Category Archives: Lost continent of Mu

Posts that describe or refer to the Lost Continent of Mu

Research Challenge – Llakoff’s Island

This is a challenge for all the researchers on the hunt for ancient lost civilizations.

In the 1931 Children of Mu, James Churchward refers to the “Llakoff Islands” in the text quoted below from page 219.

“Off from the mouth of the Lena is Llakoff’s Island. This island is composed of the bones and tusks of mammoths and other forest animals which had been swept up from the Mongolian and Siberian plains by the flood and carried to this, their final resting place. In these bones we find a confirmation that no ice accompanied the wave, for had there been, their bodies and bones would have been mashed into a pulp, and as in eastern North America, no remains of them would be found and Llakoff’s Island never formed.”
Children of Mu, page 219

  1. A web search yields references that all point back to this one passage or derivatives, there is no such place with this name.
  2. The text is included as a portion of the chapter on the Great Uighur Empire describing its destruction. The complete chapter’s text can be viewed at http://www.my-mu.com/gue/com.html and even includes a map.
  3. The questions are:
    1. Provide the real name of the island (the easy part,) and,
    2. Provide the name of the earliest written account that James may have used as a reference in his description of the island, as well as author’s name, publisher (if known,) and page numbers.
  4. The winner of the contest will be the holder of the email address that sends the earliest correct answer to both questions. There will be only one contest winner. The contest will remain open for one month (May 2016) and all the responses evaluated. After the evaluation, the My-Mu.com blog will announce the winner. Preliminary research has developed tentative answers; however, that may not be the final word.
  5. The US or Canadian contest winner will receive a signed copy of either of my books Lifting the Veil on the Lost Continent of Mu Motherland of Men or The Stone Tablets of Mu or a one-month access to scanned copies of James Churchward’s scrapbooks. Due to the onerous costs of overseas postage, a winner in another location would be limited to access to the scanned scrapbooks and whatever else we work out. There is no cash value associated with winning the contest.
  6. All entries shall be emailed to contest@my-mu.com and contain easily identifiable answers to the questions in English. Please include your name (or alias) to be included in the announcement of the winner. Please use an alias if you do not wish your name to become public.
  7. The Contest Administrator (Jack Churchward,) may request verification of the answer to the second question via email to request a url to an image of the text from a printed work or the actual text listed online (i.e., you have seen a document I have not.)
  8. The Contest Administrator is the sole arbiter of the results of the contest.

The Madrid Codex

When discussing ancient documents, on many occasions mention is made of the Troano Manuscript and the Codex Cortesianus, and how the translation of these documents lends credence to the existence of ancient advanced civilizations. Included on that list are the theories of Augustus Le Plongeon (1825-1908) and James Churchward (1851-1936,) purveyors of ancient civilizations in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico and the now sunken continent of Mu in the Pacific Ocean, respectively.

Augustus Le Plongeon (1825-1908)

Augustus Le Plongeon (1825-1908)


Augustus Le Plongeon was born on the island of Jersey and at the age of 19 found himself shipwrecked off the coast of Chile. Five years later, he sailed to San Francisco and worked as a surveyor. His subsequent travels to England and Peru lead him to study photography and start a studio in Lima. He also visited and photographed ancient ruins there. In 1870 he went back to San Francisco and gave a number of lectures on Peruvian archaeology and the causes of earthquakes. From there he traveled to New York City and then on to London where he studied Mesoamerican manuscripts. One of the manuscripts was a translation by Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg (1814-1874) that lead him to believe that civilization had originated in the New World. After marrying Alice Dixon in New York City, the couple traveled to the Yucatan in 1873 where they stayed until 1885 searching for connections between the Maya and the ancient Egyptians. Le Plongeon’s photographs, including 3D images, of the ancient ruins were an important part of his research.
Le Plongeon describes the Troano manuscript in an appendix (Note III. (Page xxxi)) of the 1896 Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx on page 174. He identifies the owner of the manuscript as Señor Dn. Juan Tro y Ortelano, a professor of palaeography at Madrid University and mentions the Abbé Brasseur’s efforts to copy and translate the document. The document is named the Troano Manuscript after the owner. The Abbé’s research and interpretations were published in 1869 or 1870 under the name Manuscrit Troano, études sur le système graphique et la langue des Mayas. Le Plongeon wrote of the document:

