The Continent That Never Sank

In 1864, a French clergyman named Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg sat with the Troano Codex, an ancient Maya manuscript, and misread a glyph using the flawed de Landa alphabet. He rendered it as 'Mu' and decided it referred to a sunken land destroyed by catastrophe. It was an error — but errors, once published, take on lives of their own.

That life began in earnest with Augustus Le Plongeon, a British-American antiquarian who had spent years excavating Maya ruins in Yucatán. Le Plongeon claimed he had translated the Popol Vuh, the sacred K'iche' text, and concluded that Yucatán's civilization predated Greece and Egypt. Borrowing Brasseur's word, he identified Mu with Atlantis itself, following Ignatius Donnelly's 1882 book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. In his telling, Mu was a proud Atlantic landmass, destroyed by the wrath of Human, lord of volcanic fires, its fate echoing Plato's account of Atlantis in the Timaeus. Le Plongeon even claimed ancient Egyptian civilization had been founded by a refugee queen named Moo, fleeing Mu's collapse, while other survivors fled to Central America and built the Maya world.

Mu might have stayed a curious footnote if not for James Churchward, a writer who relocated the lost continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific and rebranded it, in effect, as Lemuria's replacement. Beginning with The Lost Continent of Mu, the Motherland of Man (1926) and continuing through The Children of Mu and The Sacred Symbols of Mu, Churchward built an entire cosmology.

His origin story was suitably mysterious: more than fifty years earlier, he claimed, while serving as a soldier in India, a high-ranking temple priest showed him ancient sunburnt clay tablets written in a supposedly lost 'Naga-Maya' language that only two other people in India could read. Churchward said he convinced the priest to teach him the language and, upon deciphering the tablets, learned they described 'the place where man first appeared — Mu.' He paired these with 2,500 stone tablets unearthed in Mexico by William Niven as his supposed scientific foundation.

According to Churchward, Mu was ruled by an advanced civilization called the Naacal, dominant between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago, and home to 64 million people organized into ten tribes under one government and religion, spread across seven major cities. He placed the continent in the Pacific, stretching from the Mariana Islands to Easter Island and from Hawaii to Mangaia — a landmass larger than South America, with plains, rivers, and hills, lifted above the sea by volcanic gas and destroyed in almost a single catastrophic night when its granite honeycombed chambers collapsed.