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ATLANTIS
– PLATO
 Alan
Alford argues that in order to understand the story of Atlantis,
it is vital to get inside the mind of its author, Plato. Below,
in extracts from his book ‘The Atlantis Secret’, he
provides a biography of Plato, explains his most fundamental
ideas and hints at a spiritual secret which Plato may have encoded
in his writings.
Biography
Theory of Forms
Belief in the Soul and True Philosophy
Account of Creation by the Demiourgos
Secret Code
Plato’s
Biography
Born in Athens in 428 BC, Plato enjoyed an education that was afforded
by an aristocratic background and, on coming of age, he began to
take a profound interest in politics and philosophy. At that time,
Plato had no hesitation in joining the entourage of Socrates (born
469 BC), who enjoyed a formidable reputation as a master of verbal
dialectics, and whom Plato would later describe as ‘the wisest
and justest man of that time’. He could never have guessed
that his prestigious mentor would soon be sentenced to death by
a jury of his own citizens.
In 399 BC, at the age of seventy, Socrates was arrested and put
on trial in Athens. The charge against him read: ‘Socrates
does wrong because he does not believe in the gods in whom the city
believes, but introduces other divine powers (daimonia);
he also does wrong by corrupting the young’. Despite an eloquent
personal defence to these trumped-up charges, the jury pronounced
Socrates guilty and sentenced him to death. After a month’s
delay in prison, the noble philosopher drank the hemlock and breathed
no more.
In shock and disgust, Plato left Athens and went travelling, possibly
as far afield as Egypt and Libya. In 388 BC, at the age of forty,
he visited southern Italy and Sicily where he forged an important
contact with the Pythagorean community. The following year, 387
BC, Plato returned to Athens and founded a new school of philosophy,
the Academy, which quickly became a leading centre of Greek thought
and would remain so for nearly a thousand years.
On the face of it, Plato was a prodigious writer. A modern compilation
of his works (the Hackett edition, published in 1997), extends to
1,745 pages and contains no less than forty-two books, plus three
additional compilations of letters, definitions and epigrams respectively,
all of which were attributed to Plato in ancient times. The vast
majority of these forty-two books take the form of dialogues, in
which most of the conversation is directed not by Plato but by Socrates.
These dialogues, in the absence of any written work by Socrates
himself, provide nearly all that is known about Plato’s mysterious
mentor.
Herein lies a problem for, as modern scholars are at pains to point
out, it is virtually impossible to tell if a certain idea belonged
to Socrates or to Plato (as the author of the dialogues). Where
does Socrates’ philosophy end and Plato’s begin? Or, alternately,
what overlap exists between the two mens’ ideas?
In fact, the picture is more complicated, for modern scholars recognise
that many of ‘Plato’s works’ were not actually written
by Plato himself, but by other Socratic and Platonic writers. In
fact, of the forty-two books mentioned above, modern scholars believe
that between thirteen and sixteen should be attributed to ‘the
school of Plato’ rather than Plato per se. One thus has
to distinguish between the ideas of Plato and the ideas of the school
of Plato, and then distinguish these ideas from the ideas of Socrates
himself. This would be all very well if there were a reliable method
by which scholars could judge the authorship of individual books,
but there is not.
My own feeling is that Plato personally authored just three books:
Timaeus, Critias and Laws (the latter being unpublished
at the time of his death in 347 BC). In my opinion, all of the other
books, including the famous treatise Republic which acts
as a direct prelude to Timaeus, Critias and Laws,
were authored by other Socratic writers, with the credit later being
given to Plato as the founder of the Academy for philosophical studies
of this kind.
In this scenario, Republic becomes a linchpin work. This
book – a ten volume exposition on a theoretical form of future
government known as ‘the ideal state’ – was probably
written by one or more Socratic writers (senior to Plato) based
on their many years of discussions with Socrates himself (Plato,
it should be emphasised, was a relatively young man, not quite thirty
years of age, when Socrates died). The ideal state would thus have
been Socrates’ big idea, and in time, via Republic,
it would have provided the inspiration and impetus for Plato’s
own writings.
Thus, in my view, Plato would have begun his writing career with
the linked pair of books Timaeus and Critias in which
he told the story of Athens and Atlantis in order to illustrate
Socrates’ ideal state in action. Later, towards the end of
his life, and after many years of failed political machinations,
he would have written his final work, the twelve-volume exposition
entitled Laws. In this huge book, unfinished at his death,
Plato reformulated the legal improvements that had been urged by
Socrates in Republic, in order to facilitate the implementation
of the ideal state in the real world.