This Maya Manuscript is, indeed, a most precious document, for it is a brilliant light that, besides the monumental inscriptions, now illuminates the darkness which surrounds the history of the ancient inhabitants of the peninsula of Yucatan. The second part after describing the events that took place during the awful cataclysms that caused the destruction of ten different countries, one of which, called Mu, was probably Plato’s Atlantis, is mostly dedicated to the recital of meteorological and geological phenomena that occurred in the “Land of the Serpent,” also called Beb (tree), of which Mayab formed a part.

The translation by Abbe Brasseur is quoted to provide the existence of a land of “Mu” in Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx, in a footnote on page lvi, the figure below is translated.
QueenMoo_image1

The figures are anthropomorphous representations – the kneeling, supplicating female, of the “Land of Mu;” the male, of the “Lord of Seven Fires” (volcanoes), Men kak uuc. Mu, in an imploring posture comes to inform him that the one of his volcanoes has caused the basin at the edge of her domains to rise, and has converted the country into a marshy ground. She speaks thus: “Ak ha pe be be imik Kaan” (that is, “The basin has risen rapidly, and the land has become marshy”). Men Kak uuc, for all consolation, replies “Imix be Ak Mu?” So, the basin in rising has caused the land to become marshy, Mu?) This is evidently the record of a geological event – the rising of the part of the ocean near Mu.
Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx, page lvi, footnote 1

However, Le Plongeon’s Mu resides in the Atlantic as the mystical lost continent of Atlantis as shown in this passage:

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 Homen, 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.
Queen Moo & The Egyptian Sphinx Chapter VI, page 66

James Churchward’s also mentions the Troano Manuscript in his books, Lost Continent of Mu Motherland of Men (1926), Lost Continent of Mu (1931), Children of Mu (1931) and Sacred Symbols of Mu (1933.) In the Children of Mu, James states, according to the Troano Manuscript, that Queen Moo lived 16,000 years ago (page 92) and that the first people to settle in the Nile delta were Mayas and since these settlers came from Atlantis, there were Mayas that lived in Atlantis as well (page 108.) A complete discussion of James’ use of the Troano Manuscript would be very lengthy.

James Churchward (1851-1936)

James Churchward (1851-1936)

Described in the August 1881 edition of the American Naturalist by Cyrus Thomas, the Troano Manuscript was found by Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg in the Library of the Historical Academy in Madrid, Spain in 1865. The fourteen-foot long and 9-inch wide document painted on tree bark is seventy pages in length. The translation by the Abbé de Bourbourg used the notes and writings of the infamous Bishop of Yucatan Diego de Landa. The Abbé used the deLanda’s notes to create an alphabet used to translate the document. Unfortunately, this was the wrong approach as discovered by scholars in the 20th century; the symbols represented syllables in the language as opposed to characters. Rather than a book about the destruction of lost continents, the contents has today been translated to reveal it’s true purpose, as a repository of mostly almanacs and horoscopes to be used by the Mayan priests to perform rituals and ceremonies.

Another ancient document referenced is the Cortesianus Codex, another of the Mayan documents. Le Plongeon in Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx uses an unacknowledged translation as the third of three narratives concerning the destruction of his Mu (Atlantis.) The first is a carved slab in Chichen Itza in a chamber in the Akab-Dzid (the awful, tenebrous record) building and the second is the Troano Manuscript previously discussed. The discussion of the existence and it’s destruction by earthquakes and fire begins on page 145.

