James Churchward and the "Lost Continent of Mu".

James Churchward (1851–1936) was a British writer, industrialist, and former military officer best known for his occultist works. After leaving the army, he travelled in Southeast Asia, worked as a tea planter in Sri Lanka, and emigrated to the United States in the 1890s. By 1914 he had retired to a seven-acre estate in Connecticut, where he devoted himself to questions that had preoccupied him since his Pacific travels.

At seventy-five he published The Lost Continent of Mu: Motherland of Men (1926), arguing that a vast continent had once occupied much of the Pacific Ocean before sinking through cataclysmic geological events. He went on to publish several further books expanding this theory. In these works he described Mu as an advanced civilisation of 64 million inhabitants, reaching its peak 50,000 years before the present era, possessing technology superior to that of the early twentieth century, and seeding later cultures such as those of India, Babylon, Persia, Egypt, and the Maya.

The name “Mu” had first been proposed by Augustus Le Plongeon (1825–1908), who associated a “Land of Mu” with Atlantis. Churchward adapted and extended this idea, identifying Mu with the hypothetical continent of Lemuria and locating it in the Pacific. He drew heavily on Le Plongeon’s writings—particularly Queen Moo and Sacred Mysteries—and on the notion of a lost Naacal civilisation. According to his biographer Percy Tate Griffith (My Friend Churchey and His Sunken Continent), Churchward had discussed the subject with Le Plongeon and his wife in the 1890s, but he later reshaped the idea to suit his own broader narrative.

Both men regarded the Maya as an exceptionally ancient and accomplished people. Le Plongeon argued that they originated in Central America and spread civilisation abroad, while Churchward claimed they had migrated from Mu and carried its culture around the world. In both versions, an original, highly advanced Maya race was eventually displaced by less developed groups.

Churchward further asserted that the Garden of Eden had been located on Mu, that the Biblical creation story ultimately derived from this “Motherland of Men,” and that Mu had once spanned nearly half the Pacific—from the northern Hawaiian Islands to Fiji and Easter Island. Its destruction, he believed, resulted from a sequence of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and even a pole shift, after which some fifty million square miles of ocean filled its place.

Central to his account was the claim that an Indian priest had taught him to read the sacred writings of the Naacals, preserved on ancient tablets. Churchward said the language was then understood by only three people in India and is now extinct. He maintained that he eventually saw these tablets, though their present whereabouts are unknown, and that they represented only fragments of a much larger body of knowledge hidden in the archives of other ancient cultures. According to Churchward, the tablets revealed that the Garden of Eden was not in the Middle East, but on Mu, that Mu was an advanced civilization many tens of thousands of years old, and that science and religion were fused together in their belief system.

Churchward’s books blend imaginative prehistory, exotic travel narratives, and bold reinterpretations of ancient myth, forming one of the classic expressions of the Pacific lost-continent tradition. By the second half of the twentieth century, improvements in oceanography, in particular understanding of seafloor spreading and plate tectonics, have left little scientific basis for claims of geologically recent lost continents such as Mu. Churchward's books contain geological and archaeological errors. Archaeologists regard his writings, at best, as pseudoscience. Other scholars regard them as a hoax (Gardener 1957 p. 170). According to Stephen Williams (1991 p. 152), Churchward's "translations are outrageous, his geology, in both mechanics and dating, is absurd, and his mishandling of archaeological data, as in the Valley of Mexico, is atrocious." According to Gordon Stein (1993 pp. 52–53) "it is difficult to assess whether Churchward really believed what he said about Mu, or whether he was knowingly writing fiction". Then there is the quote from the book by Percy Tate Griffith “My Friend Churchey and His Sunken Island of Mu” where James tells the author (Reconciling the evidence part 1) they were fiction.

" Of course, as I have sufficiently indicated before, there were no such Naacal tablets. The claim about them he had admitted to me was simply pure fiction. It was irrelevant, superfluous, and extraneous at best. His story in the main was the same as Le Plongeon’s. It was what we discussed with the old professor Augustus Le Plongeon and his young wife Madame Alice Dixson Le Plongeon in my home in those early days when I had introduced them both to my friend Churchey, to King Gillette and others".

         Bibliography

1. The Lost Continent of Mu, the Motherland of Men (1926)
2. The Children of Mu (1931)
3. The Sacred Symbols of Mu (1933)
4. Cosmic Forces of Mu (1934)
5. Second Book of Cosmic Forces of Mu (1935)

See also: 

Gardner, Martin. (1957). Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. Dover Publications.

Stein, Gordon 1993, ' Encyclopedia of Hoaxes', Gale Group.

Williams, Stephen 1991, 'Fantastic Archaeology: The Wild Side of North American Prehistory', University of Pennsylvania Press.

Worth a visit, Jack Churchward, blog.my-mu, and the research website my-mu.com used to discuss and investigate the theories of James Churchward and the Lost Continent of Mu.