Mu (continent)

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The hypothetical continents Mu and Atlantis according to James Churchward

Mu is a fabulous continent , which, depending on the author, is mostly located in the Pacific , but also in the Atlantic . Similar to Atlantis , this continent is said to have disappeared in the sea during a recent period of the earth's history .

There are different ideas about the extent of this supposed land mass. It was generally assumed by supporters of this hypothesis that at the time of its greatest expansion, Mu extended in the west from the waters bordering today's East China Sea to the eastern Pacific, and in the south to Easter Island .

History of ideas

The idea that there was a sunken continent called Mu goes back to the work of the French historian , ethnologist and archaeologist Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg in the 19th century, who, however, referred to Plato's Atlantis, which he located in the western Atlantic . Since he only deciphered the ancient texts of the Quiché and Maya with the help of the inadequate Landa alphabet , he mistakenly believed that he could find the term Mu in them . A catastrophic scenario for the fall of the putative continent was only provided by Brasseur in his last publication, a paper entitled Chronologie historique des Mexicains (1872). In it, with reference to the Aztec Codex Chimalpopoca, he identified four periods of worldwide cataclysms that began around 10,500 BC. Should have begun, and which he traced back to displacements of the earth's axis .

A little later, the photographer, writer and self-made archaeologist Augustus Le Plongeon took up the idea of ​​a Mu sunk in the Atlantic. Le Plongeon, who examined the Mayan ruins of Yucatán and from 1875 together with his wife Alice Dixon Le Plongeon carried out the first systematic excavations of the relics of Chichén Itzá , said on the basis of the - extremely dubious - linguistic research of Diego de Landa and with the help of Brasseur's work, also based on Landa's misinterpretations, of having deciphered ancient Mayan records (part of the Codex Tro-Cortesianus ) that spoke of the sunken land of Mu. These records supposedly indicated that the Mayan civilization was much older than that of the Egyptians. It was founded by survivors of the fall of the continent he suspected.

James Churchward (1851-1936)

The British inventor, civil engineer, writer and globetrotter James Churchward , a younger contemporary and acquaintance of Le Plongeon, was after all the first author who presented the idea of ​​a Pacific Mu in various treatises and books (see: Literature ) and made it popular. Allegedly an Indian priest had shown ancient tablets that indicated this. Hawaii and all of today's Pacific Islands are, according to Churchward, former mountain peaks and remnants of this sunken continent, which about 50,000 to 25,000 years ago over the course of repeated cataclysmic, etc. a. earthquakes caused by the collapse of huge underground caves broke and sank. In the largest of these disasters, around 64 million people are said to have died. Le Plongeon had already referred to this alleged primal culture, which Churchward referred to as ' Naacal '. Like the latter, Churchward (1926) asserted that the civilization of Ancient Egypt ultimately descended from the Naacal. He explained that the name of the Egyptian sun god Ra was a term from the supposed Nacaal language, in which 'Rah' was both a name for the sun and its god and ruler.

Even if Churchward's publications and ideas on the subject of 'Mu' - like the Le Plongeons before them - met with rejection or disinterest in scientific circles and only received completely uncritical approval from esoteric authors, the idea of ​​a land mass sunk in the Pacific and an ancient culture residing on it remained still popular. As early as 1924, the Scottish-New Zealand university professor John Macmillan Brown , a philologist, suspected that the megalithic structures on many islands in the Pacific region were a clear indication of the previous existence of an ancient high civilization as well as a very late submerged land mass on which this culture is at home has been. In the late 1930s, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk , the founder of what is now Turkey, conducted intensive research into Mu, as has been published in some Turkish publications. Ataturk's aim was to determine the background to the alleged parallels between the original culture of the Turkic peoples and the countless Indian cultures, such as the Aztecs and Mayans, on the American continent.

