The Lost Continent of Lemuria

The Lost Continent of Lemuria

This article relates to Blazing Eye Sees All

Amy Carlson, the leader of the Love Has Won cult, claimed to have been many different figures in past lives—Jesus, Cleopatra, and Marilyn Monroe, to name just a few—but one of her most eyebrow-raising claims was that she was once the Queen of Lemuria, an ancient, hyper-advanced kingdom that originated the human race before being destroyed in a war against Atlantis that caused both kingdoms to sink to the ocean floor. Perhaps surprisingly, this "woo-woo" theory has a long history independent of Carlson. And it all originated from a scientific article about lemurs.

In 1864, a zoologist named Philip Sclater had a theory. Lemurs mostly live on Madagascar, an island off the coast of southern Africa. But while lemur fossils had not been found on the African mainland, they had been found in India, even though India was much further away from Madagascar than Africa. How could that be? Sclater decided that there must have been a huge continent which once connected Madagascar and India, a continent that, for some reason, was no longer there. He called it "Lemuria."

Eventually, Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift would become widely accepted, explaining the mystery of the lemur fossils and relegating Lemuria to the fanciful world of science fiction. But before that happened, a German biologist named Ernst Haeckel published a book called History of Creation, where he leapfrogged off of Sclater's theory, as well as Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, and posited that Lemuria was the birthplace of humankind. In the 19th century, Haeckel was a household name, sometimes called the "Darwin of Germany." But he was also an enormous racist whose theories of Social Darwinism and eugenics influenced the Nazis; Lemuria was, in his mind, evidence of the superiority of the white race.

The idea of Lemuria's existence was picked up by Helena Blavatsky, who incorporated Lemuria into her belief system known as "Theosophy," and it has lived on through the occult even long after it has been scientifically discredited. Guy Ballard, the founder of the "I AM" Movement, claimed that Mount Shasta in California housed a number of surviving Lemurians, which some people still believe today.

Image of Haeckel's History of Creation courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Filed under Cultural Curiosities

This article relates to Blazing Eye Sees All. It first ran in the May 7, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.