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(More customer reviews)It is sad to see derogatory reviews of James Churchward's well researched books. If you can't name the fifth President of the United States or say where Point Roberts is - forget about judging Churchward, a veteran traveller, philologist and student of human culture - virtually without equal today. These days - people study narrow fields. Churchward mapped the connections between these isolated fields or cultures - and traced them back to the lost continent or Motherland of Mu. He presented and deciphered Cara-Maya, the mother tongue of Mu, showing how its roots can be traced in a number of different languages and cultures located within or around 'The Ring of Fire.' He provided details of cultural artifacts - to illustrate his theory. Churchward claimed to have received much help in this regard, from an aged Indian Rishi.
Having lived in various bits of the Pacific rim, including odd visits to pacific islands, I can guarantee that anyone who does more than speculate from an armchair -would find Churchward's ideas backed up by substantial evidence scattered through dozens of pacific rim cultures - be it the Pacific N.W. of America, Japan - or wherever. Age-old symbols, in seemingly disparate and disconnected cultures share similar myth-motifs, tell related tales of a tragic, swallowing of a mother-culture beneath the ocean. Besides the Bible, such a deluge is also mentioned in the Chinese Shih-ching (Book of History).
Thor Heyerdal noted the phenomenon - again, not a man prone to expound on distant cultures - from an armchair. Many of Churchward's ideas challenge current scientific and academic 'orthodoxy' (alleging, for instance, that the earth's large mountain ranges were formed - long after mother earth, herself). Churchward also notes anomolous facts - like archeological artifacts that show the existence of technically advanced cultures - beneath the remains of other, less advanced cultures. In most cases, such anomalies cannot be accounted for by orthodox archeology and strictly linear theories of human cultural development.
It may be disturbing to consider that a sudden geological cataclysm might throw human civilisation and culture backwards - almost wiping the slate, but after the recent tsunami - it doesn't take much imagination to think what would happen - if whole techtonic plates broke up - effectively reducing a whole continent to nothing - save scattered islands and peripheral strips of land mass. Plato,for his own part, related similar events (Atlantis) in the Timaeus. Usually mocked as 'fiction' - the fact remains that Plato was absolutely serious about it.
Churchward was thoroughly serious. Given the fact that he reconstructed the hieratic sacred alphabet of Mu, and spent years deciphering the information yielded by hundreds of artifacts from cultures around the Pacific rim - and related areas, it is absurd to suggest that his theories were without proof and ill-founded.He has given us the evidence. The greater part of it is too compelling to ignore.
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Mu, as a lost Pacific Ocean continent, was later popularized by James Churchward (1851-1936) in a series of books, beginning with Lost Continent of Mu, the Motherland of Man (1926), re-edited later as The Lost Continent Mu (1931). Other popular books in the series are The Children of Mu (1931), and The Sacred Symbols of Mu (1933).Churchward claimed that "more than fifty years ago," while he was a soldier in India, he befriended a high-ranking temple priest who showed him a set of ancient "sunburnt" clay tablets, supposedly in a long lost "Naga-Maya language" which only two other people in India could read. Having mastered the language himself, Churchward found out that they originated from "the place where [man] first appeared-Mu." The 1931 edition states that 'all matter of science in this work are based on translations of two sets of ancient tablets:" the clay tables he read in India, and a collection 2,500 stone tablets that had been uncovered by William Niven in Mexico. p. 7Churchward gave a vivid description of Mu as the home of an advanced civilization, the Naacal, which flourished between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago, was dominated by a 'white race," p. 48 and was "superior in many respects to our own"p. 17 At the time of its demise, about 12,000 years ago, Mu had 64,000,000 inhabitants and many large cities, and colonies in the other continents.Churchward claimed that the landmass of Mu was located in the Pacific Ocean, and stretched east-west from the Marianas to Easter Island, and north-south from Hawaii to Mangaia. He claimed that according to the creation myth he read in the Indian tablets, Mu had been lifted above sea level by the expansion of underground volcanic gases. Eventually Mu 'was completely obliterated in almost a single night" p. 44: after a series of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, "the broken land fell into that great abyss of fire" and was covered by "fifty millions of square miles of water." p. 50Churchward claimed that Mu was the common origin of the great civilizations of Egypt, Greece, Central America, India, Burma and others, including Easter Island, and was in particular the source of ancient megalithic architecture. As evidence for his claims, he pointed to symbols from throughout the world, in which he saw common themes of birds, the relation of the Earth and the sky, and especially the Sun. Churchward claims the king of Mu was Ra and he relates this to the Egyptian god of the sun, Ra, and the Rapanui word for Sun, ra'a, which he incorrectly spells "raa."[8]: p. 48 He claimed to have found symbols of the Sun in 'Egypt, Babylonia, Peru and all ancient lands and countries - it was a universal symbol."[8]: p. 138Churchward attributed all megalithic art in Polynesia to the people of Mu. He claimed that symbols of the sun are found 'depicted on stones of Polynesian ruins," such as the stone hats (pukao) on top of the giant moai statues of Easter Island. Citing W.J. Johnson, Churchward describes the cylindrical hats as 'spheres" that "seem to show red in the distance", and asserts that they 'represent the Sun as Ra." p. 138 He also incorrectly claimed that some of them are made of "red sandstone" [8]: p. 89 which does not occur in the island. The platforms on which the statues rest (ahu) are described by Churchward as being 'platform-like accumulations of cut and dressed stone," which were supposedly left in their current positions 'awaiting shipment to some other part of the continent for the building of temples and palaces.": p. 89 He also cites the pillars 'erected by the Maori of New Zealand" as an example of this lost civilization's handiwork.: p. 158 In Churchward's view, the present-day Polynesians are not descendants of the dominant members of the lost civilization of Mu, responsible for these great works, but survivors of the cataclysm that adopted 'the first cannibalism and savagery" in the world.
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