In the floor of the Pacific Ocean, near the south-western point of Japan's Ryukyu Islands, lies a structure that is believed to be about 12,000 years old - pre-dating the pyramids of Giza by about 5000 years. Mu was originally put forward as an ancient civilisation by Col James Churchward in the late 1800s. Based upon thousands of ancient clay tablets he came across in Indian monasteries, he concluded that there was once a mid-Pacific Ocean continent that was home to an advanced civilisation of about 65m people some 70,000 years ago which was wiped out in a cataclysmic earthquake. Churchward also believed that Mu was the original Garden of Eden and the location of the original Tree of Life, a herb which is still harvested and consumed on the island of Yonaguni, where remnants of the temple can be found. Furthermore, Churchward claimed that Mu was a "mother" civilization that extended its influence, through emigration, to South and North America, Asia and Africa, especially Egypt. Vestiges of Mu can still be found today throughout the Pacific - on Easter Island, Nan Madol in Micronesia and Tonga. Furthermore, ancient Chinese writings from the so-called Warring States describe an island to the east known as Peng Jia, a huge land mass inhabited by magical beings who could fly and had a potion of eternal life. It is recorded that the first emperor of China, the Qin emperor, sent emissaries abroad in search of this strange island, but they failed to return from the mission.
OK, these theories seem a little way out but how do you explain the Temple of Mu?
It wasn't discovered until 1996. A gigantic, coral-encrusted pyramid-like structure lying in about 30m of water. Consisting of a ceremonial center of broad promenades and flanking pylons, the building measures about 110m long, 50m wide and 20m high. There also appears to be an encircling road, what might be post holes that supported long-gone wooden structures and castle-like structures located nearby on land. While Churchland attributed the demise of this civilisation to an earthquake, Japanese researchers suggest rising sea levels due to glacier melt at the end of the last Ice Age about 12,000 years ago point to a more reliable date and explanation of Mu's demise. A more probable explanation is a combination or rising sea levels and tectonic activity which still continues to affect this part of the world.. The pictures here reveal its glory. As you can see, the structure is neither simple or small. Its size and complexity suggest that an advanced civilization was responsible for its construction. Professor Masaki Kimura, a marine geologist at Ryukyu University in Okinawa, who was the first scientist to investigate the site, has concluded: "This could only have been done by a people with a high degree of technology. "There would have to have been some sort of machinery involved to have created such a huge structure. "The object has not been manufactured by nature. If that had been the case, one would expect debris from erosion to have collected around the site, but there are no rock fragments there," he said.
Robert Schoch, professor of geology at Boston University, who dived at the site said: "It basically looks like a series of huge steps, each about a metre high. Essentially, it's a cliff face like the side of a stepped pyramid. It's a very interesting structure."It's possible that natural water erosion combined with the process of cracked rocks splitting created such a structure, but I haven't come across such processes creating a structure as sharp as this." Further evidence that the structure is the work of humans came with the discovery of smaller underwater stone mounds nearby. Like the main building, these mini-ziggurats are made of stepped slabs and are about 10m wide and 2m high. Prof. Kimura said it was too early to know who built the monument or its purpose. "The structure could be an ancient religious shrine, possibly celebrating an ancient deity resembling the god Nirai-Kanai, whom locals say gave happiness to the people of Okinawa from beyond the sea. "This could be evidence of a new culture as there are no records of a people intelligent enough to have built such a monument 10,000 years ago," he said. Teruaki Ishii, professor of geology at Tokyo University, said the structure dated back to at least 8000BC when the land on which it was constructed was submerged at the end of the last ice age. "I hope this site is artificial as it would be very exciting. But at this time I feel it is too early to say. I think the structure could be natural, but part of it may have been made," he said. The first signs of civilisation in Japan are traced to the Neolithic period around 9000BC. The people at this time lived as hunters and food-gatherers. There is nothing in the archeological record to suggest the presence of a culture advanced enough to have built a structure like the ziggurat. Now comes the interesting bit: why has this information been suppressed? Apart from a news report on CNN and a documentary on Discovery Channel, the existence of this structure is not common knowledge. Why? Is it because this structure lies in Oceania and is, therefore, subject to the Eurocentric racism that insists that Pacific islanders couldn't have possibly produced such a structure? Is it because this structure's existence undermines the Egyptologists' view of history that says Giza is the centre of archeological wonder?
Is it because the existence of this structure gives some credence to the existence of an Atlantean-like civilisation that was, at the least, the equal to the technological advances of modern civilisations?
Or is it because its existence is further evidence of an extraterrestrial - or non-human role - in the evolution of human civilisation.
How do you explain the fact that people who were basically subsistence fishermen and farmers with little or no mathematical or literary skills managed to achieve technological and logistical feats that the best brains of the 20th century would be hard pressed to achieve within the same timeframes?
