Lemuria¶

Lemuria is a discredited lost continent from real-world fringe history that, in the Marblehead case, surfaces in the Sons of Adam's modified Bible as a sunken Eden and fills a fringe shelf in Amos Shaw's house.


Type	Lore (fringe belief)
Aliases	None; the Bible never names it
Associated with	Sons of Adam, Amos Shaw
First appearance	Summer Service 01

The real-world theory¶

Andre explains the background at the table. Lemuria was proposed in the 1800s to explain how lemur skeletons got to Madagascar, before continental drift was understood. Continental drift discredited it, but occultists and hippies kept it alive as a kind of "Indian Atlantis." (Summer Service 01)

In the Sons of Adam Bible¶

While the team waits for a girl to come home so they can interview her, Andrew speed-reads the motel's Sons of Adam Bible with a "sick intensity." Rita rolls an 11, a full success, and asks what sort of creature is involved and what is being concealed. Andre's answers describe a text that is mostly the normal Bible with added material:

Jesus travels to a lost landmass between India and Madagascar, which is Lemuria even though the Bible never uses the name.
The Garden of Eden was on that land bridge and was taken beneath the waves to protect it.
On Judgment Day everyone will physically return to Eden.
Angry, noticeably worse-written diatribes against continental drift are mixed in, insisting that "the firmament does not shift."
The tone around Revelation is hysterical and millenarian, with Jonestown overtones; Andre says that in an FBI agent's professional opinion "the Kool-Aid is no more than five or six years out."

Andrew recognizes the allusions from his own fringe reading. (Summer Service 01)

Rita (as Andrew Howard)

"I think they might sacrifice people to a sea monster."

Dante's Kurt agrees that this is the vibe he got from the front-desk clerk, and compares the church to a Wicker Man cult. Andrew corrects him: "No, they're not wicker people. They're definitely water people. They're wet. They're wet people." (Summer Service 01)

The same themes of water as origin and Eden under the sea recur in the sermon the team hears that night; see Second coming and eschaton.

In Shaw's house¶

In Summer Service 03, Huell searches the largely untouched bedroom of Shaw's house and rolls a 12 on Investigate a Mystery. He finds a bookshelf of academic biblical texts mixed with fringe material about Lemuria. The closet holds clerical garments like those the preacher wore at the church, with signs that others have been removed, and the nightstand holds a grocery bag with roughly ten pounds of clear crystal spheres. (Summer Service 03)

This ties the preacher personally to the lost-continent material. It is never established who wrote the Bible's added text, or whether the church believes the sunken Eden is a real place beneath Marblehead's waters or only a doctrine.

Trivia¶

Zack and Dante riffed on lemurs ("a continent of lemurs") and on Wicker Man during the Bible scene. (Summer Service 01)