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| The Atlantean legend has been around long enough to fire human imagination with the tales of a lost island-civilization run by a utopian government and peopled with highly intelligent beings who were equally accomplished in the arts and sciences, and were capable of harnessing the elements of nature. But is
there a possibility of this legend being true? Did Atlantis
really exist? And even if that hoary civilization did exist, how
would a reasoning mind begin to extract fact from fiction—enmeshed
as the whole narrative is in the fantastic and the fabular? |
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Interest in this lost civilization was resurrected in 1882 by Ignatius
T. T. Donnelly (1831-1901), a US congressman from Minnesota, when he wrote
Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. This was followed by Lewis Spence's
The Problem of Atlantis in 1924. And then there was
Edgar Cayce (1877-1945), the Sleeping Prophet of Virginia Beach, who gave
thousands of readings on the lost continent of Atlantis. Throughout
the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a plethora of occult theories
emerged regarding the lost island race—including theories about the
Atlanteans being extraterrestrial creatures!
There have also been enough speculations regarding the real location of Atlantis to match the number of occult theories surrounding it. Interpretations have been as varied as—the Azores, Sahara, Antarctica, North and South America, Indonesia, Bimini and Malta—to name just a few! However, for want of more clinching archeological and other scientific evidences, the Aegean island of Thera, believed to be once part of the ancient Minoan civilization, is for the most part considered the modern site of the lost Atlantis. |
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