The Lost Continent of Mu
A writer claimed an advanced civilisation once lived on a vast continent in the Pacific, before it sank.
What was reported
The idea of Mu began in the 1860s, when the French scholar Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg misread an ancient Maya manuscript as describing a land destroyed by catastrophe. Augustus Le Plongeon later took up the idea.
In 1926 the writer James Churchward published The Lost Continent of Mu, describing a vast Pacific continent that was the birthplace of humanity, home to 64 million people, until it sank about 12,000 years ago. He said he learned this from ancient tablets shown to him by a priest in India, which no one else ever saw.
Explanations offered
Geology rules it out: the Pacific floor is dense ocean crust, not a sunken continent, and there's no evidence of any lost landmass there. Brasseur's reading of the Maya text was based on a mistaken alphabet. Mu lives on in fiction, games and New Age ideas.
- When
- Popularised in 1926
- Where
- Central Pacific Ocean
- Witnesses
- The writers Augustus Le Plongeon and James Churchward
- Status
- Never existed
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