In the Lost Continent of Mu Motherland of Men, James cites the Codex Cortesianus as being the same age as the Troano Manuscript and written confirmation of Mu (page 21.) On page 56, the readers are schooled further:

Codex Cortesianus.—The Codex Cortesianus is another of the old Maya books that escaped the eyes of the fanatical Bishop Landa. This book is now in the National Museum of Madrid, Spain. The characters, figures and writings would indicate that it is about the same age as the Troano Manuscript. The language of the Codex Cortesianus, however, is much more symbolical than that of the Troano Manuscript. Here are some extracts from it, bearing on our subject:
“By his strong arm Homen caused the earth to tremble after sunset and during the night Mu, the country of the hills of earthy was submerged.”
“Mu, the life of the basin (seas), was submerged by Homen during the night.”
“The place of the dead ruler is now lifeless, it moves no more, after having twice jumped from its foundations: the king of the deep, while forcing his way out, has shaken it up and down, has killed it, has submerged it.”
“Twice Mu jumped from her foundations; it was then sacrificed by fire. It burst while being shaken up and down violently by earthquakes. By kicking it, the wizard that makes all things move like a mass of worms, sacrificed it that very night.”
It is self-evident that both the Codex Cortesianus and the Troano Manuscript were written from the same temple record. The Codex Cortesianus gives the land its hieratical name only, while the Troano Manuscript gives both its hieratical and geographical names.

All but the first paragraph and last sentence is copied word for word from Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx on page 148. Le Plongeon’s take on the Codex Cortesianus, as opposed to the Troano Manuscript is contained in the following passage.

“His style is more prolix, less terse, more symbolic than that of the writer of the Troano.”
Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx; page 147.

The Codex Cortesianus was discovered in Spain in 1867, when a Madrid resident tried to sell it. It ended up in the collection of the National Archaeological Museum (Museo Arqueológico Nacional) in 1872. It was named the Cortesianus after Hernan Cortes, thinking that he had brought it back from the new world.

In 1880, French scholar Léon de Rosny, after careful study, revealed that the Troano Manuscript and the Codex Cortesianus were two parts of the same document. The Cortesianus has pages 1-21, 55-77 and the Troano contains pages 22-56, and 78-112. The separate parts were reunited in 1888 and a faithful copy is on display today Museo de América in Madrid, Spain; the reason the document is called the Madrid Codex today.

The latest translations indicate the contents to be mostly almanacs and horoscopes used by Mayan priests in their rituals and ceremonies. The Madrid Codex also contains astronomical tables and appears to be copied from older Mayan books. It is not a book on history and does not describe the sinking of a either an Atlantic or Pacific ocean continent.

James Churchward also used other references to the destruction of his lands of Mu, such as the Ramayana, the Troano Manuscript, and the existence of ruins in certain locations, decorated with the correct symbols. The fourth item on his list from the Lost Continent of Mu Motherland of Men are the ‘universality of certain old symbols and customs as discovered in Egypt, Burma, India, Japan, China, South Sea Islands, Central America, South America and some of the North American Indian tribes and other seats of ancient civilizations.”

The Troano Manuscript, as a reference for the sinking of Mu, must be removed from the list, if there is to be any legitimacy accorded to an evaluation of Churchward’s theories on Mu. Furthermore, other works that rely on the early mistranslations of the Troano Manuscript, Codex Cortesianus, or the Madrid Codex, should be scrutinized as well. The pieces of this single document were reunited in 1888 and it had been known that they were parts of the same document for eight years prior. Individual references to them with the mistranslations have been published one hundred years later in an attempt to ignore reality and maintain the myth of a non-existent reference to a lost continent.

If you find references to the Troano Manuscript or the Codex Cortesianus that claim these documents to be other than almanacs, horoscopes, or astronomical tables, the author is basing their work on a fraudulent translation and is not to be believed.

Dedication of “The Children of Mu” Part 2

Part 1 with the complete dedication is here.
Another article about Captain E.A Salisbury
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Captain Edward A. Salisbury (1875-1962)

Captain Edward A. Salisbury (1875-1962)


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In Our Motherland of Mu Where 60,000 Years Ago Many Strange Things Happened
After disaster came to a continent more wonderful than the lost Atlantis, Friends ate one another.

