[Drawing of Ring-tailed Lemur, 1775]

Interest in the new version of Atlantis sparked speculations about whether there might be other lost lands. Some years earlier Victorian scientists had conjectured that a land-bridge must once have spanned the Indian Ocean, because of the distribution of lemurs and other animals across Africa and southern Asia. A geologist, Philip Sclater, had dubbed this sunken bridge 'Lemuria'. Madame Blavatsky adopted this lost land and extended it, taking it around into the Atlantic and far across the Pacific, making it the home of her third 'root-race', prior to the Atlanteans. Her Lemurians were huge and hermaphroditic. Some had four arms, and eyes at the back of their heads. Yet they were a further step towards familiar humanity, leading to the Atlanteans, and their era was reasonably happy. Scott-Elliott followed this up with his own unique conceptions. In The Lost Lemuria (1904), he revealed Lemurians who were twelve feet tall, leading tame pleiosaurs on leashes. Despite this early feat of domestication, however, they were not an advanced people, and only made what progress they did through the help of higher beings from Venus who arrived as teachers of useful arts, such as metallurgy, agriculture, and large-scale building.

Their status was happily transformed by Colonel James Churchward, a British army officer, who drew inspiration from studies of the Maya of Yucatan. A Mayan text, the Troano Codex, had been 'translated' as an account of the volcanic destruction of a country called Mu. At first Mu was equated with Atlantis, but Churchward placed it in the Pacific. It was not the same as the Theosophists' huge trans-continental Lemuria, but it was the principal portion of it, extending across the ocean six thousand miles from east to west, three thousand from north to south. Churchward claimed for Mu the sort of exalted attributes others had claimed for Atlantis. It was Mu in fact, not Donnelly's Atlantis, that was the location of Eden and the first "highest and most ancient civilization the world has known." How did he know this? A Hindu priest had taught him an almost-forgotten language, Naacal, enabling him to translate a series of stone tablets in an Indian temple. He identified religious symbols, myths, and folklore from many places as having Muvian inspiration and thereby attesting to its reality. Volcanic cataclysm had broken Mu apart, but it survived, in fragmented form, as Polynesia; Easter Island, with its bizarre, intriguing statues, was claimed as a Muvian fragment and evidence of its existence.

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