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

during a famine in the 1880s, he became friendly with an Indian priest. This priest told Churchward that he and two cousins were the only survivors of a 70,000- year-old esoteric order that originated on Mu itself. This order was known as the Naacal Brotherhood.

The priest showed Churchward a number of ancient tablets written by the Naacal Order in a forgotten ancient language, supposed to be the original language of mankind, which he taught the officer to read. Churchward later asserted that certain stone artifacts recovered in Mexico contained parts of the Sacred Inspired Writings of Mu, perhaps taking ideas from Augustus Le Plongeon

and his use of the Troana Codex to provide evidence for the existence of Mu. Unfortunately, Churchward never produced any evidence to back up his exotic claims: He never published translations of the enigmatic Naacal tablets, and his books-though they still have many followers today-are better read as entertainment than factual studies of Lemuria/Mu.

Zoologists and geologists now explain the distribution of lemurs and other plants and animals in the area of the Pacific and Indian Oceans to be the result of plate tectonics and continental drift. The theory of plate tectonics (and it is still a theory) affirms that moving plates of the Earth's crust supported on less rigid mantle rocks causes continental drift, volcanic and seismic activity, and the formation of mountain chains. The concept of continental drift was first proposed by German scientist Alfred Wegener in 1912, but the theory did not gain general acceptance in the scientific community for another 50 years. With recent understanding of plate tectonics, geologists now regard the theory of a sunken continent beneath the Pacific as an impossibility.

The idea of Lemuria as something other than a physical place, perhaps more akin to a lost spiritual homeland, seems to derive from the writings of colorful Russian occultist Helena Petrovska Blavatsky (1831-1891). Blavatsky was the co-founder (together with lawyer Henry Steel Olcott) of the Theosophical Society in New York, in 1875. The society was an esoteric order designed to study the mystical teachings of both Christianity and Eastern religions. In her massive tome, The Secret Doctrine (1888), Blavatsky describes a history originating millions of years ago with the Lords of Flame and goes on to discuss five Root Races which have existed on earth, each one dying out in an earth-shattering cataclysm. The third of these Root Races she called the Lemurian, who lived a million years ago, and who were bizarre telepathic giants, keeping dinosaurs as pets. The Lemurians eventually drowned when their continent was submerged beneath the Pacific Ocean. The progeny of the Lemurians was the fourth Root Race, the human Atlanteans, who were brought down by their use of black magic, when the continent of Atlantis sank beneath the waves 850,000 years ago. Present humanity represents the fifth Root Race.

Madame H.P. Blavatsky, in New York, 1877.

Blavatsky maintained that she learned all of this from The Book of Dzyan, supposedly written in Atlantis and shown to her by the Indian adepts known as Mahatmas. Blavatsky never claimed to have discovered Lemuria; in fact she refers to Philip Schlater coining the name Lemuria, in her writings. It has to be said that The Secret Doctrine is an extremely difficult book, a complex mixture of Eastern and Western cosmologies, mystical ramblings, and esoteric wisdom, much of it not meant to be taken literally. Blavatsky's is the first occult interpretation of Lemuria, but on one level it should not be equated with the physical continent proposed by Churchward. What Blavatsky and other occultists have since suggested concerning Lemuria could be partly interpreted as an ideal spiritual condition of the soul, a kind of lost spiritual land. Nevertheless, there are some psychics and prophets who even today regard the existence of ancient Lemuria or Mu as a physical reality. Indeed, there are a few who, when hypnotically regressed, have recalled former lives as citizens on the doomed continent.

This is not, however, quite the end of the story. In the last 20 years, submerged civilizations have once again been in the news, due to a number of intriguing underwater discoveries. In 1985 off the southern coast of Yonaguni Island, the western-most island of Japan, a Japanese dive tour operator discovered a previously unknown stepped pyramidal edifice. Shortly afterwards, Professor Masaki Kimura (a marine geologist at Ryukyu University in Okinawa) confirmed the existence of the 600 foot wide, 88 foot high structure. This rectangular stone ziggurat, part of a complex of underwater stone structures in the area which resemble ramps, steps, and terraces, is thought to date from somewhere between 3,000 to 8,000 years ago. Some have suggested that these ruins are the remains of a submerged civilization-and that the structures represent perhaps the oldest architecture in the world. Connections with Lemuria and Atlantis have also been mentioned. However, some geologists with knowledge of the area insist that the underwater buildings are natural, and similar to other known geological formations in the region. The debate is still continuing on these controversial structures.

In 2001, the remains of a huge lost city were located 118 feet underwater in the Gulf of Cambay, off the western coast of India. A year later, further

acoustic imaging surveys were undertaken, and evidence was recorded for human settlement at the site, including the foundations of huge structures, pottery, sections of walls, beads, pieces of sculpture, and human bone. One of the wooden finds from the city has been given a radiocarbon date of 7500 B.C., which would make the site 4,000 years earlier than the oldest known civilization in India. Research is ongoing at this fascinating site, which-if the dates are proved correctmay one day radically alter our understanding of the world's first civilizations. Whether these underwater finds in the Pacific and Indian Oceans prove to be the remains of forgotten civilizations or not, one thing is certain: Man will always be searching for a lost homeland or a more spiritually satisfying ancient past. In this sense, Lemuria or Mu