Ancestry
The name Lemuria resulted from a Nineteenth Century controversy over Darwin’s Origin of the Species. Defenders of Darwin had trouble explaining how certain species became distributed over large areas. Zoologists had a particularly difficult time explaining the distribution of the lemurs. The lemur is a small primitive form of primate found in Africa, Madagascar, India, and the East Indian archipelago. Some zoologists suggested a land mass in the Indian Ocean, between Madagascar and India, millions of years ago. An English zoologist, Phillip L. Schlater, proposed the name Lemuria (LEMURia) for this former land of the LEMURS in the Indian Ocean.
Earnst Heinrich Haeckel (1834-1919), a German naturalist and champion of Darwin, used Lemuria to explain the absence of fossil remains of early man: If man originated on a sunken continent in the Indian Ocean, all the fossils of the missing link are now under the sea. To quote Haeckel: “Schlater has given this continent the name of Lemuria, from the semi-apes which were characteristic of it.”
Zoologists have now explained the distribution of lemurs without resorting to the use of a land bridge. And anthropologists have discovered many bones of ancient man in Africa. However in the nineteenth century, Haeckel’s theories were widely read and respected. As a result, the name Lemuria was well known among educated people in Europe and America.
Madame Elena Petrovna Blavatsky (born Helena Hahn 1831-1891), the founder of Theosophy, in her book The Secret Doctrine (1888), claimed to have learned of Lemuria in The Book of Dzyan, which she said was composed in Atlantis and shown to her by the Mahatmas. However, in her writings she did give Philip Schlater the honor of inventing the name, Lemuria.
Mme Blasvatsky located her Lemuria in the Indian Ocean about 150 million years ago. She may have obtained her ideas of a sunken land in the Indian Ocean from Sanskrit legends of the former continent of Rutas that sank beneath the sea. But the name Rutas sounds too spiritless and uninspiring to have held such a prominent place in cosmic history.
She described the Lemurians as the third root race to inhabit the earth. They were egg-laying beings with a third eye that gave them psychic powers and allowed them to function without a brain. Originally bisexual, their downfall came about after they discovered sex.
