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and now, a very special post
I just finished reading Lemuria: A True Story of a Fake Place by Justin McHenry, and I am so bursting with things to say that I can't even wait till next week's What I'm Reading Wednesday. This book deserves an entire post of its own.
Let me be clear: I do not recommend this book. But I do recommend you reading this post about this book because it is wild.
The content of the book is absolutely fascinating. A Victorian scientist, trying to figure out how flora and fauna got to Madagascar, theorized either a land bridge or a larger continent and cheekily named it Lemuria after the most unique and striking of that fauna, the lemur. Other scientists picked up on this idea, linked it to the shifting of continents and the evolution of humans--and hence to race science, this being the 19th century when everything was linked to race science. You will not be surprised to hear the word "Aryans" and many descriptions of tall, handsome, white beings pop up several times in these pages. Still, at the beginning, the idea of Lemuria didn't contradict any established science, and so all conjecturing was at least within the realm of the possible.
But then Madame Blavatsky adopted it and the woo-woo people were off to the races with it. Each person who got their hands on it added new layers to the mythos; it snowballed until today, when it's at the heart of a ton of the worst conspiracy theories and weirdest new religious stuff on the planet.
The book traces this development. There are chapters about scientists, about Theosophists, about early 20th century science fiction publications, and about the New Age movement. It's really incredible how many people have glommed onto this idea and used it to their own ends.
Like I said, this is fascinating stuff! And McHenry seems to have done his research well. I was actually really impressed by how he managed to trace all of this across decades and languages and genres (though maybe I shouldn't have been. More on that anon).
But y'all, the writing! It! Is! So! Bad!
At first, I was only noticing the repetition--sadly typical of nonfiction writing these days--and the weird amount of sentence fragments. Now, I am a huge fan of sentence fragments and use them often. But this guy was using them way too much--I'd say 70% more than is enjoyable to me, a known sentence fragment enjoyer. And the further I read, the further the prose devolved till I was thinking as much about the writing as I was about what the author was trying to tell me--sometimes more!
This isn't the bad writing of a person who is writing in a foreign language and just hasn't mastered the grammar; that's a very particular kind of "bad" writing that I personally am indulgent of (and respect. It has its own internal logic, and I'm fine with that!). Nor is it the bad writing of a person who's trying too hard to sound professional or, in the other direction, too hard to sound chatty; that's annoying, but it's readable. And it is not the stilted writing of an LLM "AI" bot that sounds like an alien trying to imitate human speech; if it were that, I'd at least understand how it came to exist.
But no. This book combines two kinds of bad writing that I can't remember seeing in published works before:
1. The bad writing of a first draft where the writer is just putting in placeholders and phrases that will be filled out/changed later. I wouldn't have been surprised if STUPIDEST VERSION was written on the title page or if I came across brackets with "insert later" written in them. This kind of writing is completely appropriate for a first draft and completely, completely inappropriate for anything that's actually published by anyone at any time. Y'all wouldn't even subject me to this kind of writing on a DW post. (For which I thank you.)
2. A kind of bad writing that I cannot even find the pattern of. Sometimes there would be the diction is so bad that I'm not actually sure what he's talking about (unclear antecedents, unclear whether something really happened or not, unclear who said what, etc.). There's an entire paragraph at one point that I think is a quote from someone else, but it's neither in quotation marks or block quotes, so I'm just guessing that the block quote got left out accidentally? But who knows! There were places where he suddenly mentions something esoteric that I've never heard of but either doesn't ever explain what it is or waits several more paragraphs to do so. Add in some very random tense shifts, and it's just horrific.
If I were either the author or the editor, I would be ashamed of myself. I seriously don't know how this made it to publication in this state. I kept lamenting the fact that I live alone because I kept wanting to thrust the text under someone else's nose and demand they read it. "Can you believe someone wrote a sentence like that?"
So let me do that virtually to you now! Here are some completely random examples of things that drove me wild:
Listen to me: ALL OF THESE WERE FROM ONE CHAPTER. And they were just the most egregious examples; I bookmarked a ton more pages than I transcribed here.
Here are a few more excerpts that I couldn't not share:
And here is a random quote that I'm not including because of bad writing (it's relatively unobjectionable) but because I thought it was so damn interesting:
Do you see what I mean???????
