Mu is a mythical
lost continent introduced by
Augustus Le Plongeon (1825–1908), who identified the "Land of Mu" with
Atlantis. The name was subsequently identified with the hypothetical land of
Lemuria by
James Churchward (1851–1936), who asserted that it was located in the Pacific Ocean before its destruction.
The place of Mu in both pseudoscience and fantasy fiction is discussed in detail in ''
Lost Continents
''Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme in History, Science, and Literature'' is a study by L. Sprague de Camp that provides a detailed examination of theories and speculations on Atlantis and other lost lands, including the scientific arguments ...
'' (1954, 1970) by
L. Sprague de Camp.
Geologists dismiss the existence of Mu and the lost continent of Atlantis as physically impossible, as a continent can neither sink nor be destroyed in the short period of time asserted in legends and folklore and literature about these places.
Mu's existence is considered to have no factual basis.
History of the concept
Augustus Le Plongeon
The mythical idea of the "Land of Mu" first appeared in the works of the British-American antiquarian
Augustus Le Plongeon (1825–1908), after his investigations of the
Maya ruins in
Yucatán.
He claimed that he had translated the first copies of the
Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the K'iche' from the ancient Mayan using
Spanish. He claimed the civilization of Yucatán was older than those of
Greece and
Egypt, and told the story of an even older continent.
Le Plongeon got the name "Mu" from
Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, who, in 1864, mistranslated what was then called the
Troano Codex (now called "Madrid Codex") using the
de Landa alphabet. Brasseur believed that a word which he read as ''Mu'' referred to a land that had been submerged by a catastrophe. Le Plongeon identified this lost land with
Atlantis and, following
Ignatius Donnelly in ''Atlantis: The Antediluvian World'' (1882), identified it as a continent that had once existed in the
Atlantic Ocean:
Le Plongeon claimed that the civilization of ancient Egypt was founded by Queen Moo, a refugee from the land's demise. Other refugees supposedly fled to
Central America and became the Maya.
James Churchward
Mu, as an alternative name for a lost Pacific Ocean continent previously identified as the hypothetical
Lemuria (the supposed place of origin for
lemurs), was later popularised by
James Churchward (1851–1936) in a series of books, beginning with ''Lost Continent of Mu, the Motherland of Man'' (1926),
[
https://archive.org/details/the-lost-continent-of-mu] re-edited later as ''The Lost Continent Mu'' (1931).
[ Re-published by Adventures Unlimited Press (2007)] Other popular books in the series are ''The Children of Mu'' (1931) and ''The Sacred Symbols of Mu'' (1933).
Churchward claimed that "more than fifty years ago", while he was a soldier in
India, he befriended a high-ranking temple priest who showed him a set of ancient "sunburnt" clay tablets, supposedly in a long-lost "Naga-Maya language" which only two other people in India could read. Churchward convinced the priest to teach him the dead language and decipher the tablets by promising to restore and store the tablets, for Churchward was an expert in preserving ancient artifacts. The tablets were written in either Burma or in the lost continent of Mu itself, according to the high priest.
[Churchward, James (1926). Lost Continent of Mu, the Motherland of Man. United States: Kessinger Publishing. .] Having mastered the language himself, Churchward found out that they originated from "the place where
anfirst appeared—Mu". The 1931 edition states that "all matter of science in this work are based on translations of two sets of ancient tablets": the clay tablets he read in India, and a collection of 2,500 stone tablets that had been uncovered by
William Niven in
Mexico.
The tablets begin with the creation of Earth, Mu, and the superior human civilization Naacal by the seven commands of the seven superlative intellects of the seven-headed serpent Narayana. This creation story dismisses the
theory of evolution.
Churchward gave a vivid description of Mu as the home of an advanced civilization, the
Naacal, which flourished between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago, was dominated by a “white race",
and was "superior in many respects to our own".
At the time of its demise, about 12,000 years ago, Mu had 64 million inhabitants and seven major cities, and colonies on the other continents. The 64 million inhabitants were separated as ten tribes that followed one government and one religion.
Churchward claimed that the landmass of Mu was located in the Pacific Ocean, and stretched east–west from the
Marianas
The Mariana Islands (; also the Marianas; in Chamorro: ''Manislan Mariånas'') are a crescent-shaped archipelago comprising the summits of fifteen longitudinally oriented, mostly dormant volcanic mountains in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, betw ...
to
Easter Island, and north–south from
Hawaii to
Mangaia. According to Churchward the continent was supposedly 5,000 miles from east to west and over 3,000 miles from north to south, which is larger than South America. The continent was believed to be flat with massive plains, vast rivers, rolling hills, large bays, and estuaries. He claimed that according to the
creation myth
A creation myth (or cosmogonic myth) is a symbolic narrative of how the world began and how people first came to inhabit it., "Creation myths are symbolic stories describing how the universe and its inhabitants came to be. Creation myths develop ...
he read in the Indian tablets, Mu had been lifted above sea level by the expansion of underground volcanic gases. Eventually Mu "was completely obliterated in almost a single night":
after a series of earthquakes and
volcanic eruptions, "the broken land fell into that great abyss of fire" and was covered by "fifty millions of square miles of water."
