Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries, Brian Haughton [books you need to read .TXT] 📗

of this forced depopulation, a substantial part of the oral history and culture of the Easter Islanders was tragically lost.

In 1888, the island was annexed to Chile and the population subsequently rose again. Though Rapa Nui National Park was created by the Chilean government in 1935, the native inhabitants were confined to a reservation outside the capital, Hanga Roa, while the rest of the land was leased to ranchers who kept sheep. In 1964 an independence movement began, and by the 1980s, sheep ranching had been stopped and the entire island was declared a historic park. In 1992 it had a population of 2,770, which had reached 3,791 by 2002, most of whom live in the capital. Though the official language is Spanish, many native islanders still speak the Rapa Nui tongue. In 1995, Rapa Nui National Park was declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO, recognizing the considerable achievements of this unique and enigmatic culture.

the Lost Lands of Mu and Lemuria

The geographical position of Mu, as shown in The Lost

Continent of Mu, by James Churchward (1926).

Lemuria and Mu are interchangeable names given to a lost land supposedly located somewhere in the southern Pacific Ocean. This ancient continent was apparently the home of an advanced and highly spiritual culture, perhaps the mother race of all mankind, but it sank beneath the waves many thousands of years ago as the result of a geological cataclysm of some kind. The thousands of rocky islands scattered throughout the Pacific (including Easter Island, Tahiti, Hawaii, and Samoa) are said to be the only surviving remains of this

once great continent. This theory of a physical and spiritual lost land has been put forward by many different people, most notably in the mid-19th century by scientists in order to explain the unusual distribution of various animals and plants around the Indian and Pacific Oceans. In the late 19th century, occultist Madame Blavatsky approached the idea of Lemuria from a spiritual angle and influenced many thereafter to do the same, including psychic healer and prophet Edgar Cayce. The popularization of Lemuria/Mu as a physical place began in the 20th century, with exBritish army officer Colonel James Churchward, and the idea still has many adherents today. But is there any physical evidence to back up these claims of an ancient continent under the Pacific Ocean? Or should these lost homeland stories be interpreted in another way entirely, perhaps as the symbol of a mythical vanished Golden Age of man?

The land of Mu does not actually have a particularly long history, nor is it mentioned in any ancient mythologies, as some writers have suggested. The title Mu originated with eccentric amateur archaeologist Augustus Le Plongeon (1826-1908), who was the first to make photographical records of the ruins of the archaeological site of Chichen Itza in Yucatan, Mexico. Plongeon's credibility was badly damaged by his attempted translation of a Mayan book known as the Troana Codex (also known as the Madrid Codex). In his books, Sacred Mysteries Among the Mayans and Quiches (1886) and Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx (1896), Plongeon interpreted part of the text of the Troana Codex as revealing that the Maya of Yucatan were the ancestors of the Egyptians and many other civilizations. He also believed that an ancient continent, which he called Mu, had been destroyed by a volcanic eruption, the survivors of this cataclysm founding the Mayan civilization. Plongeon equates Mu with Atlantis and states that a "Queen Moo," originally from Atlantis, traveled to Egypt, where she became known as Isis, and founded the Egyptian civilization. However, Plongeon's interpretation of the Mayan book is

considered by experts in Mayan archaeology and history as completely erroneus. Indeed, much of what he interpreted as hieroglyphics turned out to be ornamental design.

Lemuria, the alternative name for the lost continent, also originated in the 19th century. Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (1834-1919), a German naturalist and supporter of Darwin, proposed that a land bridge spanning the Indian Ocean (connecting Madagascar from India) could explain the widespread distribution of lemurs-small, primitive, tree-dwelling mammals found in Africa, Madagascar, India, and the East Indian archipelago. More bizarrely, Haeckel also suggested that lemurs were the ancestors of the human race, and that this land bridge was the "probable cradle of the human race." Other well-known scientists, such as the evolutionist T.H. Huxley and the naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, had no doubt about the existence of a huge continent in the Pacific millions of years previously, which had been destroyed in a disastrous earthquake that submerged it beneath the waves, much as Atlantis was thought to have been drowned. Before the discovery of continental drift, it was not unusual in the mid- to late-19th century for scientists to propose submerged land masses and land bridges to explain the distribution of the world's flora and fauna. In 1864, the English zoologist Philip Lutley Sclater (1829-1913) gave the hypothetical continent the name Lemuria in an article "The Mammals of Madagascar" in The Quarterly Journal of Science, and since then it has stuck.

The lost civilization of Lemuria/Mu was brought dramatically back to public attention in 1931 with the publication of Colonel James Churchward's bizarre The Lost Continent of Mu, the first in a series of five books by Churchward about the lost continent. In the book, he claimed that the lost continent of Mu had once extended from an area north of Hawaii southwards as far as Fiji and Easter Island. According to Churchward, Mu was the original Garden of Eden, and a technologically advanced civilization that boasted 64 million inhabitants. Around 12,000 years ago, Mu was wiped out by an earthquake and submerged beneath the Pacific. Apparently Atlantis, a colony of Mu, was destroyed in the same way a thousand years later. All the world's major ancient civilizations, from the Babylonians and the Persians, to the Maya and the Egyptians, were the remains of the colonies of Mu. Churchward claimed he received this sensational information when, as a young officer in India