And on top of all this, he doesn't really spend much time telling us about how Lemuria is being used today? There's a long long quote from an 8chan post and a bunch of handwaving in the conclusion about how people can use Lemuria for whatever they want and so it will probably be used more in the future. He mentions that it's tied to QAnon but doesn't tell us how. After the detail of the scientific stuff of the first few chapters, this felt especially obnoxious.
Why did I keep reading this nonsense? Because I actually find the topic really interesting and wanted to learn about it!
AND THEN. At the very end of the book, there's an author's note that says, "Btw, I got most of this from a scholarly book called The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories by Sumathi Ramaswamy." And friends, I was so angry! I could have just read that book! I would bet my life that it's better written than this one!
Anyway, if any of you ever decide to brave the prose and read it yourself, please, please come and tell me whether I'm overstating. I need external validation.
Two final thoughts:
1. This book is full of people from over the past few centuries who have incredible imaginations. I kept thinking, "Why didn't these people just write fantasy novels because all this stuff is really compelling even if it is demonstrably not true." They didn't have to try to sell it as fact!
2. If anyone knows of any good books about Theosophy, please point me towards them. All the ones I'm finding are written by Theosophists or fellow travelers, and that is not what I'm looking for.
Let me be clear: I do not recommend this book. But I do recommend you reading this post about this book because it is wild.
The content of the book is absolutely fascinating. A Victorian scientist, trying to figure out how flora and fauna got to Madagascar, theorized either a land bridge or a larger continent and cheekily named it Lemuria after the most unique and striking of that fauna, the lemur. Other scientists picked up on this idea, linked it to the shifting of continents and the evolution of humans--and hence to race science, this being the 19th century when everything was linked to race science. You will not be surprised to hear the word "Aryans" and many descriptions of tall, handsome, white beings pop up several times in these pages. Still, at the beginning, the idea of Lemuria didn't contradict any established science, and so all conjecturing was at least within the realm of the possible.
But then Madame Blavatsky adopted it and the woo-woo people were off to the races with it. Each person who got their hands on it added new layers to the mythos; it snowballed until today, when it's at the heart of a ton of the worst conspiracy theories and weirdest new religious stuff on the planet.
The book traces this development. There are chapters about scientists, about Theosophists, about early 20th century science fiction publications, and about the New Age movement. It's really incredible how many people have glommed onto this idea and used it to their own ends.
Like I said, this is fascinating stuff! And McHenry seems to have done his research well. I was actually really impressed by how he managed to trace all of this across decades and languages and genres (though maybe I shouldn't have been. More on that anon).
But y'all, the writing! It! Is! So! Bad!
At first, I was only noticing the repetition--sadly typical of nonfiction writing these days--and the weird amount of sentence fragments. Now, I am a huge fan of sentence fragments and use them often. But this guy was using them way too much--I'd say 70% more than is enjoyable to me, a known sentence fragment enjoyer. And the further I read, the further the prose devolved till I was thinking as much about the writing as I was about what the author was trying to tell me--sometimes more!
This isn't the bad writing of a person who is writing in a foreign language and just hasn't mastered the grammar; that's a very particular kind of "bad" writing that I personally am indulgent of (and respect. It has its own internal logic, and I'm fine with that!). Nor is it the bad writing of a person who's trying too hard to sound professional or, in the other direction, too hard to sound chatty; that's annoying, but it's readable. And it is not the stilted writing of an LLM "AI" bot that sounds like an alien trying to imitate human speech; if it were that, I'd at least understand how it came to exist.
But no. This book combines two kinds of bad writing that I can't remember seeing in published works before:
1. The bad writing of a first draft where the writer is just putting in placeholders and phrases that will be filled out/changed later. I wouldn't have been surprised if STUPIDEST VERSION was written on the title page or if I came across brackets with "insert later" written in them. This kind of writing is completely appropriate for a first draft and completely, completely inappropriate for anything that's actually published by anyone at any time. Y'all wouldn't even subject me to this kind of writing on a DW post. (For which I thank you.)