Later supporters of the Mu hypothesis - the assumption of a large, sunken land mass in the Pacific and an ancient culture native to it - point out that the Book of the Hopi also states that there was once such a continent in the Pacific, the North American Hopi Kásskara call. Nikolai Zhirov, referring to Thor Heyerdahl, mentions a legend of the residents of Easter Island, according to which a giant named Uwoke, in an outburst of rage, caused the demise of a large continent, the remnant of which is Easter Island. In addition to such mythological evidence, linguistic arguments are put forward to support this hypothesis - as was already done by Macmillan Brown - and the discovery of traces that are approximately 9,000 to 7,000 years old, e.g. Sometimes referred to intensive agriculture with extensive canal systems in the highlands of New Guinea . The Mu hypothesis was boosted at the beginning of the 1990s by the publications of the marine geologist Masaaki Kimura on the so-called Yonaguni Monument , a rock structure that has been flooded for thousands of years - probably naturally created but previously worked and used by humans - off today's coast of Japan Yonaguni Island .

Literary and cinematic adaptations

The theme of the submerged continent of Mu is taken up in the Japanese science fiction film U 2000 - Diving into the horror of Honda Ishirō , in which the inhabitants of Mu, who are still living on the seabed, try to conquer the surface world. Mu and his inhabitants also appear in James Rollins' novel In the Triangle of the Dragon , but there the continent sank into the sea a long time ago.

In the Cthulhu myth , Mu plays a certain role as one of the first civilizations over which various cosmic "deities" ruled. This is portrayed in different stories by H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard .

The name of the legendary continent also occasionally plays a role in pop culture: for example in Illuminatus! by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea , in video games such as the Super Nintendo games Terranigma , in which it appears as an island, and Illusion of Time , as well as the texts of the English musicians The KLF or the Sweden Therion .

The Disney artist Massimo DeVita wrote the 63-page story The Mysterious Continent Mu , published in the Funny Paperback No. 141 (book title: The Tiger of Masalia ).

Hugo Pratt processed the myth of Mu in his comic series Corto Maltese under the title Das Reich Mu ( Carlsen Comic 1997, out of print; color new edition Kult Editions, 2008).

In the anime Rahxephon there is also the people of Mu.

In 2006, the Spirou and Fantasio special volume Les géants pétrifiés (Yoann / Vehlmann, 58 pages, German The Stone Giants ) appears, in which the search for Mu is described as a race between two warring groups of archaeologists. The inhabitants of Mu are fish lizards reminiscent of the Mosasaurus camperi, and Mu itself is a gigantic sacred cemetery for these creatures.

The character Tao from the Franco-Japanese TV series " The Mysterious Cities of Gold " is the last descendant of the people of Mu.

