Mu vs Lemuria vs Atlantis: Distinguishing the Myths

Robert

Alright, welcome back everyone to Mu the Motherland. I’m Robert, here with Marlene, and today we’re seriously digging into the origins of the three big legends—Mu, Lemuria, and Atlantis. I kinda love that these stories overlap so much that people just mash them into one soup, but if you look deeper, they all have really different roots.

Marlene

Yeah, absolutely. So, let’s start with Atlantis since that’s sort of the all-star. Most people know Atlantis through Plato, right? He gave us this story in—what was it? Timaeus and Critias, around 360 BCE. He describes Atlantis as this hyper-advanced civilization, a circular island with, like, temples, canals, and just… major Poseidon energy! But—and this is important—the whole thing is basically an allegory. For Plato, it was a warning: a civilization gets too proud, picks a fight with Athens, and ends up swallowed by the sea as punishment. Pretty dramatic stuff.

Robert

Yeah. Hubris, downfall, all that classic ancient Greek stuff. But then you jump ahead to later centuries and people just take Plato’s story literally. Like, “Let’s go find Atlantis!” Suddenly it’s not a metaphor for moral decay—it’s basically a blueprint for a lost, super-advanced society. And that’s going to open the door for everyone else to start imagining their own lost continents.

Marlene

Exactly. Then there’s Lemuria, and this one’s hilarious to me because it starts off with Victorian science, not myth. Philip Sclater couldn’t figure out why there were lemurs in Madagascar and India but not in Africa—so he proposed, “well, maybe there was a big land bridge,” and he called it Lemuria. Genius! Except, y’know… then geology moved on and Lemuria the landmass made zero sense. But instead of fading out, it got scooped up by Theosophy and occult writers who turned it into a spiritual homeland of advanced “root races”—and now you have Lemurians living under Mount Shasta, which is a great twist.

Robert

I mean, it’s almost like science unwittingly invented a whole new myth just by trying to explain lemur fossils. And then people were like, “No, let’s run with this! Let’s make it mystical!” So fun. And that brings us to Mu, which honestly feels the most wild to me. Mu doesn’t even pretend to be scientific. You’ve got Augustus Le Plongeon going to the Yucatán, translating Mayan stuff, and then suddenly claiming that Mu was this mother civilization in the Pacific, destroyed in this enormous disaster. Then, James Churchward—you’ll hear his name a lot—just doubles down, writing books about ancient tablets in India and a whole society that’s the root of basically everyone everywhere. Yeah, the first time I found Churchward’s book, ‘The Lost Continent of Mu’—I mean, it was just sitting in this dusty old shop like it was waiting for me. That’s when I started getting obsessed with all these lost worlds.

Marlene

And I think that’s the appeal. Each myth gives us a starting point—a sort of blank origin for humanity’s mysteries. They’re products of their eras, too: Atlantis with Plato’s moral warnings, Lemuria born of Victorian puzzles and then mystified by Blavatsky, and Mu inspired by these really inventive, let’s say, “translations” of ancient stuff. So right from the start, this isn’t just one legend—it’s three stories moving in weird, overlapping orbits.

Robert

And what’s wild is how each story gets handed off to new narrators, who totally transform what it means. Take Atlantis—after Plato, people mostly wrote it off as a good story until you get Ignatius Donnelly in the 1880s. The guy’s like, “Atlantis existed, it was wiped out by a flood, and all the world’s civilizations—Egypt, the Maya—they’re basically Atlantis 2.0.” That kicked the door open for anyone wanting to argue for a single proto-civilization. Then you get Edgar Cayce in the 20th century, psychically “reading” Atlantis as having massive crystal tech and spiritual battles between the “Law of One” and “Sons of Belial.” Now it’s not just a lost island, it’s a prophecy about our spiritual evolution—or doom, depending on how you vibe with it.

Marlene

I always find it so interesting how the myth shifts with the times. Lemuria, for example, gets totally recast by Helena Blavatsky in the late 1800s. For her, it’s not even a continent anymore—it’s pretty much an epoch. Her “root races” lived in Lemuria as massive, ethereal beings before evolving into Atlanteans. Then you’ve got Rudolf Steiner and the occultists making Lemuria this pre-matter, pure awareness kind of space. And it keeps going! By the 20th century, people are channeling Lemurian masters living in Mount Shasta, spreading love, light, and, I guess, telepathically guiding humanity toward higher consciousness. Well, they say so anyway.

Robert

Yeah, and then there’s the Mu rabbit hole, which, honestly, the longer you stare at it, the weirder it gets. Churchward is really the heart of the Mu story—former British engineer, says he finds these ancient “Naacal tablets” in India, claims that Mu is this advanced, peaceful civilization with spiritual priests, cosmic tech, you name it—sixty million people living in paradise, apparently. It’s almost like he wanted to out-Atlantis Atlantis. But what fascinates me is how his books basically landed in the hands of folks searching for something bigger—something lost that connects all the dots between Egypt, the Americas, Polynesia. And yeah, touching on earlier episodes, this longing for unity, for a single point of origin, keeps echoing in all the spiritual movements and even a lot of alternative archaeology we’ve talked about.

Marlene

That brings us to why these myths persist—there’s this shared set of themes across all three. They always start with a golden age, right? Super advanced people, living in harmony or splendor, but something goes wrong—hubris, spiritual decline, cosmic rules broken. Atlantis falls for pride, Lemuria for descending into matter, Mu for losing cosmic harmony. Deep down, they’re cautionary tales about our use and misuse of power—doesn’t matter if it’s technology or spirituality.

Robert

Yeah, and I think it’s key that survivors always ‘seed’ future civilizations. So for Atlantis, it’s teaching astronomy and architecture to Egypt or the Maya. Lemurians supposedly end up in Asia, or maybe under Mount Shasta—who knows? And “the children of Mu” show up all across the Pacific. It’s like we’re hardwired to believe that wisdom survived somehow, that nothing is ever truly lost, just transformed.

Marlene

And the symbolism just keeps evolving. Both Mu and Atlantis are obsessed with crystals, energy, vibration. That vibe still shapes New Age and alternative health practices today—like when we did that episode on Pharaoh Rods and frequency healing, remember? Or think about the feminine archetype—Mu and Lemuria especially are “motherlands,” evoking origins, return, rebirth. It’s a psychological pull as much as a spiritual or mythic one.

Robert

Oh, totally. And, I mean, we have to point out—modern science doesn’t back up the actual continents, right? Geology tells us, “Nope, you can’t just lose entire continents in the ocean.” But that doesn’t kill the myths. If anything, it kinda frees them up to work as metaphors. They become mirrors for our own fears—rising seas, climate change, loss of connection, even longing for unity. It’s all there. And, honestly, as we said in an earlier episode—like with the healing temples of Saqqara or quantum healing—sometimes the real power of these stories is their psychological and cultural resonance, not their literal geology.

Marlene

Yeah, and they keep getting reinvented. Atlantis in movies, comics, video games—from Disney to Marvel, even in sci-fi where Atlantis is maybe an alien base. Lemuria’s huge in crystal healing and Mount Shasta lore. Mu pops up in Japanese media, in metaphysical art, as this primordial homeland myth. And underneath it all there’s this—what is it? A yearning for origins, but also for unity—for a time when things weren’t so fragmented. Even the Jungian perspective, right? Lost continents as symbols of the collective unconscious—our own forgotten wisdom, just waiting under the surface.