Plato’s Theory of Forms
The Theory of Forms (also known as the Theory of Ideas) was the
centrepiece of Plato’s philosophy. It is essentially the belief
that everything on Earth is an inferior copy of an original, supreme
and heavenly master-copy. In effect, it amounts to a philosophical
counterpart of the popular religious concept of the fallen paradise.
The classic example of the Theory of Forms is the concept of justice.
On Earth, there is no single definition of justice, but rather a
proliferation of systems which reflect differing human conceptions
of what justice should be. Thus the typical Western idea of justice
might differ considerably from that of the the Muslims. What then
is ‘Justice’ with a capital ‘J’? Did
it even exist? According to Socrates and Plato, Justice did
exist, but not among the manifold copies of justice which had been
invented by races of men here on Earth. Instead, true Justice was
to be found in Heaven. It was literally an arche-type –
a first type or original form. Hence the name given to this kind
of Socratic and Platonic thinking – the Theory of Forms.
The Theory of Forms concept finds its best illustration in Socrates’
story of the Upper Earth which is told in one of Plato’s works,
Phaedo. The setting is Socrates’ final hours in an Athenian
jail cell, where he entertains a group of visitors which includes
two prominent members of the Pythagorean community. As he faces
death by drinking hemlock, Socrates shares his vision of what happens
to man upon death. The soul, he says, is evidently immortal and
experiences a variety of fates on the other side. Whilst the majority
of souls go to dwell in the Underworld (either for a while or permanently),
a privileged few are allowed to ascend to an upper realm which is
called ‘the true Heaven, the true Light and the true Earth’.
This Upper Earth, says Socrates, stands in stark contrast to the
familiar Earth down here. Everything in it is brighter and purer.
The trees are greener, the plants are more beautiful, and the stones
and minerals are absolutely perfect. In contrast, the Earth down
here is a spoiled and corroded world of ugliness and disease, where
even our most precious stones are but crude fragments of the heavenly
originals.
In this myth, the Upper Earth (Heaven) symbolises what Platonic
scholars like to call ‘the world of Forms’. It literally
is a world, albeit a perfect one – the prototype of
the world that we know. Hence the idea that it was ‘the true
Earth’ which contained the archetypes (the Forms) for everything
that existed down here on our own imperfect Earth.
Elsewhere, Socrates and Plato portrayed the ‘world of Forms’
as an invisible sphere, which was the sole unchanging thing
in an ever-changing Universe. They referred to it as ‘the realm
of what is’ and ‘that which is’. It
signified a perfect, invisible Heaven raised above an imperfect,
visible Earth.
The Theory of Forms is also fundamental to the book Timaeus
in which the Atlantis story is told.
Firstly, the Theory of Forms underlies Plato’s account of the
creation of the Universe by the Demiourgos (literally ‘the
craftsman’). As Plato put it: “It follows by unquestionable
necessity that this Universe is an image of something.” That
‘something’, he said, was the Demiourgos himself,
who had fashioned the visible Universe in his own likeness in order
that it be perfect, eternal and ever-unchanging. The Demiourgos
thus personified the ‘world of Forms’.
Secondly, the Theory of Forms provides the concept of the ideal
state, which was the pretext for the telling of the story of Ancient
Athens and Atlantis. The idea was that Ancient Athens should symbolise
the ideal state acting nobly in war. Hence the story of the war
between Athens and Atlantis, the latter symbolising a state that
had fallen into decadent ways – the fate of all things that
had fallen from the pure Heaven to the impure Earth. Athens, too,
would fall into corrupt ways once it had been founded in the Earth.
Plato’s
Belief in the Soul and True Philosophy
The first principle of Plato’s philosophy was the recognition
of the existence of the soul. From there, Plato followed the edict
of Socrates: if the soul of man exists and is immortal, then the
soul has always been immortal; therefore, the soul has always existed,
right from the beginning of Time (if Time can be conceived as having
a beginning at all). From this simple premise, Socrates and Plato
developed their model of the soul’s origin and destiny.
