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:
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), re-edited later as
The Lost Continent Mu (1931). 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. Having mastered the language himself, Churchward found out that they originated from "the place where [man] first 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. He claimed that according to the
creation myth 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": 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 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''. 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, Churchward describes the cylindrical hats as "spheres" that "seem to show red in the distance", and asserts that they "represent the Sun as Ra".
Louis Jacolliot Louis Jacolliot was a French
attorney,
judge, 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. ,
Japan Modern claims In the 1930s,
Mustafa Kemal 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. On the other hand, according to some views, Atatürk's interest in the continent of Mu did not go beyond examining the claims. Despite
Tahsin Mayatepek's proposals, he did not see the need to establish a Department of Mu Language at Ankara University's
School of Language and History – Geography. The relationship between Atatürk and the continent of Mu has been exaggerated to attract interest in the books written about the continent of Mu.
Masaaki Kimura has suggested that certain underwater features located off the coast of
Yonaguni Island,
Japan (popularly known as the
Yonaguni Monument), are ruins of Mu. ==Criticism==