A brief communiqué regarding nomenclature

I rock the thesaurus.

So a few years ago, I found a book called the Dictionary of the Occult. It sounded cool, so I bought it. It had an entry on Atlantis, which I had been expecting, but at the bottom of that entry it said "see also: Lemuria", which I hadn't been expecting. So, I saw also.

See, in the early 19th century, the early archaeologists started finding lemur fossils in Madagascar, but also in India, thousands of miles away. Either God really loved lemurs, or their theory was buggy. So they came up with a hypothetical sunken land-bridge between India and Madagascar. Since it was all about the lemurs, they called the land-bridge 'Lemur-ia'. And that was fine.

And then, in the second half of the 19th century, the occultist/spiritualist movement started to take off, the Theosophist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky wrote about about a mythic sunken continent somewhere in the Indian Ocean, which predated Atlantis. Since the name was already attached to a sunken landmass in the area, she called her continent 'Lemuria'. Some of the stories about the palace can make for entertaining reading: "a strange and powerful race of fifteen-foot-tall telepathic hermaphrodites... with a third eye in the back of their head... and their other two eyes sticking out of the front of the head facing opposite ways!" Apparently their continent sunk when they worked out that you don't need hermaphrodites for steady population growth. And that was fine.

And today, if you ask someone to name a sunken continent and they'll say Atlantis. No-one's heard of Lemuria, except in conjunction with Mount Shasta(or, they think its the underwater city of the evil Deviants in Marvel Comics). So, since no-one seems ready to mind the issue, I'm claiming it. And that is fine.

Incidentally, the Lemurians under Mount Shasta would actually be from [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(lost_continent)]the ancient sunken continent of Mu[/url]. I also rock Wikipedia.