The legend of Mu is found on islands all over the Pacific Ocean and in Southeast Asia – To the Yamato people of Japan, the early emperors, the Jim-Mu and the Kim-Mu, came from the Empire of the Land of the Rising Sun (later assumed to be Japan itself.) In Korea the land was called Mua. In China it was called Meru and the Sun of Mu. In ancient India it was called Tygris, the land of the tigers to the east (cf. Greek-tigris and the river that flows into the Persian Gulf). In the Pacific, besides tales of Mu and The Mu (the people of Mu), the land to the west was sometimes called Hawaiki or Hawai`i (esoteric meaning: the primal energy within the sacred breath and the water of life.)

For thousands of years the Polynesians have handed down the story of a civilization in the Pacific that was The Motherland of mankind.

I am writing of the possible existence of Mu by showing traces of evidence that are unverifiable. – There are only stories of unknown origin.

I am writing about the origin of the name "Lemuria" and how it became confused with the legends of Mu.

The name of Mu somehow sounds like a lifeless contraction of a more exotic name.  In contrast, the word Lemuria invokes a picture of a land at the dawn of time, a land forgotten in our histories but not in our dreams.

  Civilization    

Some have proposed Sundaland as a place for the oldest civilization. See the Wikipedia article Sundaland.

What is now the Sunda Strait was above water during the last ice age and would have been a temperate place for plants and animals of all kinds avoiding the cold and ice.

World-wide temperatures were lower then by as much as 14°F. It is estimated that the daytime temperature at the equator was above 72°F. – Neither too cold nor too hot to dampen activity. During the ice age the world-wide rainfall was less than today since so much water was locked in the glaciers, but the known presence of submerged river beds and freshwater lakes shows that Sundaland was not dry.

Man was there during the ice age: the Aborigines of Australia, over 40,000 years ago (BP) had to have traveled through there – by land, by boats or by rafts. The Niah "Deep Skull" dated 40,000 BP was found in the western part of Borneo.

Some of those early travelers would have surely stayed in Sundaland where the land was flat and lush, rivers and freshwater lakes were numerous and game was plentiful: for the first time man could devote time to things other than survival. – Perhaps developing the art of agriculture and forming settlements: a possible civilization that may have spread fragments of itself to China, India, the Pacific Islands and the Middle East when the melting ice caused the land to slowly submerge and forced its people to abandon the Motherland they once thought eternal.

For a few thousand years after the end of the ice age, mankind was looking for a place to live, free from the struggle of survival. The climate was changing. Heavy rain fell constantly in some places, there was drought in others. Plants were dying, plants were thriving. Animals were migrating. People tried to save what was lost. They knew their descendents would some day need the heritage of science and philosophy from their ancestors. The seeds of knowledge survived as legends of a Paradise, legends of a Golden Age, legends of a Motherland: stories whose meanings were distorted in the innumerable days that are past.

There has been almost no scientific effort to directly study Sundaland. Underwater exploration of such a large area is very expensive. Artifacts lying on the shallow muddy seabed for ten thousand years would be in various stages of disintegration or forever gone. Without an intimate knowledge of the beliefs and customs of a culture, artifacts can be difficult to recognize for what they really are. For a completely unknown culture there can only be speculation.

  Agriculture    

Not too many years ago, anthropologists told us that agriculture originated in the Fertile Cresent 6,000 BP – with the development of towns and cooperation necessary for the commerce of farming. Later, anthropologists switched their focus to Eastern Turkey to the north, with agriculture appearing more than 8,000 BP. Recently attention has shifted to Papua New Guinea with several discoveries of the cultivation of taro, bananas, sugarcane, breadfruit and yams from 7,000 to 10,000 BP.

As expected, most scientists have assumed that these developments in different parts of the world were independent of each other rather than being spread by diffusion. Anyone can carry a piece of pottery somewhere, but that doesn't mean the person has spread the technique of pottery making. Diffusionism has a long history of attracting people who are gifted with unrestrained pattern recognition but have trouble with logic: so scientists sometimes react by making unscientific prejudgements against it.

Diffusion isn't the same as migration. Cultural diffusion is the spreading of ideas. Ideas can be spread by one person – someone can carry ideas to an area without contributing to that area's genetic makeup. Diffusion and independent development both have their points, so it's best not to base arguments on either.

