by Ted Nield
Helena Petrovna was to grow up to be one of the strangest women of the nineteenth century, going from sweatshop worker to bareback rider, professional pianist and finally co-founder and guru of a pop-
ular and once-influential new religion called Theosophy. Helena Petrovna was the first of the New Agers, and she derived the name by which the world knows her today from her first husband, General Nikifor Vassiliyevich Blavatsky.
Escaping from the General soon after the wedding by breaking a candlestick over his head and fleeing on horseback to Constantinople, Madame Blavatsky – after another very short marriage – set off to travel the world, ending up in 1873 in New York, where she set up as a medium. There she teamed up with Henry Steel Olcott (a lawyer who left his family for her) and others and founded the Theosophical Society, a new religion combining aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism. This new creed, she claimed, had come to her in a ‘secret doctrine’ passed down from an ancient brotherhood. Unlike those of the Rosicrucians and Freemasons, Blavatsky’s ancient brothers derived from Eastern rather than Western sources. And in common with many subsequent New Agers, Blavatsky claimed that her so-called Akashic Wisdom was consistent with science, and especially the then fashionable new science of evolutionary biology. This was a remarkable claim, since the scientific idea she most hated was the one that humans had evolved from apes. Madame Blavatsky had her own ideas about that and set her own distinctive account of human origins on landmasses that no longer existed. Lemuria, coming as it did with impeccable scientific credentials, fitted the bill perfectly, just as it had for Tamils.
Blavatsky had moved from America to India in 1879, and in 1882 she passed a number of letters from her late Master, Koot Hoomi Lal Sing, to an Anglo-Indian newspaper. (Graphologists later determined that she wrote them herself.) The cosmology contained in them was based on the number seven: seven planes of existence, roots of humanity, cycles of evolution and reincarnation. This scheme formed the basis for her book The Secret Doctrine, which became the main text of the Theosophical movement.
Before she could finish this opus, however, Blavatsky was hounded out of India. Two of her staff, Alexis and Emma Coulomb (who may well have been put up to it by Christian missionaries), threatened to expose her mystic feats as trickery, and Blavatsky returned to Europe, where she completed The Secret Doctrine in 1888. It ultimately derived, she wrote, from a ‘lost’ work called The Stanzas of Dyzan. According to these, modern humans were the fifth of the seven ‘root races’. The third race had inhabited the lost supercontinent of Lemuria, bandy-legged, egg-laying hermaphrodites, some of whom had eyes in the back of their heads and four arms (though perhaps not both at once).
The Lemurians had, according to Blavatsky, lived alongside dinosaurs. As if this was not exciting enough, they also discovered sex. This turned out to be A Bad Idea (for the Lemurians) because it was the trigger, Blavatsky believed, for the destruction of their continent. Their surviving offspring (the fourth ‘root race’) were the Atlanteans. It was they who wrote the Stanzas and who gave rise to the fifth race, namely us. Modern humans would eventually give way to the sixth and seventh races, who would inhabit North and South America respectively.
Blavatsky died in London in May 1891 from a chronic kidney ailment aggravated by a bout of influenza, and was cremated at Woking cemetery. Rather like Lemuria, the movement she founded soon split up and sank in schism and recrimination, never maintaining the following it commanded while its high priestess was alive. (It is estimated to have peaked at about 100,000 worldwide and is known to have included several influential and otherwise apparently sane people.)
Theosophy, pioneer of a genre, lives on, as does its conception of Lemuria, though largely on the ethereal plane of the World Wide Web.
Mystic Mu
The Indian Ocean had its Lemuria, and the Atlantic had of course its Atlantis. But what of the largest ocean of all, the last surviving remnant of Panthalassa? The potential financial rewards for this kind of work are great, as Blavatsky had shown; and as any scientific fraud or unscrupulous journalist knows, it is a lot quicker to make things up than find things out. Crucially too, the Pacific is the closest ocean to California, the best place in the world to found new religions. Madame Blavatsky herself recognized this, and in her later writings began edging her Lemuria out of the distant Indian Ocean and into the Pacific for this sound business reason. Yet despite her tweakings, the Pacific Ocean still represented a huge vacant lot to the would-be supercontinent maker, and before long one was duly ‘discovered’. The odd thing is, by the time its name broke upon the public in the twentieth century, it had already existed in the minds of (some) men for centuries.
