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mysteries |
Mu and Lemuria |
Other Information |
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Atlantis is by no means the only submerged continent to attract the attention of archaeologists, scientists, historians and cultists. Of the remainder the two most important are Mu (on the bed of the Pacific Ocean) and Lemuria, beneath the Indian Ocean. There is also the lost land of Pan below the North Pacific, which antedated Mu by over 20,000 years, while Mu itself existed 50,000 years ago. The origins of Lemuria apparently go back 100,000 years or more. All (as is the case of Atlantis) are claimed to be the original birthplace of man, though this clearly can not be so. The name Lemuria is of interest in that it is derived from the lemur, a small mammal that has been described as a cross between a monkey and a squirrel. The lemur’s natural home is Madagascar, but it is also found in Africa, India and Malaya. This suggests that the wide migration of the lemur could only have happened if there had once been a large continent occupying what is now the Indian Ocean. (In which case, however, one might wonder why there are no tigers in Africa.) The existence of Lemuria was postulated by an English zoologist, Philip L. Sclater, soon after Charles Darwin had published his famous work on evolution, On the Origin of Species. The theory of evolution placed geographical constraints on the development of individual species in so far as they would adapt to a particular environment and ‘stay put’. The little lemur (and also a number of other animals) presented a problem, to which the only feasible solution lay in the existence, millennia ago, of a continental land mass linking Africa with India and the Malaysia archipelago. That continent, now submerged, was named Lemuria by Sclater - ‘in honour of the lemur’. On such slender evidence, the concept of Lemuria was accepted by many eminent people of the day. Alfred Russel Wallace, a contemporary of Darwin, who had developed his own independent theory of evolution, commented: ‘Lemuria represents what was probably a primary zoological region in some past geological epoch ... If we are to suppose that it comprised the whole area now inhabited by lemuriod animals, we must make it extent from West Africa to Burmah, to South China and Celebes, an area which it did once possibly occupy.’ Another keen supporter of Lemuria was Ernst Haeckel, who saw the lost continent as the point of origin of man. He wrote: ‘neither Australia nor America nor Europe can have been this primeval home of man, or the so-called ‘Paradise’ - the cradle of the human race. ‘There are a number of circumstances which suggest that the primeval home of man was a continent now sunk below the surface of the Indian Ocean, which extended along the south of Asia ... towards the east; towards the west as far as Madagascar and the south-eastern shores of Africa. By assuming this Lemuria to have been man’s primeval home, we greatly facilitate the explanation of the geographical distribution of the human species by migration.’ Today we have far more scientific reasons to account for the migration of man and the lemur across oceans, but Lemuria nevertheless took its place in the annals of mythology and the occult. The famous Madame Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy, wrote about the ‘seven root races’ that inhabited and will inherit the earth. Of these the Lemurians were the third race - gigantic brainless ape-like creatures’; they were followed by the fourth race comprising the human Atlanteans ‘ who were destroyed by black magic’. We of today consist of the fifth race, and the sixth race will evolve from us ‘and return to live on Lemuria’. (Presumably by then sunken Lemuria will have resurfaced.) Our ultimate fate, according to Madame Blavatsky, is that after the seventh root race all life will leave planet earth and start afresh on Mercury. Another theosophist W. Scott-Elliott, amplified Madame Blavatsky’s occult vision in more detailed physical terms. The Lemurians, he wrote, were ‘far from beautiful’ - being up to 15 feet tall, brown skinned, with flat faces, no foreheads and an elongated muzzle of a nose. They had a third eye at the back of their heads, which has now receded into the brain and is known as the pineal eye or body (which , according to modern science, appears to have no useful function). However, to quote Scott-Elliott, this third eye was very useful to the Lemurians ‘because their heels stuck out so far at the back that they could walk backward as well as forward’. He added that the Lemurians began as egg-laying hermaphrodites, but later evolved into normal heterosexual ‘people’. Nevertheless, ‘during their later sexual progress they foolishly interbred with beasts, producing the apes that still populate the planet’. They were indoctrinated into the ways of human civilization by highly advanced visitors from Venus, and eventually became intelligent and human in appearance. Their descendants today include the Lapps and the Australian Aborigines (according to Scott-Elliott). What