Lost worldsSimplifiedDefined by Blavatsky

Lemuria

Also: Third Root-Race continent · The land of the first speaking humans

Zoologist Philip Sclater’s 1864 hypothetical land-bridge, adopted as occult prehistory by Blavatsky

Tied, like Atlantis, to the Root-Race scheme. Later New Age Lemuria is a soft-focus rewrite of that scheme.

Blavatsky

Original sense

Lemuria is the continental system of the Third Root-Race, stretching through what is now the Indian and Pacific oceans. Early Lemurians, in her account, are not yet fully physical, sexual, or linguistic as we are; later ones become the first truly human type. The Easter Island statues, she speculated, remember their giants.

Lemuria is the name given to the continent of the Third Race… a land that stretched from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific.
The Secret Doctrine, Volume II

She took a discarded biological hypothesis and made it a chapter of occult anthropology. The gentle, psychic, matriarchal Lemuria of later lore is mostly a twentieth-century overlay (Churchward’s Mu, then Mount Shasta mythology).

New Age

Later sense

A pacific, crystal-hearted, often feminine civilization of telepaths, later fleeing to Mount Shasta or inner earth. Lemurians are past-life identities and a style of jewelry. The giant, egg-born, and ethically mixed beings of the Secret Doctrine are gone.

Typical use. ‘Lemurian seed crystals,’ Shasta pilgrimages, starseed origin stories.

The drift

The core survived; the metaphysics was flattened.

A strange, sometimes grotesque origin story was prettified into a wellness homeland. What survived is the name, the Pacific, and the feeling of a lost gentleness. What did not survive is Blavatsky’s actual Third Race.

Related terms

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