Churchward claimed the reasoning for the continent's destruction in one night was because the main mineral on the island was granite and was honeycombed to create huge shallow chambers and cavities filled with highly explosive gases. Once the chambers were empty after the explosion, they collapsed on themselves, causing the island to crumble and sink.
Churchward claimed that Mu was the common origin of the great civilizations of Egypt, Greece, Central America, India, Burma and others, including
Easter Island, and was in particular the source of ancient
megalithic
A megalith is a large stone that has been used to construct a prehistoric structure or monument, either alone or together with other stones. There are over 35,000 in Europe alone, located widely from Sweden to the Mediterranean sea.
The ...
architecture. As evidence for his claims, he pointed to symbols from throughout the world, in which he saw common themes of birds, the relation of the Earth and the sky, and especially the
Sun. Churchward claimed that the king of Mu was named Ra and he related this to the Egyptian god of the sun,
Ra, and the
Rapa Nui word for Sun, ''ra’a''.
He claimed to have found symbols of the Sun in "Egypt,
Babylonia
Babylonia (; Akkadian: , ''māt Akkadī'') was an ancient Akkadian-speaking state and cultural area based in the city of Babylon in central-southern Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq and parts of Syria). It emerged as an Amorite-ruled state c. ...
,
Peru and all ancient lands and countries – it was a universal symbol."
As additional evidence for his claims, Churchward looked to the Holy Bible and found through his own translations that
Moses
Moses hbo, מֹשֶׁה, Mōše; also known as Moshe or Moshe Rabbeinu (Mishnaic Hebrew: מֹשֶׁה רַבֵּינוּ, ); syr, ܡܘܫܐ, Mūše; ar, موسى, Mūsā; grc, Mωϋσῆς, Mōÿsēs () is considered the most important pro ...
was trained by the Naacal brotherhood in Egypt. Assyria mistranslated when writing and misplaced the Garden of Eden, which according to Churchward would have been located in the Pacific Ocean.
Churchward makes references to the
Ramayana epic, a
religious text of
Hindu
Hindus (; ) are people who religiously adhere to Hinduism.Jeffery D. Long (2007), A Vision for Hinduism, IB Tauris, , pages 35–37 Historically, the term has also been used as a geographical, cultural, and later religious identifier for ...
attributed to sage and historian
Valmiki. Valmiki mentions the Naacals as “coming to Burma from the land of their birth in the East,” that is, in the direction of the Pacific Ocean.
Churchward attributed all megalithic art in
Polynesia to the people of Mu. He claimed that symbols of the sun are found "depicted on stones of Polynesian ruins", such as the stone hats (''
pukao'') on top of the giant ''
moai'' statues of Easter Island. Citing
W. J. Johnson W. may refer to:
* SoHo (Australian TV channel) (previously W.), an Australian pay television channel
* ''W.'' (film), a 2008 American biographical drama film based on the life of George W. Bush
* "W.", the fifth track from Codeine's 1992 EP '' B ...
, Churchward describes the cylindrical hats as "spheres" that "seem to show red in the distance", and asserts that they “represent the Sun as Ra.”
He also incorrectly claimed that some of them are made of "red sandstone",
which does not exist on the island. The platforms on which the statues rest (''ahu'') are described by Churchward as being "platform-like accumulations of cut and dressed stone", which were supposedly left in their current positions "awaiting shipment to some other part of the continent for the building of temples and palaces".
He also cites the pillars "erected by the
Māori of
New Zealand" as an example of this lost civilization's handiwork.
In Churchward's view, the present-day Polynesians are not descendants of the dominant members of the lost civilization of Mu, responsible for these great works, but are instead descendants of survivors of the cataclysm that adopted "the first
cannibalism
Cannibalism is the act of consuming another individual of the same species as food. Cannibalism is a common ecological interaction in the animal kingdom and has been recorded in more than 1,500 species. Human cannibalism is well documented, b ...
and savagery" in the world.
