The riddle of Atlantis has mystified students of the unknown and attracted researchers for a score of centuries. Fortunately today’s New Age fans can now enjoy a wide variety of publications addressing the mystery of Atlantis, both academically oriented and fiction.

There are more versions of what that legendary locale engendered and where the remnants might be encountered than virtually any other of the many stories involving prehistoric superior cultures. The legend of an advanced culture which perished in a Deluge has lived on exactly because it rings so true as our own culture reaches heights that may well presage catastrophe.

Prominent author of the Dialogues, Plato, first began to write about a forgotten Paradise, that he named Atlantis, during the height of his own Athenian civilization. He believed the lost Island lay near the Straits of Gibraltar and met a fateful end about one hundred centuries before his time.

Prolific author Edgar Cayce described the island as a large land mass, approximately equal in size to Europe. According to the medium’s vivid account, the inhabitants of the Island were accustomed to supernatural telepathic abilities and technologies, and seeded colonies to the peculiarly similar solar-worshiping peoples of the early Mesopotamians and the pre-Columbian Americans. The topic is often related with past lives as well as the paranormal, often figuring in World Rebirth prophecy.

Conjectures about the true whereabouts of the ruins include the coast of India to the New World, although, of course the most promising candidates that are islands in the vicinity, especially the Azores and Malta.

The world may never know the true story, nevertheless, there is one lesson which is hard to deny: human kind has achieved great levels of sophistication in the distant past and the process of proliferation and annihilation, perhaps in a recurring pattern, long before that which we habitually regard as being birth of society.