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Lemuria: A True Story of a Fake Place
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 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.
A True Story of a Fake Place is a fascinating history of a land that doesn’t exist. McHenry takes us on a journey explaining how this strange theory materialized, from the rainforests of Madagascar to Madame Blavatsky’s drawing room to the hidden city in Mount Shasta and a plunge into the depths of 4chan. It’s a wild ride!
– Tea Krulos , American Madness
With narrative deftness and compellingly crafted prose, Lemuria traces the birth and evolution of a more than 150-year-old myth. In exploring the forces that have shaped and buffeted the story of a fake place, the book reveals what those forces and the story itself have to do with modern, digitally connected society. McHenry seamlessly weaves in investigations into topics ranging from evolution to spiritualism, from racism to conspiracy culture, all while bringing the real people who promulgated and propelled the myth of Lemuria to life. Whether you’re interested in science, history, the history of science, or how tales are told, Lemuria is a rigorously researched and fascinatingly unfolded book.
– Sarah Scoles , They Are Already Here and Making Contact
A True Story of a Fake Place is a fascinating history of a land that doesn’t exist. McHenry takes us on a journey explaining how this strange theory materialized, from the rainforests of Madagascar to Madame Blavatsky’s drawing room to the hidden city in Mount Shasta and a plunge into the depths of 4chan. It’s a wild ride!
– Tea Krulos , American Madness
With narrative deftness and compellingly crafted prose, Lemuria traces the birth and evolution of a more than 150-year-old myth. In exploring the forces that have shaped and buffeted the story of a fake place, the book reveals what those forces and the story itself have to do with modern, digitally connected society. McHenry seamlessly weaves in investigations into topics ranging from evolution to spiritualism, from racism to conspiracy culture, all while bringing the real people who promulgated and propelled the myth of Lemuria to life. Whether you’re interested in science, history, the history of science, or how tales are told, Lemuria is a rigorously researched and fascinatingly unfolded book.
– Sarah Scoles , They Are Already Here and Making Contact
- GenresHistory
200 pages, Paperback
Published January 9, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 21, 2025
tl;dr: interesting subject, terrible writing, read a different book
But for those of you who want more than that, here's a rant.
Reading this book was such a wild experience that I'm almost tempted to start with "Buckle up, kids!"
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?"
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!
But for those of you who want more than that, here's a rant.
Reading this book was such a wild experience that I'm almost tempted to start with "Buckle up, kids!"
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?"
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!
March 17, 2025
Engaging and entertaining. This is definitely meant to educate New Age and conspiracy theory-minded readers but not in the way they hoped, so most will be disappointed but I found this very refreshing. It doesn't give an opinion on the existence of a real Lemuria or Mu, but it does show how the many legends inspired by an obscure and long-debunked 1800s theory have led to the current political climate of paranoid and white supremacist ideologies. It saves the political commentary for the end and most of the book is a well-researched and hilarious history of Lemurian fiction and nonfiction. I wish the book was longer and it immediately dates itself when it becomes an unfortunate pro-vaccine soapbox but it doesn't overstay its welcome and its core message is very needed.
April 29, 2025
McHenry certainly did his research while constructing Lemuria, and he has the receipts. The history about Lemuria goes back thousands of years, and the author leaves no stone unturned. Readers learn about notable figures from all over the world, over many generations, and their contributions to myth and facts alike. And in today’s world of digital information and sharing, we’re reminded just how quickly the increasingly outlandish theories can travel.
In-depth book review: https://cantinabookclub.com/review/le...
Podcast interview with Justin McHenry:
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2EGH...
YouTube: https://youtu.be/pP4Z4o0NGtM?si=8hIhC...
In-depth book review: https://cantinabookclub.com/review/le...
Podcast interview with Justin McHenry:
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2EGH...
YouTube: https://youtu.be/pP4Z4o0NGtM?si=8hIhC...
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews