Atlantis is not the only ancient land purported to have sunk beneath the sea. Scholars and fabulists
alike speak of two other sunken continents, the legendary lands of Lemuria and Mu.
The name Lemuria comes from the ancient family of lemurs, and was coined by nineteenth-century English zoologist P.L. Sclater to
account for the similarity of lemur fossils found in the southern tip of India and the Natal province of South Africa. Sclater
postulated the existence of Lemuria, a drowned continent that formerly spanned the Indian Ocean connecting Southern Africa and
Southern Asia.
The notion of a tropical bridge once connecting the existing land masses captured the fancy and support of no less an evolutionary
authority than Thomas Huxley. In Germany, biologist Ernst Haeckel went so far as to speculate that ancient Lemuria might have been
the long-lost Garden of Eden, the cradle of the human race.
The missing land mass of Mu has also been long sought by students of the unexplained. It first surfaced in a series of books authored
by James Churchward, a retired British colonel who once served with the Bengal Lancers in India. While assigned to famine relief, said
Churchward, he became acquainted with a rishi, or Indian high priest, who had in his possession a library of stone tablets written in
Naacal, the native tongue of Mu.
According to Churchward's theory, based on the Naacal tablets and the oral traditions of the Pacific islands and parts of South and
Central America, the first humans originated in Mu some 200 million years ago. Their science, including the ability to manipulate
gravity, had advanced far beyond what we know today. But approximately twelve thousand years ago, tragedy struck in the form of a
cataclysmic gas explosion. Undermined, the continent of Mu collapsed into the Pacific Ocean. All that remained of the five-thousand-
mile-long by three-thousand-mile-wide land mass were a few scattered islands surviving above the waves. The huge and unexplained
remains on a number of Pacific Islands and the great head statues on Easter Island could not have been constructed by the manpower
available on islands limited in population by their present size. It is also noted that the native Hawaiians still call this lost
continent Mu.
Of the people of ancient Mu, 64 million are supposed to have perished in the cosmic explosion. Those who survived eventually colonised
the other continents. Churchward died in 1936, aged eighty-six, after having written five books on the subject of Mu. Other written
references to Mu are supposed still to exist in certain monasteries in the high mountains of Central Asia.
