A ONCE IMMENSE SUBMERGED CONTINENT

In the “Theosophist” (August, 1880), we wrote: “We have as evidences the most ancient traditions of various and wide-separated peoples – legends in India, in ancient Greece, Madagascar, Sumatra, Java, and all the principal isles of Polynesia, as well as the legends of both Americas. Among savages, and in the traditions of the richest literature in the world – the Sanskrit literature of India – there is an agreement in saying, that, ages ago, there existed in the Pacific Ocean, a large Continent, which by a geological cataclysm was engulfed by the sea, ¹ (Lemuria). And it is our firm belief . . . that most, if not all, of the islands from the Malayan archipelago to Polynesia, are fragments of that once immense submerged Continent. Both Malacca and Polynesia, which lie at the two extremities of the ocean, and which, since the memory of man never had, and never could have any intercourse with, or even a knowledge of each other, have yet a tradition common to all the islands and islets, that their respective countries extended far, far into the Sea: that there were in the world but two immense continents, one inhabited by yellow, the other by dark men; and that the Ocean, by command of the gods, and to punish them for their incessant quarrelling, swallowed them up. Notwithstanding the geographical proof that New Zealand, the Sandwich and Easter Islands, are at a distance from each other of between 800 and 1,000 leagues, and that, according to every testimony, neither these nor any other intermediate islands, for instance, the Marquesan, Society, Fiji, Tahitian, Samoan, and other islands, could, since they became islands, ignorant as their people were of the compass, have communicated with each other before the arrival of Europeans; yet they one and all maintain that their respective countries extended far toward the West, on the Asian side. Moreover, with very small differences, they all speak dialects evidently of the same language; and understand each other with little difficulty; have the same religious beliefs and superstitions; and pretty much the same customs. And as few of the Polynesian islands were discovered earlier than a century ago, the Pacific Ocean itself being unknown to Europe till the days of Columbus, and as these islanders have never ceased repeating the same old traditions since the Europeans first set foot on their shores, it seems to us a logical inference that our theory is nearer to the truth than any other. ‘Chance would have to change its name and meaning, were all this due but to chance alone.’ ”

“A great series of animal-geographical facts,” declares Professor Schmidt, writing in defence of the hypothesis of a former Lemuria, “is explicable only on the theory of the former existence of a Southern Continent of which Australia is a remnant. .. . . ” [the distribution of species] “points to the vanished land of the South where perhaps the home of the progenitors of the Maki of Madagascar may also be looked for.” ²

Mr. A. R. Wallace, in his “Malay Archipelago,” arrives at the following conclusion after a review of the mass of evidence at hand:  “The inference that we must draw from these facts is undoubtedly that the whole of the islands eastwards beyond Borneo and Sumatra do essentially form part of a former Australian or Pacific Continent . . . This continent must have been broken up before the extreme south-eastern portion of Asia was raised above the waters of the ocean, for a great part of the land of Borneo and Java is known to be geologically of quite recent formation.”

According to Hæckel:  “Southern Asia itself was not the earliest cradle of the human race, but Lemuria, a continent that lay to the South of Asia, and sank later on beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean.” (“Pedigree of Man,” Eng. Trans. p.73.) In one sense Hæckel is right as to Lemuria – the “cradle of the Human race.” That continent was the home of the first physical Human Stock – the later Third-Race Men. Previous to that epoch the Races were far less consolidated and physiologically quite different. (Hæckel makes Lemuria extend from Sunda Island to Africa and Madagascar and eastwards to Upper India.)

Professor Rutimeyer, the eminent Palæontologist, asks:  “Need the conjecture that the almost exclusively graminivorous and insectivorous marsupials, sloths, armadilloes, ant-eaters and ostriches, once possessed an actual point of union in a Southern Continent of which the present flora of Terra del Fuego and Australia must be the remains – need this conjecture raise difficulties at a moment when from their fossil remains, Heer restores to sight the ancient forests of Smith’s Sound and Spitzbergen.” (Cited in Schmidt’s” Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism,” p. 237.)

Having now dealt generally with the broad scientific attitude on the two questions, it will, perhaps, conduce to an agreeable brevity, if we sum up the more striking isolated facts in favour of that fundamental contention of Esoteric Ethnologists – the reality of Atlantis. Lemuria is so widely accepted, that further pursuit of the subject is unnecessary.

¹ For the opinions of Jacolliot, after long travels through the Polynesian Islands and his proofs of a former great geological cataclysm in the Pacific Ocean, see his “Histoire des Vierges: Peuples et Continents disparus,” p. 308.
² “Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism,” p. 236. (Cf. also his lengthy arguments on the subject, pp. 231-7.)

The Secret Doctrine, ii 788–790
H. P. Blavatsky