According to Plato in Timaeus, the soul of man had originated
in Heaven with the Demiourgos. It was he who had mixed the
soul of man, dividing the mixture into the same number as the stars
which he had created in the heavens. The Demiourgos had then
introduced these newborn souls to their ‘companion stars’,
and finally sowed them in the Earth, whereupon the Olympian gods
took over and, in accordance with the Demiourgos’ instructions,
wove the immortal souls to mortal bodies, thereby creating mankind.
A similar theory on the fall of the soul had been advocated by Socrates
in Phaedrus (a book attributed to Plato but originating in
all likelihood from earlier Socratic writers). In the beginning,
said Socrates, all human souls had been circulating in the company
of the heavenly gods. But then had come the moment of the fall from
Heaven to Earth. Just before that moment, the souls had been shown
a ‘spectacular vision’ and had been able to gaze for a
moment at ‘sacred revealed objects that were perfect, and simple,
and unshakeable and blissful’. But this heavenly glory had
been lost. Upon their fall from Heaven, the souls had become imprisoned
inside Earth-born bodies and many, in time, had forgotten their
celestial origins, remaining only dimly aware of the perfect objects
which they had once glimpsed there.
In accordance with these ideas, the human being was envisioned as
comprising an immortal soul trapped inside a mortal body (hence
the saying that the body was a tomb, soma sema). The body,
for its part, ‘participated’ in the ideal of its heavenly
Form, but its share of the ideal fell short of the original, as
did the share of all material things on Earth. Thus the body was
prone to corruption, decay and death. The soul, on the other hand,
had received a full share of the heavenly Forms, and was thus pure
and immortal by birthright. Moreover, since the soul had originated
in Heaven, it belonged in Heaven.
The life of a man on Earth, said Plato, was no life at all because
the Earth was an inferior, ever-changing copy of the heavenly ‘world
of Forms’; it was a snare for mankind. True life, and true
reality, said Plato, existed only in Heaven. Therefore, the purpose
of a man’s life was to recognise the spiritual nature of his
being and its fallen condition, and take all necessary steps to
ensure the return of his soul to its birthplace in Heaven (as opposed
to the usual fate of reincarnation on Earth).
This religious belief system was referred to by Plato as ‘true
philosophy’ or ‘divine philosophy’ – a much
higher kind of art than philosophy as we know it today.
The aim of true philosophy was not to gain knowledge of changeable
things on Earth but rather to gain knowledge of ‘That which
always exists’. And to do this, the true philosopher had to
recognise that the whole Universe was an allegorical riddle, where
everything visible was a coded allegory of ‘That which is’,
which was invisible.
In line with Pythagorean thinking, Plato suggested that man should
seek knowledge of ‘That which is’ by studying the
principle of constancy wherever it occurred (or nearly occurred)
in nature, notably in number, geometry, solids, astronomy and harmonic
motions. But to see the truth beyond the cosmic allegory, one had
to look with the soul or the mind, not with the eye, and this required
remembrance of the fact that one’s true self was the soul.
In Republic, Socrates suggested that the true philosopher
might indeed obtain knowledge of ‘That which is’
during his lifetime by means of an arduous series of initiations
in Pythagorean doctrines.
In his vision of the ideal state, Socrates proposed that true philosophy
should be a necessary qualification for rulership of cities. The
aspirant to kingship would become fully initiated in his fiftieth
year, and would then use his skills to govern the city in accordance
with the perfect heavenly archetypes of the ‘world of Forms’:
“Then,
at the age of fifty, those who have survived the tests... must
be led to the goal and compelled to lift up the radiant light
of their souls to what itself provides Light for everything. And
once they have seen the Good itself, they must each in turn put
the city, its citizens, and themselves in order, using it (the Good) as their model.”
True
philosophers were thus regarded as a series of messiah-like figures
who would deliver an ideal era of peace and prosperity on Earth,
but all the time preparing their own personal souls for an ultimate
elevation to Heaven. In the story of Athens and Atlantis, Plato
seems to have been hinting that true philosophers such as himself
should be placed in charge of Athens in order to restore the city’s
self-respect.
Plato’s
Account of Creation by the Demiourgos
According to Plato, everything in the Universe had to have sprung
from some initial principle, which must, by definition, have been
something capable of springing into motion by itself. This principle,
he said, had been an aethereal fifth element called ‘soul’
(psyche), which could be defined as ‘motion capable
of moving itself’. It had been ‘born long before all physical
things’ and was therefore ‘the first cause to which everything
owes its birth’. Accordingly, soul-substance was the original
cause of all movement in the Universe, and had stirred into motion
everything in the heavens and all life on Earth, including mankind.
