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Love Has Won, False Prophets and the Fever Dream of the American New Age
by Leah Sottile
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Chapter 1
Two hundred million years ago, the Earth was like a house with all of its furniture piled into one corner. The seven continents of our planet were, back then, just one. Australia was shoved into Antarctica; India flopped nearby. South America fit into the elbow crook of Africa, and the land that would one day become the island of Madagascar was trapped in the midst of it all.
The continental plates that act as the foundation of the world began to move, as they are wont to do. As one dragged over another, volcanic magma burbled up from the planet's angry core, rising toward the Earth's surface, searing apart that giant mass of land into jagged new pieces. Those pieces drifted. For eons upon eons upon eons, they kept moving as the planet underwent a great reorganization.
As everything drifted, Madagascar, a wisp of land, spun like a feather in the wind until it settled, finally, 250 miles off the eastern coast of Africa.
Millions more years passed.
In the 1860s a British zoologist named Philip Lutley Sclater sat down at his desk to write an essay about lemurs—those strange, curious-eyed primates. He attempted to explain something that had until that point been a curiosity to men like him: men of answers, men of science.
Sclater was a lawyer and, in the zoological world, an ornithologist mostly—a bird man. But in 1864, he published his essay about lemurs in a small academic journal. At that point, he wrote, the animals primarily lived on the island of Madagascar, but lemur fossils had been unearthed in India as well. India but not Africa. This was a strange mystery: How could the same species be found in two places with a wide, gaping ocean between them, but not across the narrow 250-mile-wide channel that separated the African island from the African continent?
Sclater had a theory. In his essay, he posited that a massive continent had once stretched between Madagascar and India. And that continent had simply vanished. He said lemurs were a relic of this lost world, a living connection to it.
"I should propose the name Lemuria!" Sclater declared. And with that, a place was born.
In one way, Sclater's story had everything to do with the planet's slow eternal rearrangement. And yet he had no idea that the land had been forever roaming. Scientists had not yet published findings about continental drift, and so Sclater did not know that the Earth was slowly shifting underneath his feet as he came up with this idea of a lost place. Late in his life, Sclater would hedge on his lost-land theory, characterizing the idea as "hypothetical." But by then, some people had already taken the idea of Lemuria and run with it. An Australian science journal discussed it not as theory but fact. Writers composed speculative stories about Lemurians—what they might have looked like, how they spoke, whether or not they kept pets. When Sclater died in 1913, it was his largest legacy—the story of a place that was never a place called Lemuria.
All the while, the Earth kept moving.
Excerpted from Blazing Eye Sees All by Leah Sottile. Copyright © 2025 by Leah Sottile. Excerpted by permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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