ATLANTIS

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?

the factual validity notwithstanding, the Atlantean civilization does lay claim to a noble ancestry—Plato`s Dialogues.

The first mention of Atlantis occurs in two of Plato`s Dialogues: Timaeus and Critias, written somewhere between 370 and 350 BC. According to Plato, the story of Atlantis came to him from certain 200-year-old records of the Greek ruler Solon, who, in turn, heard of Atlantis from an Egyptian priest. In his Dialogues, Plato also mentions that the island-continent of Atlantis lay in the Atlantic Ocean near the Straits of Gibraltar until its destruction 10,000 years before his time, triggered off by the Atlanteans` misuse of power.

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.