4.4 • 921 Ratings
🗓️ 22 June 2024
⏱️ 75 minutes
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Is Lemuria a real place, or the fever dream of crackpots, mystics, conspiracy theorists, and Bigfoot hunters?
Below the waters where the Pacific and Indian Oceans lies a lost continent. One of hopes and dreams that housed a race of beings that arrived from foreign planets and from which sprang humanity, religion, civilization, and our modern world. It was called Lemuria and it was all fake.
What began as a theoretical land bridge to explain the mystery of lemurs on Madagascar quickly got hijacked to become the evolutionary home of humankind, the cradle of spirituality, and then the source of cosmological wonders. Abandoned by science as hokum, Lemuria morphed into a land filled with ancient, advanced civilizations, hollowed-out mountains full of gold and crystals, moon-beings descending in baskets, underground evil creatures, and a breast-feeding Bigfoot.
The history of Lemuria is populated with a dizzying array of people from early Darwinists to conspiracy spouting Congressmen, globetrotting madams, Rosicrucians, Hollow-Earthers, sci-fi writers, UFO contactees, sleeping prophets, New Age channelers, a “Mother God”, and a tequila swigging conspiracy theorist. Historian Justin McHenry provides a thoughtful exploration of how pseudo-science hijacked the gentle Victorian-era concept of Lemuria and, in following decades, twisted it into an all-encompassing home for alternative ideas about race, spirituality, science, politics, and the paranormal.
Justin McHenry is a writer, historian, and archivist. His writing has appeared in magazines such as FATE, newspapers, journals, and various online publications like Belt Mag, 100 Days of Appalachia, and he edited the collection of stories, The Garden at Rose Brake. He received his Master’s degree in History from West Virginia University. His new book is Lemuria: A True Story of a Fake Place.
Shermer and McHenry discuss: how organisms get to islands from mainlands • how lemurs get to Madagascar • rafting sweepstakes vs. land bridges. • Alfred Russel Wallace and Island biogeography • Zoologist Philip Sclater • Ernst Haeckel to Hitler • Alexander von Humboldt • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe • Land of Mu and Atlantis • Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis • Madame Blavatsky • Hermes Trismegistus and Hermeticism, Rosicrucians • pseudohistory, pseudoarchaeology and mythology.
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0:00.0 | You're listening to the Michael Sherman Show. The Michael Sherber Show Here's the new book, Learn, Le Muria. A True Story of a Fake Place, check that out, |
0:30.6 | Lamuria, the True Story of a fake place. All right. Hey Justin how you doing? |
0:36.3 | Doing lovely. How are you doing today Michael? Where are you? Are you in West |
0:39.7 | Virginia? I am in West, yep. I'm still in West Virginia. |
0:42.7 | Oh nice. |
0:44.0 | So what's your story? |
0:44.7 | How did you get into this? |
0:46.1 | I'll introduce the topic in a second, |
0:47.4 | but yeah, how did you get into all this kind of, |
0:49.5 | I don't know if you call it alternative history |
0:51.1 | or alternative archaeology or I don't know how you characterize it. |
0:55.2 | Oh that it has a lot of pseudos behind it I think there's a lot of pseudo archaeology, |
0:59.5 | pseudo science, pseudo history, a little bit of everything around it. |
1:04.3 | So, you know, I love history. |
1:07.4 | I've always loved the stories behind history. |
1:09.9 | And so getting into just finding stories and finding interesting things to talk about. |
1:17.0 | And also I just love weird things just from as a kid growing up and getting, watching unsolved mysteries and stuff like that it got me into it so just |
1:26.0 | being around history and just weird topics in general like the two just kind of combined and so |
1:32.3 | honestly when the like pandemic like the two just kind of combined and so |
1:33.6 | honestly when the like pandemic hit and stuck at home and looking for stuff to do |
1:39.1 | for some people it's you know crafting or something along those lines for me it's researching books I guess and so it was just an interesting topic I knew a little bit about and then when I started diving deeper into it finding more and and more. I was like, oh, well, this is really interesting. |
1:56.0 | Yeah, it is a compelling subject, all of this, you know, the kind of fringes, margins, borderlands, |
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