories and fiction. Our education must use both and start with fiction. . . . And the first step, as you know, is always what matters most, particularly when we are dealing with those who are young and tender. That is the time when they are easily moulded and when any impression we choose to make leaves a permanent mark (Desmond Lee translation).

Later, Plato writes, prefacing the “Myth of Blood and Soil,”

[Republic: 414 b-c] “Now I wonder if we could contrive one of those convenient stories we were talking about a few minutes ago,” I asked. “Some magnificent myth that would in itself carry conviction to our whole community, including, if possible the Guardians themselves. . . . Nothing new-a fairy story like those the poets tell and have persuaded people to believe about the sort of thing that often happened ‘once upon a time,’ but never does now and is not likely to: indeed it would need a lot of persuasion to get people to believe it” (Desmond Lee translation).

As the modern philosopher Karl Popper notes in the first volume of his two-part series The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton, 1962), Plato sees legends about the origins of a people, moral fortitude, and great achievements as socially useful indoctrination tools-noble lies.

Critias, the character in the Timaeus who tells the story of Atlantis to Socrates and his guests, is special for many reasons. First, he is the great uncle of Plato. He was also one of the Thirty Tyrants-the authoritarian regime that took over Athens after the Peloponnesian War. He was anti-democratic and pro-Spartan. The ideal society outlined in Plato’s Republic is by no coincidence both anti-democratic and remarkably like the society of Sparta. Critias was also a poet of some note and professed the doctrine of the "noble lie” shared by Plato in the Republic.

According to Popper, he “was the first to glorify propaganda lies, whose invention he described in forceful verses eulogizing the wise and cunning man who fabricated religion . . .” (1962, p. 142).

As propaganda, the Atlantis myth is more about Athens than a sunken civilization. The tale places Athens’s history deep into the past, making the Athenians a people sprung from the soil, and portrays its citizens in a heroic battle against the menacing power of Atlantean foes. In the Timaeus, Critias answers Socrates request to “accurately describe my city [Athens] fighting a war worthy of her":

[25c] [Athens] in gallantry and all warlike arts, and acting partly as leader of the Greeks, and partly standing alone by itself when deserted by all others, after encountering the deadliest perils, it defeated the invaders and reared a trophy; whereby it saved from slavery such as were not as yet enslaved, and all the rest of us who dwell within the bounds of Heracles it ungrudgingly set free (Benjamin Jowett translation).

The context of the festival during which Critias hears the story from his grandfather is telling, as I mentioned above. The feast of Apatouria involves the induction of infants, youth and wives into the phratry, or clan of families. This is where the society inducts its next generation into the fold-exactly the context where the purpose for education through fictions presented as fact is laid out in the Republic. Also notable is the fact that this is a contest in epic poetry recital. Epic poetry was the classic medium in Greek society for tales of heroic men of yore.

There is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that Atlantis represented any real place at any time. Where the story contains descriptions or events that resemble historic happenings, it only does so to the degree that any piece of fiction relies on experiences of reality. All of the evidence points to the story being one of Plato’s noble lies: useful fictions used to make a point, not to refer to the past.

Atlantis continues to captivate people’s imaginations because it offers the hope that lost ideals or some untapped human potential will someday be uncovered, not the masonry blocks of a dead civilization. Scrying for crumbled roads in Bimini or poring over the outline of some terra incognita on a forged map ignore the real Atlantis, the undiscovered country of human ideals.

Journalist Russ Kent in the January 27, 2001 edition of the News-Journal (Mansfield, Ohio) reports that on Thursday evening, January 25, Marion resident Mike Ulery saw “a bright light in the sky, moving east to west.” He went to his garage to get a pair of binoculars for a closer look. A view of the object magnified convinced him that it was not an aircraft. Ulery called his wife Yolonda outside to witness the unidentified object, which she described as a steady, “bright, white light moving across the sky.”

Ulery commandeered his wife’s car and hotly pursued the object for a few minutes up to the local high school. Low on gas, he had to turn around but insisted that he would have “followed it all the way to Cleveland to find out what it was.”

The mysterious object intrigued local law enforcement as well. Kent writes: “A Marion County Sheriff’s Department deputy submitted a similar report at 8:57 p.m. He said he saw a bright light in the sky and didn’t know what it was. The deputy followed the craft for about ten minutes before it disappeared in the sky above Hardin County.”

Was it aliens? A top-secret Skunk Works super-weapon? A promotional stunt by Jonathan Frakes’s agent? Russ Kent followed up on a more mundane possibility at the Perkins Observatory in Delaware, Ohio.

In the Sunday, January 28, News-Journal, Kent quotes observatory director Tom Burns: “Every time Venus is this close to Earth we get calls like this. . . . It’s Venus and it’s not actually moving across the sky.” Burns had been fielding calls in recent weeks about an unidentified object moving east to west between the hours of 8 and 9 p.m. “If people look up at that thing for long enough, it does appear that it’s moving. . . . Actually it is, but not enough so that anyone can notice.”

So the mystery object wasn’t from Venus it was Venus-one of the brightest celestial objects in the night sky: my condolences to Art Bell and Stanton Friedman.

If Briefs readers have the urge to contact Russ Kent to thank him for a fine job of terrestrial reporting, they can contact him by mail at: Russ Kent, News-Journal, 70 W. Fourth St., P.O. Box 25, Mansfield, OH 44901.