Lemuria

Lemuria is the name given by 19th century geologist Philip Sclater[?] to a hypothetical land mass in the Indian Ocean, used in the theories of Victorian Darwinists to explain the distribution of lemurs across Africa and Southeast Asia. Earnst Heinrich Haeckel[?], a German Darwinist, used Lemuria to explain the absence of 'missing link' fossil records, claiming they were all undersea.

It was not until Madame Blavatsky began writing about Lemuria (claiming to have been shown the ancient, pre-Atlantean Book of Dzyan by the Mahatmas) that it took on its currently existing air as a mystical lost continent similar to Atlantis, and began to grow from a land bridge to a huge continent spanning both the Indian and Pacific oceans. She wrote of massive, hermaphroditic, egg-laying beings with four arms and three eyes that inhabited a utopian world. Their downfall came, she wrote, when they discovered sex.

It has since been shown that lemurs would not necessarily require a land bridge to achieve their current distribution across the globe. However, both the Polynesians and the Mayans (in the Troano Codex[?]) left records of a continent in the Pacific destroyed by volcanic activity. Supposedly, a similar legend has been translated from Sanskrit tablets that describe a continent called Rutas[?].

The continent of Mu is possibly a permutation of ideas about what Lemuria might have been.

External Link

The Stanzas of Dzyan, by H.P. Blavatsky (http://www.theosophical.ca/StanzasDzyan.htm)

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Lemuria was also a festival in the Roman religion, in which the lemures, the ghosts of the dead, were appeased with offerings of beans.