Mu

Mu is the name of a lost continent, which was located in the Pacific Ocean before it sank beneath the waters, similar to Atlantis and Lemuria, with which it is sometimes identified.

General acceptance by the scientific community of the theory of plate tectonics ended any scientific basis for the once popular belief in sunken continents. Plate tectonics explains that continental masses are composed of the lighter SiAl (silicon/aluminium) type rocks which literally float on the heavier SiMg (silicon/magnesium) rocks which constitute ocean bottoms. There is evidence of SiAl rock in the Pacific basin.

History of the concept

Augustus Le Plongeon[1]

The idea of Mu first appeared in the works of the antiquarian Augustus Le Plongeon (1825–1908), a 19th century traveler and writer who conducted his own investigations of the Maya ruins in Yucatán. He announced that he had translated the ancient Mayan writings, which supposedly showed that the Maya of Yucatán were older than the later civilizations of Greece and Egypt, and additionally told the story of an even older continent of Mu, which had foundered in a similar fashion to Atlantis, with the survivors founding the Maya civilization.

Le Plongeon actually got the name "Mu" from Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg who in 1864 mistranslated what was then called the Troano Codex using the de Landa alphabet. Brasseur concluded that the word 'Mu' (that he thought he had found) referred to a land submerged by a catastrophe. Le Plongeon then turned this into a sunken continent whose Queen Moo fled to Egypt and founded a civilization there. Other refugees supposedly fled to Central America and became the Mayans .

James Churchward[2]

This lost continent was later popularised by James Churchward (1851–1936) in a series of books, beginning with Lost Continent of Mu, the Motherland of Man (1926), The Children of Mu (1931), The Lost Continent Mu (1931), and The Sacred Symbols of Mu (1933). Churchward claimed that Mu was the home of the advanced Naacal civilization. The books still have devotees, but they are not considered serious archaeology, and nowadays are found in bookshops classed under 'New Age' or 'Religion and Spirituality'.

Other authors

Mu is identified with Lemuria in Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy, in Martin Gardner's Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, and in the Hungarian Jeno Csicsaki's Mu, az emberiseg szulofoldje.

Archaeological evidence

Yonaguni[3]

The Morien Institute has suggested that underwater structures located off the coast of Yonaguni, Okinawa, Japan are possibly ruins of Mu. In a video news report, CNN mistakenly referred to the site as the "ruins of the lost world of Muin".

Easter Island

Archivo:Easter Island map-en.svgEaster Island with Moai showing locations of Ahus, and submarine Contour lines showing the depth of the surrounding Pacific OceanAlfred Metraux visited Easter Island in the 1930s and subsequently made the following rebuttal of the theory that the island was a mountain top of a submerged continent.

• The island's Ahus (platforms for Moai statues) are concentrated on the current coast of the island, which implies that little change had happened to the island's shape since they were built.
• Easter Island is a volcanic island of recent origin rising from the deep ocean (1,770 Fathoms deep twenty miles from the island).
• The "Triumphal Road" that Pierre Loti had reported ran from the island to the submerged lands below, is actually a natural lava flow.