Botanists tell us that it must have taken man thousands of years to develop grains, corn, rice, bananas and other plants from their wild counterparts. Luther Burbank tried to prove that teosinte was the ancestor of maise. He developed a primitive corn in only 18 generations by cross-breeding. He had to retract his claim after he discovered his original teosinte had previously been cross-polinated with maise.

If the development of crop plants took so long, the start of agriculture must be placed well before 10,000 years ago. Anthropolgists have found evidence of agriculture in Papua New Guinea, 28,000 BP. In the Solomon Islands taro starch found on tools was identified as cultivated rather than wild taro, 28,000 BP – Many thousands of years before the spread of the Lapita style of pottery.

Temperature during this time had to have played its part. In a cold climate, meat can last indefinitely. In a warm climate meat must be eaten soon after it has been killed. People who rely on the hunt must follow the game, seldom founding any lasting settlement. If the climate is cold and dry, agriculture is impractical. In a warm climate, if you can dig a hole, you can control heat, humidity and oxygen content. Store the crop in clay jars to keep out the bugs and mice and your harvests can last for several years.

Plants thrive in some envirnoments while others wither: the local climate limited the possible food sources, which gives weight to the argument of independent development in different parts of the world. But that conclusion is weakened by the fact that during the generally accepted time frame for the origin of agriculture, local climates all over the world were changing at an extremely rapid rate. Farmers have continuously been developing local varieties of plants since the birth of agriculture.

Even in its broadest outline, the history of plant domestication is largely unknown, but there has been almost unlimited conjecture based on limited evidence.

Out of the hundred thousand wild plants that had possibilities for a reliable food source, how did primitive man know which were the best candidates for developing into life sustaining major crops?

A common theory is that the major crop plants hybridized all by themselves, and man just started growing and eating them. If so, crop plants seems to have developed on their own over a unusually short time span and that time somehow accidentally coincides with man's cultural development. And that doesn't explain how the modern banana came to be: bananas do not propagate themselves, a person has to cut a slip from a banana plant and plant it. How did the unfortunate self-hybridized bananas have babies before man started planting them?

In some people's minds, primitive man, communicating in grunts and hand gestures, could not have developed today's major crops on their own: until modern direct genetic modification came along, Science could not surpass such achievements. Case closed. And, where is the evidence? After all, Scientists claim they can trace man's step by step development from the cave to the space capsule. There is no room for such unlikely progress. – Such intelectual exercises by modern logical thinkers reveal their psychological addiction to their world view.

The precursors of many crop plants have disappeared in the few thousands of years that orthodoxy places on the origin of agriculture. – That is a narrow slice of time compared to the lifetime a specific plant.

The seeds of many wild plants are small and are firmly attached to the chaff: they are not easily harvested. Other varieties and species had seeds so loosely attached that they dropped their seeds to the ground before farmers could harvest them. Our ancestors could not live on these plants, they (and we) are not able to properly digest the primitive forms of crop plants.

After thousands of years of agricultural development we have genetically bred only a few major crops from a wild species. (Some say the soybean has been traced to China only 3,000 years ago.) Some of our recent improvements on mother nature have produced undesirable side effects. The world needs a breakthrough to feed nearly seven billion people. Are you a botanist and want to make millions of dollars? – Just come up with a new major crop.

It was a long, farsighted, astute, bold and dangerous experiment to develop plant crops from their wild counterparts: until agriculture developed into maturity, the only life that Stone Age people could depend on was hunting and gathering. Why take such a chance?

It was one of the highest achievements of human intellect.

It seems unlikely that this dedicated development over such a long period happened independently in different parts of the world without any sharing of knowledge. Mankind has a urge to wander, I feel it myself at times.

  The Origin of the Word Lemuria    

So far I've only been indulging in speculations on the origin of civilization. I now turn to the verifiable history of the word Lemuria.

One of the first to write about Mu was Augustus Le Plongeon. He claimed to have discovered the existence of Mu from Mayan writings, but it he seems to have borrowed from Charles de Bourbourg who claimed he found the word Mu in Mayan writings. Le Plongen located Mu in the Atlantic Ocean and declared that Mu and Atlantis were the same continent. James Churchward, a friend of Le Plongeon, wrote that Mu was a continent in the central Pacific. Churchward claimed to have deciphered "Mu writing" on volcanic rock tablets discovered in Mexico by the mineralogist William Niven. On a trip to India, Churchward said he was instructed in the "Naacal" language by a priest and read the history of Mu from ancient records. Both Le Plongeon and Churchward seemed to have had limited knowledge of Polynesian or Southeast Asian legends.

