Lemuria
Lemuria was originally the name given to an hypothesised
continent in the southern Indian Ocean, proposed in 1860 by the
geologist William T Blandford (1832-1905) as a means of
explaining the presence of identical Permian rocks in South
Africa and Gondwana (in southern India). Around the same time,
the German biologist Ernst Heinrich Häckel (1834-1919), 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. In 1864, the English zoologist Philip Lutley Sclater
(1829-1913) suggested the name Lemuria for this hypothetical land
bridge, and the name stuck. We now know that the reason for the
similar geology is that the tectonic plates carrying East Africa,
Madagascar and India were once joined and whilst lemurs are
related to the hominoideae, they belong to a parallel
line of evolution.
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 and colourful 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 then 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 (said to have ‘ascended’ in 1889), to an Anglo-Indian newspaper editor, although handwriting analysis later appeared to indicate that she had written them herself. The letters contained an eclectic mix of Western occultism, Indian mysticism and nineteenth-century popular science, 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. The world, it turns out, is ruled by a secret Brotherhood of Mahatmas who beam occult energies from their hidden base in Tibet. This cosmology later formed the basis of a massive work, The Secret Doctrine (1888), written in Europe after she had been forced to leave India when erstwhile 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 said was
called The Stanzas of Dzyan, supposed to be the first
book ever written. The Secret Doctrine works as a
commentary on The Stanzas: it is also their only source.
According to the Stanzas as revealed by Mme Blavatsky,
the first humans (or ‘First Root Race’) 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, in
this case 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 – modern humans – evolved; 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 otherwise 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 uncovered and confirmed 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 her farrago of evolutionary history, including Lemuria and all other lost continents, as a true account of human origins. The growing scientific understanding of archaeology, anthropology and geology has resulted in a chasm between the beliefs of Theosophy and scientific knowledge, exactly as it has impacted on religious fundamentalism. The Society still exists, but no longer has a large or influential membership. Nevertheless, it became an important source for much of the New Age belief system, with its eclectic mix of religious and pseudo-scientific philosophies, and it is probably thanks to Theosophy that Atlantis and, to a lesser extent, Lemuria have become part of contemporary folk wisdom.