R: Ragnarok to Ruty 241
Rudbeck, Olaus
Living from 1630 to 1702 , Olaus Rudbeck was a Swedish scientific genius,
Professor of Medicine (Uppsala), discoverer of the lymphatic system at just
22 years of age, inventor of the anatomical theater dome, designer of the first
university gardens, initiator of Latin as the lingua franca of the scientific world
community, astronomer, architect, shipyard builder, musician, historian of early
Sweden, and on and on. Rudbeck’s ambition to create a life-size woodcut of
every plant known to botany resulted in more than 7,000 carved images. He
financed and personally led the first professional expedition beyond the Arctic
Circle to bring back numerous plant and animal specimens previously unknown
to science. A brilliant scholar fluent in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, Rudbeck
possessed a grasp of classical literature nothing less than encyclopedic.
Combining his vast knowledge of the ancient world with personal archaeo-
logical research in his own country, he concluded during a long period of investiga-
tion (1651 to 1698), that Atlantis was fact—not fiction—and the greatest civilization
in prehistory. From 1679 until shortly before his death 23 years later, he composed
Atlantica, published in a bilingual Latin-Swedish edition. According to the four-
volume work, Norse myths and some physical evidence among his country’s mega-
lithic ruins show how a relatively few Atlantean survivors may have impacted
Sweden, contributing to its cultural development, and laid the foundations,
particularly in ship construction, for what would much later become the “Viking
Age” from the ninth to 12th centuries A.D.
Although Atlantologists have since dismissed Rudbeck’s chauvinist belief that
Sweden and Atlantis were synonymous, the main thesis of Atlantica—that
Scandinavia was among the first lands occupied by Atlantean survivors—continues
to persuade through the vast amount of still-valid cultural evidence he marshalled
on behalf of his argument. He identified some Atlanteans with the biblical tribe of
Magog, whose members migrated after the catastrophe far across the Black Sea,
following Russian rivers to the Kimi districts in northern Finland, moving on to
the plain around Uppsala in the middle of what would much later become Sweden.
“Magog” features the “og” associated with Atlantis in several ancient Old World
cultures: the Bronze Age British Gogmagog, the Celtic Ogimos, the Old Irish Ogma
andTir-nan-Og, the Greek Ogyges, and so on.
Rudbeck’s tracing of Atlantean influences appeared to have been verified
more than 250 years later, during the early 1960s, when Swedish archaeologists
identified Scandinavia’s earliest known Bronze Age site in digs at Uppsala. Radio-
carbon testing revealed a habitation date circa 2200 B.C. The Swedish savant had
stated that the Atlanteans arrived at Uppsala around 2400 B.C. This time parameter
is particularly significant, because it has been identified with the second Atlantean
flood, brought about by the near-miss of a debris-laden comet in 2193 B.C.
Rudbeck’s Atlanto-Nordic researches were taken up by another 18th-century
scholar, the French astronomer Jean Bailey, who concluded that Spitzbergen, in