John Newbrough
In the 1882 book ''
Oahspe: A New Bible'', John Newbrough included a map of the Earth in antediluvian times (i.e. prior to the great flood of biblical record) where an unknown continent is located in the Northern Pacific. Newbrough called this continent Pan. People often link both Pan and Mu as the same mythological continent since both are claimed to be located in the Pacific. Newbrough continues to claim that the unknown continent disappeared 24,000 years ago, but will soon rise from the Pacific and will be inhabited by the Kosmon race.
Max Heindel
Max Heindel, a Danish-American
occultist, wrote about Mu in ''
The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception'' (1909), which offers a different image and chronology. According to Heindel, Mu existed when the
Earth's crust
Earth's crust is Earth's thin outer shell of rock, referring to less than 1% of Earth's radius and volume. It is the top component of the lithosphere, a division of Earth's layers that includes the crust and the upper part of the mantle. The ...
was still hardening, in a period of high heat and dense atmosphere. Heindel claims humans existed at this time, but that they had the power to
shape-shift
In mythology, folklore and speculative fiction, shape-shifting is the ability to physically transform oneself through an inherently superhuman ability, divine intervention, demonic manipulation, sorcery, spells or having inherited the ...
. He says they had no eyes but rather two sensitive spots that were affected by the light of the Sun. In the dense atmosphere, humans were guided more by internal perception than by external vision. The language of these humans consisted of the sounds of nature.
Louis Jacolliot
Louis Jacolliot was a French
attorney
Attorney may refer to:
* Lawyer
** Attorney at law, in some jurisdictions
* Attorney, one who has power of attorney
* ''The Attorney'', a 2013 South Korean film
See also
* Attorney general, the principal legal officer of (or advisor to) a gove ...
,
judge
A judge is a person who presides over court proceedings, either alone or as a part of a panel of judges. A judge hears all the witnesses and any other evidence presented by the barristers or solicitors of the case, assesses the credibility an ...
, and
occultist who specialized in the translation of
Sanskrit. He wrote about the land of the Rutas, a lost land that ancient sources claimed was in the Indian Ocean but which he placed in the Pacific Ocean and associated with Atlantis stories in ''Histoire des Vierges. Les Peuples et les continents disparus'' (1874). He amplified upon this in ''Occult Science in India'' (1875, English translation 1884). He has been identified as a contributor to
Rosicrucianism
Rosicrucianism is a spiritual and cultural movement that arose in Europe in the early 17th century after the publication of several texts purported to announce the existence of a hitherto unknown esoteric order to the world and made seeking its ...
.
Modern claims
James Bramwell and
William Scott-Elliot claimed that the cataclysmic events on Mu began 800,000 years ago
and went on until the last catastrophe, which occurred in precisely 9564 BC.
In the 1930s,
Atatürk, founder of the
Turkish Republic, was interested in Churchward's work and considered Mu as a possible location of the
original homeland of the
Turks.
Masaaki Kimura
is a Japanese geologist and a Emeritus, professor emeritus from the Faculty of Science of the University of the Ryukyus, Okinawa, Japan.
Biography
Masaaki Kimura graduated in science at the Faculty of Fisheries of the University of Tokyo (1963) a ...
has suggested that certain underwater features located off the coast of
Yonaguni Island,
Japan
Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...
(popularly known as the
Yonaguni Monument), are ruins of Mu.
Criticisms
Geological arguments
Modern
geological knowledge rules out "lost continents" of any significant size. According to the theory of
plate tectonics, which has been extensively confirmed since the 1970s, the
Earth's crust
Earth's crust is Earth's thin outer shell of rock, referring to less than 1% of Earth's radius and volume. It is the top component of the lithosphere, a division of Earth's layers that includes the crust and the upper part of the mantle. The ...
consists of lighter "
sial" rocks (
continental crust rich in
aluminium silicates) that float on heavier "
sima" rocks (
oceanic crust richer in
magnesium silicates). The sial is generally absent in the ocean floor where the
crust is a few kilometers thick, while the continents are huge solid blocks tens of kilometers thick. Since continents float on the sima much like
iceberg
An iceberg is a piece of freshwater ice more than 15 m long that has broken off a glacier or an ice shelf and is floating freely in open (salt) water. Smaller chunks of floating glacially-derived ice are called "growlers" or "bergy bits". The ...
s float on water, a continent cannot simply "sink" under the ocean.
It is true that
continental drift and
seafloor spreading can change the shape and position of continents and occasionally break a continent into two or more pieces (as happened to
Pangaea). However, these are very slow processes that occur in
geological time scale
The geologic time scale, or geological time scale, (GTS) is a representation of time based on the rock record of Earth. It is a system of chronological dating that uses chronostratigraphy (the process of relating strata to time) and geochronol ...
s (hundreds of millions of years). Over the scale of history (tens of thousands of years), the sima under the continental crust can be considered solid, and the continents are basically anchored on it. It is almost certain that the continents and ocean floors have retained their present position and shape for the whole span of human existence.
