The Lost Continent of Lemuria

Because these land plants and animals could not have crossed the open sea and continents were thought to be immobile, geologists explained the presence of identical fossil plants and animals on India, Africa, South America, and Australia by postulating the existence of land bridges and even whole continents that had long since sunk beneath the oceans. In 1864, the English zoologist Philip Lutley Sclater (1829-1913) suggested the name Lemuria for this land bridge, and the name stuck.Around the same time, Ernst Häckel (1834-1919), a German biologist, saw this as an explanation for the presence of lemurs in Madagascar and south-east Asia; he also proposed that lemurs were our ancestors and that this land bridge was the original home of humanity.

Haekel used it to explain the distribution of lemurs in Africa, India, Madagascar, and Malaya Peninsula. He proposed that this hypothetical land-bridge had stayed above water long enough for it have served as the means by which lemurs spread into these areas. The English biologist, Philip L. Scalter named this land bridge "Lemuria" because of its hypothesized association with lemurs. Thus, Lemuria was neither named nor conceived of by prehistoric people, but by geologists and biologists in the 1800s.

When plate tectonics and other more prosaic theories better explained the distribution of strata, fossils, and lemurs, it was widely accepted that Lemuria and other such continents and land bridges never really existed, e.g. Wicander and Monroe (1989).

Lemuria might have vanished into the realm of discarded evolutionary theories, had it not been for the Theosophists and, especially, Helena Petrovska Blavatsky (1831-1891). She had a varied background (from sweatshop worker to circus bareback rider, from mistress of a Slovenian singer to professional pianist) and in the 1870s was living in New York, where she discovered that she could find easy work as a medium. In 1875 she and her partner, Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907), a New York lawyer who had left his family for her, founded the Theosophical Society and moved to India.

In 1882, Madame Blavatsky sent letters written by her alleged Master, Koot Hoomi Lal Sing (alleged to have ‘ascended’ in 1889), to an Anglo-Indian newspaper editor, although handwriting analysis later showed she had written them herself. The letters contained an eclectic mix of Western occultism and Indian mysticism, revealing a seven-based cosmology in which there are seven planes of existence, seven Root Races of humanity, seven bodies possessed by each human being and seven cycles of evolution. This later formed the basis of a massive work, The Secret Doctrine (1888), written in Europe after she had been forced to leave India when accomplices threatened to expose her magic feats as fraudulent.

Mme Blavatsky claimed that The Secret Doctrine was based on a lost Atlantean religious work, which she called The Stanzas of Dzyan, supposed to be the first book ever written. According to the Stanzas as revealed by Mme Blavatsky, the first humans had existed only on an astral plane, living in the ‘Imperishable Land’ at the North Pole. The Second Root Race also lived in the arctic, on the lost continent of Hyperborea. Like most other ‘lost continents’, Hyperborea broke up and sank beneath the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean. The third Root Race comprised the Lemurians. They were bandy-legged, egg-laying hermaphrodite apes (some with four arms, some with eyes in the back of their head), 3.7 m (twelve feet) tall. They were contemporary with dinosaurs, which they kept as domestic animals. When the Lemurians discovered sex, their fate was sealed and the continent followed Hyperborea in sinking beneath the waves. The offspring of the Lemurians’ sexual adventures was the fourth Root Race: fully human Atlanteans, guided into human form by adepts from Venus. After the drowning of Atlantis, the fifth Root Race evolved (in other words, ourselves); the sixth Root Race is about to evolve in North America, while the seventh will one day develop in South America.

The ordinary members of the Theosophical Society (who included perfectly rational and intelligent people) never seemed to see through Mme Blavatsky’s bizarre charade. She had made little effort to cover her tracks and her true history is easily read by those who wish to do so, but the Theosophical Society’s official biography resolutely ignores the facts to glorify its founder. It continues to regard Blavatsky as a saint and Lemuria and the rest as continents that once existed. The growing scientific understanding of geology has resulted in a chasm between the beliefs of Theosophy and scientific knowledge. The Society still exists, but no longer has a large or influential membership. Nevertheless, it is an important source for much of the New Age belief system.

The English Theosophist W. Scott-Elliot, who said he received his knowledge from the Theosophical Masters by "astral clairvoyance", writes in The Story of Atlantis & The Lost Lemuria (1896), that the sexual exploits of the Lemurians so revolted the spiritual beings, the Lhas, that they refused to follow the cosmic plan of becoming the first to incarnate into the bodies of the Lemurians. Scott-Elliot located his Lemuria not only in the Indian Ocean: He described it as stretching from the east coast of Africa across the Indian AND the Pacific Oceans.

A historically and biblically known event the Great Flood finally destroyed the great continent of Lemuria. There are different stories that explain the origin of the great flood and the reasons. What was left behind after the great flood was a whole new world. The old histories of humanity had been virtually flooded away and all that was left were the oral stories and legends.

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