Books on Mu aka Lemuria
Posted by Adrian Tremayne on December 26, 2010 at 7:00pm in Lemurians
Does anyone remember the books by James Churchward (b. 1851 - d. 1936) regarding Mu, or Lemuria for those being very formal? He wrote The Lost Continent of Mu, the Motherland of Man (1926; republished as The Lost Continent Mu [1931]), The Children of Mu (1931) and The Sacred Symbols of Mu (1933).
Back in "the old days", before Graham Hancock and others began writing, Mr Churchward was considered by many to be the authority on Mu and all things Lemurian. People who hadn't read Churchward's histories and theories of Mu were considered less-than-well-educated on the subject. He said he had befriended a high-ranking temple priest while stationed in India 50 years before he began writing (or was published?), who showed him a set of tablets written in what he referred to as "Naga-Maya". Churchward claimed to have learned to read the language, though he doesn't say how, and translated the tablets. He further stated his work was also based on a set of 2,500 stone tablets discovered in Mexico by William Niven.
Niven (b. 1859 - d. 1937) was actually an explorer-archaeologist-minerologist who did find stone tablets of andesite while working as an archaeologist in the Valley of Mexico. The first tablet was unearthed in 1921, and did have writing or symbols in an unknown language on it. I can't find a record of how many there actually were, but Niven did support himself by selling some of them and trying to have them interpreted or deciphered. Toward the end of his life, they were "lost in shipment" from Mexico to the United States. The rubbings of the petroglyphs remain in storage somewhere, probably either the Smithsonian or the Library of Congress. I have not been able to locate them.
Churchward, in some ways, did Niven a disservice by 'deciphering' the tablets as a history of Mu and the origins of the neo-Mu civilization in Mexico. Because his theories were not popular at the time, Churchward's translations gave impetus to those claiming the tablets were a hoax to begin with. Churchward placed Mu (or Lemuria) in the Pacific Ocean, but the accepted legends of the time only allowed for Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean. Atlantis was considered somewhat 'provable' because the Atlantic Ocean was named after it, and Plato told of its destruction on authority from an ancient priest in Egypt. Since everything Egyptian was popular and sacrosanct at the time, and Plato was a real Athenian philosopher who left records in writing, the prior existence of a continent named Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean was a given. No such thing existed for a continent in the Pacific, so Churchward was talking myth (not believable) as opposed to legend (from oral and written 'history').
Having read Churchward's books, I think the man was on to something. Whether he translated records in then-unknown languages or not, his history and what I remember parallel fairly closely. His history is somewhat stylized and idealized, in my opinion, but that was the style of the time - to look back to a "Golden Age" when the world resembled the utopian fancies of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Nobles were, well, noble; and workers were always industriously doing tasks they enjoyed and wanted to do for the good of society. Religious figures were always morally and ethically upright, with the good of the souls of those under their care at the forefront of their minds and actions.
Churchward dates the destruction of Mu at about 12,000 years ago, and as happening very rapidly "in almost a single night". Hancock, writing more modernly, sets the date as about 10,000 B.C. , or roughly in line with Churchward. In 1939, James Bramwell, writing in Lost Atlantis, states the cataclysmic events began 800,000 years ago and went on until the last catastrophe occurred in precisely 9564 B. C.. I don't have any way of cross-referencing the Lemurian dating system I remember with the calendar currently in use in the U.S., so I won't even venture a guess.
There have been other books published since Churchward, Hancoak, and Bramwell. Some have been dictated under the influence of extra-terrestrials, others channeled from assorted other entities, some from past-life remembrances. Lemuria has even provided fodder for novelists, whether they have acknowledged the source of their inspiration or not. What is accurate? I can't say. Everyone lives their own lives, and has their own perspectives. Not to mention that the continent, and civilization, lasted a long, long time. If you were a person of standing and power, life was really good. If you were a slave (and slavery did creep in there eventually), probably not as good, if not downright miserable. Never underestimate man's ability to be inhumane.
Were the people of Mu in contact with extraterrestrials of any type? My guess, probably. Extraterrestrials seem to have been fascinated by us 'mere' humans for as long as we've been able to record our history in some form capable of describing "not human". Reports of their visits, or apparent records of their visits, go all the way back to the Stone Age, and maybe even before. Who knows what may have been lost with the civilizations which existed prior to the Western-defined Stone Age? Atlantis would have been pre-Stone Age. If, as has been posited, Lemuria is/was older than Atlantis, it would definitely pre-date the Stone Age. If Bramwell is right, it pre-dates modern science's understanding of when "true" Homo Sapiens developed, which begs the question of where we really came from.
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Thanks -
Adrian