Lore 268: Lost Empire

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And baking the surprise birthday cake for Lou.

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In 1920s, New England, Island Park was the place to be.

This permanent carnival was perched on a spot of land in the middle of the Connecticut River, right on the border between Brattleboro, Vermont, and Hinsdale, New Hampshire.

And this place was like something out of a dream.

There was a dance hall and a big bandstand, an arcade complete with zinging ping-pong machines and mutoscopes and automata that would dance for a coin.

There was a baseball diamond and a wrestling ring, and a giant pavilion aflutter with bright silk flags.

Whenever a big act came through New England, it always stopped at Island Park.

Miss America came to visit, and even President William Howard Taft.

The entire Barnum and Bailey circus piled onto the island and children lined the banks to watch elephants drinking right out of the river.

Oh, and given that the island was technically owned by New Hampshire, a wet state during Prohibition, while Vermont was dry, Vermonters loved to canoe out to Island Park, legally party the night away, and then canoe dizzily home.

In short, Island Park was pure magic.

But as they say, all good things must come to an end.

In the winter of 1927, a great ice storm came along.

The river rose and demolished the carnival.

Island Park, once a glittering fantasy, was swallowed by the waters.

And that's where its final remains are today, a sunken carnival hidden beneath the current in a small New England town.

There is something endlessly enticing about buried lands, the marvel and horror of an entire world blinking out in an instant, and the haunting subterranean ghosts that remain.

That's what draws us to the Titanic and Pompeii, and yes, Island Park.

But of course, there is no sunken wonder that has captured the imagination more than the lost city of Atlantis.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore.

Before the treasure hunters, before the countless movies and books, before the bold explorers and the schoolyard games, there was one single legend that started it all.

Well, maybe legend is the wrong word.

You see, the story of Atlantis didn't arise out of whispered rumors and oral tradition the way that typical folklore would.

No, it was authored by an individual guy, a guy that you may have heard of, in fact.

His name was Plato.

It turns out the legend of Atlantis first appeared in just two excerpts from Plato's writings and every single piece of Atlantean lore that came after was based on these primary texts and these texts alone.

Plato depicted a conversation between four characters, Socrates, Timaeus, Hermocrates, and Critias.

Now, maybe the conversation was fictional, or maybe it was something that Plato had indeed overheard.

But regardless, partway through the chat, Critias breaks out into a monologue.

He's got a story, you see, and he thinks that the fellows around him might be interested in it.

Plato wrote that Critias had heard from an Athenian, who had heard from a priest, who had heard from an Egyptian, that long, long ago, 9,000 years prior to the writing of this document, there used to be a massive island in front of the Strait of Gibraltar.

Quite the game of telephone, I know.

This island, Critias explained, was huge, as in larger than Africa and Asia combined.

Now, the island would eventually boast a civilization unlike anything the world had ever seen.

which probably had a little something to do with the fact that Poseidon made it his pet project.

First, the sea god carved an ornate palace right into the mountain that sat at the island's center.

Then he protected this palace by gouging not one but three moats around it, deep into the earth.

And then finally, he gave it all to his ten sons to rule.

And he named the empire after the oldest of these sons, Atlas.

Thus the nation of Atlantis was born.

And of course, the population grew.

As it did, the Atlanteans began to build bridges and canals, towers, and waterways.

They built walls to line each of the three moats, one of redstone and coated in brass, the next of white stone coated in tin, and the last made from black stone and coated in the coppery metal or a calcum, all mined, of course, from Atlantis' own rich quarries.

But the land wasn't only rich in precious metals and stones.

It also boasted lumber, wild game, spices, herbs, fruits, and countless other lavish resources.

As time went on, citadels and opulent temples arose too.

More palaces as well.

Atlantis had quickly become the most technologically advanced and prosperous and powerful civilization in the world.

And yet, even with all the riches there were, the Atlanteans wanted more.

They grew greedy and ravenous and soon their empire began to spread and spread and spread.

They invaded and enslaved nation after nation until Atlantis' power controlled everything from Egypt to Tuscany and beyond.

