The Atlantis Blueprint by Colin Wilson Read Free Book Online Page B

who took it seriously, for it sounds like the raw material of a novel by H. Rider Haggard or Jules Verne:
    The evidence presented by ancient maps appears to suggest the existence in remote times, before the rise of any known cultures, of a true civilisation, of an advanced kind, which either was localised in one area but had worldwide commerce, or was, in a real sense, a
worldwide
culture. This culture, at least in some respects, was more advanced than the civilisations of Greece and Rome. In geodesy, nautical science, and mapmaking, it was more advanced than any known culture before the 18th centuryof the Christian era. It was only in the 18th century that we first developed a practical means of finding longitude. It was in the 18th century that we first accurately measured the circumference of the earth. Not until the 19th century did we begin to send out ships for exploration into the Arctic or Antarctic Seas and only then did we begin the exploration of the bottom of the Atlantic. These maps indicate that some ancient people did all these things. 21
    Asking how a great civilisation can vanish without trace, Hapgood enunciated a basic principle of exploration:
that we find what we look for.
The portolans had been known for centuries. The Piri Reis map, discovered in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul in 1929, had been discussed in the Library of Congress as early as the 1930s, before interest suddenly revived in 1956. But no one had seen its significance – or, if anyone saw it, was courageous enough to raise the questions that Hapgood asked.
    Then why did the publication of
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings
not cause a major academic controversy in 1966? The answer must be, partly, that academia was already a little suspicious of Hapgood. In 1958, when
Earth’s Shifting Crust
finally appeared in print, it was accepted for abridgement by one of America’s most popular weeklies,
The Saturday Evening Post,
which alone was enough to arouse the irritation – and envy – of academics. In his foreword to the later edition,
The Path of the Pole,
in 1970, the geologist F. N. Earll tells how, after reading this abridgement, he looked for reviews in technical and academic journals but found none. When the reaction finally came, says Earll, it ‘could hardly be described as rational – hysterical would be a better description’. One academic declared indignantly that Hapgood was not a geologist, while another cited an authority who disagreed with the authorities Hapgood quoted and used that as a basis for condemning the whole book. In short, Hapgoodwas treated with fury and contempt for daring to write about geology.
    As a result, none of these professors were going to enter into discussion of a book that claimed to have discovered evidence for a civilisation predating anything known to history. It was easier to ignore Hapgood.
    There was another reason that no one was prepared to take Hapgood seriously. In 1960, a book called
Le Matin des Magiciens,
by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, broke all bestseller records in France, and was translated into dozens of languages. Pauwels was a journalist, while Bergier was a physicist who was also interested in alchemy. Their book was a flamboyant and dazzling hotchpotch of alchemy, archaeology, magic, hermeticism and literary speculation, with chapters on Lovecraft, the Great Pyramid, Gurdjieff and Nazi occultism. One of its major exhibits was the Piri Reis map, among other portolans. ‘Had they been traced,’ asked the authors, ‘from observations made on board a flying machine or space vessel of some kind? Notes taken by visitors from Beyond?’ As
The Morning of the Magicians
made its triumphal progress all over the world, the Piri Reis map became more widely associated with evidence for ‘ancient astronauts’. 22 Hapgood, who had spent ten years working on
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings,
could hardly have had worse luck.
    In 1966, a Swiss hotel manager named Erich von Däniken, whose