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

ruinous night being rove over those wretches.

Few would disagree that the “Helios [that] lights on those men at morning, when he climbs the sky of stars” refers to the Sun. Helios was literally the Greek word for “sun,” with the “flaming eye” one of its common representations. The Greek root helio- is seen in our language, too, in the heliocentric theory, which places the sun at the center of our solar system, and helium, the element named after its discovery on the sun. So when the Odyssey notes that “Never the flaming eye of Helios lights on those men,” Rudbeck believed that the poet’s words needed very little commentary. This was not fantasy, but rather a clear description of actual phenomena that take place in the far north, above the Arctic Circle.

For three long months at that high latitude, Sweden indeed looked like what Homer called the “sunless Underworld.” Scandinavians living near and around the Arctic have long adjusted to the harsh environment. As Rudbeck saw it, they skated and skied, rode sleighs and pulled sledges, and even held markets on the thick winter ice. Cold weather provided natural refrigeration that kept fish fresh for four, five, and sometimes six months with no need of salt. The same ice also created spectacular vistas, hanging down from roofs of houses and heated cabins “like tallow candles or lances, with different colors and in various positions, as though the pipes of an organ were placed vertically next to the walls.”

As for the “mist and cloud” predominating at the entrance to the Underworld, this was another well-known feature of Rudbeck’s far northern location. Frost, snow, and mist created a dreadful concoction that inspired Homer’s Hades, or what he called “the realm and region of the Men of the Winter.” Pools and lakes emerged on the high ground, and the cold weather in turn hardened them into ice. When additional water came from nearby caves and channels, the traveler saw “the waters throw up a steamy mist into the heights and in their descent form inverted pyramids of ice at the sea.”

One of the big objections to Rudbeck’s emerging theory of Hades was of course the fact that classical mythology presented the Underworld as the abode of the dead. But under the sway of his imagination, Rudbeck cast this problem aside without much ado. Indeed, his reading of the ancient myths made him question that part of the tale. As Odysseus himself showed, the Underworld was not literally a home of the dead. Not only did he and his crew sail there, but, even more remarkably, they returned! Many other ancient heroes sailed to the Underworld— Hercules, Perseus, Theseus, Orpheus, and so on—and they, too, returned from the voyage. With so many arrivals and departures, the halls of Hades did not exist in the classical imagination as only a place for departed souls.

In fact, Rudbeck believed that Homer had made it absolutely clear that the kingdom of the Underworld was located not only aboveground, but also in the far north. When Odysseus arrived at the abyss, for instance, some of the shades showed surprise at how far he had traveled. But it was not a surprise, as Odysseus’s guide, the beautiful witch Circe, had given him unmistakable sailing instructions for reaching this kingdom at the world’s end:

Odysseus, master of land ways and sea ways,

feel no dismay because you lack a pilot;

only set your mast and haul your canvas

to the fresh blowing North.

Then she added, just “sit down and steer, and hold the wind.”

What clearer words, Rudbeck thought, on the need to sail north to reach the Underworld, “the gloom at the world’s end.” There Homer’s “region of winter” seemed to correspond well with the deep, dark winters known to prevail in the Arctic. The poet had also given another possible name for “the Men of the Winter”: the Cimmerii, or Cimmerians. This name survives in many modern translations of the Odyssey. To Rudbeck, though, the name raised even more questions, for if you pull out a map of the north, you will find this name of the Cimmerii, remarkably, almost verbatim.

More exactly the name was Kimmi or Kimmerii, and it was found all over the north. There was a region called Kimme-Lapmarck, located on a peninsula called Kimmer- nas. There was also the Kemi River, which flowed through northern Finland, not to mention Kimmi town and Nort- Kimm and Kimmi marsh, bordering on the White Sea. So many other examples were also close at hand. By Rudbeck’s derivation, the Kimmi or Kimmerii drew their name literally from the Old Swedish for “darkness”—no surprise, as Homer’s Cimmerii were said to live in perpetual darkness somewhere near the entrance to the Underworld.

But why had the ancient mariner pointed his rudder north? Because he needed to know the future, and according to Rudbeck, there was no better place to consult seers, soothsayers, and sorcerers than northern Sweden.

Indeed, many branches of fortune-telling and superstition thrived particularly well in the small villages around the Arctic Circle. Some of the dwellers excelled in predicting the future, reading everything from the flights of birds to the movements of vapors rising from the distant mountains. Some knew spells to enchant victims, and to summon the good, favorable winds for distressed ship captains. There were others who claimed to be adept in shape-changing, and there were even some who could “put out the stars, melt the mountains, solidify springs,” and perform striking feats of wind magic. With its soothsayers and magicians, the northernmost lands were still, as one observer put it, “as learned in witchcraft as if it had had Zoroaster the Persian for its instructor in this damnable science.”

On his visit to Sweden, Magalotti had also noted how deeply rooted witchcraft was during the 1670s: “Never does one hear anything else spoken about in the northern provinces, Boshuslan, Dalarne, and Lappland, than witchcraft.”

There was not enough ink and paper, Rudbeck said, to record all the stories about this art of magic, prophecy, and dream interpretation that flourished in the bubbling witches’ pot he was finding in the far north. Most spectacularly, Rudbeck believed that he had found a connection between the seer Odysseus sought in the Underworld and a traditional authority among the indigenous peoples of the Arctic. Tiresias, the blind seer who foretold Odysseus’s future, was a Saami shaman, a Tyreas, who went into ecstatic trances and claimed to tell the future.

Hyperborean Mountains surveyed by Rudbeck’s students in an expedition to the far north of Sweden.

Odysseus’s perilous voyage to the Underworld was not simply a good story told for entertainment as the minstrel strummed the harp and the wine went around the warrior’s halls of Bronze Age Greece. The very details of Odysseus’s journey could be seen in the far north of Sweden. The Cimmerians, the darkness, the mists, the seer Tiresias, and the reputation for wisdom were all there, around the Arctic Circle. Before long, Rudbeck would also have proposals for other missing elements. The name of Charon, the boatman who ferried souls to the Underworld, was derived from baron, a funeral barge used among the indigenous peoples in the largely unexplored regions of the far north. Cerberus, too, the three-headed guard dog of Hades, was originally Garm, the fierce hound of Hel remembered in the Old Norse sagas, and probably, Rudbeck thought, a survival of an ancient bodyguard force stationed at the entrance to the kingdom.

So, full of excitement, Rudbeck was amazed at how closely Homer’s vision of Hades fit his proposed Arctic home. He made plans to send some of his mathematical students on a scientific expedition to survey the mountains and rivers of what he now claimed was the original kingdom of Hades. As thrilling as it was tantalizing, every clue suggested a new understanding about the forgotten golden age of the north.

Rudbeck pledged to continue writing “as long as God gives me health, and the moon continues to become full.” What he found next would lead into the tangled web of one of the greatest and most enduring enigmas of all time—and cause his sharpest critics to think it was really a result of moonstruck lunacy.

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