literature

Web links

Commons : Mu (lost continent)  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. On the subject of Atlantis / Mu, see above all: Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg: Grammaire de la langue quichée , Paris, 1862; Vers .: Monuments anciens du Mexique (Palenque, et autres ruines de l'ancienne civilization du Mexique) , Paris, 1866; and der .: Quatre Lettres sur le Méxique , Paris, 1868
  2. Umberto Eco : The History of the Legendary Countries and Cities. Hanser, Munich 2013, p. 198.
  3. See z. E.g .: Lawrence G. Desmond: Exavation Of The Platform Of Venus, Chichén Itzá, Yucatán, México: The Pioneering Field Work Of Alice Dixon Le Plongeon And Augustus Le Plongeon . ( Memento of August 10, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) accessed: July 11, 2012
  4. See: Robert B. Stacy-Judd: Atlantis: Mother of Empires . Santa Monica, CA. (USA), 1939, p. 85
  5. See: Augustus le Plongeon: Queen M'oo and the Egyptian sphinx . New York 1896; archive.org (online version accessed: July 11, 2012) There (Chapter VI, p. 66) it says: “In our journey westward across the Atlantic we shall pass in sight of that spot where once existed the pride and life of the ocean, the Land of Mu, which, at the epoch that we have been considering, had not yet been visited by the wrath of Humen, that lord of volcanic fires to whose fury it afterward fell a victim. The description of that land given to Solon by Sonchis, priest at Sais; its destruction by earthquakes, and submergence, recorded by Plato in his Timaeus, have been told and retold so many times that it is useless to encumber these pages with a repetition of it. "
  6. See z. E.g .: Lyon Sprague de Camp : Sunken Continents - From Atlantis, Lemuria and other lost civilizations , Munich, 1975, p. 55
  7. See: Percy Tate Griffith: My Friend Churchey and His Sunken Island of Mu: Biography of Colonel James Churchward , Dick Lowdermilk, 2004 (written 1937/1938); and: Jack E. Churchward: My-Mu.com accessed: July 11, 2012
  8. Umberto Eco: The History of the Legendary Countries and Cities. Hanser, Munich 2013, p. 198.
  9. L. Sprague de Camp stated (1975, pp. 57, 58) that according to Churchward the final catastrophe occurred 13,000 years ago, unfortunately without an exact source. Churchward may have given diverging data on this.
  10. See z. E.g .: Lyon Sprague de Camp: 'Mu' - James Churchward and the Atlantis of the Pacific Retrieved July 11, 2012; and: Books of Col. James Churchward - Summary , at: Biblioteca Pleyades; accessed: July 10, 2012
  11. See: James Churchward: The Lost Continent of Mu, Motherland of Man , 1926
  12. See: Augustus Le Plongeon: Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx , 1896
  13. See: Lyon Sprague de Camp: Sunken Continents (1975), pp. 54–55
  14. On an early rejection of the assumption, also advocated by Churchward, that Easter Island was the remnant of a sunken continent, see the monograph by the Swiss anthropologist Alfred Métraux , Mysteries Of Easter Island , published in 1940 - several years after his field studies there . ( Memento of April 6, 2008 in the Internet Archive ; PDF; 129.2 kB) accessed: July 11, 2012
  15. See about him: Cherry Hankin, ' Brown, John Macmillan - Biography '; from: Dictionary of New Zealand Biography / Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand; accessed: July 11, 2012
  16. See: John Macmillan Brown: The Riddle of the Pacific , London 1924
  17. See e.g. E.g .: Sinan Meydan: Ataturk Ve Kayip Kita Mu . İnkılap Kitabevi, 2008 (Turkish)
  18. Michael Knüppel: Hasan Reşit Tankut and the Turkish origin of the Mayas . In: Materialia Turcica . tape 22 , 2001.
  19. See: JF Blumrich: Kasskara and the seven worlds . Munich 1985; and online: Roland M. Horn : Kásskara and Taláwaitíchqua . and Ders .: Hopi memories of Atlantis . accessed: July 10, 2012
  20. See about him: Bernhard Beier: Dr. Nikolai Zhirov - Nikolai Zhirov and the autonomous development of atlantology in the USSR . accessed: July 11, 2012
  21. Source: N. Zhirov: Atlantis - Atlantology: Basic Problems . Honolulu / Hawaii, 2001, p. 155 (reprint from 1970, Moscow)
  22. See: J. Macmillan Brown: The languages ​​of the Pacific , Honolulu (Bishop museum press), 1920
  23. See for example: Frank Joseph: "Mu" found? - Discovered submerged civilization between Japan and Taiwan in the Pacific! ( Memento of July 18, 2012 in the Internet Archive ); from: Efodon Synesis , No. 22/1997; and: Bernhard Beier: Mythological Foundations for the Pacific Hypothesis? Section: Churchwards 'Mu' - in Australian and Japanese myths? both accessed: July 11, 2011
  24. See: William R. Corliss: Where Did Agriculture Really Begin? In: Science Frontiers , No. 86, March / April 1993 (Corliss refers for reference to Leigh Dayton: Pacific Islanders Were World's First Farmers , New Scientist , p. 14, December 12, 1992); and: Peter Marsh: Polynesian Pathways . at: Lapita pottery . (Marsh refers to the results of studies by Tim Denham of the University of Adelaide in Kuk Swamp , Wahgi Valley in the New Guinea highlands, between 1998 and 1999.) Both links. Retrieved July 11, 2012
  25. See for example: Masaaki Kimura: Mu tairiku wa Ryukyu ni atta (The Continent of Mu was in Ryukyu), Tokuma Shoten, 1991; Ders .: Sunken Citadel off Yonaguni Island . In: Ancient American , Vol. 6, p. 39; and: Robert M. Schoch: Ancient underwater pyramid structure off the coast of Yonaguni-jima . accessed: July 11, 2012