Lemuria and Mu

The teaching

As the lore of the lost lands, from Sclater's paper to Churchward's Mu teaches it.

Sclater's Lemuria

Lemuria begins as an answer to a puzzle about animals. Lemurs, the large-eyed primates that Linnaeus named after the lemures, the restless ghosts of Roman belief, for their nightly ways, live in Madagascar in many kinds, and kin of theirs turn up in India, but not in the lands between. Philip Sclater reasoned that a land must once have joined Madagascar to India across the Indian Ocean, along which the lemurs' forebears spread, and that it had since sunk; he named it Lemuria, after its animals.

The German naturalist Ernst Haeckel took the sunken land further. Since no fossil of a link between apes and humans had yet been found, he proposed that Lemuria might have been the cradle of humankind, a paradise from which the earliest people spread out before it sank, taking the missing link with it, and he drew a map with the routes of their wanderings running out from it.

The Stanzas of Dzyan and the root races

Theosophy gave Lemuria a people. Helena Blavatsky, in The Secret Doctrine, set out her teaching as a commentary on the Stanzas of Dzyan, verses she said she had translated from an ancient book of the East. In her scheme humanity passes through seven root races, each on its own continent. The first, ethereal and shadowy, lived in the Imperishable Sacred Land; the second in Hyperborea, in the north; the third in Lemuria; the fourth in Atlantis; and the fifth is the present, which she called Aryan. Two more are still to come.

The Lemurians of Theosophy

Her Lemurians are not people as we are. The earliest of them, she taught, were sexless and then double-sexed, born from eggs, and only in the later part of their age did the sexes divide. They were giants, with a third eye at the back of the head that in us has shrunk to the pineal gland. They had no mind of their own until the Sons of Wisdom, beings of a higher order, entered them and lit the spark of thought; but some of the mindless, before that gift, mated with beasts, and from that sin, she said, came the great apes. Lemuria perished at last by fire, its volcanoes bursting as the land sank, and its last high places passed to the Atlanteans.

What the root races allege, and why it is false

The scheme is a ranking of peoples. It holds that the races of the world stand on different rungs of one ladder, and The Secret Doctrine names living peoples, among them the Tasmanians and some Aboriginal Australians, as dying remnants of lower races left behind, while the peoples it calls Aryan stand at the head of the present age. Teaching of this kind fed the racial doctrines of the twentieth century. It rests on verses that its author alone claimed to have read, and every finding about our past refutes it.

All living people belong to one species, which arose in Africa and spread across the earth. No egg-born, double-sexed or giant humans ever lived. The differences among peoples are small and run in gradual shades, not in ranked races. And the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, far from a remnant, keep one of the longest unbroken cultures on earth, rooted in their country for at least fifty thousand years.

Lemuria after Blavatsky

Her followers filled in the land. William Scott-Elliot published maps of Lemuria and Atlantis that he said had been seen by clairvoyance, and Rudolf Steiner described the Lemurian age from what he called the Akashic Chronicle, the memory of the world that a trained seer can read. In America the lost land came to rest under Mount Shasta in California, where a book of the Rosicrucian order AMORC placed a colony of Lemurian survivors living hidden inside the mountain, and seekers still go up its slopes hoping to meet them. Shasta is a high, glaciated volcano, and its upper slopes are for trained climbers only.

Kumari Kandam, the drowned south

Tamil tradition tells of its own land taken by the sea to the south. The Silappatikaram, the old Tamil epic, speaks of the cruel sea swallowing the Pahruli river and the many-ridged Kumari hills. A medieval commentary tells of three ancient academies of poets, the Sangams, of which the first two sat in cities that the sea later swallowed, the southern Madurai and Kapatapuram, before the third met at Madurai, where the city stands now; and a later commentator counted forty-nine lands lost between the Pahruli and the Kumari rivers. These are Tamil poems and memories in their own right, older than any talk of Lemuria.

Mu and Queen Moo

In the reading of the Maya book called the Troano manuscript that gave Mu its name, Mu is a land overwhelmed by a volcanic catastrophe. Augustus Le Plongeon, who photographed the ruins of Yucatán, built a romance upon it. In his story Queen Moo of the Maya loved her brother Prince Coh, whom their jealous brother Aac murdered. She fled to seek refuge in the land of Mu, found it sunk beneath the sea, and went on to Egypt, where she was worshipped as Isis and raised the Sphinx in memory of Coh.

Churchward's Motherland of Man

James Churchward gave Mu its fullest form and moved it to the Pacific. He said that as a young soldier in India he was shown clay tablets by a temple priest, one of the few who could read them, written in the tongue of the Naacal, the holy brothers of Mu, and he later added stone tablets dug up in Mexico. From these he taught that Mu was the Motherland of Man: a continent some five thousand miles from east to west and more than three thousand from north to south, spanning the Pacific from the Marianas to Easter Island, flat and fertile, with sixty-four million people in ten tribes under one government and one king, called Ra. Its religion was the worship of one Creator, whose sign was the Sun. It sent colonies to India, the Maya lands, Atlantis and Egypt, and about twelve thousand years ago it sank in almost a single night, as the gas chambers beneath it burst and it fell into an abyss of fire.

What Churchward's Mu alleges, and why it is false

Churchward's Mu is also a ranking. In his books a fair-skinned race rules the land with darker peoples beneath it, and the islanders of the Pacific are cast as the fallen remnant of Mu's survivors, sunk into savagery. Both claims are false. There was no master race. The peoples of the Pacific descend from seafarers whose forebears came out of Taiwan and the islands of South-East Asia, and who over the last three thousand years found and settled the farthest islands of the ocean, steering by star, swell and bird, one of the great feats of the human past; their pottery, their languages and their genes trace that road plainly.