11. Speculation About a Lost Civilization’s Location
Serious scholars dismissed Ignatius Donnelly, but some writers took his version of Atlantis, and ran with it. Most prominent among them in the early twentieth century were a mystic named Madame Blavatsky, and a famous psychic named Edgar Cayce. Cayce imparted a Christian spin to the story, and gave psychic readings in which he claimed that many of his clients had led past lives in Atlantis. He also predicted that Plato’s island would be discovered in 1969. It was not, despite the ancient Greek philosopher’s specificity about the location of Atlantis. Plato wrote of an island bigger than Asia (what Greeks called Asia Minor back then) and Libya put together, situated in the Atlantic Ocean at the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea, just past the Straits of Gibraltar. It is hard to miss a landmass that big, even if swallowed by the waves.
