Lemuria is a beautiful example of the creation of
legend. As
p_i indicates, towards the middle of the nineteenth century when
archaeology and
geology were examining things on a
global scale, scientists noticed a number of connections between continents separated by thousands of miles of water. Rocks, plants, and even animals of an identical sort appeared in
India,
Africa, and
South America. The distances were, obviously, much to great to cross by swimming or by mere
migration. Geologists, therefore, postulated a giant bridge or continent of some kind that connected
South Africa and India. Because one of the major pieces of evidence for this was the existance of the same kind of
lemur in India and Africa, they called this theoretical chunk of land Lemuria.
Lemuria is not real. Why are the same plants, rocks, and lemurs in India and Africa?
Plate tectonics. All of the evidence for Lemuria vanishes with plate tectonics. But Lemuria hasn't vanished with
aether, the
geocentric theory of the
solar system, and other
disproven scientific theories. It has persisted through the years thanks largely to one woman:
Madame Blavatsky.
Using strange and magical
psychic scrying powers, Madame Blavatsky determined that Lemuria resided in the
Indian Ocean something like 150 million years ago. She claimed that it was populated by a race of psychic,
hemaphrodite apes that somehow got by without a
brain. They laid eggs and engaged in
revolting sex acts. She wrote of these things in a few books towards the end of the nineteenth century.
Some modern occultists have moved Lemuria to the
Pacific Ocean. Others have said that it spaned both the Indian and the Pacific. But the fact of the matter is, _it never existed_.