There is also no conceivable event that could have "destroyed" a continent, since its huge mass of sial rocks would have to end up somewhere—and there is no trace of it at the bottom of the oceans. The
Pacific Ocean islands are not part of a submerged landmass but rather the tips of isolated
volcanoes.
This is the case, in particular, of
Easter Island, which is a recent volcanic peak surrounded by deep ocean (3,000 m deep at 30 km off the island). After visiting the island in the 1930s,
Alfred Métraux observed that the ''moai'' platforms are concentrated along the current coast of the island, which implies that the island's shape has changed little since they were built. Moreover, the "Triumphal Road" that
Pierre Loti had reported ran from the island to the submerged lands below, is actually a natural lava flow.
Furthermore, while Churchward was correct in his claim that the island has no sandstone or sedimentary rocks, the point is irrelevant because the ''
pukao'' are all made of native volcanic
scoria.
Archaeological evidence
After the
Pleistocene, cultures of the
Americas
The Americas, which are sometimes collectively called America, are a landmass comprising the totality of North and South America. The Americas make up most of the land in Earth's Western Hemisphere and comprise the New World.
Along with th ...
and the
Old World
The "Old World" is a term for Afro-Eurasia that originated in Europe , after Europeans became aware of the existence of the Americas. It is used to contrast the continents of Africa, Europe, and Asia, which were previously thought of by the ...
developed
social complexity independent of each other, and, in fact,
agriculture and
sedentism emerged in multiple locations around the world after the inception of the
Holocene at 11,700 BP. The emergence of
Pre-Pottery Neolithic A
Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) denotes the first stage of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, in early Levantine and Anatolian Neolithic culture, dating to years ago, that is, 10,000–8,800 BCE. Archaeological remains are located in the Levantine and Up ...
sites such as
Göbekli Tepe and
Neolithic villages such as
Jericho
Jericho ( ; ar, أريحا ; he, יְרִיחוֹ ) is a Palestinian city in the West Bank. It is located in the Jordan Valley, with the Jordan River to the east and Jerusalem to the west. It is the administrative seat of the Jericho Gove ...
and
Çatalhöyük in the
Levant and
Anatolia, respectively, result from local processes of
cultural evolution, not
colonization
Colonization, or colonisation, constitutes large-scale population movements wherein migrants maintain strong links with their, or their ancestors', former country – by such links, gain advantage over other inhabitants of the territory. When ...
by individuals from elsewhere.
Easter Island was first settled around AD 300
[;] and the ''
pukao'' on the ''
moai'' are regarded as having ceremonial or traditional headdresses.
[
]
In popular culture
Literature/print
* H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) featured the lost continent in his revision of Hazel Heald's short story " Out of the Aeons" (1935
Events
January
* January 7 – Italian premier Benito Mussolini and French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval conclude Franco-Italian Agreement of 1935, an agreement, in which each power agrees not to oppose the other's colonial claims.
* ...
). Mu appears in numerous Cthulhu mythos stories, including many written by Lin Carter.
* The 1970 ''Mu Revealed'' is a humorous spoof by Raymond Buckland purporting to describe the long lost civilization of Muror, located on the legendary lost continent of Mu. The book was written under the pseudonym "Tony Earll", an anagram of "not really". The book claimed to present a translation of a diary compiled by a boy called Kland found and translated by an archaeologist named "Reedson Hurdlop", an anagram of "Rudolph Rednose".
Music
* The band the Grateful Dead
The Grateful Dead was an American rock music, rock band formed in 1965 in Palo Alto, California. The band is known for its eclectic style, which fused elements of rock, Folk music, folk, country music, country, jazz, bluegrass music, bluegrass, ...
named their second album, '' Anthem of the Sun'' from the Churchward book. In his book there is an instrument, made from a skull, that was used to perform the "Anthem of the Sun".
Video games
* One of the levels in the 1993 '' DuckTales 2'' videogame is set on the island of Mu.
See also
* Doggerland
* Kumari Kandam
*Lost city
A lost city is an urban settlement that fell into terminal decline and became extensively or completely uninhabited, with the consequence that the site's former significance was no longer known to the wider world. The locations of many lost citi ...
* Lost lands
* Mauritia (microcontinent)
* Agartha
* Zealandia
References
External links
James Churchward's book, ''The Lost Continent of Mu'', on Bibliotecapleyades
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mu (Lost Continent)
Earth mysteries
Easter Island
Mythological places
Pseudohistory
Theoretical continents
Atlantis