A large continent said to have existed prior to the Tertiary age or Eocene epoch (approx. 56 to 65 million years ago) and which was the land of the Third Root Race, now called the Lemurians. The name was given in 1864 by Philip L Sclater who, on zoological grounds, assumed the existence of a continent that extended from Madagascar to Sri Lanka and Indonesia. The name comes from the supposition that it was on this continent that the Lemurs were developed.

Theosophical literature affirms the existence of this continent. Helena P. Blavatsky, in The Secret Doctrine, wrote that it stretched from Tibet and Mongolia down to Sri Lanka, then east to Australia and the Pacific including Easter Islands, then west to Magadascar, thus covering the Indian Ocean. Its southern tip reaches a few degrees into the Antarctic circle. The continent was “destroyed by volcanic action, and afterwards sank” (SD II:141). Africa was not part of Lemuria. Neither was it a part of Atlantis. It is said that both Lemuria and Atlantis will reappear again as masses of land in the distant future.

In 1904, W. Scott-Elliot published a book entitled The Lost Lemuria. It contained maps and descriptions of the continent based on the works of H. P. Blavatsky and an unnamed clairvoyant, who is most certainly Charles W. Leadbeater. It also provided clairvoyant descriptions of human beings at that time, who were said to be twelve to fifteen feet high, with dark skin, long lower jaw, flattened face, small but piercing eyes that are far apart and which could see sideways, with an eye at the back of the head.

During the sinking of the Lemurian continent, Blavatsky wrote that it was the Vaivasvata Manu who saved the people who would later become the Atlantean root race and civilization. This is one of the origins of the universal myth of the deluge, although the end of the Atlantean continent was also due to a similar flooding.

P.S.H./V.H.C.

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