Name: Churchward's Lost Continent of Mu
Author: James Churchward

The Lost Continent of Mu contains several maps intended to give geographical form to Churchward’s theories. They include maps showing the supposed position and outline of Mu in the Pacific Ocean, the scattered ‘prehistoric stone remains’ that Churchward regarded as remnants of its civilisation, and the remarkably precise extent of an alleged ‘Uighur’ empire belonging to Mu at the time of the biblical Flood.

These maps are fundamental rather than incidental to Churchward’s argument. Presented according to familiar cartographic conventions, they transform speculative claims into apparently geographical and geological facts, lending his imagined prehistoric world a persuasive veneer of scientific authority.

By the 1960s, developments in the understanding of continental drift, seafloor spreading and plate tectonics had made a vanished Pacific continent on Churchward’s scale geologically untenable. Yet the broader idea of a lost primordial civilisation remained remarkably persistent, reappearing in later pseudo-historical and ‘ancient astronaut’ theories.

Ex Carta

 sets out his theory that an advanced prehistoric civilisation once occupied a vast continent in the Pacific Ocean. Its maps give geographical form and apparent scientific authority to a speculative history that proved influential in occult, pseudo-historical and popular-fiction traditions.

Born in Devon, James Churchward (1851–1936) led an enterprising and unusually varied life, taking in tea planting, engineering, invention, and writing. After emigrating to the United States in the 1890s, his success in patenting a steel alloy used in the armour plating of warships during the First World War allowed him to retire to a ranch in Connecticut. It was here that he turned his attention to researching and writing 

The Lost Continent of Mu: Motherland of Man

, published in 1926 when Churchward was 75 years old. In his 1954 study 

 (also in Ex Carta), L. Sprague de Camp (1907–2000) presents Churchward in a less than flattering light, describing him as a ‘small, wraithlike Anglo-American’ and raising an eyebrow at his adoption of the title ‘Colonel’ and his claim to have travelled widely in Asia and Central America.

Churchward could never be accused of reticence in presenting his theory. In his preface he claimed that his information about Mu had been derived from ancient ‘Naacal’ tablets to which he had gained access while in India. These fragmentary clay tablets, supposedly preserved in a secret temple archive, ‘indubitably’ established the existence of an immensely ancient civilisation superior in important respects to the modern world. The civilisations of India, Babylonia, Persia, Egypt and Yucatan, Churchward argued, were merely the ‘dying embers’ of this primordial culture.

The location of the supposed Naacal tablets was never disclosed, and Churchward ranged freely across archaeological and cultural evidence in support of his theory. His method exemplifies a recurring feature of lost-continent thought: cultural diffusion, whereby the remains of later civilisations are interpreted as vestiges of a vanished ‘mother culture’, generally imagined as spiritually or technologically superior to its descendants. Such arguments frequently imply a wider historical declinism and, in the early twentieth century, could intersect uneasily with contemporary racial and eugenic theories.

Despite the eccentricity of Churchward’s claims, Mu acquired an extensive cultural afterlife among occultists, mystics, pseudo-historians and writers of popular fiction. H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) incorporated Churchward’s terminology into his mythos, while Mu later became particularly important to Hugo Pratt’s 

Map showing the geographical position of Mu

Portrait of James Churchward and title page for 'The Lost Continent of Mu' (1926)

Legend of symbols of and vignetts found on Naacal Tablets

Map of Mu - The Lands of the West from the Egyptian Book of the Dead

Map illustrating the distribution of Prehistoric stone remains on the South Sea Islands in the Pacific

Map of the Great Uighur Empire in Europe and Asia

Map illustrating the Colorado River and its tributaries

Two maps illustrating the possible position of underwater gas chambers under Mu before her submersion, and the present gas belts across the Pacific Ocean

 contains several maps intended to give geographical form to Churchward’s theories. They include maps showing the supposed position and outline of Mu in the Pacific Ocean, the scattered ‘prehistoric stone remains’ that Churchward regarded as remnants of its civilisation, and the remarkably precise extent of an alleged ‘Uighur’ empire belonging to Mu at the time of the biblical Flood.

These maps are fundamental rather than incidental to Churchward’s argument. Presented according to familiar cartographic conventions, they transform speculative claims into apparently geographical and geological facts, lending his imagined prehistoric world a persuasive veneer of scientific authority.

By the 1960s, developments in the understanding of continental drift, seafloor spreading and plate tectonics had made a vanished Pacific continent on Churchward’s scale geologically untenable. Yet the broader idea of a lost primordial civilisation remained remarkably persistent, reappearing in later pseudo-historical and ‘ancient astronaut’ theories.