Ladon
The serpent who guards the Tree of Life in the Garden of the Hesperides, scene of a mystery cult in Atlantis known as “The Navel of the World.” When Ladon entwines his length around its bough he becomes the Kundalini snake winding about the human spinal column, the symbolic force of rising consciousness and spiritual power. The Golden Apples of immortality he protects are the fruits of enlightenment. These concepts, so long associated with Eastern thought, originated in Atlantis, where even their appearance in classical Greek myth still predated Buddhism by centuries. Ladon was also the name of a Trojan warrior, another linguistic connection between the Trojans and their Atlantean ancestry.
Lak Mu-ang
A pillar venerated in its own small shrine at the spiritual center of Thailand, in the capital city of Bangkok. It is a copy of the original brought to southeast Asia by the Thens from their drowned homeland in the Pacific Ocean. They managed to carry away just one column that belonged to the most important temple in Lemuria before the entire structure was engulfed by the sea. Arriving on the shores of what much later became Thailand, the Thens set up the Lak Mu-ang at the center of their new capital, Aiyudiya. During centuries of subsequent strife, the city was sacked and its sacred souvenir lost, but memory of it persisted with the relocation of various Thai capital cities, each one erecting a simulacrum of the original pillar.
In 1782, King Rama I, who traced his royal descent from the lost motherland of Mu, erected a ceremonial column at the precise center of the city. The original La Mu-ang was so ancient, however, no efforts succeeded to preserve it against decay, and it was eventually replaced with a replica by Rama VI. Today’s Bangkok Lak Mu-ang is continually decorated with gold-leaf by anyone wishing to pay homage to their country’s sacred center. The shrine itself is decorated with symbols and images of the Lemurian homeland from which the column was brought so long ago, such as stylized swastikas and scenes of a tropical island suggestive of the land of Mu itself. The small shrine in which it stands is an elaborate pavilion with intricate gold-inlayed doors and is set, untypically, below ground level in a sunken court, suggesting the undersea condition of the civilization from which the pillar was taken.
The name recurs at important monumental sites in Thailand: Mu-ang Fa Daet, Ban Mu-ang Fai, Mu-ang semay, and Mu-ang Bon, where the original Lak Mu-ang may have been installed by immigrants from Mu.
Lam Abubia
The “Age Before the Flood,” preserved by Babylonian and Assyrian scribes from their Sumerian predecessors, it described a highly advanced land of wise men and sorcerers who ruled the world until a natural catastrophe annihilated their oceanic kingdom. Only a few survivors managed to reach Mesopotamia, where they worked with native residents to build civilization anew.
Lankhapura
In ancient Hindu tradition, the capital of a great empire believed to have been swallowed by the sea toward the end of the Treta yuga, 1621 or 1575 b.c. Lankhapura’s demise corresponds with the cataclysmic eruption of Thera, in the Aegean, and the penultimate destruction of Atlantis.
Lapita People
An archaeological term for a sophisticated culture that flourished throughout the western Pacific for 1,000 years after 1500 b.c. The Lapita People are associated with the survivors of Mu, who dispersed after its destruction in the 16th century b.c.
Lara
Along with thousands of other refugees, he escaped the late fourth-millennium b.c. seismic upheavals of Atlantis to settle with his wife, Balma, in Ireland, where these earliest Atlantean immigrants were known as the Fomorach. Lara was the son of their leader, Fintan.
Law of One
According to Edgar Cayce, this monotheistic cult arose in Atlantis as a reaction to the Followers of Belial, who made a religion of materialism. Tenets of the Law of One included social service for the less fortunate, acts of charity, abstinence, and humility. Although more of a social service creed than a theology with any original spiritual ideas, Cayce regarded it as a forerunner of Christianity. In any case, both the Law of One and its opposite number in the Followers of Belial were symptoms of the overall decline of Atlantean civilization during its final phase, when the former quest for enlightenment degenerated into a narrow-minded religious struggle for ascendancy. The Followers of Belial finally triumphed politically, only to have the technology they idolized blow up in their faces. Both sides were intolerant of opposing views, and together they contributed, despite their intense mutual animosity, to the social chaos of Atlantis in its latter days.
Le Cour, Paul
French professional Atlantologist who, in 1926, stated that Atlantis was not a “continent,” but a large island not far outside the Strait of Gibraltar.
Lemmings
Every three or four years, hundreds of thousands of lemmings (Lemmus lemmus) head away from the Norwegian coasts, swimming far out into the Atlantic Ocean, where they thrash about in a panicky search for dry land, then drown. The small rodents do not begin to move in packs, but usually head out individually, their numbers growing into a large mass. After rejecting overpopulation versus food resources as the cause, animal behaviorists do not understand why the self-destructive migrations take place. But it is the singular manner in which the process occurs that points to something special in their migratory pattern.
