Mystical systems
The Land of Mu
Direct answer
The Land of Mu: Mu is a continent said to have sunk in the Pacific with an early civilisation. The name comes from a faulty nineteenth-century reading of a Maya book, and no evidence supports it.
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At a glance
- Also called
- mu lost continent, continent of mu, churchward mu, lost continent of mu
- Found in
- Mystical Systems
- Related
- Lemuria, Atlantis, Pseudoarchaeology
Mu is a continent said to have sunk in the Pacific with an early civilisation. The name comes from a faulty nineteenth-century reading of a Maya book, and no evidence supports it.
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Did the continent of Mu exist?
The land of Mu has no ancient source. In the 1860s the French priest and scholar Brasseur de Bourbourg tried to read a Maya book, the Troano Codex, with a key that later proved wrong, and believed he had found the story of a land called Mu destroyed by a catastrophe. Augustus Le Plongeon, who photographed Maya ruins, built on this a tale of a Queen Moo who fled to Egypt.
James Churchward gave Mu its modern form in a series of books from 1926. He set it in the Pacific, made it the motherland of all peoples, and said he had learned its history from tablets shown to him by a priest in India. The tablets have never been seen by anyone else.
On the tree of the hidden arts: Lost worlds.
What sets The Land of Mu apart
Mu can be traced step by step, which is rare for a legend. The first step is a key: a list of Maya signs written down in the sixteenth century and wrongly taken for an alphabet. The second is a reading made with it that produced the syllables of a name. The third is an author who, sixty years later, set that name in the Pacific and offered as proof tablets that he alone had seen. At no step does a Maya, Polynesian or Indian tradition of such a land appear.
- Source of the name: a reading of the Maya Troano Codex in the 1860s
- Faulty key: Diego de Landa's list of Maya signs, taken for an alphabet
- Made a Pacific continent by: James Churchward, in five books from 1926
- Claimed proof: tablets shown to Churchward in India, never produced
- Maya script deciphered: between the 1950s and the 1980s; no such land is named
Often mistaken for something else: Atlantis at least has an ancient text behind it; Mu has only a nineteenth-century mistake about one.
The story behind The Land of Mu
Brasseur de Bourbourg used a sixteenth-century list of Maya signs made by Bishop Diego de Landa, taking it for an alphabet. The Maya script was deciphered between the 1950s and the 1980s, and the codex is now read as an almanac of days, rites and the sky that names no lost land. Churchward's The Lost Continent of Mu appeared in 1926 and was followed by four more volumes. The name survives in novels, games and occult books.
How to read The Land of Mu
Readers cite it when a claim rests on a document nobody else may inspect, as Churchward's tablets could not be inspected.
The Land of Mu in practice: an example
A reader who sees a map of Mu in the Pacific can ask which excavation it comes from, and find that there is none.
Where readings of The Land of Mu go wrong
No translation by a scholar of the Maya finds Mu in any Maya book; the reading that produced it was abandoned long ago.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Mystical Systems
- Aliases
- mu lost continent, continent of mu, churchward mu, lost continent of mu
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
See The Land of Mu in your personal almanac
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Common questions
Did the continent of Mu exist?
There is no evidence that it did. The Pacific floor shows no sunken continent, and the Maya book the name was taken from says nothing of such a land when it is read with the deciphered script.
Who invented the lost continent of Mu?
The name comes from Brasseur de Bourbourg's mistaken reading of a Maya codex in the 1860s. Augustus Le Plongeon turned it into a story, and James Churchward made it a Pacific continent in books published from 1926.
Are Mu and Lemuria the same?
They began separately, Lemuria in zoology in 1864 and Mu in a misread Maya book. Twentieth-century occult writers often merged them into a single lost Pacific land, which is why the names are now used together.
