The Drowned Kingdom

MYTH & METAPHOR

Lyonesse is a mythical kingdom off the coast of Cornwall. Legend puts it between Land’s End, the westernmost shore of England, and the Isles of Scilly, thirty miles out to sea. It was swallowed by the ocean, in a night, and but a single rider, on a white horse, outran the waters. His horse is said to have lost a shoe in the escape, and there are local families still whose coats of arms have an image of three horseshoes. Legend or no, recent mapping of the sea floor has shown the remains of old-growth forest, along with stone walls and cultivated meadowland. A plausible guess is that all this was submerged about 2500 BC, and while not in living memory, then maybe recalled in folklore or oral history, but the geologic record of rising sea levels from glacial melt would locate such a seismic event at around 25 thousand BC, the end of the last Ice Age.

European - or Eurasian - history and myth is filled with deluge and catastrophe. It’s in the Bible, of course, but it’s chronicled, historically. The volcano that erupted underneath Santorini in the Bronze Age produced tidal waves, and enough ash to darken the sun. The earthquake that came afterwards destroyed the labyrinth of Crete. There’s a long-held race memory, for that matter, that the entire Mediterranean basin was once a fertile lowland, that flooded catastrophically when the Atlantic burst through the Pillars of Hercules. The tectonics of the Aegean and the Anatolian plateau are a petri dish for disturbances in the continental crust, and the Greeks gave the god Poseidon both a bull as his symbol, and the name Earth-Shaker.

Atlantis. The oldest, I imagine, of our myths of a drowned world. I suspect it derives from the tsunami that created the Mediterranean, see above, which I also think is the basis for the Biblical deluge. The motif recurs too often not to be grounded in fact, an archetype from the early Neolithic, or thereabouts. It keeps coming back, in one form or another, like the fable of Beowulf and Grendel, a fear of something in the outer darkness, beyond the edge of the firelight cast from inside the mouth of the cave.

The story of Lyonesse is also one of enchantments. Tristan and Isolde, forbidden love, their grave guarded by thorns. The question of why the ocean swallowed up the kingdom, was it sinfulness, or an offense against the gods? That’s the usual thing, but you have to accept that these are the gods of the Iliad, petty, and coarse, and easily slighted. Or nobody’s fault, really, just the unknowable, implacable force, the wall of water, bearing down. Most of the time, though, we want to come up with some reason, what did we do to God, that we deserve this? Are we cursed?

The prevalence, the repetition, the durability, of the danger. The menace of the rising waters, and the memory of a drowning world, it’s a very primitive intuition at work. There’s something tidal about it. It must call to our bodies, our biology, the average adult being 60% water, and all of us derived from some primordial, placental soup - bacteria to humans. Does the ocean call us back? Silkies and shape-shifters, the Sirens beckoning Odysseus. The power of the sea, its muscularity and mass, the great heartbeat, below the surface, its overbearing indifference, the darkness, the deep.

So, the metaphor of the drowned world is loss. Something unrecoverable. But not, perhaps, entirely. The idea seems to be, that we can go back, that we can find what it is that’s been stolen from us, whether solace, or knowledge, or our soul’s ease, if only we have the right talisman, the book or charm or key, that opens the secret door, or turns back time, or deceives the guardian at the gate, and gets us safely past. And we win the princess in the bower of thorns. We return to the surface, empowered and redeemed. Because the story is about something that’s been taken from us, that we earn back, through our purity, or virtue.

In other words, mythically, our recovery of a place Before the Fall. A time when we were uncorrupted. This is the language of legend, or allegory. Which means it’s wishful thinking, although it doesn’t necessarily make it false. We choose to believe these stories, since they provide hope of redemption. This faith in the past, the notion that we once were innocents, but have now become victims of an enchantment, an evil spell, is conflated or confused with Christian imagery, and associated with a revanchist or Fascist iconography. We can find rescue if we return to this other Eden, an earlier, blessed time, unmixed with the impure.

But that’s an over-simplification. We all long for a simpler, untroubled world, and to see it again as a child. This is common currency, not the province of any single attitude, or appetite. It seems an entirely human weakness. The world we inhabit is ambiguous and contrary, when once we knew it as a still point. Would we deny it to ourselves, if we could get it back?

There’s a tale told among the Cornish fisherfolk, that if the wind is right, and the water is still, you can hear the hidden bells of Lyonesse, tolling beneath the sea.