Complex Numbers

Lemur and More

I have been seeing pieces about a "new continent" that scientists have "found." As the landmass is almost entirely under ocean, and shows no sign of rising out of the ocean anytime soon, in order to do this, they had to redefine what "continent" means. It's basically New Zealand, dwarfed by a hell of a lot of what they're defining as continental shelf. One wonders at their motivation for this. Oh well, call it a classification problem, like calling the Blue Ridge "mountains" and Pluto a "dwarf planet."

In any case, that's only the latest in imaginary places in the ocean. Most famous is probably Atlantis, but I do hope you've heard of Lemuria, as well.

    The Frenzy About the Weirdest Continent That Never Existed  
Forget Atlantis, the lost land of lemurs had people in a tizzy.

The article, appropriately from Atlas Obscura, is fairly long, but it has maps, so you'll want to look at those. It begins with an early attempt to reconcile finding similar fossils in Madagascar and India... a discovery perfectly well explained by continental drift, but that wasn't a thing back then.

The fossils were of lemurs; hence, Lemuria.

So he did what other scientists of the day did when faced with similar disconnects: He proposed a vast land bridge that had once linked Madagascar to India.

Lots of former "land bridges" are well-attested: Bering, e.g., and Doggerland.   Incidentally, if we're going to start defining continents by their tectonic plates, then North America would get a big chunk of eastern Siberia.   Bet that would go over well.

That was in 1864, and ever since, Sclater’s serious scientific work has been overshadowed by his creation—because Lemuria turned out to be one of the weirdest continents that never existed.

Hey, science has to start somewhere. The problem comes in when a hypothesis is disproven and yet still remains in public imagination.

In 1870, German biologist Ernst Haeckel suggested that Lemuria could be the ancestral home of humanity, as a way of explaining “missing links” in the fossil record of early humans. (Rejecting Darwin’s hypothesis of humanity’s African origin, Haeckel had initially favored India as the birthplace of humankind.)

Gosh. I wonder what might motivate a German in 1870 to disbelieve that humanity emerged in Africa. Hmm. Can't quite put my finger on it.

In the 1880s, Lemuria graduated from scientific hypothesis to pseudoscientific fact when Helena Blavatsky, the founder of theosophy, integrated it into her esoteric, proto-New Age belief system.

You mean "pseudoscientific fiction." But whatever.

There is, as I noted, a lot more there at the link above. But here's the part I found most fascinating (though I'd heard some of it before):

In the American imagination, Lemuria became most closely associated with Mount Shasta in northern California, which according to Frederick Spence Oliver (in his 1894 book A Dweller on Two Planets) and other occultist writers was the last refuge of the survivors of sunken Lemuria, who lived there in a jewel-encrusted underground city called Telos.

The Mount Shasta connection might seem tenuous at first glance, but I'm assured that his book did all the proper fantasy world-buildingresearch. Hell, there are people even today who swear weird stuff happens in and around Mount Shasta.  

Lemuria also lives on in Ramona, a small town in Southern California and headquarters of the Lemurian Fellowship.

I bet they got to move it move it.

...look, I tried. I tried really, really hard to get through this entry without making a King Julien reference. I could not. Just like how it's impossible to say "mah na mah na" without someone singing "do doo do doodoo," or playing Don't Fear the Reaper without someone calling out desperately for more cowbell, I can't get through a lemur-related article without a Madagascar movie reference joke.

The Lemurian Philosophy says that if we live by universal laws (including the belief in reincarnation, karma, and the teachings of Christ), we will achieve an advanced stage of civilization.

Pretty sure reincarnation/karma is diametrically opposed to the words attributed to Jesus, but the wonderful thing about religion is that people can say it means whatever they really want it to mean.

The article ends with some fun facts about lemurs, the primates who inspired all this:

Lemurs were named in the 1850s by Carl Linnaeus himself, the founder of the current system of biological nomenclature. Linnaeus got the name from ancient Rome, where the lemures were the restless spirits of the unburied dead. On May 9, 11, and 13, during the festival of Lemuria, the father of the household would rise at midnight to placate the lemures by casting black beans behind him.

So, would that be the midnights that start May 9, 11, and 13, or the midnights that end May 9, 11, and 13? It's important to get it right so the ghosts don't eat you. And what if you miss actual midnight when casting the black beans? That would be bad, right? And this was before clocks. Hell, even with clocks, 0:00 or 12:00 am isn't actual local midnight, except very rarely and only by coincidence.

I guess we'd have to ask the Lemurians. Anyone up for a trip to Mount Shasta?