2. A kind of bad writing that I cannot even find the pattern of. Sometimes there would be the diction is so bad that I'm not actually sure what he's talking about (unclear antecedents, unclear whether something really happened or not, unclear who said what, etc.). There's an entire paragraph at one point that I think is a quote from someone else, but it's neither in quotation marks or block quotes, so I'm just guessing that the block quote got left out accidentally? But who knows! There were places where he suddenly mentions something esoteric that I've never heard of but either doesn't ever explain what it is or waits several more paragraphs to do so. Add in some very random tense shifts, and it's just horrific.
If I were either the author or the editor, I would be ashamed of myself. I seriously don't know how this made it to publication in this state. I kept lamenting the fact that I live alone because I kept wanting to thrust the text under someone else's nose and demand they read it. "Can you believe someone wrote a sentence like that?"
So let me do that virtually to you now! Here are some completely random examples of things that drove me wild:
Leadbetter possesses little redeeming value. Born in 1854, educated at Oxford, entered the clergy of the Church of England in 1978. A keen interest in spiritualism led him to the doorstep of Theosophy in 1883.[Why this weird fragment? Nearly every paragraph has sentences constructed like this.]
In The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky makes vague assertions of there being life on other planets, more like spirits, and they, in the form of spirits or angels, may have come down to aid the evolution of humanity. A proto-version of the ancient alien theory. It is all sourced out and tied together with the Bible, Kabbalists, science, and other occult matters.
The Martian seventh root race became Earth's third root race, Lemurians. They had to battle the second root race on Earth, which were beasts. Huge crocodile-like things and scaly birds. 'Savage reptilian creatures' they battled with. Humans at this tiem were gorilla-like, with egg-shaped heads, and standing between twenty-four and twenty-seven feet tall. And they were black. They were also cyclopes; this is something that Blavatsky claimed as well, with a central eye toward the top of the forehead. This eventually receded into the head, becoming the pineal gland, and the other two eyes slowly traveled their way across the brow. These beings from outer space taught much to the Lemurians so that they developed a mind of their own and an ego all theirs.
The best of these Lemurians would be chosen to go on and become Atlanteans. As Atlanteans, their skin color would change and the next root race would go about its evolutionary journey, along the way dabbling in black magic which would get them in hot water, and the rise of the Aryan race, the fifth root race. It is at the end of this root race that the seeds of the next one start to grow in America, California to be exact, in the twenty-eighth century. Blavatsky had spoken of America being the breeding ground for the sixth root race but did not specify California. How they came to settle in California is a bit of a mystery. Its proximity to the Pacific Ocean and the possibility of there arising from the Pacific a new continent could position California as a prime location for this new world. Whatever the case may be, it would stick in the literature that California was a chosen land, destined for future great things in the evolution of humanity. This would have major consequences for the future of Lemuria as well. At the end, Lemuria will rise again from its 'age-long sleep' and complete the spiritual evolution of the root races and of Earth.
This led to the slim work The Lost Lemuria (1904), which confounds in its stated goal of scholarly research. All he does is use the sources that Blavatsky already provided in The Secret Doctrine like Haeckel, Wallace, so no new ground is being trod there; the other set of research relies on the Akashic Records [note that these records have not been mentioned before], which were already coming from clairvoyant means like Leadbeater himself. Proving with the proof provided.
He does supply some additional fun details concerning Lemuria and Lemurians, such as that they began with giant gelatinous bodies and slowly evolved to have bone structures. And when they first were able to stand up on their own they could walk as well backward as forward, due to the shape of their heels and the third eye helping see them better. Also, the 'Chinese language' is the lone descenant of the Lemurian tongue. Venutians, beings from Venus, came here and showed the Lemurians how to cultivate grain. Lemuria existed many, many million years ago. Well over five million years ago and during the time of the 'age of the reptiles,' seemingly meaning dinosaurs.
