Fully illustrated. According to James Churchward, Mu was a vast lost continent in the Pacific Ocean, destroyed in a cataclysm tens of thousands of years ago. He believed Mu to be the cradle of humanity, from which all later civilizations ultimately descended. The scattered Pacific islands and their peoples, in his view, were the last remnants of this primordial motherland. Churchward described Mu as a massive landmass stretching from Micronesia in the west to Easter Island and Hawaii in the east. He also maintained that Atlantis existed in the mid-Atlantic as a literal continent. To explain sudden geological upheavals, he proposed the existence of an immense global network of gas-filled caverns, which, when vented, could cause vast regions of land to sink beneath the sea. Churchward further claimed that during his time in India he befriended a priest, or Rishi, who introduced him to a set of ancient tablets inscribed in an otherwise unknown language. The Rishi taught him to read this language, known as Naacal. These tablets, he said, described the land of Mu—identified by Theosophists with Lemuria. He also asserted that he could recognize inscriptions from Mu on mysterious tablets unearthed in Mexico by the explorer William Niven.
