extraordinary%20encounters

156 Lemuria
bridge. Others theorized that Lemuria was
just part of a vast continent, called Gondwanaland,
which had circled most of the
Southern Hemisphere, leaving only a patch of
the Pacific Ocean uncovered. None of the scientists
argued that either Lemuria or Gondwanaland
had survived into historical time.
Lemuria entered the occult tradition
through Helene Petrovna Blavatsky, founder
of Theosophy. In The Secret Doctrine (1889),
Blavatsky wrote that the present human race
evolved through a series of “root races.” The
third root race lived on Lemuria. These beings
had three eyes, one in the back of the head,
and were egg-laying hermaphrodites (possessing
attributes of both sexes); some had four
arms. Aside from these features, they were
generally apelike in appearance.
Other occult writers went on to create their
own Lemurians. Through “astral clairvoyance”
the English theosophist W. Scott-Elliot
learned that it was on Lemuria that human
beings entered physical bodies. The original
Lemurians were twelve to fifteen feet tall, had
flat faces and muzzles, and no foreheads.
Their eyes were set so far apart that their vision
extended sideways, and they had a third
eye behind their heads. Eventually, these beings
began to practice sex, and the Lhas, spirit
entities who were to inhabit the bodies and
guide them through evolution, were so repulsed
that they refused their duty. The Lords
of the Flame, advanced Venusians, took over
and guided the Lemurians into a more human
and spiritual state. During the Mesozoic era
Lemuria began to break up, and one of its
peninsulas became Atlantis.
In the late nineteenth century, archaeologist
Augustus Le Plongeon, working in the
Yucatan, believed he had discovered how to
translate Mayan hieroglyphics. His translations,
which other scholars judged dubious,
led him to believe that he had uncovered evidence
of a lost civilization known as Mu. He
assumed Mu to be Atlantis. After his death,
however, his friend James Churchward, who
had inherited Le Plungeon’s papers, argued
that Mu, “the motherland of man,” had been
in the South Pacific, not in the Atlantic. Mu
housed a white population of some sixty-four
million souls who had built great cities and
worshipped the sun. Mu sank beneath the sea
ten thousand years ago. Churchward claimed
to have learned about Mu from tablets written
in the dead Naacal language. He had been
given access to them, he said, while serving in
India in the Bengal Lancers. Churchward
wrote about his “findings” in four books, beginning
with The Lost Continent of Mu
(1926). His failure to produce any evidence
that the Naacal tablets existed outside his
imagination sparked hoax charges that
Churchward never successfully refuted.
Soon Mu and Lemuria were assumed to be
the same place, and thus Lemuria became a
Pacific equivalent to the Atlantic’s Atlantis. In
the early years of the twentieth century, speculation
grew that California was a surviving
fragment of Lemuria. A popular occult legend,
apparently originating in a 1908 article
in The Overland Monthly, held—and still
holds—that a surviving Lemurian colony lives
inside Mount Shasta, on the California-Oregon
border. According to Lemuria: The Lost
Continent of the Pacific (1931), by H. Spencer
Lewis (writing as Wishar S. Cerve), when
Lemuria broke up, a California-sized part of it
crashed into North America’s west coast and
attached itself. In 1936, Robert Stelle of
Chicago founded the Lemurian Fellowship,
based on his channeled messages from
Lemurians living inside Mount Shasta. In two
books published between 1940 and 1952,
Stelle depicted Lemuria as an enormous land
mass and a lost paradise.
In the mid-1940s, the Ziff-Davis sciencefiction
magazines Amazing Stories and Fantas -
tic Adventures ran a series of stories and allegedly
factual articles based in part on
Richard S. Shaver’s “memories” of life in
Lemuria, some of whose inhabitants still reside
under the earth. Most have gone mad and
use the advanced technology available to them
to torment surface-dwellers.
Lemuria was incorporated into the flying
saucer-based alternative realities proposed by