Augustus Le Plongeon was a semi-professional archaeologist who teamed up with his spiritualist photographer wife Alice to travel to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico to prove the Mayan civilization was the oldest on earth and the cradle of all the world's civilizations. Somewhat selective and flexible with the archaeologist record in Mexico, the couple saw patterns in the Mayan artifacts that would lead them to proving this Mayan cradle of civilization theory. Their findings caught the attention of Donnelly and Blavatsky, both of whom cited the Le Plongeons' research in their works. They forged ahead doing major excavations at Chicen Itza and Uxmal, the first to do so, and presented an alternative, metaphysical history of the New World.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Churchward's Mu is that it is Lemuria. Same location, dimensions, and descriptions, even cribbing Blavatsky's origin story of being taught a secret language while in India to be able to read Niven's tablets. What everyone else thinks is Lemuria to Churchward, it is Mu. He seemingly goes out of his way throughout multiple books to never mention or utter the name Lemuria. That does not mean it does not still play a part in Lemuria's saga. People saw the 'M' and 'U' in Lemuria, and Mu became synonymous with Lemuria and a vital part of the Lemurian myth, as Mu would be a part of Edgar Cayce's ancient mythmaking and of many in the New Age Movement. [Aside: Churchward is never mentioned when we get to Cayce, so we never learn the details of this] Though they borrowed Churchward's Mu name, that was about it. And they have brushed aside his in-depth analysis of Pacific Islander symbology and cultural studies.
Despite the lack of Lemuria, Churchward's Mu shared some key similarities with it, such as being the cradle of mankind, that the people from there would go on to colonize Earth, and that it was destroyed by volcanic activity....Mu was also a very paradisiacal place. So whatever Mu was, it shared a whole heck of a lot with Lemuria.
Of course, certain segments treated his views with derision and certain others accepted it as confirmation. [Note that this is is the beginning of a paragraph that immediately follows a direct quote from a source.]
One thing that Churchward pioneered in populating Mu/Lemuria with actual people with names. Prior to this, Lemuria was full of 'pudding sacks' or beings described but really given nothing to connect with. Churchward actually discusses some of the individuals from Mu, most significantly the Emperor/High Priest Ra-Mu, who materializes time from time as an ascended master that channels like Elizabeth Clare Prophet and Uriel summon to spread his wisdom to their followers.
Listen to me: ALL OF THESE WERE FROM ONE CHAPTER. And they were just the most egregious examples; I bookmarked a ton more pages than I transcribed here.
Here are a few more excerpts that I couldn't not share:
For Shaver, the paranoia came first. Thoughts of being watched and followed crept inside of him. Next, the voices came. At first they only began to appear at work. Being broadcast via his welding gun. Something in the wiring got crossed that allowed him to overhear the conversations of all the plant workers: Richard's a Commie. Richard's gay. Richard. Richard. Richard. Day after day these voices assaulted the inside of his head.
While on stage, beyond preaching their pro-American, white nationalist rhetoric, they also came out in favor of celibacy and that you should not eat anything with a face nor consume alcohol or tobacco. And that there was hope in America, for a golden age was coming. That your true self is divine and can accomplish anything it wants in this world through the power of thought. And borrowing nearly verbatim from Theosophy the notion that Ascended Masters had all been ordinary but through reincarnation, they realized their ascension through spiritual realization, a la Phylos in A Dweller on Two Planets.
This was the beginning of the rise of the Reptoids. Which might not have too much bearing on the Lemurian story, other than tales of being abducted by Lemurians and taken underground, or Shaver's deros doing similar things [note, he throws around the word 'dero' about fifteen times before he actually defines it], or Bernard's remnants of Lemurians flying UFOS around having already been established. [We have heard nothing of Bernard so far.] And who's to say that the Ultraterrestrial beings from another dimension, plane, or parallel universe, theorized by the lacks of John Keel, Jacques Vallee, and Mac Tonnies [again, none of these people have been mentioned before] are not the same as the Mt. Shasta Lemurian sightings or the earlier tales of fairies and other mythical beings.
The Lemurian Fellowship arose from a collaboration between Robert Stelle and Howard John Zitko. They combined to turn the Fellowship into a mail-order citizenship-building school built around the concept that Lemuria was the first great civilization, followed by Atlantis, with America poised to be the next one. A new type of citizen was needed to inhabit and lead this new great civilization. Everything is new: "A New Race is emerging in America. A New Civilization is being born. A new kind of human being is being created for a new kind of world.' Not just a New Age being born, it is a whole New Earth--where you need to get on board to gain citizenship in this "New Race of Christ-honoring, divinity-conscious' America. Lemuria is going to rise out of the Pacific and when it does, it will fulfill biblical prophecy, and the United States of America will ascend to the status of Lemuria and Atlantis, with Americans transforming into Lemurians and Atlanteans.[And then the next paragraph goes on to talk about something completely different!]
