A Lemurian in their cosmic-astral form dancing through the heavens [1]
and a pair of lemurs in all their wet-nosed beauty ghosting in the forest
I.
Humanity is a species desperately insecure about its place in the universe. The Copernican revolution followed by the death of God hasn't helped matters.
However, existential anxiety does in part explain the rise of numerous New Age mythologies which offer alternative histories of mankind based on pseudoarchaeology and various occult beliefs.
The possibility that we are descended from superhuman - possibly alien - beings addresses the pathological need to feel not only exceptional but cosmically significant. We obsessively imagine ethereal ancestors to validate our uniqueness, while pushing the flesh-and-blood miracles staring back at us from the natural
world to the edge of extinction.
This is perfectly illustrated by the way in which a scientific hypothesis about a lost continent called Lemuria - intended to explain the presence of lemurs on Madagascar - was hijacked by theosophists in the late nineteenth century and transformed into a bizarre myth of a primal spiritually advanced species of man.
In other words, humans decided that the evolutionary history of lemurs was of no great concern to them - even though, of course, their evolutionary history is our evolutionary history [2] - and that it was far more fascinating to invent a fictional race of giant, telepathic beings who once lived on a sunken continent: ladies and gentlemen, meet the Lemurians ...
II.
To understand how deeply this preference for conceited fantasy over objective scientific fact runs, we must look at how the myth of Lemuria developed. It did not begin with an esoteric vision; it began, rather, with a pile of bones and an attempt by British zoologist Philip Sclater in 1864 to solve a geographical puzzle [3].
Sclater noticed that fossilised remains of lemurs were found in both Madagascar and India, but, curiously, not in the landmasses between them. Before the mechanics of continental drift
were understood, the only logical explanation Sclater could devise was a sunken land bridge beneath the Indian Ocean; a continent he named Lemuria, in honour of the primates whose ancient remains inspired him.
Initially, then, Lemuria was a theory within respectable mainstream science. But after the famous German biologist Ernst Haeckel suggested in 1868 that Lemuria might also be the lost cradle of humanity, the idea was appropriated by thinkers outside the scientific community, including Helena Blavatsky and members of her Theosophical Society.
They didn't give a shit about the evolution of lemurs or patterns of primate migration. They simply wanted a stage upon which they could play out their mad racial fantasies and conjure up visions of a lost world inhabited by a root-race of hermaphroditic superhumans channelling cosmic energy with sacred crystals [4].
Theories about Lemuria were laid to rest when, in the 1960s, the scientific community finally accepted Alfred Wegener's theory of plate
tectonics and continental drift, first proposed in 1912. However, the idea lived on in the popular imagination, especially among those prone to New Age beliefs, crackpot history, and pseudoarchaeology and there is now a vast body of fringe literature available for those with the time and patience [5].
It is now believed by those who like this sort of thing that the last of the Lemurians are holed up - literally - beneath Mount Shasta, in Northern California, in a hidden, jewel-encrusted city called Telos [6].
III.
Strip away all the comforting New Age delusions and a simple truth emerges: It is infinitely preferable to be a real wet-nosed prosimian than a mythical Lemurian.
Certainly for my part, I have no desire to become spiritually superhuman. On the other hand, however, I would quite happily become-animal or reincarnate as any species [7] of forest-haunting lemur [8] subordinate to the alpha-female leading my troop.
Being a lemur - i.e., an actual living creature - offers distinct advantages over being a Lemurian; i.e., a mythical being born of lost-continent lore. For one thing, you are actually alive - and that, as Lawrence says, is the most marvellous thing of all: "For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive" [9].
Inhabiting a lush, tropical habitat, lemurs lead a relatively stress-free existence: foraging for food (which is plentiful and varied); sleeping, sunbathing, leaping from tree to tree, and cuddling up with other members of their tight-knit and highly cooperative family troops (a demokrasian'ny fikasihana as they say in Malagasy).
Before the relatively recent arrival of man, lemurs enjoyed a safe and peaceful existence for tens of millions of years [10].
IV.
So, we have to ask: Why do so many people find an imaginary humanoid more compelling than a biological organism, such as a strangely beautiful (and beautifully strange) lemur?
The answer is simple: myths flatter the human ego, whereas evolutionary reality demands humility.
For the science reveals that our ancestors were not glowing, ethereal giants, but small, scurrying, bug-eating mammals that survived by clinging to branches in the dark. It demonstrates how we are intimately linked to the lemur through shared DNA, skeletal blueprints, and social impulses - and a lot of people find that disconcerting.
In fact, those who subscribe to Idealism and myths of human exceptionalism despise all animals, including lemurs, because they remind us that we are fundamentally the same: eating, breathing, shitting, fucking, and dying just like them.
To believe in Lemurians is to believe that we are the descendants of gods. It implies that the universe is a story centred entirely around the human potential to transcend our biology, our mortality, our terrestrial nature. It allows us to indulge in escapism, looking both backward and forward to a golden age of spiritual perfection while we busy ourselves actively destroying the Earth we live on.
The Lemurian is a sterile projection of Victorian and New Age anxieties: nothing more. The lemur is a miracle of evolution, perfectly adapted to an environment that they help maintain in one of the most biodiverse places on Earth [11].
When we trade the lemur for the Lemurian, we exchange a vital link to our own evolutionary history for a funfair mirror that reflects only our selves in a crazily distorted manner. Looking into the limpid amber eyes of a lemur [12] doesn't connect you to a fake spiritual hierarchy, but to the foundational elements of our own behaviour, including not only cognitive flexibility, but the need to be in touch - with other people, but also with plants and animals and inanimate objects [13].
