Table of Contents
Madagascar turns up on my pages in two very different ways: as a fragment of a sunken southern continent in the Theosophical maps, and as the home of its own creation stories. These are the pages where the island appears.
A survivor of Lemuria
W. Scott-Elliot counts Madagascar among the lands he believed had outlasted every catastrophe since the Lemurian period. On The Lost Lemuria (1904) I quote him:
A comparison of the two maps here given, along with the four maps of Atlantis, will also show that Australia and New Zealand, Madagascar, parts of Somaliland, the south of Africa, and the extreme southern portion of Patagonia are lands which have probably existed through all the intervening catastrophes since the early days of the Lemurian period.
W. Scott-Elliot, The Lost Lemuria
On What Are Blavatsky’s Root Races? I trace the Secret Doctrine geography, where the land runs from the Himalayan foothills through India, Ceylon, Sumatra, Madagascar, Australia and Tasmania into the Pacific. On The Lemurian Era Rudolf Steiner places the Lemurians on a continent that, in Theosophical literature, stretched from Ceylon to Madagascar. On Lemurians: androgynous with group focused consciousness the summary of Arthur Powell’s account of the Third Root Race mentions one city on Madagascar.
Where the idea came from
The name itself goes back to zoology. On Mount Shasta I note that the concept of Lemuria began with Philip Sclater, who proposed a lost continent to explain lemur fossils in India and Madagascar but not in Africa.
Malagasy creation stories
On Zanahary shaped Andrianerinerina I follow an origin myth of the Merina people of the central Highlands, in which Andrianerinerina is the son of God (Zanahary) and the ancestor of the Merina rulers. On Androgyne Adam, in the section on the inhabitants of Madagascar, I give a strange myth about the origin of woman, in which the first man was made of the dust of the earth and placed in a garden.
Related pages
- The Lost Lemuria (1904)
- What Are Blavatsky’s Root Races?
- The Lemurian Era
- Lemurians: androgynous with group focused consciousness
- Mount Shasta
- Zanahary shaped Andrianerinerina
- Androgyne Adam
For every page I tagged with Madagascar, see the Madagascar tag archive.