Captioned picture(s):
Captain Edward A. Salisbury, explorer and ethnologist, who has devoted twelve years to a study of the evidence indicating the existence of the great continent of Mu 50,000 years ago, in the center of what is now the Pacific Ocean. The map shows its probable extent and that of the more generally known “Lost Continent” of Atlantis of which the ancient Greeks had many traditions. The map also shows the location of the great interoceanic canal built by the Muans into a sea that is now the watershed of the Amazon River. The great upheaval that lifted the Andes Mountains lifted the canal and both its ends are far above sea level.

It is quite passé to talk about the Lost Atlantis. Its mythical fields have been beaten barren with the feet of poets, writers of imaginative fiction and a few scientists of the Oliver Lodge variety. So, for the second time, it is sunk and in its place rises a land, a little more substantial, known to us Uighurs as Mu, the Motherland of Man.

“Mu.” Doesn’t the word arouse some deep-seated brain cell in the subconscious to a faint hurrah of patriotism? It should. We Uighurs are Mu-ans for 60,000 years or so – one of the ten tribes, in fact – and we more atavistic ones should have an exclusive impulse, at a mention of her name, to bow to Ra-Mu, the emperor.

Where is Mu, our motherland, anyhow? Capt. Edward A. Salisbury, famous explorer and ethnologist, who is stopping by the Commonwealth hotel for several weeks, can explain it all. He is soon to depart for Burma to search the clay libraries for some more sidelights on its prehistoric culture.

Mu, the cradle of life, was a vast continent until 12,000 years ago, when her last segment gave the Pacific Ocean more floor space, lying roughly between the Hawaiian Islands and the Fiji Islands on the south, Japan on the west and the Easter Islands, off the coast of South America, on the east. The continent measured 5,000 miles east and west and 3,000 miles north and south.

The continent was a vast plain, most of it over gas strata, just as Texas and California are over gas belts today. Captain Salisbury begs, however, that Texans and Californians be not afraid, because it sometimes takes and aeon or two for the gas to become volcanic.

Seventy-five thousand years ago Mu was a highly civilized nation of 65 million inhabitants. Through its sloping plains ran seven great rivers. At the mouth of each stood a great city. So it was the land of seven rivers and seven cities, Captain Salisbury pauses.

“There we have, perhaps, the mystic seven of all religions,” he says.

“There, perhaps, the first 7-headed hydra was reared in a temple. Those hydras stand today as guardians of Cambodian gates.

An Advanced Civilization

The Mu-ans give us a heritage, if at all, to be proud of. One is perfectly justified in waving a flag in every atavistic dream pertaining to Mu. This plainland was more highly civilized than Atlantis. Its people had great mills. They wore silk and fine linen. Like the Egyptians, they tossed thunderbolts from their fingers tips. The circumlocutions of modern science were unknown. They treated illness by thought and vibration.

Such inane conversations as this could never have been conducted on the streets of any Mu-anese city:
“Well, how on earth are you? I haven’t seen you for ages. Where have you been keeping yourself?”

A Mu-an would have known. He had developed mental telepathy. Thought transference was an accomplishment of every ordinary educated citizen.

“Don’t be surprised at that,” said Captain Salisbury. There are still cannibal tribes in the South Seas who see you before you arrive and can tell you what you did at the last place. They have no telephones or runners, either. They are telepathic.”

From the continent of Mu colonists went out through the world. Colonization began about 75,000 years ago. There were ten tribes of Mu-ans – The Uighurs, from which we spring; the Tamils, the Negro tribe, and others. The Uighurs went westward, as Uighurs, if such we are, have been doing it ever since. They went into Europe, into England, and founded the basis of the tribes of which we learn from Caesar. The Cro-Magnon man, the Piltdown man, all of those interesting, baldheaded, grinning friends of the European museums of prehistoric life were the children of the Uighurs.

The Tamils, who lived in the south of Mu, jumped across the straits formed by their coast and the coast of South Africa; jumped over the Andes. In the center of South America was a vast inland sea. The Amazon is all that is left of this great Tamil resort.

A Canal Now High in Air

“And now,” said Captain Salisbury, squinting his blue eyes significantly and taking a deep drag from his cigar, “we understand that broad, mysterious ditch cut across the Andes, a ditch man-made, beginning in air, ending in air. Science for many years was baffled by it. That was a canal from the Pacific Ocean into the South American inland sea.”

