“Ideas and arts were communicated in early times, slowly, by a hand-to-hand process, over many extensive distances, and myths and artifacts, tools, and even slaves and captives have been known to travel thousands of miles from the areas of their origin by exchange or barter. Atlantis and Lemuria knew about each other, but contact was probably through diffusion.”
Lewis Spence (1933)
Helena Blavatsky’s Missing Continents
Blavatsky (1831-1891) was the first to place Lemuria in the Pacific Ocean near California rather than in the Indian Ocean, signaling a shift in occultist perspectives from Eastern to Western sources. Many key figures in the occult movement were based in North America, making ancient histories seem more accessible in this region. Theosophy, often considered a modern Gnostic movement from the late 19th century, laid the groundwork for New Age beliefs. Its philosophical roots trace back to ancient Greece, particularly in the writings of Plato, Plotinus, the neo-Platonists, and Jakob Boehme (1575-1624), whose Mysterium Magnum (1623) discussed the concept of evil as necessary and God as an abyssal nothing. Many of Boehme’s followers later joined the Quakers.
Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine (1928) and Isis Unveiled (1931) describe the ancestors of humans not as simians but as highly evolved and technological beings. Blavatsky provided a theory of evolution for those seeking an alternative to Darwin and Christian beliefs. People find their descent from apes and monkeys distasteful, and for many, humans evolving from the spirit is more palatable. Thus, for Theosophists, Darwin had discovered only part of the human evolution record.
Geographic Timeline of Lemuria
Theosophists placed Lemuria in the Mesozoic era (250 to 65 million years ago) until the end of the Permian (290 to 245 million years ago). At the end of the Mesozoic era, the Atlantean Fourth Root-Race began to appear, and their sub-race, the Rmoahals, bred with the Lemurians. In the Eocene Period (55 to 38 million years ago), the Lemurian continent vanished due to cataclysmic events; the sinking of Lemuria took almost 700,000 years. For the Lemurians that survived, many traveled to Atlantis, creating the Fourth Root-Race. The Fourth Root-Race evolved into the Chinese, Japanese, Polynesians, Indians, Siberians, and North Pole tribes.
According to Theosophists, another sub-race, the Tlavatlis, were red-skinned; their descendants now live in Mexico and Central America. The flight of the Toltecs also occurred at the same time as the destruction of Lemuria. The Toltecs were originally eight feet tall and kept the Atlantean glory alive by establishing a monarchy. However, their culture disintegrated after 100,000 years because of their gross misuse of psychic powers. Another sub-race, the Turanians, fought the Toltecs and were cruel and lawless. When Atlantis began to sink, the Turanians migrated to Asia and started the Seventh sub-race, which is now the Mongolians. The Fifth sub-race, the Semites, were driven out of Atlantis by the Sixth sub-race, the Akkadians, who are the present-day Basque people.
The constituent sub-races of the Aryan race are Hindus, Sumerians, Egyptians, Hellenes, Europeans, Nova men, and a race that will appear as the seventh sub-race. The sixth race constitutes a new group with a higher consciousness than humans today. However, this was futuristic when it first appeared and now looks pretty dated. The future of nanotechnology and genetic engineering seems to overtake any theosophical version of a coming race.
More about Root Races here, website
Author: mountshastamyths
Lurking around here with more questions than answers