is interesting is that the hypothesis that astronauts from Venus intervened in human evolution many thousands of years ago, currently and recently propounded by many authors, should have been published as long ago by Scott-Elliott in 1896. In the course of time Lemuria began to break up, and parts of the continent sank into the ocean. One particular peninsula which extended into what is now the Atlantic Ocean was thus isolated and duly became Atlantis. Another occult philosopher, Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian who left the Theosophists in 1907 to form his own Anthropological Society, confirmed that the Lemurians were feeble minded, but had ‘enormous will-power by which they could lift heavy weights’. They were slowly developing the basics of true speech. Starting as oviparous hermaphrodites and making do with a single eye ‘their vision improved along with their discovery of sex’. Apparently the Lemurians were not very keen on this evolutionary change because for a long period they regarded sex relations ‘as a sacred duty rather than a pleasure’. That, at least, was Steiner’s view based on ‘astral clairvoyance’. while it would be easy to dismiss ‘astral clairvoyance’ as spurious fantasy, it should be remembered that Plato’s detailed description of Atlantis is today taking material shape in methodical investigation and underwater photography on the Atlantic sea-bed between the Bahamas and Florida in the area known as Bimini. Other more material evidence concerning the existence of Lemuria takes the form of many early maps of the world in which a continental land mass is marked in the southern hemisphere. That was long before the name Lemuria was ever devised, and the land mass was known as ;the great unknown southern continent’ (Terra Australis Incognita). Exploration in the 17th Century and later disclosed plenty of water but no trace of any continent, but that does not disprove that the early Grecian and other cartographers were necessarily wrong. Their maps were based on historical records passed down over centuries and not on direct observation. Whether the vanished land mass was Lemuria or Mu is open to speculation. One major product of continental drift is the Pacific Ocean, on the bed of which is supposed to be the remains of Mu, which originally stretched from north of Hawaii to Polynesia and the strange Easter Island in the South Pacific. Perhaps the most definitive work on Mu was the book, The Lost Continent of Mu, written by James Churchward and was first published in 1926 - a book, incidentally, which is invariably referred to bu other Mu-minded writers. Churchward, who had served with the British Army in India, claimed that his main source of information about Mu came from the inscribed ‘Naacal tablets’ which were shown to him and translated by a Hindu temple priest. There were only two sets of these tablets (in the shape of flattened human figures) - the set which he saw in India and another in Mexico, discovered by a colleague, William Niven, an American engineer to whom Churchward dedicated his book. Churchward stated categorically that both sets of tablets had the same origin, as both bore extracts from the ‘Sacred Writings of Mu’. The two sets were complementary, inscribed in the alphabet of Mu, and were between 12,000 and 15,000 years old. The opening paragraphs of Churchward’s book are dramatic enough, and certainly uncompromising: ‘The Garden of Eden was not in Asia but now on a sunken continent in the Pacific Ocean. The Biblical story of creation - the epic of seven days and nights - came first not from the peoples of the Nile or Euphrates Valley but from this now submerged continent Mu - the Motherland of Man. ‘These assertions can be proved by the complex records I discovered upon long-forgotten sacred tablets in India, together with records from other countries. They tell of this strange country of 64 million inhabitants who 50,000 years ago, had developed civilization superior in many respects to our own. They described, among other things, the creation of man in the mysterious land of Mu... ‘I learned that in this beautiful country there had lived a people that colonized the earth, and that the land had been obliterated by terrific earthquakes and submersion 12,000 years ago, and had vanished in a vortex of fire and water.’ Mu, it seems, was a beautiful, tropical country of richly grassed plains for grazing, and tilled, cultivated fields. There were no mountains, but rolling wooded hills around which curved broad streams and rivers which irrigated the fertile land. Churchward later states that there were two disasters, in the first one half of the continent was lost, and the Muians had to set up colonies about the world, they then decided to rebuild and they lived in relative calm for a while, when the second disaster struck and sunk the rest of the land of Mu. This was what happened to the land of Mu, the colonies that were set up soon decayed after the homeland had gone, and the last of the colonies, Atlantis went about 1,000 years later.
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