This might have continued like this forever too, if they hadn't made one fatal mistake.

They went to war with athens a favorite city of the gods by invading athens it was clear that atlantis had gotten a little too big for its britches so the gods banded together and ensured that against all odds athens would defeat the atlanteans then to punish them for their hubris the island was struck by a terrible earthquake and sunken forever into the sea and that's well it that's the story plato gives us you'll notice that there's nothing about the people of atlantis somehow surviving and starting an unlikely underwater city, despite what Aquaman comics and sea monkey ads would have you believe.

That was never part of the deal.

But of course, all this leaves us with one burning question.

Is any of it true?

Well, most scholars from ancient times all the way up to the present have interpreted Plato's writings on Atlantis to be strictly allegorical.

It's a morality tale, a cautionary fable to warn against avarice and greed, and to extol the many virtues of Plato's own hometown, Athens.

And I'll be honest, that seems most likely.

After all, even Plato's own student, Aristotle, insisted that Plato had invented the legend to prove a philosophical point.

Others, though, had a different opinion.

Some believe that Plato was indeed describing an actual geographical place from history, and a real historical series of events.

Maybe it was based on the Minoan civilization, or maybe the earthquake was actually the eruption of Thera in Santorini.

Heck, maybe the war between the Athenians and the Atlanteans was actually based on the Trojan War.

Or maybe, just maybe, Atlantis was right under our noses.

All along.

When I say the words field trip, it probably conjures memories of art galleries, historical sites, maybe even the zoo.

What probably doesn't spring to mind is following your frenzied, sleepless teacher into an ancient burial site to measure a bunch of human skeletons.

But then again, you probably weren't a student of Professor Olaf Rudbeck.

Olaf Rudbeck was born in Sweden in the year 1630, and he was not a fool.

In fact, he was the furthest thing from it.

An avid scholar, he enrolled in Sweden's finest university, the University of Uppsala, at the age of 18, where he studied everything from botany to anatomy and physiology.

When he was only 20 years old, he kind of discovered the lymphatic system and was the first to prove that the liver wasn't the organ responsible for forming blood.

You know, no big deal, right?

By the time he was 30, he'd become a professor, and by 31, he was appointed rector of the whole university.

In short, this was a brilliant, brilliant guy.

But all that intelligence didn't stop him from becoming absolutely cuckoo bananas obsessed with Atlantis.

It all started when a colleague asked him to draw a few maps of ancient Sweden to accompany an edition of an old Norse saga, because Rudbeck of course was a talented cartographer too, right?

As he poured over this book of Norse folklore, he was startled to find remarkable parallels between the Nordic tales and those he remembered from Greek mythology.

For example, the saga described an ancient Swedish kingdom called Glittering Plains, which sounded a heck of a lot like the Greeks' Elysian fields.

Then there was the nearby home of the giants who fought Odin and the other gods versus a similar place in Greek mythology full of giant creatures who fought against Zeus.

And there was so much more.

Story after story, name after name.

Everything just seemed to line up.

It couldn't be a coincidence.

What if, Rudbeck wondered, all those mysterious distant lands described in the ancient tales had actually been Sweden all along?

And so he set out to prove it.

But first he would need to figure out just how old Swedish civilization was to see if the timing could even line up with the Greeks.

Books wouldn't cut it either.

This time he would need to do the digging himself, literally.

Rudbick began sneaking out to an ancient burial ground in Old Uppsala and digging down into the graves.

He noticed that the soil changed the deeper he got and figured out that he could tell how old something was by measuring what layer of soil it was in.

Now, if you happen to be a geologist, you may be thinking, that's just stratigraphy, a common method that geologists use for dating today.

And you're right, it is.

Except for the fact that Rudbeck came up with this hundreds of years before stratigraphy was supposedly invented.

I'm telling you, this guy was smart, but he was also a little overzealous.

You see, Rudbeck conducted not one, not two, but 16,000 tests to see how old the burial mounds were.

And what he discovered was staggering.

They weren't just old.

Rudbeck found that Swedish civilization stretched back to 2300 BC, a good 1,000 years before the Trojan War.