In this article, I ask the reader to accompany me upon an intriguing journey through the dimly-remembered, faintly-recorded archaic world of our ancient ancestors. We shall be guided by some of those great imaginative visionaries who tirelessly endeavoured to fill in some of the blanks pages of the legendary past history of this mysterious world of ours. Much of what had virtually faded away into pure myth has been steadily fleshed-out again down the centuries by Greek and Roman scholars like Plato, Herodatus and Tacitus; intrepid explorer-archaeologists like James Churchward, Percy H. Fawcett, and Heinrich Schliemann, and mystic-explorers like Nicholas Roerich and Theodore Illion. Theosophists and philosophers like Helena Blavatsky, W. Scott-Elliot and Rudolph Steiner, and even gifted seers like Edgar Cayce, have also played their part.
Nor should we overlook the input of such authorities on Thule and the Aryan race as Julius Evola and Joscelyn Godwin, or researchers into hidden underground and inner earth empires such as Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Saint-Yves and even the Nazi historian, Miguel Serrano. Polar explorers like Sir George Wilkins, Fridjof Nansen and Richard E. Byrd also have their input to make on matters Borealic. Nor is the inspired fiction of famed writers Verne, Poe and Rice Burroughs overlooked for its useful contribution in fanning the flames of imagination that have revitalized this almost fogotten part of the world�s history.
A great deal has been recorded and written about such great empires and nations as ancient Egypt, Greece, Troy, Rome, Assyria, Persia and even India, Tibet and China, but here I seek to remind the reader of the more esoteric and archaic empires of Mu, Atlantis, Osiria, Hyperborea, and Agharta. The ancient empires from which these later and better-known ones were originally born! Thus our partly-proven - partly-theoretical journey begins with the tropical paradise of ancient Mu and takes us via a tortuous route to the polar paradise of Hyperborean Thule, and thence to the Interior World which lies hidden just beyond!
Let us then set forth on our travels through the mists of time with open minds and the readiness to acquire whatever wisdom and knowledge our individual minds are willing to accept as we go!
The Lost Continent Of Mu
In 1868, Colonel James Churchward, who was then a serving officer in the British Army in India, befriended the high priest of an Indian temple, who showed him several sets of ancient, inscribed clay tablets which had lain concealed in the temple vaults for many centuries, unread and neglected by most of the temple priests down the ages. With the aid of his new-found friend, Churchward learned how to decipher the ancient Naacal tablet inscriptions. As Churchward translated them, and grasped vast fund of information they contained, he realized that he had stumbled upon the amazing history of a long-lost continent which had been the first great civilization on the Earth. They told of a huge civilization that had arisen, flourished and decayed long before any of those known to modern scholars! It was the great continent of Mu, the Motherland of all the races of the Earth! For long years, Churchward followed the trail of this mysterious new civilization to the far ends of the earth, piecing together the many parts of a vast jigsaw. Then, as he steadily acquired more and more pieces of information and carefully fitted them into place,.a marvellous picture began to form. A stunning picture of a vast, lost Pacific continent and its original inhabitants gradually came together. The final result of Churward�s immense labour was his amazing book: �The Lost Continent of Mu�. Sadly, after its first publication in 1926, Churchward�s book attracted a lot of ridicule and criticism from the archaeological scholars of his day, and very few of them took his findings and theories seriously. It was regarded more as wild fiction than a serious scientific study. But today fortunately, we live in a less narrow-minded society, and many such monumental works as Churchward�s are being taken considerably more seriously, as outmoded old dogmas are being overturned by the new findings of more enlightened scientific researchers. Of course, that isn�t to say that we need necessarily subscribe entirely to his idea of Mu being one huge mid-Pacific continent, since, like the idea of Atlantis being a huge mid-Atlantic continent, it can�t be supported by the findings of modern submarine exploration and geological investigation. However, from my own study of bathymetric maps and charts of the Pacific ocean floor, there does seem to be reasonable geological support for there having once been a number of large and long islands forming a series of ridges across the Pacific, which could have become submerged through tectonic activity into the ocean floor of the Pacific. It is known to be a highly unstable region, surrounded by the so-called �Ring of Fire� of volcanoes, and earthquake-prone regions where tectonic plates rub against each other, and the Pacific ocean-bed is dotted with chains of sea-mounts, many of which are volcanic, as well as deep cracks and rifts known as �trenches�. Also, churchward�s concept of underground �Gas-Chambers� collapsing or imploding in upon themselves after losing their supporting internal gas pressure sounds entirely feasible to me. It�s not unreasonable, therefore, to place a certain degree of credence in Churchward�s assertion that there has been a great amount of rising and sinking in such an unstable sea-bed, and that, in the fairly recent geological past, many of the current island-chains could have stood much higher above sea-level, to form continuous mountainous ridges stretching across a good deal of the western half, if not two-thirds, of the Pacific. As mentioned, I�ve taken the trouble (as any reader should) to closely study the