Mu is perhaps the maddest of all imaginary lost continents. Its origins, however, lie not with the sciences of zoology, botany or geology, but with archaeology; and the very unscientific analysis of some very ancient writings.
Its existence was first proposed by one Charles Etienne, Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg (1814–74). The Abbé travelled much of Europe and Central and South America in the service of the Catholic Church, and apart from missionary zeal his main life interest lay in the ethnography of the native peoples of America. In his later years he became convinced of pre-Columbian connections between American and Eastern races, connections for which the existence of the Pacific Ocean constituted something of a geographical snag.
The Mayans left very few written documents, and deciphering them has always presented acute difficulties in the absence of any equivalent of the Rosetta Stone that offers the linguist parallel texts of which at least one is known. Nothing daunted, the Abbé set about the task of reading the Troano Codex. This codex consisted of half of one of three surviving Mayan manuscripts, and it is now part of what is today known as the Madrid Codex. In his reading he thought he discovered references to a sunken land by the name of Mu, and leapt at the idea because it solved his ethnographical problems by bridging the Pacific. So Mu started life, rather like Lemuria, as a means of explaining a distribution pattern – only this time, of people.
The Abbé’s references were next picked up by a widely (though uncritically) read Philadelphia lawyer and Minnesota congressman, Ignatius Donnelly (1831–1901), author of Atlantis: the Antediluvian World (1882). Unhappily for Donnelly, his literary judgement failed him over the de Bourbourg ‘translation’ of the Troano Codex on which he, the Abbé and the supposed continent of Mu depended. For the translation was, in fact, nothing of the sort.
De Bourbourg had ‘interpreted’ the Codex, having himself discovered a ‘Mayan alphabet’ devised by a Spanish monk by the name of Diego da Landa. Arriving in America with the Conquistadores, da Landa was among the first scholars to come across the vivid pictograms of the Mayan people. His so-called alphabet was nonsense; the Mayan writing system was not letter-based at all.
The Abbé’s Troano Codex ‘translation’, which supposedly described (in highly elliptical terms) some great volcanic catastrophe, was nothing more than a figment of the Abbé’s fevered imagination, spurred on by the application of da Landa’s bogus alphabet. And, crucially for this story, during the process of his creative decipherment de Bourbourg came across two pictograms that he could not at first identify. Thinking, though, that they bore a slight resemblance to the symbols that da Landa asserted to be the Mayan equivalents of the letters M and U, the Abbé duly discovered the name of the ill-fated continent. Thus was Mu born.
The supposed ‘Mayan Alphabet’.
Back in Washington, unaware of how rotten its foundations were, Ignatius Donnelly took the Mu story on. In his book he linked this entirely bogus Mayan legend with Plato’s allegorical Atlantis and went on to speculate about how this connection might shed light on archaeological links between the Mayan and other civilizations. And there the Mu legend paused, until one Colonel Churchward picked it up and moved it back into the Pacific.
Colonel James Churchward (1851–1936) stares winningly out of his picture like a cross between Colonel Sanders and a travelli
ng medicine man peddling potions in a Hollywood Western. He sports a rakish goatee and moustache, and wears a large rose in his left lapel. Although he had written a book before, namely A Big Game and Fishing Guide to North-Eastern Maine, this gasconading English émigré shot to literary success rather late in life with his colourful accounts of a huge continent lost below the Pacific.
The two ideograms thought, from tenuous supposed similarities to characters in the supposed alphabet, to represent the letters M and U.
