Lemuria in popular culture


is the name of a hypothetical "lost land" variously located in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is said in Tamil legend to have been civilised for over 20,000 years, with its population speaking Tamil. The concept of Lemuria has been rendered obsolete by modern understanding of plate tectonics. However, it has still been used as a location and inspiration in a wide range of novels, television shows, films and music.

Blavatsky, Elliot and Bramwell

"Lemuria" entered the lexicon of the occult through the works of Helena Blavatsky, who claimed that the Mahatmas had shown her an ancient, pre-Atlantean Book of Dzyan. Lemuria is mentioned in one of the 1882 Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett. According to L. Sprague de Camp, Blavatsky's concept of Lemuria was influenced by other contemporaneous writers on the theme of lost continents, notably Ignatius L. Donnelly, American cult leader Thomas Lake Harris and the French writer Louis Jacolliot.
Within Blavatsky's complex cosmology, which includes seven "Root Races", the "Third Root Race" occupied Lemuria. She describes them as about tall, sexually hermaphroditic, egg-laying, mentally undeveloped and spiritually more pure than the following "Root Races". Before the coming of the Lemurians, the second "Root Race" is said to have dwelled in Hyperborea. After the subsequent creation of mammals, Mme Blavatsky revealed to her readers, some Lemurians turned to bestiality.
The later theosophical author William Scott-Elliot gave one of the most elaborate accounts of lost continents. The English theosophist received his knowledge from Charles Webster Leadbeater, who reportedly communicated with the Theosophical Masters by "astral clairvoyance". In 1896 he published The Story of Atlantis, followed in 1904 by The Lost Lemuria, in which he included a map of the continent of Lemuria as stretching from the east coast of Africa across the Indian and the Pacific Oceans.
James Bramwell portrayed Lemuria in his book, Lost Atlantis, as "a continent that occupied a large part of what is now the South Pacific Ocean". He described the people of Lemuria in detail and characterized them as one of the "root-races of humanity". According to Bramwell, Lemurians are the ancestors of the Atlanteans, who survived the period "of the general racial decadence which affected the Lemurians in the last stages of their evolution". From "a select division of" the Atlanteans – after their promotion to decadence – Bramwell claims the Aryan race arose. "Lemurians, Atlanteans, and Aryans are root-races of humanity", according to Bramwell.

Australia

Blavatsky theorised that Australia was a remnant inland region of Lemuria and that Aboriginal Australians and Aboriginal Tasmanians were of Lemurian and Lemuro-Atlantean origin, after cross-breeding with animals. Her idea was subsequently developed in pseudo-histories and fiction of the white Australian popular culture of the 1890s and early 1900s, including the writings of nationalist Australian poet Bernard O'Dowd, author Rosa Campbell Praed in My Australian Girlhood, author John David Hennessey in An Australian Bush Track and George Firth Scott's novel The Last Lemurian: A Westralian Romance.
Professor Robert Dixon theorises that the popularity of the idea of "lost races" like Lemurians and Atlanteans reflected the anxieties of colonial Australians, that "when Englishness is lost there is nothing to replace it". A. L. McCann attributes Praed's use of the Lemuria trope to an "attempt to create a lineage for white settlers without having to confront the annihilation of Indigenous people".

Mount Shasta

In 1894, Frederick Spencer Oliver published A Dweller on Two Planets, which claimed that survivors from a sunken continent called Lemuria were living in or on Mount Shasta in northern California. Oliver claimed the Lemurians lived in a complex of tunnels beneath the mountain and occasionally were seen walking the surface dressed in white robes.
In 1931 Harvey Spencer Lewis using the pseudonym Wisar Spenle Cerve wrote a book about the hidden Lemurians of Mount Shasta that a bibliography on Mount Shasta described as "responsible for the legend's widespread popularity." This belief has since been repeated by Guy Warren Ballard and the followers of the Ascended Masters and the Great White Brotherhood, The Bridge to Freedom, The Summit Lighthouse, Church Universal and Triumphant and Kryon.

Kumari Kandam

Some Tamil writers such as Devaneya Pavanar have associated Lemuria with Kumari Kandam, a legendary sunken landmass mentioned in the Tamil literature, claiming that it was the cradle of civilization.

List of notable examples in popular culture

Literature