Swedish civilization easily could have intersected with ancient Greece.

From then on, he was consumed.

He started obsessively interviewing Swedish peasants, trying to find traces of Greek connections in their folk traditions.

He dragged his students back to the burial mounds to help him measure skeletons and more soil, completely neglecting the fact that he was supposed to be teaching them medicine.

For a real sense of Rudbeck's hardcore miss-frizzle energy, at one point he became convinced that Jason and the Argonauts was not only real, but that they had sailed to, you guessed it, Sweden.

Now, Sweden is not a straight shot from the Mediterranean, which meant that Jason and company would have also had to drag their boat over land aways.

And by aways, I mean 45 miles.

So to prove that it was possible, Rudbeck recruited a team of volunteers, acquired a 50-foot yacht, and successfully hauled the thing 45 miles by hand.

There was nothing that Rudbeck wouldn't do to prove his belief that Sweden was the oldest, most advanced civilization on Earth.

And he was saving his wildest claim for last, that his beloved Sweden was none other than the lost nation of Atlantis.

Now, it may sound absurd, I know, but bear with me here because his arguments are actually pretty compelling.

Atlantis was named for its king, Atlas, right?

Well, there was an old Norse king named Aten.

Plato's Atlantis was 5,000 stadia long, stadia being an ancient Greek unit of measurement, just like Sweden in Rudbeck's estimation.

Plato also wrote of two rivers and a mountain near the capital.

Rudbeck again dragged his now thoroughly overwhelmed students out on countless surveying trips, only to discover a similar mountain and rivers.

In Old Uppsala, he unearthed artifacts and remnants of what he believed to be the Atlanteans' racetrack and pagan temple.

There was no doubt in Rudbeck's mind, he was living on the famous sunken empire.

Now, I know what you're thinking.

Sweden isn't underwater.

Well, don't worry, Rudbeck had an explanation for that too.

He argued that when Plato had mentioned Atlantis sinking into the sea, he meant it figuratively, that the Atlantean culture sank into obscurity, not the landmass.

Convenient, I know.

The thing is, to the Swedes of his time, Rudbeck was a star.

The Swedish Empire was booming, nationalism was at an all-time high, European enlightenment was on the horizon, and here here was a learned man proving Swedish superiority once and for all.

Rudbeck became an admired figure at court, a popular guest in salons and cafes, and was proclaimed the Oracle of the North.

He died peacefully in 1702, a celebrated historian.

And it's probably a good thing that he didn't survive another 20 years.

Because alas, just like his beloved Atlantis, Rudbeck's reputation was destined to sink.

By 1721, Sweden had been crushed in the Great Northern War.

Its empire had fallen, its territory seized by other more powerful nations.

Sweden would never be a military power again.

Its patriotic fervor flattened.

And suddenly, Rudbeck's claims of Swedish dominance and Atlantean heritage seemed downright laughable.

By the 18th century, his work was viewed as little more than a joke.

Even so, it's impossible to overlook what Rudbeck got right.

He proved the interconnectedness of languages.

He was a pioneer of the scientific method and developed archaeological techniques that researchers still rely on today.

He may have been discredited and Atlantis forgotten along with him, but Rudbeck laid the groundwork for others to follow in his footsteps.

And follow is exactly what they did.

Welcome to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, 1883.

Parades filled the streets, the revelers dressed in scaled fish-like armor.

Sub-aquatic gardens drip from great-wheeled floats, while invitations to grand fates fall like confetti, depicting long-haired maidens reclining on the backs of sea monsters, and Poseidon driving a quartet of frothing stallions into the waves.

Everything is oceanic and lush.

The theme of that year's Mardi Gras?

Why, that would be Atlantis.

But it wasn't just the big easy.

No, after centuries of obscurity, Atlantis had suddenly boomed again into a full-on cultural craze.

And it was all thanks to Ignatius Donnelly.

Like Olaf Rudbeck, Ignatius was a character, to say the least.

I think it's safe to say that anyone who becomes deeply obsessed with Atlantis probably would be.

But unlike Rudbeck, Ignatius Donnelly was not a Swede.

