The religion of very ancient India was that of the
Motherland, brought there from Mu by the Naacals, a holy brotherhood. These men
were taught religion and the Cosmic Sciences in the Motherland and when
proficient were sent to the colonial empires to form colleges and perfect the
local priesthoods, who in turn taught the people. (James Churchward, Sacred
Symbols of Mu, p. 274).
According to Churchward, Mu was a lost continent in the
Pacific Ocean, which was destroyed in a global cataclysm tens of thousands of
years ago; Mu was the original home of mankind, and all subsequent
civilizations descended from it. The Pacific islands and their inhabitants are
supposed to be the last survivors of this primordial motherland. Churchward's
Mu was a huge continent, which stretched from Micronesia in the West to Easter
Island and Hawaii in the East. Churchward also believed in a literal
mid-Atlantic Atlantis. He proposed a global network of huge gas-filled caverns
which, if vented, could cause large areas of land to be submerged.
Churchward's Mu theory hasn't achieved even the marginal
credibility of Atlantis. For one thing, his science is absurd. The Pacific
appears to have been free of large land masses for billions of years. In fact,
the Pacific basin may mark the place where the Moon was expelled from the
proto-earth. Coral atolls that dot the Pacific have taken millions of
undisturbed years of activity to form. And the Pacific was one of the last
regions on the planet to be settled by humans; this is proven by linguistic
evidence, and the well-documented oral traditions which describe the history of
the Polynesian migrations.
It doesn't help matters that Churchward's books are largely
absent of apparatus such as footnotes or bibliography, and his basic source
material cannot be independently confirmed. In his Mu-monomania, he employs
circular and tautological reasoning. Often, he will make a startling assertion,
and before supporting it, will move on to some other train of thought. At other
times, he writes factually about, say, Egyptian mythology, without any clue for
the reader as to why this proves anything about Mu. The reader is
simultaneously entertained and irritated by this intellectual shell game.
However, Churchward may have the last laugh yet. There was a
large land mass in the Pacific that was submerged during prehistoric times:
Sundaland, the continental shelf around Indonesia, which was exposed during the
ice ages. It was most certainly the route that humans used to get to Australia,
as only a few kilometers of water separated Sundaland from Australia at that
time. Although it was submerged slowly as the result of rising sea levels at
the end of the ice age, the region has some of the most violent volcanoes on
Earth (such as the famous Krakatoa). A documented eruption in that region about
60,000 years ago may have decimated the human race, producing a 'population
bottleneck' during which our species was reduced to a few hundred individuals;
this has emerged from mitochondrial DNA studies. Some have hypothesized that
Sundaland may have been home to an early lost civilization, perhaps the home of
the mysterious voyagers who charted the anomalous ice-age maps which the early
modern map-makers incorporated in their atlases. While not Mu or Lemuria, of
all of the nooks and crannies where a lost civilization might have existed,
Sundaland is one of the most plausible; only time will tell.
Source: J. B. Hare