The Lost Continent of Mu (1926) set out Churchward’s claim to have discovered the tale of Mu and its destruction in mysterious ancient texts. He claimed the continent had sunk about 60,000 years ago and that Easter Island, Hawaii, Tahiti and a few other Pacific islands were its last remnants. This information he gleaned from the ‘Naacal Tablets’, having himself been taught the Naacal language by a Hindu priest in India in 1866. (Churchward’s military rank was said to have been gained in the British Army in India, but this too is unconfirmed.) As well as the tablets of Naacal, Churchward gleaned information from a different set of tablets found in Mexico by one William Niven, who is variously described as a geologist and engineer. No one else has ever seen these tablets either.
The lost continent of Mu as envisaged by Churchward.
Churchward held that the first humans had appeared two million years ago on Mu. Modern humans were, he believed, all descended from the survivors of Mu’s cataclysmic destruction, brought about by the explosion of the ‘gas belts’ on which it rested. Churchward followed his first book with four more: The Children of Mu, The Sacred Symbols of Mu, The Cosmic Forces of Mu and The Second Book of the Cosmic Forces of Mu.
One would think that after five volumes of elaboration (all of which are now back in print in America) Churchward’s might have proved the last written words on the subject. But as recently as 1970 yet another book appeared, Mu Revealed by Tony Earll. This claimed to be the diary of a boy called Kland who, according to Earll, moved to Mexico in 21,000 BC but was unlucky enough to meet with an earthquake and get his scrolls trapped in a collapsing temple. Then in 1959, so the story goes, archaeologist Reedson Hurdlop excavated the temple. He found the scrolls and discovered that they not only supported Churchward’s Mu hypothesis but provided even more information about the lost continent and its people.
Except all this was also fiction. Crossword enthusiasts may have noticed in passing that ‘Tony Earll’ is an anagram of ‘not really’ and ‘Reedson Hurdlop’ of ‘Rudolph Rednose’. Mu Revealed was, in fact, the first novel by another émigré Englishman, the TV scriptwriter, self-styled witch and occult author Raymond Buckland (b. 1934). In the same year that he published Mu Revealed, Buckland also released (under his own name) Witchcraft Ancient and Modern and Practical Candleburning Rituals.
It is probably true to say that there is no stretch of land too miserable, too mean, or even too imaginary, that someone will not wish to be the king of it. For twenty years or so, beginning in 1933, the Office of the Geographer of the US State Department carried on a correspondence with a number of people concerning some alleged islands off Panama. One Mrs Gertrude Norris Meeker wrote in 1954 (on headed notepaper declaring her to be the Governor General of the Government of Atlantis and Lemuria) to point out that since 1943 a group of islands 200 miles south-west of Florida and just eight degrees north of the Equator had been the ‘Private Dynasty or Principality … named “Atlantis Kaj Lemuria”’. ‘Any trespassing on these islands or Island Empire is a prison offense,’ the letter ended darkly.
The Department’s geographical adviser, Sophia A. Saucerman, responded that the USA did not recognize such a state. In reply Mrs Meeker presented a detailed history of the Principality, involving a Danish seaman called John Mott who in 1917, not wishing to return to a war-torn Europe, took possession of the place and founded the dynasty to which Mrs Meeker belonged.
In 1957 an official inquiry was set up ‘to make a determination as to the reality of the Mu Group in the Pacific Ocean’, as a result of which the Office replied that it did not believe these islands existed – and nor did it believe that anyone else believed it either. But the persistent Mrs Meeker then succeeded in persuading a US Congressman, Craig Hosmer, to take a hand in her affairs. In 1958 he wrote to the Geographer pointing out that, if her plans worked out, Queen Meeker of Mu might be a good source of trade. The Congressman’s letter stimulated a swift reply. Three days later the Department pronounced itself definitively unaware of the existence of any such island empire: ‘However, the Geographer of this Department is most willing to make a geographical study of this matter …’
‘The file ends with this letter,’ writes Sumathi Ramaswamy. The Geographer’s kind offer to conduct research in the South Pacific was not taken up.
