Lemuria

The original hypothesised Lemuria

Lemuria was the name originally given to an hypothesised continent in the southern Indian Ocean, proposed in 1860 by the geologist William T Blandford (1832-1905). For Blandford it was 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 both 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.

A Lemurian with his/her
pet dinosaur

Lemuria might have vanished into the realm of discarded evolutionary theories, had it not been for the Theosophists. Their founder Mme Blavatsky claimed that her massive work The Secret Doctrine was based on a lost Atlantean religious work, The Stanzas of Dzyan. According to the Stanzas, the Lemurians 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. As archaeology, anthropology and geology developed as scientific disciplines during the later nineteenth century, a chasm developed between the revelations of Mme Blavatsky and scientific knowledge. The Society 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.

This page was last updated on 13 December 2009
Written by: Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews and James Doeser