Atlántida – or, the converging of modern medievalism and the legend of Atlantis, part 1

The following is an attempt to gather some thoughts on a comic book in the series El Capitán Trueno (Captain Thunder) that deals with the myth of Atlantis. I have a great interest in both the modern reception of the Middle Ages, and also the modern reception of the Atlantis myth, and since these two interests converge in the album Atlántida I have decided to write this piece in order to situate the album loosely within the cultural history of the Atlantis myth, and also to record some reflections on the use of the myth and the application of the myth into the medieval temporal setting of the comic book universe of El Capitán Trueno. This is therefore neither a comprehensive review of the comic book, nor a text with a coherent argument – it is rather a melange of observations and associations brought on by the particular elements that fill my frame of reference. For reasons of length, this rumination is divided into four blogposts (see also the second, third and fourth installment). 

Introduction – the reception of Atlantis in western culture          

The legend of Atlantis is a perennial feature of the cultural history of the modern west, and most people you ask will presumably have an idea about this place, an idea that is founded on the same basic details: That it was an advanced civilisation that flourished several thousand years before the common era, and which sank into the ocean in a cataclysmic event. Some will possibly take it as established history and speculate with varying degrees of earnestness about where the remnants of Atlantis can possibly be found. Others recognise it for what it is, namely a myth, or at best a metaphor formulated by Plato in his dialogues Timaios and Critias and based on material allegedly brought to Greece from Ancient Egypt by Solon. The idea of such an ancient superpower whose technological level has often been depicted as even beyond that of our modern times is unquestionably tantalising. Moreover, the details of the legend – the nature of the civilisation and its social structures, its location, its date, the background for its fall – are all very flexible within the general framework of the story. Because of this flexibility, it is very easy for readers and writers of very different tastes to imagine Atlantis in accordance with their own views and frames of reference. It is perhaps this flexibility, above everything else, that has made the myth of Atlantis so popular.

I myself have a strong interest in the cultural reception of the Atlantis myth, and also in the cultural history of utopian societies in general. However, I am also a medievalist by profession, and it is very rare that I am able to combine my interests in the Middle Ages and the reception of the Atlantis myth. Granted, Plato’s Timaios was translated into Latin with a commentary by the Christian writer Chalcidius already in the fourth century, and Plato was of course well known in the learned world of the medieval Latin West, which is my general area of expertise. Yet despite the undisputed importance of Timaios, the myth of Atlantis did not garner much interest, and I do not know of any medieval text in which an ideal society inspired by the myth was formulated. The reason for this lack of interest is beyond my knowledge, but I feel obliged to emphasise that it is not in any way indicative of a lack of imagination on behalf of the medieval intelligentsia, only that the myth did not strike the necessary chords to engender literary imitations.

This situation changed in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when fantasies of ideal societies became very common on the European literary stage. Such fantasies are of course rooted in the preceding centuries and draw on a complex web of literary forebears, but with the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) we see a text formulating an ideal society along the lines of Plato’s Republic and the thoughts of late medieval humanism. Such literature became a genre of its own, and it is here we find one of the first post-classical in-depth engagements with the myth of Atlantis, namely Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (published 1627) in which an ideal society of exceptionally high technological standing is described. This society is located on the island of Bensalem, which is situated in the East and was converted to Christianity by the apostle Bartholomew (who was historically believed to have operated in India). While this ideal society is not called Atlantis, the title of the book is a marker of the works of Plato to which Bacon’s ideas are indebted.

Since the publication of New Atlantis, a wide range of texts has been written in which this mythical civilisation is touched upon in varying degree of detail. Some of these works make serious claims about the historicity of Atlantis, such as the Swedish scholar Olof Rudbeck the elder who published his four-volume work Atlantica in the period 1679-1702, claiming among other things that Plato’s Atlantis was situated in modern-day Sweden. Another, and later, work that seriously claims Atlantis as a historical fact is The Story of Atlantis written by William Scott-Elliot in 1896. Scott-Elliot was a theosophist, and the Atlantis myth formed the kernel of his formulation of a history of mankind that envisioned the disintegration of the Atlantean civilisation and the degeneration of mankind. The theme of degeneration can already be found in the classical Atlantis myth, in which the fall of the civilisation was seen as its punishment for a society that had become corrupt. In his occasionally detailed, but predominantly extremely superficial, sketch of thousands of years of imagined human history, Scott-Elliot describes the emergence of lesser races – yellow-skinned, red-skinned, black-skinned – that brought about the collapse of Atlantis. These can easily be read as the forebears of Asians, Africans and Native Americans, and they point to the hard kernel of racism in much of theosophist thought. The theme of degeneration was something that could easily fit into the zeitgeist of the turn of the nineteenth century, when concerns of miscegenation, degeneration and eugenics were common across the political and moral spectrums.

From Edgar P. Jacobs' Atlantis Mystery

The various fantasies of Atlantis that have emerged in the twentieth century have taken many forms, but in most cases the stories are set in ancient and/or modern times while skipping the Middle Ages. For example, the Mickey Mouse story Topolino e l’Atlantide continente perduto (Mickey and the lost continent of Atlantis) from 1987 (written by Giorgio Pezzin and drawn by Massimo De Vita), is set entirely in ancient times, as it is a story of time travel where Mickey and Goofy witness the destruction of Atlantis by a comet. Other works describe how Atlantis has survived into our own times, for example in a state of reduced, almost wistful splendour as in the case of Pierre Benoit’s classic novel L’Atlantide (1919), or in a thriving utopian society that has regained and perhaps exceeded its former glory, as in the case of Edgar P. Jacobs’ story L’Énigme de l’Atlantide (1955-56) which is part of his comic book series Blake and Mortimer.

The Maracot Deep, Arthur Conan Doyle's Atlantis novel

And yet, there are exceptions. In the fantasy comic book series Thorgal by Jean van Hamme and Grzegorz Rosinski (started in 1977), the eponymous protagonist is brought up among Vikings. It is soon revealed, however, that Thorgal’s parents were part of an expedition of Atlanteans from a distant planet, to where the survivors of Atlantis had escaped following a natural disaster on earth thousands of years earlier. The temporal setting of Thorgal is obscure and appears to have changed somewhat in the course of its running, but it is clearly medieval, and Thorgal is therefore one of very few cases where the engagement with the Atlantis myth is set in the Middle Ages. Another is the episode of Capitán Trueno to which I will turn in the next blogpost.

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