Page 35 - 201205 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - May 2012

Dreams of Lemuria Dreams of Lemuria There are some accounts of Atlantis that describe it as a real, physical island continent in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, which also refer to another intriguing lost continent - Lemuria. Many “occultist” commentators believe that the inhabitants of Lemuria were highly developed long before Atlantis reached its glory - and, indeed, that the latter was originally a colony of Lemuria. Perhaps most surprising of all, they can cite eminent 19th-century scientists who firmly believed that such a continent had ot exist. The occult history of Lemuria begins with the founder of a new spiritual system called Theosophy, Madam Helen Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-91). Madame Blavatsky was nothing if not colorful - she was at various times a bareback rider in a circus, a “psychic” whose spiritualist society was closed amid charges of of Dyzan, it was written on palm leaves in the L. Sclater. fraud, and an intrepid traveler. She emerged in lost Atlantean language of Senzar. Its contents To conform with this hypothesis, due course, in her supporters’ eyes, as one of the were reportedly revealed to her during “astral Lemuria would have had to have been truly most profound and original spiritual thinkers in visits” from the ethereal “Brotherhood of vast. The eminent 19th-century naturalist A. R. history. Mahatmas” who, she argued, direct human Wallace calculated that, “If...it compromised the affairs from their mountain hideaway on thee whole area now inhabited by Lemuroid animals, The “root races” Roof of the World. Madam Blavatsky’s we must make it extend from West Africa to In Madame Blavatsky’s cosmology, successors, who elaborated on the details of Burma, South China and Celebes.” propounded in her monumental and frequency Lemurian life, history, and geography, claimed obscure The Secret Doctrine (1886), humanity that they had gained their information from Primeval home had evolved (and still is evolving) through a “astral clairvoyance” or “occult revelations Ernst H. Haeckel, a German biologist took the series of seven :root races.” The first, invisible 7B@> D96 *96@C@A9:42= #2CD6BC OK ED argument further, to explain the distribution of creatures of “fire mist,” inhabited an Theosophists did have several respectable Homo sapiens around the globe. There were he “imperishable sacred land.” The second, barely sources for their belief that there had once been wrote, “a number of circumstances...[that] visible, lived in the Arctic continent of a Lemurian continent. For the concept of suggest that the primeval home of man was a Hyperborea, and the Lemurians were the third. Lemuria at least had its origins in a thoroughly continent now sunk beneath the surface of the The fourth race were the Atlanteans, and logical scientific debate. Indian Ocean, which extended along the south present-day humanity is the fifth. From us the by Asia, as it is at present (and probably in sixth will evolve to live on Lemuria again. The Evolutionary discrepancy direct connection with it)...as far as Further seventh will depart from the Earth and live on When Charles Darwin published his Origin of India and Sunda Islands [and] west as far as Mercury. Species in 1859, his theory of evolution did not Madagascar and the southeastern shores of According to Madame Blavatsky’s convince everyone. Many opposed it, as they do Africa. “The existence of an enormous lost highly controversial and totally unsupported today, on religious grounds. Darwin postulated continent would, said Haeckel, “greatly worldview, Lemuria occupied most of the that each species evolved over millions of years facilitate the explanation of the geographical Southern Hemisphere “from the foot of the from a common ancestor. But there was a distribution of the human species by migration.” Himalayas to within a few degrees of the problem: The theory, if true, meant that the Antarctic Circle.” A volcanic cataclysm species of mammals we know today should be The “missing link” apparently destroyed the continent more than 40 limited to their own particular territories - The hypothecial lost continent neatly solved million years ago. In Blavatsky’s and later unlike birds, which can and do migrate from 2?@D96B @7 2BG:?MC 5:77:4E=D:6C KD96 C@ 42==65 Theosophists’ accounts, the Lemurians were not one landmass to another. Specifically, there was “missing link,” the elusive fossil evidence of the civilized beings that some later writers have a mystery as to how the lemur, a small mammal intermediate species between the apes and man. claimed them to be. They were 15-foot-tall, ape- related to both humans and monkeys, managed The fossil links were missing because they had like, egg-laying hermaphrodites who lived in to appear both on the island on Madagascar and sunk to the landmass of Lemuria. holes in the ground and communicated in other countries around the Indian Ocean. In the hands of the Theosophists the telepathically.. Although they lacked proper Darwin’s opponents took great pleasure in continent of Lemuria, its role in the evolution brains, their willpower could literally move discovering this flaw in his theory, and pointed of humankind, and its cataclysmic mountains. Some had four arms; some had an out that it proved their own thesis: that the disappearance were transformed from a eye in the back of their head for “psychic variety of life was the handiwork of God, and reasonable scientific proposition ito an vision.” They had protruding muzzles, but that He had distributed animals about the globe unbelieveable scenario that had no logical otherwise flat faces, with eyes set far apart.thus according to his own divine preference. justification Scientists have long since enabling them to see sideways. Their strangest The pro-evolutionist biologists rapidly discarded the Lemurian hypothesis. The feature was their feet, which had a protruding countered with a hypothesis of their own,, one theories of continental drift and tectonic plates heel that let them walk backward as easily as that did not conflict with Darwin’s theory. They help to explain the distribution of species, as the forward. reasoned that when the mammals were still modern continents split away from the original evolving into their present forms, there had single landmass. The same theories also Elusive wisdom been a vast landmass connecting the lemur’s diminish hope that any of the”sunken lost Madame Blavatsky claimed to have received various present habitats. This landmass was continents” ever had any basis in geological her information from a sacred book of ancient dubbed Lemuria by the English zoologist Philip reality. [] wisdom kept secretly in Tibet. Called the Book