Lemuria
Lemuria is a hypothetical continent that was once believed to have existed in the Indian Ocean, proposed in the nineteenth century by the British zoologist Philip Sclater to explain the geographic distribution of lemurs. Taken up by theosophy, the name has become in esotericism a lost civilization comparable to Atlantis.
Origin and etymology
In 1864, the zoologist Philip Lutley Sclater (1829-1913) published in The Quarterly Journal of Science an article in which he expressed surprise at finding lemurs in Madagascar, India, Ceylon, and the Malay Peninsula. To explain this distribution, he imagined a submerged continent linking these regions and named it Lemuria, after the lemurs. The hypothesis seemed reasonable at a time when continental drift had not yet been formulated (Alfred Wegener would publish his theory in 1912). The German biologist Ernst Haeckel took up the idea in Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (1868), even suggesting that Lemuria had been the cradle of humanity.
Evolution and tradition
The esoteric turn came from Helena Blavatsky. In The Secret Doctrine (1888), she integrated Lemuria into the cycle of theosophical root races: the third race before Atlantis, populated by four-armed, polysexual, reptilian giants. William Scott-Elliot detailed this vision in The Story of Lemuria (1904). Rudolf Steiner took up the myth in his anthroposophy. In the United States, the legend shifted: from the 1930s onward, the I AM movement and the author Frederick Spencer Oliver (A Dweller on Two Planets, 1894) located the surviving Lemurians beneath Mount Shasta in California. James Churchward (Mu, 1926) conflated Lemuria with the Pacific continent of Mu.
Practical use
In the contemporary New Age, Lemuria is associated with a harmonious, feminine, intuitive, and fusional collective consciousness, opposed to Atlantis, which is perceived as more technological and masculine. Lemurian crystals (quartz with horizontal striations) have been marketed since the 1990s and presented as programmed by the ancient Lemurians. On Tarotoui, we do not devote any spread to this theme, but the archetypal dimension of a fusional, archaic humanity, prior to separation, can resonate with certain tarot cards such as the Empress or the Moon in a spiritual reading.
Going further
On the scientific level, Sclater's hypothesis has been definitively obsolete since the establishment of plate tectonics in the 1960s. The presence of lemurs in Madagascar is explained by continental separation: Madagascar and India formed with Africa the supercontinent Gondwana, which fragmented 150 million years ago. No geological or archaeological trace of Lemuria has ever been found. The myth remains powerful nonetheless: it provides a collective narrative of spiritual origin, to be read as such.