Lemuria

Some people believe that an advanced civilization called Lemuria once existed, on either an island or a continent surrounded by the Pacific Ocean, though there is no evidence that this was the case. The concept of Lemuria was actually created by nineteenth-century scientists as an explanation of why fossils of a primate called a lemur had been found in Europe (later they were found in North America as well) while living specimens of the animal had only been found in Madagascar and the Comoro Islands. These scientists theorized that there was once a land bridge connecting Africa and India, and English zoologist Philip Schlater named it Lemuria after the lemurs. German naturalist Ernst Heinrich Haeckel subsequently expanded on this theory, suggesting that the first human beings came out of Lemuria, which eventually sank in the ocean. Haeckel said at the time that this explained why no fossil evidence of the “missing link” between humans and apes—that is, of a creature representing the evolutionary step between these two species—had ever been found.

The idea of this lost land might have remained an obscure theory if not for the work of medium Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who discussed Lemuria in her 1888 book on the occult, The Secret Doctrine. Blavatsky said that spirits of the Orient had psychically made her aware that Lemuria had been a real place, a continent that once took up most of the Southern Hemisphere but eventually sank into the sea, and she provided detailed information about the people who supposedly lived there. Several other people subsequently built on Blavatsky’s stories regarding Lemuria, including H. Spencer Lewis in his 1931 book Lemuria: The Lost Continent of the Pacific.

Lewis suggested that survivors of the sinking of Lemuria had taken up residence deep within Earth beneath Mount Shasta in California. These beings, Lewis said, were 7 feet (2.1m) tall and had a third eye in the middle of their foreheads, which they covered with a special headdress. In the 1950s some who believed Lewis’s story took UFO sightings in the Mount Shasta area as proof that the Lemurians are real and had developed space travel.

SEE ALSO:

• Ghost Miscellaneous
• Ghosts
• Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
• Hollow-Earth Theory

SOURCE:

The Greenhaven Encyclopedia of Paranormal Phenomena – written by Patricia D. Netzley © 2006 Gale, a part of Cengage Learning