The Light at the Bottom of History
The puzzle of a forgotten island has stimulated wonder among students of the unknown and perplexed writers for more than two thousand years. With the advent of the Web, on-line bookstores New Age and metaphysical connoisseurs have at their disposal a vast array of publications addressing the riddle of Atlantis, both academically oriented and fantastic and science fiction novels.
There are more theories about what the nature of this legendary locale entailed and beneath which sea the remains can be recovered than virtually any other Greek myth. Yet the tale of a Utopian culture which was destroyed in a cataclysm has endured exactly for the reason that it appeals so strongly as we confront what may turn out to be our own Deluge or Golden Age.
American mystic Edgar Cayce wrote of the island as a large land mass, about the scale of Australia. According to the seerís dynamic account, the inhabitants of the Island had mastered powerful telepathic talents and mechanisms, and gave rise to the strangely reminiscent solar-worshiping civilizations of the ancient Egyptians and the Empires of native America. The topic is often related with past lives and reincarnation stories as well as the paranormal, and are a part of prophecies of doom and apocalypse predictions of Mayan Calendar world changes on December 21, 2012.
The Greek philosopher Plato first began to write about a sunken civilization, called Atlantis, during the height of his own Athenian civilization. He believed the lost Island was just West of modern-day Spain and had perished over one hundred centuries before his time.
Speculations suggesting the site of the remnants of the Island stretch from the Eastern Indian Ocean to the Carribbean, though, of course most of the focus centers on well-known candidates which are islands in the vicinity, particularly Crete and Malta.
We may never know the actual details, nonetheless one thing seems clear: cultural innovation has reached great levels of sophistication rising and falling in a cycle of rise and catastrophe, perhaps in a recurring pattern, in the forgotten recesses of that which we habitually consider as being earliest twinkle of time.