Seventy-eight thousand years ago on the continent of Mu/Lemuria, a select few outstanding individuals organized the first human society when they realized there was a better way to live. They acquired an understanding of universal law, taking baby steps towards social harmony through teaching those who chose to live cooperatively in abeyance [yes, abeyance!!!] with God's laws. This Lemurian society, the Mukulian Empire, grew in to the ideal land, but over time as it grew and grew the proletariat increased their power, while the citizen philosopher-kings sharnk because so few sought out citizen training; this led to Lemuria's downfall. Then, it sank.
And here is a random quote that I'm not including because of bad writing (it's relatively unobjectionable) but because I thought it was so damn interesting:
It all owes a heavy debt to Oliver's (or Phylos') A Dweller on Two Planets, offering a modern spin with new thrills--although not all so new, seeing as Oliver's family sued the Ballards' Saint Germain Foundation for plagarizing parts of A Dweller on Two Planets. But the lawsuit was thrown out because the judge agreed with the argument that, since Oliver never claimed to have been the author but only the transcriber, writing down whatever Phylos told him to, he was left with no right to the copyright.
Do you see what I mean???????
And on top of all this, he doesn't really spend much time telling us about how Lemuria is being used today? There's a long long quote from an 8chan post and a bunch of handwaving in the conclusion about how people can use Lemuria for whatever they want and so it will probably be used more in the future. He mentions that it's tied to QAnon but doesn't tell us how. After the detail of the scientific stuff of the first few chapters, this felt especially obnoxious.
Why did I keep reading this nonsense? Because I actually find the topic really interesting and wanted to learn about it!
AND THEN. At the very end of the book, there's an author's note that says, "Btw, I got most of this from a scholarly book called The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories by Sumathi Ramaswamy." And friends, I was so angry! I could have just read that book! I would bet my life that it's better written than this one!
Anyway, if any of you ever decide to brave the prose and read it yourself, please, please come and tell me whether I'm overstating. I need external validation.
Two final thoughts:
1. This book is full of people from over the past few centuries who have incredible imaginations. I kept thinking, "Why didn't these people just write fantasy novels because all this stuff is really compelling even if it is demonstrably not true." They didn't have to try to sell it as fact!
2. If anyone knows of any good books about Theosophy, please point me towards them. All the ones I'm finding are written by Theosophists or fellow travelers, and that is not what I'm looking for.
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I was going to ask WHO ALLOWED THIS? But I looked it up, and it's a micro press out of Port Townsand (LOL).
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There was no acknowledgements page at all! Which now that I think about it is kind of suspect in itself...
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Right??? So weird! I totally see what you mean,
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It's the worst sort of gaslighting by publishing. A dozen or so pages of that stuff and you're sitting there wondering, Is it...me? Do I just not understand how clarity and coherent thought works?
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It's the worst sort of gaslighting by publishing. A dozen or so pages of that stuff and you're sitting there wondering, Is it...me? Do I just not understand how clarity and coherent thought works?
Right? I was like, "Am I losing my mind? Or at least all sense of perspective?"
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These excerpts of the Lemuria book are almost literally unreadable, yikes. I hope he didn't thank his editor in the acknowledgements, for the editor's sake.
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I hope he didn't thank his editor in the acknowledgements, for the editor's sake.
There were no acknowledgements!!!
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Congrats on your fortitude, and ye gods and little fishes to those sentences.
This made me sporfle!
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Decades ago I found some little mimeographed chapbook full of Lemurian conspiracy theories. I wish I still had it.
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Decades ago I found some little mimeographed chapbook full of Lemurian conspiracy theories. I wish I still had it.
Oh, that sounds amazing!
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like a book on giants I looked at. It seemed to be a book on giants in mythology, but they started out with a preface stating that giants were real and the offsrping of humans and angels...
Oh my gosh! That's hilarious!