He wasn't even European.

No, Donnelly was from Pennsylvania.

In his 20s, he moved to Minnesota where he briefly tried to start a utopian commune.

But when that didn't work out, he decided the next best thing would be to run for office.

At the age of 29, he was elected lieutenant governor of Minnesota and eventually made it all the way to Congress.

But politics weren't Donnelly's real passion.

No, he was more interested in Atlantis.

Was he a trained historian?

Nope.

Did he have an education in science?

Alas, no.

But that didn't stop him from writing what would become the single most important text on Atlantis since, well, Plato himself.

It was called Atlantis, the Anti-Diluvian World.

And okay, I'm just going to give you a rundown here of some of the claims this book makes because, friends, it is a doozy.

To start, yes, Atlantis was real.

But not only that, Donnelly claimed that this was actually where all of human civilization had begun.

He believed that the Garden of Eden, the Elysian Fields, the Norse Asgard, all those those legendary places were actually just descriptions from Atlantis, the birthplace of humanity.

And the many stories of gods and goddesses from mythology were simply the real exploits of early Atlantean kings and queens, bloated by time and folklore.

But that wasn't all.

Donnelly also insisted all European alphabets were derived from the alphabet of Atlantis.

He claimed Egyptian and Peruvian sun worship was a holdover from Atlantean religion.

He even thought that Atlantis' technology started the Bronze Age and that they were also the first people to work with iron.

In other words, just about every single element of human civilization could be traced back to Atlantis.

And the book also claimed that the sinking was literally real.

In fact, the great flood in the Bible, you know, the one that wiped out everyone but Noah's Ark?

Well, Donnelly wrote that this was actually a description of the sinking of Atlantis.

And let me tell you, people ate this stuff up.

Atlantis, the antediluvian world, was a massive hit when it came out in 1882.

It received seven printings in its first year alone.

There was the Mardi Gras theme in its honor.

The British prime minister at the time, William Gladstone, even wrote to Donnelly saying, I may not be able to accept all your propositions, but I am much disposed to believe in an Atlantis.

Atlanta Mania was all the rage.

At least it was until Donnelly's second book came out.

The next year, he followed his breakout hit with a book called Ragnarok, The Age of Fire and Gravel, a 450-page tome that he wrote in just seven weeks.

There, he asserted that a giant comet had destroyed Atlantis, as well as scattered sand and gravel over the entire planet.

Next came a third book, a 1,000-page doorstopper frenetically declaring that not only had Francis Bacon written all of Shakespeare's plays, but had hidden little cryptograms throughout them hinting at his identity, like the Easter eggs in a Taylor Swift album.

Readers were not impressed.

Scientists rejected him as a fraud, reviewers absolutely panned him.

The people decided that Ignatius Donnelly was a snake oil-selling charlatan.

And that was that.

All the faith and fandom he had garnered with his Atlantis book was gone.

But this time was different from when Rudbeck was discredited.

You see, after Rudbeck's disgrace, it wasn't only the man who was forgotten, but Atlantis as a concept plummeted into obscurity as well.

But with Donnelly, well, just because Ignatius Donnelly had fallen out of fashion, it didn't mean that Atlantis had as well.

No, Atlantis remained firmly lodged in the public consciousness.

Pop culture loved the murky, mysterious lost nation and continues to love it to this day.

It's been referenced in everything from Doctor Who and Yu-Gi-Oh!

to the Narnia books and the 90s television series Flipper.

The musician Donovan, best known for his song Jennifer Juniper, released a top 10 charting song in 1968 called Atlantis.

There's even a Disney movie called Atlantis the Lost Empire about a group of explorers who find the Atlantean civilization still thriving deep underwater.

Oh, and of course, our favorite supernatural conspiracy theorist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle also got on board, writing a short novel on the place called The Marrakot Deep.

Atlantis, it seems, had been sunken long enough.

The Lost Empire had risen, and it was here to stay.

There are few mysteries that capture the imagination quite as strongly as Atlantis.

What is it about that watery world that draws us in?

Why are we so curious to know what may or may not have happened to an island over 10,000 years ago?