Lemmings have a natural aversion to water and hesitate to enter it. When confronted by rivers or lakes, they will swim across them only if seriously threatened, and otherwise move along the shore or bank. Their mass-migrations into the ocean dramatically contradict everything known about the creatures. Natural scientists recognize that lemmings seek land crossings whenever possible, and tend to follow paths made by other animals and even humans. Their suicidal instinct may be a persistent behavioral pattern set over thousands of years ago, when some land-bridge, long since sunk, connected the Norwegian coast to a former island in the Atlantic. The other three lemming genera (Dicrostonyx, Myopus, and Synaptomys), whose habitats have no conjectured geographical relationship to such an island, do not participate in migratory mass-suicides.
Nostophilia is a term used to describe the apparent instinct in certain animals which migrate to locations often very great distances from their usual habitat. Perhaps some behavioral memory of a large, lost island that for countless generations previously sheltered and nurtured the lemmings still survives in the evolutionary memories and compelling instincts of their descendants.
Lemuel
Literally, the “king” (el) of Lemu(ria), the contemporary civilization of Atlantis in the Pacific. His royal identity is underscored in the Old Testament (Proverbs, viii, 31), where he is described as a monarch. The 18th-century American revolutionary, Thomas Paine, wrote in The Age of Reason that the verse in which he appears “stands as a preface to the Proverbs that follow, and which are not the proverbs of Solomon, but of Lemuel; and this Lemuel was not one of the kings of Israel, nor of Judah, but of some other country, and consequently a Gentile” (134). The Lemurians reputedly proselytized the tenets of their spirituality far and wide, so the biblical “proverbs” associated with King Lemuel may have been remnants of Pacific contacts in deep antiquity.
Lemuria
An ancient civilization of the Pacific predating both the emergence and destruction of Atlantis. The name derives from a Roman festival, celebrated every May 9, 11, and 15, to appease the souls of men and women who perished when Lemuria was destroyed by a natural catastrophe. These dates probably represent the days during which the destruction took place. The Lemuria festival was believed to have been instituted by the founder of Rome, Romulus, as expiation for the murder of his twin brother, Remus. During the observance, celebrants walked barefoot, as though they had fled from a disaster, and went through their homes casting black beans behind them nine times in a ritual of rebirth; black beans were symbolic of human souls which were still earthbound (that is, ghosts), while 9 was a sacred numeral signifying birth (the nine months of pregnancy).
The ritual’s objective was to honor and exorcise any unhappy spirits which may haunt a house. This part of the Roman Lemuria is identically observed by Japanese participants in the Bon Festival, or “Feast of Lanterns,” when the head of the household walks barefoot through each room of his home exclaiming, “Bad spirits, out! Good spirits, in!” while casting beans behind him.
Obviously, both ancient Rome and Japan received a common tradition independently from the same source, when Mu was destroyed in a great flood. A graphic reenactment of that deluge occurred on the third day of the Roman Lemuria, when celebrants cast 30 images made of rushes into the River Tiber. What the images represented (perhaps human beings?), and why they were put together from rushes is not precisely known, but they were plainly meant to simulate loss in a torrent of water. Nor is the specific significance of 30 understood, although Koziminsky (citing Heydon’s similar opinion) defines it as appropriately calamitous (49).
The name, “Lemuria,” is not confined to Rome, but occurs as far away as among the Chumash Indians of southern California. They referred to San Miguel 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.”
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 topics that survived the wholesale incineration of Mayan literature 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.
Lesser Arrival
The Mayan epic, the Popol Vuh (“The Topic of Counsel”) records two major immigrations of white-skinned foreigners from over the Atlantic Ocean. The earlier is the Greater Arrival, and corresponds to large-scale, although not total, evacuation of Atlantis in the late 4th millennium b.c., during a period of geologic upheavals. The Lesser Arrival took place some 2,000 years later, when Atlantis was utterly destroyed and some of its survivors made their way to the shores of Yucatan. According to the Popol Vuh, the leading personality of the Greater Arrival was Itzamna, the founding father of Mesoamerican Civilization. Votan led the Lesser Arrival. He was described as saving sacred records written on deer hide that chronicled the early history of his people from Valum before its destruction by a natural catastrophe. (See Greater Arrival)
Peru’s Emerald Pyramid is adorned with the motif of an over-arching rainbow through which a fair-skinned foreigner arrived with the gifts of civilization, following a catastrophic deluge.