It is erroneous, of course, to say that the Tamils dug that ditch in the Andes. There really were no Andes. They had not been lifted. A vast cataclysm did that later. Andes and the canal were elevated at the same time.

From South America the Tamils crossed into Africa, where they still may be found. Every one of the tribes of Mu sent out shoots. … the brown men, the yellow men, red men found their places in the world. The continent of Mu was overpopulated and Ra-Mu, the emperor, the Mussolini, commanded the nation to expand.

They were a simple-hearted, God-fearing people, these Muans. Their surviving literature – if indeed, it is theirs and not the writing of some Chinese Edgar Rice Burroughs – tells us they knew not war nor strife. They were at peace with themselves and with their faraway and only neighbors, the doomed inhabitants of Atlantis, mythical or not, as you please.

Down in Titanic Cataclysms

And, then, 15,000 years ago, the eastern half of Mu was shaken by great earthquakes. Tidal waves swept over the land. Volcanoes burst forth. The eastern half sank, leaving a few wretched Mu-ans lodged on the foothills of barren, fireswept, volcanic islands.

“They were without vegetation, fish, food of any kind,” the captain explained. “They were forced to eat the weaker members of the group. They lived upon these weaker ones until vegetation sprang up, until fish killed or driven away by the great upheavals, returned to those ocean waters. And so we have cannibalism. At first a necessity, it became a religious custom, a surviving justification, even after vegetation and fish returned.

“These cannibal tribes of the South Sea Islands carried this religious custom later through South America and into Africa. We find it on both continents. But it began with the destruction of the Eastern half of Mu.

“Three thousand years passed. The 30 million people left on the mainland readjusted their civilization. Many of them were insane with the disaster. Commerce was shattered. And just about the time the remainder of Mu was restored to calm, industry and sanity, a thunder shook the earth and the last of Mu sank into the Pacific. In the same cataclysm Atlantis perished. The mountains of the earth reared their heads and the surface of the earth took the general appearance we know.

Whence came this strange legend? Or, if a scientific fact, whence came the data? Captain Salisbury gives a rational explanation.

Fifty years ago James Churchward, an English ethnologist, then in military service, was sent to India to lend relief in a famine. He administered his merciful work from a Naacal temple, Naacal priests assisting. They were silent, peaceful men with a great capacity for gratitude. And when the work was done, the oldest priest removed from a vault two clay tablets and said to Churchward:

“These tablets are of Mu, the language of Mu, which we alone understand.
And the priest translated them. They were Mu-anese history. But they began unrelated and ended unrelated. One of them was broken. Churchward repaired it. This gave the priest confidence. At first reluctant to reveal all, he at length gave Churchward the use of all fifty. They described the continent of Mu, some of its history, its science, its colonizations. But they did not tell all. Those tablets, Churchward explained in a privately circulated volume, are more than 50,000 years old.

More From Yucatan Tablets

Churchward thenceforward gave his life to the search for data pertaining to Mu. Captain Salisbury said Churchward was the only living man who knew the language of Mu but would not, for some unstated reason, permit the disclosure of the alphabet until his death.

From legends, ideagraphs, and customs of South Sea Islands and Mexico, Churchward learned much. Captain Salisbury has given twelve years of exploration to the service of Churchward already.

“We learned of the destruction of Mu from tablets in Yucatan,” he said.

“The history-old legend of the destruction of the earth by water no doubt had its origin in Mu.

“From art symbols used by South Sea cannibals, we substantiated our theory of their relation to the lost continent.”

The crest of Ra-Mu, the emperor, appears in many cannibalistic designs. It consists of the Greek cross, set within a circle. Around this circle are the eight rays of the sun and the rays are bound by another circle, the symbol of the universe.

Captain Salisbury is lecturing in neighboring colleges and universities, with Kansas City as his headquarters. When he departs for Burma, he intends to take with him a group of college men.

Continued with Samuel Hubbard next