In Timaeus, Plato had Timaeus (a Pythagorean character) elaborate
on the theory of the soul-substance and build a whole cosmogony
around it.
To begin, Timaeus declares that the Universe must have had an origin,
and must have come to be by some agency or cause. This cause he
then names as Demiourgos (literally ‘the craftsman’)
whom he identifies as the ‘father’ of the Universe. Next,
Timaeus declares that the Demiourgos must have used a model
for his work, and he asserts that this model must have been something
perfect, eternal and ever-unchanging: “It follows by unquestionable
necessity” he states “that this Universe is an image of
something.”
Of what was the Universe an image? The answer, says Timaeus, is
the Demiourgos himself, who wanted everything to be as much
like himself as was possible. Thus the Universe was created as a
‘living thing’ in the image of ‘the real Living Thing’,
i.e. the Demiourgos himself.
To create the Universe, the Demiourgos carried out a number
of tasks, more or less simultaneously. He mixed the body of the
Universe, using the four proto-elements of earth, air, fire and
water, and agitated it ‘like a shaking machine’, thus
causing the elements to become separated and purified. In this way,
he formed the Sun, Moon, planets and stars, which he set in seven
concentric bands around the Earth.
At the same time, the Demiourgos mixed the soul of the Universe,
which he planted in the centre, in the Earth, and then extended
outwards, thereby energising the Sun, Moon, planets and stars. Finally,
he wrapped this soul-substance around the outside of the Universe
so that it totally surrounded the sphere, and he set the sphere
of the Universe spinning upon itself, round and round in a circular
motion.
All of these things the Demiourgos created according to ‘a
symphony of proportion’, employing Pythagorean mathematical
relationships as the basis for cosmic order.
As discussed earlier, the whole visible Universe was a cipher for
the invisible realm of the ‘other world’, personified
by the Demiourgos, and the challenge for man was to decipher
the riddle in order to pave the way for the return of his soul
to
unity with God.
Plato’s
Secret Code
In keeping with the traditions of the ancient Mysteries, Plato
did not speak openly about the cataclysmic nature of the Olympian
gods,
nor about the secret power which brought the gods into being.
There can be no doubt, however, that Plato did know the secrets
behind the Greek religion and did encode these secrets knowingly
into his works, Timaeus in particular (see my arguments
in
‘The Atlantis Secret’). In all likelihood, Plato learned
the identity of the secret power from the Pythagoreans whom he
visited
in 388 BC, at the age of forty.
This is not to say, however, that the physical mechanism of creation
is the
ultimate secret behind Plato’s writings. In my opinion, there
is something more, namely a very specific and profound idea concerning
the destiny of the soul in the afterlife, which Plato was reluctant
to spell out in his writings. A hint of this important something
withheld appears in the ‘seventh letter’ of Plato which
he wrote towards the end of his life:
“Anyone
who is seriously studying higher matters will be the last to write
about them and thus expose his thoughts to the envy and criticism
of men. What I have said, in short, comes to this: whenever we
see a book... we can be sure that if the author is really serious,
the book does not contain his best thoughts; they are stored away
with the fairest of his possessions. And if he has committed these
serious thoughts to writing, it is because men, not the gods,
‘have taken his wits away’.”
I
believe that Plato’s did include his ‘best thoughts’
in his writings, but in the form of hints and allusions which would
make sense only to readers who had been initiated into the meaning
of religion and myth, and who hence had the ability to spot the
subtle nuances in his presentation. I am fairly certain that I have
identified some of these nuances, and they brought to my mind a
very specific, consistent and plausible idea concerning, as I say,
the true destiny of the soul in the afterlife. In writing my book
‘The Atlantis Secret’, however, I decided not to expose
these clues or underlying idea to the eyes of all and sundry, many
of whom would regard the idea as worthless in any case. Rather,
I decided to follow Plato’s example and drop subtle hints about
the idea, as I perceive it, so that people who are genuinely attracted
to Plato’s true philosophy may, by their own arduous efforts,
come to learn this ‘truth’ for themselves. For a ‘truth’
given away is but a worthless speck of dust, whereas a ‘truth’
hard-learned has the value of an entire world. This is the way it
must be.
Click here for further details about ‘The
Atlantis Secret’
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