The next time you hear some idiot rambling on about the ancient wisdom of the lost continent of Lemuria or the spiritual aura of its fictional
inhabitants, tell them to put down their crystals and go look at the vibrant chaos of the natural world unfolding in their own back garden.
The phantom continent is exposed as a historical footnote born from a misunderstanding of what the fossil record was telling us. But the animals that inspired the myth are still there, clinging to survival in the forests of Madagascar. We don't need to invent a magical past to be a part of something wondrous. Reality is already spectacular enough.
Stop looking for the Lemurian: celebrate the lemur!
Notes
[1] Artwork by Harry Rankin for the cover of the debut album by Sophia Space Agency, The Turning Blue, released on Lemurian Records (2026). For my thoughts on this dark ambient project by Melpomeni Kermanidou, please click here.
[2] As primates, both humans and lemurs share a distant common ancestor. The split into two distinct suborders - humans belong to the Haplorhini along with other dry-nosed apes and monkeys; lemurs belong to the Strepsirrhini (wet-nosed primates) - occurred over sixty million years ago.
As those who have devoted their professional lives to studying lemurs will tell you, "both living species and their extinct relatives, are a crucial part of the human story", for despite millions of years separating us, "we still share genes, complex social lives, and many of the same susceptibilities to disease".
For more information, please visit the Duke Lemur Center, founded at Duke University (North Carolina) in 1966. The DLC is a world leader in the study, care, and protection of lemurs - Earth's most threatened group of mammals (although lemurs have thrived for tens of millions of years, human activity and climate change has now left many species either endangered or critically endangered).
[3] See Philip Lutley Sclater, 'The Mammals of Madagascar', in The Quarterly Journal of Science, Vol. 1, pp. 213-219.
[4] I really don't want to follow Blavatsky too far down the theosophical rabbit hole, but, in brief, she believed Lemurians to be the third of seven distinct root races from which modern humanity evolved. Exceedingly tall beings, Lemurians possessed a third eye via which they could perceive higher dimensions.
Unfortunately, after discovering sex they began to mate with lower species. This led to their spiritual degeneration and eventual downfall (although, on the bright side for any primatologists reading, it did result in the creation of apes).
[5] See the work of James Churchward, for example, who developed the concept of Lemuria in several books published in the 1920s and '30s. He referred to it as the lost continent of Mu, however, and identified its location in the Pacific Ocean (also incorporating ideas to do with Atlantis into his work).
See also L. Sprague de Camp's classic study Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme in History, Science, and Literature (Gnome Press, 1954). An updated version was published by Dover Press in 1970 and it remains one of the most reliable books on this subject.
[6] Mount Shasta - a potentially active volcano - has been the subject of a large number of myths and legends. In 1905, the American writer and mystic Frederick Spencer Oliver published his A Dweller on Two Planets which claimed that survivors from Lemuria had found refuge there after their own land sunk beneath the waves, building a complex system of tunnels and caves - carpeted with furs, apparently.
Later, Rosicrucian Harvey Spencer Lewis also wrote about the hidden Lemurians of Mount Shasta and his work - Lemuria: The Lost Continent of the Pacific (1931) - along with Oliver's, is largely responsible for the legend's widespread popularity. Predictably, belief in the US-based Lemurians has been incorporated into numerous new religious movements (or cults, as I think we might fairly call some of them) and today internet forums are still filled with people instructing you how to connect with your inner Lemurian.
[7] There are over a 120 recognised species of lemur divided across five main families. They are found exclusively in the wild on the island of Madagascar. Readers might be interested to know that with more than 200 animals across 13 species, the Duke Lemur Center (linked to above) houses the world's most diverse population of lemurs outside their native Madagascar.
[8] I say forest-haunting rather than simply forest-dwelling, as the name lemur comes from the Latin word lemures, meaning ghost. Carl Linnaeus chose this term in 1754 because of the nocturnal habits and slow movements of the animals and not, as is popularly believed, because of their large eyes that seem to glow in the dark and strange cries.
[9] D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 149.
[10] See Katherine Rundell, 'Consider the Lemur', in The London Review of Books, Vol. 40, No. 13 (5 July 2018), where she writes: "The early human arrivals on the island eradicated at least 15 species of lemur. Now, largely due to deforestation, 24 species are critically endangered, 49 are endangered and 94 per cent of all species are threatened."
Rundell also explains how until recently there was a strong taboo on hunting and eating lemurs, which were believed to be magical creatures (part cat, part monkey, part human, part demon) but this has now mostly been eroded: "So the myths have not saved the lemurs."
[11] Madagascar scores exceptionally high for global biodiversity, ranking as a top megadiverse country with over 90% endemic species. The UK, by comparison, ranks in the bottom 10% worldwide for nature-depleted ecosystems, retaining only half of its original plant and animal life due to centuries of industrialisation and intensive land use.
[12] I'm thinking here of something written by William Burroughs in his short eco-surreal novel Ghost of Chance (1991), that was primarily set in Madagascar and addressed the subject of environmental destruction. Burroughs was particularly fond of lemurs and described them as having eyes like "limpid amber, in which the pupil floated like a glittering jewel, changing color with shifts of the light". The story ends with the author requesting readers donate to the Duke University Primate Center.
[13] Lawrence's democracy of touch - mentioned earlier in the post (in Malagasy) - is founded upon what he terms the mystery or inspiration of touch and by which he means: "The touch of the feet on the earth, the touch of the fingers on a tree, on a creature, the touch of hands and breasts, the touch of the whole body to body, and the interpenetration of passionate love."
See D. H. Lawrence, The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 323
This post is for Meni.
