Free Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet by Ted Nield

duly discovered the name of the ill-fated continent. Thus was Mu born.

    The supposed ‘Mayan Alphabet’.
     
    Back in Washington, unaware of how rotten its foundations were, Ignatius Donnelly took the Mu story on. In his book he linked this entirely bogus Mayan legend with Plato’s allegorical Atlantis and went on to speculate about how this connection might shed light on archaeological links between the Mayan and other civilizations. And there the Mu legend paused, until one Colonel Churchward picked it up and moved it back into the Pacific.
    Colonel James Churchward (1851–1936) stares winningly out of his picture like a cross between Colonel Sanders and a travelling medicine man peddling potions in a Hollywood Western. He sports a rakish goatee and moustache, and wears a large rose in his left lapel. Although he had written a book before, namely A Big Game and Fishing Guide to North-Eastern Maine, this gasconading English émigré shot to literary success rather late in life with his colourful accounts of a huge continent lost below the Pacific.
    The two ideograms thought, from tenuous supposed similarities to characters in the supposed alphabet, to represent the letters M and U.
     
    The Lost Continent of Mu (1926) set out Churchward’s claim to have discovered the tale of Mu and its destruction in mysterious ancient texts. He claimed the continent had sunk about 60,000 years ago and that Easter Island, Hawaii, Tahiti and a few other Pacific islands were its last remnants. This information he gleaned from the ‘Naacal Tablets’, having himself been taught the Naacal language by a Hindu priest in India in 1866. (Churchward’s military rank was said to have been gained in the British Army in India, but this too is unconfirmed.) As well as the tablets of Naacal, Churchward gleaned information from a different set of tablets found in Mexico by one William Niven, who is variously described as a geologist and engineer. No one else has ever seen these tablets either.
    The lost continent of Mu as envisaged by Churchward.
     
    Churchward held that the first humans had appeared two million years ago on Mu. Modern humans were, he believed, all descended from the survivors of Mu’s cataclysmic destruction, brought about by the explosion of the ‘gas belts’ on which it rested. Churchward followed his first book with four more: The Children of Mu, The Sacred Symbols of Mu, The Cosmic Forces of Mu and The Second Book of the Cosmic Forces of Mu.
    One would think that after five volumes of elaboration (all of which are now back in print in America) Churchward’s might have proved the last written words on the subject. But as recently as 1970 yet another book appeared, Mu Revealed by Tony Earll. This claimedto be the diary of a boy called Kland who, according to Earll, moved to Mexico in 21,000 BC but was unlucky enough to meet with an earthquake and get his scrolls trapped in a collapsing temple. Then in 1959, so the story goes, archaeologist Reedson Hurdlop excavated the temple. He found the scrolls and discovered that they not only supported Churchward’s Mu hypothesis but provided even more information about the lost continent and its people.
    Except all this was also fiction. Crossword enthusiasts may have noticed in passing that ‘Tony Earll’ is an anagram of ‘not really’ and ‘Reedson Hurdlop’ of ‘Rudolph Rednose’. Mu Revealed was, in fact, the first novel by another émigré Englishman, the TV scriptwriter, self-styled witch and occult author Raymond Buckland (b. 1934). In the same year that he published Mu Revealed, Buckland also released (under his own name) Witchcraft Ancient and Modern and Practical Candleburning Rituals.
    It is probably true to say that there is no stretch of land too miserable , too mean, or even too imaginary, that someone will not wish to be the king of it. For twenty years or so, beginning in 1933, the Office of the Geographer of the US State Department carried on a