At the end of the day, the most important thing about a story is rarely the story itself, it's the people who tell it.

And I have a suspicion that the answer might lie right there with the storytellers, Olaf Rudbeck and Ignatius Donnelly.

Like the Atlanteans themselves, these two men lived in booming empires of their own.

Rudbeck Sweden was on top of the world with its military might.

Donnelly was writing in a post-Civil War America.

Both had witnessed the violent imperial power of their countries firsthand.

And here was a story about an empire not so very unlike their own, wiped out in the blink of an eye.

What if their obsession with Atlantis wasn't about Atlantis at all?

What if it was about proving that their empires were different?

A desperate bid to assure that the same fate wouldn't happen to them.

And really, wasn't Plato doing exactly the same thing?

He wrote that very first story as a lesson on hubris, sure, but the real hero of that scene was Athens, his own beloved, powerful homeland.

Athens, Sweden, America.

They were special, these men insisted.

They were like Atlantis, but better.

In some ways for them, Atlantis was a sort of sacrifice.

It had to sink for other empires to float.

The historical consensus today is that it really was just that, a story.

But Atlantis truthers still won't quit.

People have claimed to find Atlantis in the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and even deep in the Sahara Desert.

But there's one prominent theory that places Atlantis far closer than you may have thought.

You see, in the late 15th century, a certain discovery took place.

Europe became aware of a massive continent on the other side of the Atlantic.

This new world was a massive place with a history, culture, and citizens all its own.

To many, there could be only one explanation: the lost empire of Atlantis was none other than North America.

I hope you enjoyed today's exploration of one of the world's oldest folktales, complete with the real people and weird drama that those stories have inspired.

It might not necessarily be creepy per se, but it's a story that becomes something bigger and more powerful within the right context.

Atlantis might might be the most famous sunken civilization, but it isn't the only one.

And today, I have one last story for you about a mysterious drowned people.

Oh, and lemurs.

Lots and lots of lemurs.

Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.

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English zoologist Philip Sclater was flummoxed, and it was all the lemur's fault.

These marble-eyed, striped-tailed primates had him absolutely shaken, and not just because of how freaky they looked.

You see, Sclater had noticed that lemur fossils had been found in both Madagascar and India.

Despite the fact that Madagascar is an island separated from India by thousands of miles of ocean, lemurs certainly can't swim that far, and there's no way the exact same animal coincidentally evolved in both places.

So, how the heck had the lemurs traveled from one place to the other?

Well, in 1864, Philip Sclater finally came to a conclusion.

The two landmasses must have once been connected by a land bridge, which had since sunk into the Indian Ocean.

Naturally, he named this lost continent Lemuria.

And it sounds like a reasonable enough theory, right?

Well, just wait, because this is about to snowball wildly out of control.

His idea took off, by which I mean someone else set a fuse to the thing and it exploded into pure chaos.

First, a German biologist named Ernst Haeckel proposed that Lemuria was not only an intercontinental primate highway, but also the birthplace of all mankind.

And from there, the theories went berserk.

For one, much like Atlantis, Lemuria's exact location became up for debate, despite the fact that the whole point of Sclater's original theory was location-based.

And then there was the cult stuff.

You see, in 1936, a gold prospector/slash-homeopathic doctor named Robert D.

Steele founded what he called the Lemurian Fellowship.

Allegedly, he had received, and I quote, information relating to the great work from the Elder Brothers, instilling Steele with knowledge of the Lemurian philosophy.

What does that mean?

Well, I couldn't tell you, but Steele sure could.

He distilled this information into a 436-page book.

And the book was convincing enough that the Lemurian Fellowship bought its own land in Southern California, where by the 1970s they had established a 10,000-square-foot headquarters with hundreds of members worldwide.

The Lemurian philosophy focuses their teachings on reincarnation, karma, Christ, and the number of egos in existence, which they insisted was specifically 13 million for what it's worth.

And you might be wondering, how does this relate to a geography theory about a land bridge and lemurs?

Well, you'll have to ask them for yourself, which you can.

The fellowship still exists to this day, offering courses in Lemurian philosophy and also selling rather nice handmade wooden music stands online.

