Some Lore of Lumeria

While Atlantis is the most famous sunken continent, it’s not the only one that’s ever been postulated by writers, thinkers, scientists, and mystics.

Lemuria began in modern times as a hypothesis by a highly respected scientist. Then, others latched on to the idea and it was wildly expanded by occultists and nationalists in southern India. While Lemuria has become a concept heavily entrenched in secret societies, mysticism, and the occult, it didn’t start out that way. Lemuria was originally conceived as a legitimate scientific hypothesis put out there by a real scientist. Lemuria was hypothesized in the 1850s by Philip Lutely Sclater, a highly respected British ornithologist who collected thousands of specimens for the British Museum. When Sclater was in his 20s, he began a study of the fauna of Madagascar, and he soon noticed that the fossils of animals he found there were similar not only to those on mainland Africa, but also to those in India. Because of its name, Sclater named Lemuria based off of the amount of Lemurs he found in Madagascar.

If we take a look at metaphysical lore, it is a very common misconception that the lemurians were all white. It is also a misconception that pleiadians and venusians are white. They come from a planet with many skin colors, just like ours. This is because their planet is apparently very similar to earth. Lemuria, being near the equator, would obviously not inhabit only white people.

Philip Sclater’s Lemuria was not the only hypothesized lost land bridge at the time, nor was it the first proposed land bridge between India and Madagascar. As such, it’s not unlikely that the idea of Lemuria would have simply faded away as many of these other hypothetical land masses had were it not for some zealous writers. Key to the expansion of the idea of Lemuria was the German biologist Ernst Haeckel, who included ideas about Lemuria as part of his 1868 work “The History of Creation.” Haeckel believed that Lemuria wasn’t just the origin of the development of lemurs, but also of humans. At the time, humankind was believed to have arisen in Asia, but the idea of humanity originating in Africa was gaining traction. Haeckel thought that an area connecting the two might be the true solution. Later editions of Haeckel’s book really drive home the connection between Lemuria and the birth of the human race by labeling the lost continent as “Paradise,” explicitly identifying it with the Garden of Eden.

If we peek into metaphysics, it is thought that aliens had a hand in the rapid development of humans. The “missing link”, you could say. This is where the lore of aliens living in Lemuria rises. However, Ernst Haeckel was not the first person to theorize that a lost continent now sunk beneath the waves of the Indian Ocean was the true cradle of humanity. According to Ancient Origins, the Tamil — a people indigenous to south India — have a story of a lost continent that dates back to ancient times, with the name Kumari Kandam being applied to this sunken land in the 15th century. The stories tell of an early Tamil dynasty known as the Pandiyan kings, who ruled over Kumari Kandam before it was swallowed by the sea. When the concept of Lemuria was introduced into colonial India at the end of the 19th century, it hit at a time when two key things were happening. A Tamil cultural renaissance was occurring, which led to both the infusion of Tamil folklore into the accepted understanding of history and a rise in Tamil nationalism. The idea of Lemuria came at just the right time for it to flourish. By the early 20th century, Lemuria was being identified with the 15th century story of Kumari Kandam. The land was touted as the birthplace of all humankind and the home of the Pandiyan, who had been rulers of the entire Indian subcontinent. Presenting the Tamil people as the oldest civilization in the world and its language as the world’s first was key to nationalistic sentiments of the time.

By the 1880s, the idea of Lemuria was appealing to Helena Blavatsky, the co-founder of the Theosophical Society, a mystical occult organization founded in 1875 in New York. Central to the concept of Helena Blavatsky’s evolution of the human race are what she called the seven root races, which are the different stages of human development across time. According to Blavatsky, humanity now stands at the fifth stage, of which the root race is the Aryans. Yes, this is some nonsense that the Nazis ate up like delicious pudding. So, no, Nazis did not come up with the idea of Lemuria. A mystic who was a little racist came up with it, and Nazis latched onto it. The original conception of Lemuria was clearly in the Indian Ocean, spanning from Madagascar to the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent, but as time went on and the idea was conflated with other lost mystical lands, the physical area of Lemuria expanded until it covered a good chunk of the Pacific Ocean as well. One other such sunken continent that was soon identified with Lemuria was the lost continent of Pan, which is described in the 1882 Spiritualist text “Oahspe: A New Bible,” by John B. Newbrough. Encyclopedia.com explains that Pan was a large continent that covered the north Pacific, and its remnants included the land that is now the western coast of California. California, like Madagascar, has its own hard-to-explain flora and fauna, and so the idea of California as a surviving chunk of a lost land only increases in popularity after Newbrough.

Newbrough, by the way, was a dentist. Got Questions explains that he wrote “Oahspe” through the spiritualist technique of automatic writing, in which the medium enters a trance and lets an external force — in this case “the angel hosts of heaven in the name of Jehovih” — control their body to do the writing. “Oahspe” inspired a small spiritualist movement called the Faithists, which encouraged pacifism, vegetarianism, and the belief in an ancient sunken continent whose symbols were the basis for many of their rituals. New Age beliefs regarding Lemuria were also popularized by the work of an amateur archeologist named Augustus Le Plongeon. In the late 19th century, Le Plongeon had been studying Mayan hieroglyphics at Chichen Itza and claimed to be able to read them. He stated that the glyphs told the story of a princess of a lost continent, which he presented in a book with the inarguably scientific-sounding title, “Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx.” This text claimed that Princess Moo had fled the Yucatan for an ancient continent called Mu, which Le Plongeon identified with Atlantis. Perhaps needless to say, Le Plongeon’s ideas were pretty roundly ignored by the legitimate archeological community. Churchward claimed to have found and deciphered a set of tablets in the lost (fictional) Naacal language, which told the story of the sunken continent of Mu, which Churchward moved from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. He presented his ideas in his 1926 book “The Lost Continent of Mu,” which described Mu as an enormous continent in the Pacific, south of Hawaii. Needless to say, moving Mu to this location led to its being conflated with that other eastern hemisphere sunken continent, Lemuria. Lemuria’s unusual origins haven’t stopped some people from wondering whether there’s some truth to a sunken continent in the Indian or Pacific Oceans. All That’s Interesting reports that in 2013, geologists found granite fragments (a common rock in continental crusts) in the Indian Ocean on a shelf near Mauritius. Additionally, on Mauritius itself, scientists found zircon that predated the formation of the island by billions of years, leading some to speculate that the zircon had come from an older landmass that had sunk to the ocean floor before later being shoved back up to the surface by plate tectonics. Scientific America believes that it is not possible, and that ancient Lemuria would have sunk before lemurs even evolved. Whatever you choose to believe, Lemuria is widely studied by scientists and spiritualists alike.