latest depictions of the Pacific Ocean bed as it would appear without water, and I find that there is certainly an entirely plausible case to made for the various island-chains having once actually been continuous, above-water ridges of dry land stretching for anything between a thousand miles to two thousand miles in length! The Midway and Hawaiian Island group in the North Pacific, that form the undersea Hawaiian Ridge, is a typical example of what I mean. They would have formed a connection to the Line Island Ridge via the Mid-Pacific Ridge, and thus down to other ridges of contiguous island-chains in the South Pacific. Following this line of thought, one can easily see how there could very well have been an interconnected or easily-reached group of land-ridges extending all the way from Japan and the East Indies, right across to Pitcairn Island, or even Easter Island, in the south, the Marquesas nearer the equator, and Hawaii itself in the north. Nor should we ignore the submerged South Eastern Pacific Plateau in this consideration, which runs almost north-north-east, toward the west coast of Central America, in the midst of which we find Easter Island. From there, it�s only a distance of under two thousand miles or so to the Peruvian coastline. This would have been a comfortable sail for such an empire of seafarers as the people of Mu must surely have been, according to Churchward�s theory! However, apart from this leaning of Churchward toward the need for a huge super-continent to occupy a good half the Pacific Ocean area, I personally find his general basic theory quite intriguing, especially since it fits in well with so many other strange anomalies regarding the origins and movements of various ancient peoples - including both the Atlanteans and the Naacal Ramans, besides the three principal races of humanity. Perhaps if Churchward had only had access to the knowledge we now possess of the geology and topography of the ocean floors, his �continent�-proposition would have been appropriately modified, and might have met with a far better reception than it did from the scholars of his day. However, having hopefully helped his premise become a little more realistic and feasible, I should now define some of the points of interest in his �Mu� concept.
Why Did Churchward Search for Mu?
As we saw previously, the whole thing was triggered off by the old high priest of the Indian college temple, which was obviously a remnant off-shoot of the Holy Brotherhood of the ancient Naacals. Had he not spoken about this amazing 50,000 years old civilization with its 64 million inhabitants to Churchward, Mu might well have completely disappeared from human memory long ago. Instead, having befriended Churchward, and found him to be a seeker after esoteric knowledge, the old high priest eventually allowed Churchward access to the precious tablets which had been loving preserved mostly intact for nearly fifty millennia. f it hadn�t been a time of great famine in India in 1868, and had Churchward not been assisting in famine relief (courtesy of the British Army), the two would never have met, and the story would never have come to light. Such are the curious twists of fortune and circumstance which direct our destinies! As I said at the outset, once Churchward saw the ancient tablets, he was well and truly hooked, and �Mu� became the driving obsession of his life thereafter. He felt totally compelled to unearth the proof of this amazing story, or die in the attempt! For two full years, he studied with the old priest, learning how to decipher the bass-relief characters upon the clay tablets, that had been written either in Burma or actually in Mu itself by ancient Naacal priestly scholars. The tablets he studied were, in fact, only a few fragments of what had once been a vast collection, and these had been rescued from one of the old seven Rishi cities which were the centres of learning in the old Rama Empire in ancient India! After many months of intense study of the tablets (including having to repair many that had been broken in packing or transit) Churchward eventually began to crack the code. His efforts were justified when he discovered that they described in detail the creation of the Earth and of the appearance of Man - in the land of Mu! When he realized the enormous significance of his discovery �In the elucidation of that eternal problem� (the origin of mankind and his races), Churchward set off to Burma, armed with introductory letters from the Indian priests, in the fond hope of finding more of the tablets. Sadly, he was rebuffed by the Buddhist priests there, who told him to go back to India and �Ask those thieves who stole them to show them to you!� Undaunted however, he decided to make a study of the writings of all the ancient civilizations of the old world, to compare them with the legends he had discovered about Mu from the clay tablets. And this he did, only to discover that they were all preceded by the Civilization of Mu.
During his studies, he learned that the �Lost Continent� had extended from north of Hawaii southward as far as Fiji and Easter Island, �and was undoubtedly the original (earthly) habitat of man�. He learned that �this beautiful land of smiling plenty� had produced �the people that colonized the Earth�, and that it had been �obliterated by terrific earthquakes and submersion 12,000 years ago, and had vanished in a vortex of fire and water�! Subsequently, he traced the same story to India, where colonists from Mu had settled: �from India into Egypt; from Egypt to the temple of Sanai (Sinai?), where Moses copied it; and from Moses to the faulty translations of Ezra, 800 years later. The plausibility of this will be apparent even to those who have not studied the subject carefully, when they see the close resemblance between the story of the creation as we know it and the tradition that originated in Mu�. |