Weird, I know.

Now, believers in Lemuria as a continent is one thing, but what about the actual Lemurians?

After all, if lemurs lived there, surely someone or something else had too.

Helena Blavatsky, founder of the esoteric religion Theosophy, claimed that the Lemurian people were ape-like, hermaphroditic, egg-laying creatures.

Author William Scott Elliott described them as 15 feet tall, brown-skinned, flat-faced beings with bird-like sideways vision.

Oh, and they also laid eggs, plus interbred with animals, hatching an ape-like race that eventually evolved into modern humans.

And just like with Atlantis, some people believe that some of these Lemurians must have survived their homeland sinking and have walked among humanity ever since, serving as shamans and priests.

Either that or they just transformed into dolphins and mermaids, both of which are great options, but the third option takes the cake that the Lemurians are actually hiding inside Mount Shasta.

Many Lemurian believers claim that refugees from the sunken land built a great crystalline city named Talos deep within the California mountain, a city populated entirely by Lemurians.

Like anyone though, they occasionally want to go on vacation and are said to wander out into northern California.

In the 1930s and 40s, multiple witnesses claimed to have seen them strolling about town.

They described the Lemurians as noble-looking men with spotless white robes.

Allegedly, the Lemurians like to pop into local shops and buy massive bulk quantities of sulfur, salt, and lard, paying with gold nuggets worth more than the items themselves.

And just like in any good story, when the shop owners turned around to give them their change, these visitors would simply vanish into thin air.

Also, it seems that the Lemurians had a philanthropic side too.

According to an LA Times article from 1932, they occasionally donated gold nuggets to charity, including the Red Cross during World War I and a fund for Japanese earthquake survivors.

By the way, Mount Shasta isn't just home to the Lemurians.

It's also said to be frequented by lizard people, Bigfoot, and an unusual number of UFOs.

Suffice to say, Philip Sclater's straightforward theory about a land bridge truly took on a life of its own.

And as it so happens, even that hypothesis was disproven about a century later with the discovery of plate tectonics.

It turns out that Madagascar and India had been part of the same supercontinent, before drifting apart 70 million years ago, separating the poor lemurs in the process.

So, lemuria wasn't real.

And that's a bit of a buzzkill, I know.

But it turns out the strangest and spookiest part of the story might actually be the lemurs themselves.

Lemurs, you see, were actually named after the ancient Roman lemmeres.

But lemurs were not primates.

No, they were ghosts.

Apparently, in ancient Rome, if you failed to bury your dead, they could turn into a lemarae.

The restless spirits were grotesque and terrifying and punished their neglectful family members by haunting them and even injuring them.

To placate these threats, Rome began hosting a religious festival in their honor, spanning three nights in May.

On these nights, the father of the household would rise at midnight and cast black beans behind him for the lemarais to snack on.

If this didn't satisfy them and the lemarais attacked anyway, a good bang on a copper pot would send them packing.

So, hey, the next time you visit the primate room at the local zoo, consider bringing a pocket full of black beans.

You know, just to be safe.

This episode of Lore was produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with writing by Jenna Rose Nethercott, research by Sam Alberty and Cassandra de Alba, and music by Chad Lawson.

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There's the book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television adaptation on Amazon.

Information about all of that and more is available over at lorepodcast.com.

And you can also follow this show on YouTube, threads, Instagram, and Facebook.

Just search for lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button.

And when you do, say hi.

I like it when people say hi.

And as always, thanks for listening.

It's that time of year again, back to school season.

And Instacart knows that the only thing harder than getting back into the swing of things is getting all the back-to-school supplies, snacks, and essentials you need.

So here's your reminder to make your life a little easier this season.

Shop favorites from Staples, Best Buy, and Costco all delivered through Instacart so that you can get some time back and do whatever it is that you need to get your life back on track.

Instacart, we're here.

If you thought goldenly breaded McDonald's chicken couldn't get more golden, think golden because new sweet and smoky special edition gold sauce is here.

Made for your chicken favorites.

I participated in McDonald's for a limited time.