L: Ladon to Lyonesse 167
Island, site of an un-Indian megalithic wall, as “Lemu.” Laamu is in the Maldives,
south of the Indian subcontinent at the equator, featuring the largest hawitta, or
stone mound, in the islands, constructed by a foreign, red-haired, seafaring people
during prehistory. Throughout Polynesia, Lemu is the god of the dead, who reigns
over a city of beautiful palaces at the bottom of the sea. On the Polynesian island
of Tonga, Lihamui is the name of the same month, May, just when the Roman
Lemuria was celebrated.
In some of these names, “l” and “r” become interchangeable. The Roman
festival may also have been called “Remuria,” just as Polynesia’s god of the dead
was sometimes prayed to as “Remu.” Lima, the Peruvian capital, was preferred
by the Spanish conquerors over the native “Remu,” which was probably itself a
linguistic twist, like the others, on the name of a pre-Inca city, originally known as
“Lemu.” If so, it represents another Lemurian influence on coastal Peru. “Lemuria”
is a variant of “Mu,” which, according to Churchward, means “mother.” “Lemuria,”
then, may have been an equivalent of “motherland.”
(See Bon, Mu)Le Plongeon, Augustus
French physician (1826 to 1908) who lived for many years among the Lacadone
Indians, descendants of the Mayas, learning their language, customs, and oral
traditions firsthand. Dr. Le Plongeon was first to excavate the pre-Columbian
ruins of Yucatan, amassing important artifact collections that became valuable
additions to some of the leading museums of Mexico and the United States. He
was also an early pioneer in decipherment of the Mayan hieroglyphs, which his
academic contemporaries found utterly inscrutable.
It was his ability to achieve at least their partial translation with the help of his
Lacadone friends that sabotaged his professional standing, because Le Plongeon
found references among a few of the carved steale to the sunken civilization of
Mu. After its destruction, survivors arrived in Central America, he read, where
they became the ancestors of the Mayas.
He believed the story was preserved in the Tro-Cortesianus, or Troano Codex,
one of only three books that survived the wholesale incineration of Mayan lit-
erature by Christian zealots in the 16th century. While his literal translation was
erroneous, it was at least vaguely correct, because the Troano Codex, while not a
history of the Lemurian cataclysm, is a kind of astrological almanac describing
natural catastrophes as the delineators of world epochs.
Le Plongeon’s Sacred Mysteries Among the Mayas and Quiches 11,500 Years
Ago and Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx were important influences in the
work of James Churchward, who brought the subject to a wider reading audience
beginning in the early 20th century, and they remain valued, if flawed contributions
to Lemurian studies.
(See Churchward)