Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Like his mentor Socrates (470-399
BC), Plato (428-348 BC) dismissed
truth by observation, seeing “form”
as the essence that relates to with
what it participates. Plato’s
universe is the product of divine
intelligence, the “Demiurge,” the
personification of reflection and
reason. Physical experiment is but
a base art.
Chapter 2 -- Greek Philosophers
As did his teacher, Plato found little problem in reverting to folklore for questions of mere
substance. Plato’s Timaesus tells of Atlantis, larger than Asia and Libya together, located on the
far side of the Pillars of Hercules (modern Gibraltar). He visited Sicily in 387 BC to view Mt. Etna
which eleven years before had produced one of its greatest eruptions (Chapter 3), but Plato's
thoughts did not stoop to geology. If anything, the devastation cemented Plato’s reliance on the
supernatural.
Timaesus also furthered the paradigm of microcosm and macrocosm, a world view to persist for
another 2000 years. To understand the cosmos, we need only know the anatomical,
physiological and psychological structure of man. We'll see the implications for underground
rivers in Chapter 8, Transmutational and Bilological Engines.
The schematic suggests how Socrates and Plato would have viewed the flow of springs.
invisible
visible
Underworld
Ocean
The Platonic Hydrologic Cycle
Springs
Rivers
Re-label “Springs” as “Craters” and note that Etnean lava flowed as rivers to the sea and the
upward arrow becomes the River Pyriphlegethon. In the case of water, Plato's visible portion is
correct. It is in the unseen portion where arrows are misdirected that has come to be known as a
“reversed” hydrologic cycle.
In Phaedo, note Plato's use of "wider channels," what seem to be river-like passageways.
But all these are in many places perforated one into another under the earth, some with
narrower and some with wider channels, and have passages through, by which a great quantity
of water flows from one into another, as into basins, and there are immense bulks of everflowing
rivers under the earth, both of hot and cold.
In Critias, written some years later, Plato refers to the Athens region in former times.
[Rainwater was] not lost to it, as now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea; but ... , storing
it up in the retentive loamy soil, and by drawing off into the hollows from the heights the water
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