Louis Jacolliot (1837-1890) was a French barrister, colonial judge and writer. He was obsessed with Indian occultism and collected Sanskrit myths and interpreted some of them as telling of a sunken continent, Rutas, in the Indian Ocean. However, he decided to move this lost land to the Pacific and as a consequence, Jacolliot was quoted as an ‘authority’ by Blavatsky when she sought support for her own invention – Lemuria. Later this was embellished even further by William Scott Elliott. Jacolliot presented his sunken land as being echoed by Plato’s Atlantis.

He is also credited with the invention of the story of Agartha^[789.81].