Mu was an immense continent covering nearly one-half of the Pacific Ocean. When she sank during volcanic destruction, fifty million square miles of water claimed her place.
This vast continent and culture was the center of civilization some 25,000 years ago. This is the story of Churchward’s search for the lost continent, from the vaults of an Indian temple to the four corners of the world.
Lemuria /lɨˈmjʊəriə/ is the name of a hypothetical “lost land” variously located in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The concept’s 19th-century origins lie in attempts to account for discontinuities in biogeography.
Although sunken continents do exist — like Zealandia in the Pacific as well as Mauritia and the Kerguelen Plateau in the Indian Ocean — there is no known geological formation under the Indian or Pacific Oceans that corresponds to the hypothetical Lemuria.
It has been adopted by writers involved in the occult, as well as some Tamil writers of India. Accounts of Lemuria differ, but all share a common belief that a continent existed in ancient times and sank beneath the ocean as a result of a geological, often cataclysmic, change, such as pole shift.
Sclater’s theory was hardly unusual for his time: “land bridges”, real and imagined, fascinated several of Sclater’s contemporaries. Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, also looking at the relationship between animals in India and Madagascar, had suggested a southern continent about two decades before Sclater, but did not give it a name.
The acceptance of Darwinism led scientists to seek to trace the diffusion of species from their points of evolutionary origin. Prior to the acceptance of continental drift, biologists frequently postulated submerged land masses in order to account for populations of land-based species now separated by barriers of water.
Similarly, geologists tried to account for striking resemblances of rock formations on different continents. The first systematic attempt was made by Melchior Neumayr in his book Erdgeschichte in 1887. Many hypothetical submerged land bridges and continents were proposed during the 19th century, in order to account for the present distribution of species.
After gaining some acceptance within the scientific community, the concept of Lemuria began to appear in the works of other scholars. Ernst Haeckel, a German Darwinian taxonomist, proposed Lemuria as an explanation for the absence of “missing link” fossil records.
According to another source, Haeckel put forward this thesis prior to Sclater (but without using the name “Lemuria”). Locating the origins of the human species on this lost continent, he claimed the fossil record could not be found because it sunk beneath the sea.
Other scientists hypothesized that Lemuria had extended across parts of the Pacific oceans, seeking to explain the distribution of various species across Asia and the Americas.
