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Wherefore art thou Lemuria?
Dec. 7th, 2009 11:57 amWe had a Chungatorial meeting yesterday, and at some point our high-powered intellects got themselves focused on the hot topic of Lemuria. In lost continent mythologies, Atlantis goes back to Plato, if not earlier, but my sense was that Lemuria was of a more recent vintage. I think the initial question was whether Lemuria was invented by Madame Blavatsky or whether she got the idea from somebody else. The answer, according to Wikipedia, is quite fascinating: a sunken continent named Lemuria was initially proposed in 1864 by a zoologist named Philip Sclater, who was trying to explain why there were lemurs in both India and Madagascar but not in any of the intervening territory in the Middle East or Africa. This was before the theory of plate tectonics was widely accepted and it was understood that Madagascar had once been a part of the same land mass as India but India broke off and drifted toward Asia. Sclater's theory was that there had been a continent in the Indian Ocean that both India and Madagascar had been a part of and that the bulk of it between them sank under the ocean.
What fascinates me about this origin is that a discarded scientific theory was then adopted by occultists (i.e., the theosophists) and was passed on from *them* to science fiction writers such as A. Merritt and Robert Howard. Blavatsky peopled Lemuria with an ancient race of dragon or snake people who developed a mighty civilization but began to practice black magic, which caused the continent to sink. This is what Merritt picked up on in The Moon Pool, not the idea of a land bridge for lemurs. Blavatsky claimed to have received her ideas from a text called The Book of Dzyan, but it's assumed to be her own invention, and of course some of her ideas about these ancient races with superhuman civilizations came from Bulwer-Lytton's early science fiction novel, The Coming Race (1871). How did she come across Sclater's idea of a sunken continent in the Indian ocean? Her first reference to Lemuria, in The Secret Doctrine, was apparently in 1888, about twenty years after Sclater published a scientific paper proposing his idea. Did Blavatsky read about his theory, or had the idea already spread into the esoteric imagination by then?
One of the other odd bits in the Wikipedia article is that they have recently discovered a large land mass called the Kerguelen Plateau that actually was submerged in the Indian Ocean 20 million years ago. Drilling in 1999 discovered "pollen and fragments of wood in a 90 million-year-old sediment." There are no reports of lizard men wielding ancient superscience and quietly biding their time, waiting for the right moment to take humanity by main force.
Update: Brian Haughton, in an article called "The Lost Lands of Mu and Lemuria" at New Dawn Magazine ("A Journal for a New Consciousness, a New Humanity, and a New Era!" -- ahem), says "Madame Blavatsky never claimed to have discovered Lemuria; in fact she refers to Philip Schlater coining the name Lemuria, in her writings." (There seems to be some confusion on the internet about whether the name is Sclater or Schlater.) The article also indicates that Australian writers at the end of the 19th century latched onto the Lemuria concept, envisioning Australia as a remnant of the sunken continent.
What fascinates me about this origin is that a discarded scientific theory was then adopted by occultists (i.e., the theosophists) and was passed on from *them* to science fiction writers such as A. Merritt and Robert Howard. Blavatsky peopled Lemuria with an ancient race of dragon or snake people who developed a mighty civilization but began to practice black magic, which caused the continent to sink. This is what Merritt picked up on in The Moon Pool, not the idea of a land bridge for lemurs. Blavatsky claimed to have received her ideas from a text called The Book of Dzyan, but it's assumed to be her own invention, and of course some of her ideas about these ancient races with superhuman civilizations came from Bulwer-Lytton's early science fiction novel, The Coming Race (1871). How did she come across Sclater's idea of a sunken continent in the Indian ocean? Her first reference to Lemuria, in The Secret Doctrine, was apparently in 1888, about twenty years after Sclater published a scientific paper proposing his idea. Did Blavatsky read about his theory, or had the idea already spread into the esoteric imagination by then?
One of the other odd bits in the Wikipedia article is that they have recently discovered a large land mass called the Kerguelen Plateau that actually was submerged in the Indian Ocean 20 million years ago. Drilling in 1999 discovered "pollen and fragments of wood in a 90 million-year-old sediment." There are no reports of lizard men wielding ancient superscience and quietly biding their time, waiting for the right moment to take humanity by main force.
Update: Brian Haughton, in an article called "The Lost Lands of Mu and Lemuria" at New Dawn Magazine ("A Journal for a New Consciousness, a New Humanity, and a New Era!" -- ahem), says "Madame Blavatsky never claimed to have discovered Lemuria; in fact she refers to Philip Schlater coining the name Lemuria, in her writings." (There seems to be some confusion on the internet about whether the name is Sclater or Schlater.) The article also indicates that Australian writers at the end of the 19th century latched onto the Lemuria concept, envisioning Australia as a remnant of the sunken continent.
