Review of The Lost Continent of Mu by James Churchward

The Lost Continent of Mu, by James Churchward, 1931, New York, Paperback Library Edition, 1959, 286 pp.
The Lost Continent of Mu is an exercise in poor logic, weak citations, and the art of jumping to conclusions. Basically, James Churchward figured out the method of presentation now used by those advocates of the History Channel’s “Ancient Aliens” almost a century earlier. Oh, and he’s openly racist.
The beyond belief story presented as true based on evidence twisted … no, rung out of sources—some of which don’t even seem to exist—is that civilization originated on a massive continent in the middle of the Pacific ocean that like the story of Atlantis was destroyed in a catastrophe. The people (of course) were white. Or at least those in charge on the continent of Mu were white.
An example of Churchward’s logic is that since a Mayan record refers to a land to the West and an Asian record refers to a land to the East, they must each be referring to the same place and thus there was a place (a whole continent!) in the Pacific.
The whole story Churchward says he translated from tablets in India with the help of “a high priest.” His story is not always straight. Sometimes it is plural “high priests” who helped him out. He translated everything in “2 years” which really is blindingly fast given that the text of the tablets is presumably from a language tens of thousands of years old.
Churchward probably isn’t serious in this book. That is, it is hard to believe that he believed his own theories. Maybe the book is just for entertainment value. But on that account it fails as well. It just isn’t very entertaining. The book is frustrating slow as he presents some character or drawing from (nonexistent) tablets and then jumps to some translation of it without any convincing reason.
Apparently some people were entertained (or dumb enough to believe the book) because it sold enough copies to be made into a Paperback Library Edition and even spurred additional writings about Mu. That way, just in case you haven’t had enough of Churchward’s nonsense in this volume, you can continue with more.

2 thoughts on “Review of The Lost Continent of Mu by James Churchward”

  1. I have never read The Lost Continent of Mu by James Churchwood, nor have I read this review in its entirety, but I take issue with Douglas Douma’s critique.
    Douma largely ignores the enormous amount of well-researched, empirical, ground-breaking, earth-shattering, and mind-opening scholarly work that has appeared over the last eighty years to support Churchward’s assertions. We must all wonder how Douma is not familiar with the work of eminent scholars like Erich von Daniken, Giogio Tsoukalos, David Hatcher Childress, Graham Hancock, Donovan, David Iche, Zecharia Sitchin, and David Wilcock. I recommend that Douma spends the next twenty years getting up to speed on the scholarship before he revisits this subject. He might consider the graduate program at South Southeastern North Arkansas State University as a place to get guidance for his studies. I hear that department has a great job placement record at several prestigious thinktanks and centers throughout the Orient, in Rhodesia, and Czechoslovakia.
    It also seems that Douma is jealous of Churchwood’s ability to translate archaic oriental/aboriginal texts in a timely manner. Is Douma familiar with the stellar work of Zecharia Sitchen who painstakingly retranslated thousands of Sumerian texts in just 3 months’ time? Churchwood is clearly of the caliber of Zecharia Sitchen, something Douma is unable to grasp.
    If Churchwood is wrong in anything at all, he neglects to discuss the fact that the Lost Continent of Mu was actually a lost Annunaki settlement that suffered a deluge during what Christian theologians refer to as the “Flood of Noah.” We must remember that Churchwood’s work was critical for future scholars, like Sitchen, who helped to established Annunaki settlement of the Earth approximately 582,251 years (and 3 days) ago.
    In sum, Douglas Douma is a bad person.

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