Sunken lands
By the end of the nineteenth century geologists and biogeographers had found out much about the rocks, fossils, animals and plants of the world, notably on the previously little-known southern continents. They had found sequences of rocks that looked so similar, it was incredible that they were now so far apart. Equally improbable was the fact that these rock sequences began with boulder beds, which suggested there had been a massive glaciation that had spanned the Equator and had apparently emanated from the middle of what is now the Indian Ocean. Biogeographers meanwhile had found similar evidence of widely separated animals that could not possibly have migrated across the waters that now separated them. The obvious explanation at the time was that the intervening ocean had not always been there. Where was that land now? The only reasonable explanation seemed to be that it had sunk.
As the persistence of Atlantis, Lemuria and Mu myths attest, ‘sunken lands’ tap into something deep in the human psyche, and many theories have been advanced as to why this should be. One has it that, after the last Ice Age, sea levels rose 125 metres in a relatively short time. The sea reclaimed vast areas of coastal land that had been exposed during the great freeze. We know that this happened and we know that humans must have witnessed it. Perhaps this event really did leave deep scars and give rise to ancient legends of drowned land, legends that informed early geological speculations.
On the other hand, if you throw a stone into the sea it sinks. Sinking is what rock does. Land subsides. Things fall into holes. It’s the sort of movement that seems natural for rocks, acting under the influence of gravity.
But although one could explain many troubling facts by supposing that former land (‘land bridges’ was the somewhat misleading term) had fallen away to become the bed of the sea (separating things that seem too similar to be so far apart), this did not help to explain Wallace’s line, across which very different creatures live in such inexplicably close proximity. Nor did it help much in explaining why the southern continents had all been glaciated at more or less the same time, and on opposite sides of the (present) Equator.
The great British geophysicist Arthur Holmes, an early convert to continental drift, who first suggested convection in the Earth’s mantle as a plausible mechanism for it as early as the 1920s, wrote in the 1965 edition of his great book Principles of Physical Geology:
The … climatic dilemma could only be resolved by realising that the deep-rooted ‘common sense’ belief in the fixity of the continents relative to each other … was now in direct conflict with the evidence of the chief witness – the Earth herself. In other words … continental drift had to be taken seriously. But mathematical physicists declared [it] to be impossible and most geologists accepted their verdict, forgetting that their first loyalty was to the Earth and not to books written about the Earth.
To see a thing, first you must believe it to be possible. As it was for the Blanford brothers with their bold interpretation of the Talchir boulder bed, the simple act of believing your eyes is very often an act of considerable mental courage. The same went for the faunal zones and the Wallace line. The simplest explanation, such as William of Occam always urges upon scientists, was that the continents had moved sidewa
ys across the surface of the Earth. But in the late nineteenth century (and for much of the twentieth) that remained too wild a surmise to be accepted.
Nevertheless, after all this confusion and speculation about a lost continent that had never actually existed, the first genuine lost continent to be freed from oblivion by the human mind was emerging into the gaze of a new breed of time traveller. A vanished geography, that had begun its disappearing act 250 million years ago, was backing slowly into the light.
4
LAND OF THE GONDS
The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.
ALFRED TENNYSON, IN MEMORIAM
Fixed to number five, at the end of the street nearest to Angel tube station in Islington, north London, is a rectangular green plaque put there by the Geological Society of London, announcing it as the birthplace of Eduard Suess (1831–1914), ‘Statesman and Geologist’. Sadly, today almost nobody remembers who Eduard Suess was. But he was recognized in his lifetime as one of the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century; one who, in the course of a long and busy life, manned the barricades in a revolution; brought a new fresh water supply from the Alps to another great European capital, Vienna; and tamed that city’s floods. He also wrote a wholly remarkable book which made him the first human being to conceive of a long-vanished giant landmass uniting the southern continents. This land still bears the name he gave it: ‘Gondwanaland’.