That there was a "continent" of Lemuria seems to be an idea of modern dreamers: they assume that if there was a continent of Atlantis, the civilization of Lemuria (Mu) must have been a continent. Geologists dismiss the idea of a submerged continent in the Pacific out of hand, thereby dismissing the whole idea of Mu. They, like the dreamers, are also assuming that Lemuria was supposed to be a continent in the middle of the Pacific. Polynesian stories tell of the land, the civilization and the people of Mu: I know of no Polynesian story of the "continent" of Mu.

The name Lemuria resulted from a Nineteenth Century controversy over Darwin's Origin of the Species. Defenders of Darwin had trouble explaining how certain species became distributed over large areas. Zoologists had a particularly difficult time explaining the distribution of the lemurs. The lemur is a small primitive form of primate found in Africa, Madagascar, India, and the East Indian archipelago. Some zoologists suggested a land mass in the Indian Ocean, between Madagascar and India, millions of years ago. An English zoologist, Phillip L. Schlater, proposed the name Lemuria (LEMURia) for this former land of the LEMURs in the Indian Ocean.

Earnst Heinrich Haeckel (1834-1919), a German naturalist and champion of Darwin, used Lemuria to explain the absence of fossil remains of early man: If man originated on a sunken continent in the Indian Ocean, all the fossils of the missing link are now under the sea. To quote Haeckel: "Schlater has given this continent the name of Lemuria, from the semi-apes which were characteristic of it."

Zoologists have now explained the distribution of lemurs without resorting to the use of a land bridge. And anthropologists have discovered many bones of ancient man in Africa. However in the nineteenth century, Haeckel's theories were widely read and respected. As a result, the name Lemuria was well known among educated people in Europe and America.

Madame Elena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), the founder of Theosophy, in her book The Secret Doctrine (1888), claimed to have learned of Lemuria in the mythic Sacred Books of Dzyan, which she said was composed in Atlantis and revealed to her by the Mahatmas. However, in her writings she did give Philip Schlater the honor of inventing the name, Lemuria.

Blasvatsky located her Lemuria in the Indian Ocean about 150 million years ago. She may have obtained her ideas of a sunken land in the Indian Ocean from Sanskrit legends of the former continent of Rutas that sank beneath the sea. But the name Rutas sounds too spiritless and uninspiring to have held such a prominent place in cosmic history.

She wrote that the Lemurians were the third root race to inhabit the earth. They were egg-laying beings with a third eye that gave them psychic powers and allowed them to function without a brain. Originally bisexual, their downfall came after they discovered sex.

The English Theosophist W. Scott-Elliot, who said he received his knowledge from the Theosophical Masters by "astral clairvoyance", writes in The Story of Atlantis & The Lost Lemuria (1896), that the sexual exploits of the Lemurians so revolted the spiritual beings, the Lhas (cf. Lhasa), that they refused to follow the cosmic plan of becoming the first to incarnate into the bodies of the Lemurians. Scott-Elliot located his Lemuria not only in the Indian Ocean: he described it as stretching from the east coast of Africa across the Indian AND the Pacific Oceans.

In this century, writers have increasingly placed Lemuria in the Pacific Ocean. Psychics and modern prophets channel beings who say they were citizens of "Lemuria". Other believers have claimed to have met with Lemurian adepts living on/under Mt. Shasta in California.

Today just about everyone assumes the legends of Mu refer to Lemuria, the English zoologist's land of the lemurs.

    For more information read:
Mysterious Places by Daniel Dodd, Mead & Company, New York
  — Good information mixed with questionable science.
Lost Continents by L. Sprague de Camp, Random House, New York
  — Good information if you can manage to wade through Mr. de Camp's arrogant writing style.
The Lost Continent of Mu, etc. by James Churchward, (various publishers)
  — Six influential books with some interesting information hidden among almost endless speculation presented as facts.
The Secret Doctrine by Elena Petrovna Blavatsky, Theosophical Pub. House, 1888 - 1938, 6 vols.
  — You can quickly skip the nonsense, but it could take years to check the rest – there are better sources.
Eden in the East by Stephen Oppenheimer, Orion Publishing, London
  — Good information on Sudaland mixed with elaborate linguistic speculation.