The Sacred Symbols of Mu (1932)

I read James Churchward’s The Sacred Symbols of Mu for the symbols, the names he gives them, and every Mu or Atlantis claim in this book. The copy is an Internet Archive scan of the Ives Washburn edition. The title page names him as author of The Lost Continent of Mu and The Children of Mu, and it says the book is illustrated. The publisher line is Ives Washburn, New York. The year is in roman numerals. That line sits in a deep shadow on this scan. The text layer of the title page reads MCMXXXII, which is 1932. The copyright page, which I can read, prints Copyright, 1933, by James Churchward, and says the book was manufactured in the United States by the Vail-Ballou Press, Inc., Binghamton, N.Y. I put 1932 in the title because that is the title-page reading. The book is still in copyright. I paraphrase. The two quotations below are short consecutive passages I checked against the page.

Page numbers are the printed numbers. In this file they sit at the foot of the text pages. Chapter I, printed 15, is PDF page 21. Plates are often unnumbered. Where a plate has no number I can read, I cite the printed page the list of illustrations gives, or I say it faces a printed page. The preface is printed xi. The text ends on printed page 258. The PDF file has 280 pages, and the last leaves are blank.

He says this is the third book of a trilogy, and that some decipherings are only in The Lost Continent of Mu or The Children of Mu. I do not bring those books in. I also do not carry figures over from James Churchward’s Mu. Where he cites Plato on Atlantis, the dialogue itself is Timaeus & Critias. I do not import the dialogue’s numbers.

The dedication leaf names Marjorie V. Lee Hudson. He says her high ideals are the Four Great Virtues inscribed in the Sacred Inspired Writings of Mu. I cannot read a printed number on that leaf.

The book at a glance

• Title: The Sacred Symbols of Mu.
• Edition I read: Ives Washburn, New York. Title page MCMXXXII. Copyright page 1933. Vail-Ballou Press, Binghamton, N.Y. Illustrated. Nine chapters. Preface on page xi. Text ends on page 258. No index.
• What he claims: Until Mu sank, every sacred symbol still had its first meaning. The sun, called Ra, is the one collective symbol of the Deity. The working set is the Four Great Primary Forces, the seven-headed serpent Naga, the feathered serpent he spells both Quetzacoatl and Quetzalcoatl, the lotus, the Tau, and the plain cross. Mu was the motherland, the Lands of the West, the Empire of the Sun, with two small companion islands. Atlantis was a colonial empire under her. Osiris cleansed the Atlantean religion. Thoth of Atlantis planted Egypt. The Biblical flood, in this book, is a magnetic cataclysm and the same event as the glacial period.

Findings worth setting beside other writers

These are the claims I would set beside his other Mu books, beside Plato, and beside anyone who dates a Pacific motherland or an Atlantic colony. The chapter notes give the pages. Where he prints two figures for the same event, I leave both.

• What Mu was. The motherland of man, also the Lands of the West, the Empire of the Sun, and the suzerain of the whole world. One great continental island and two smaller islands, parted by narrow seas which the Egyptians called canals. The two islands are the breasts of Mu, drawn as lotus buds. She had no land connection with any other continent. The unadorned serpent around the Tree of Life is the ocean (pp. 124, 159 to 160, 165 to 168).
• When she sank. About 10,000 B.C. on the altar-painting page, and about 12,000 years ago on the Hawaii page. A temple under her jurisdiction is therefore more than 12,000 years old. The Uxmal temple was built about 11,500 to 12,000 years ago as a monument to Mu (pp. 102, 127, 170). The day is a Friday, the 13th of the month Zac, the white month (p. 164).
• How she sank. The Four Great Forces carried out the Creator’s command. Pillars gave way. She went into a fiery abyss, a tank of fire, and the waters rolled over her. A Nootka picture adds magnetic forces sent by the Primary Forces. He also calls the Biblical flood, the last magnetic cataclysm, and the glacial period one event, which destroyed about half the earth, and he says it was not a heavy rain (pp. 170, 176, 215 to 217, 245).
• How many died. On the sacrifice page, 60,000,000 people in that land before sacrifices began, and 60,000,000 souls when Mu went down. On the Haida page the Killer Whale is named for drowning the figure he prints as 64,000,000 millions. I leave both wordings (pp. 212, 234). An Oriental legend, in the Pueblo chapter, says nearly a billion lives were lost in Asia when the Asiatic mountains rose (p. 203).
• The ten tribes. A Troano glyph is the ten tribes submerged with Mu. Nevada writings, he thinks, may be one or two of those ten (pp. 168, 208).
• Atlantis. A colonial empire of Mu, and Egypt was a sub-colony of the motherland under Atlantis’s direct control. The first outrage he has recorded is extravagance in the priestly teachings of Atlantis 22,000 years ago. Osiris, a man of Atlantis, studied in a Naacal college in Mu, went home, and purged that religion. He was murdered by a brother about 20,000 B.C. On a later page the same man lived about 22,000 years ago. People wanted him on the throne in place of King Ouranos. He refused. His son became the hieratic head. Churchward does not find that son’s name, and he does not find Isis or Nephthys in the Naacal tablets. The religion was named Osirian, as the Christian religion is named for Christ (pp. 33, 230 to 232, 235).
• Thoth and Egypt. Thoth, son of an Atlantean priest, planted the colony at the mouth of the Nile about 16,000 years ago, built the first temple at Sais, and taught the religion Osiris had purged. The same teaching at Sais is also dated 14,000 B.C. Chapter 64 of the Book of the Dead was written by Thoth at Sais about 14,000 B.C. A Horus, name or title, was the church head until Menes, about 5,000 B.C. One sentence says Egypt commenced her history 10,000 years before the priesthood dragged the Osirian religion down. I leave that sentence beside the 16,000-year and 14,000 B.C. figures (pp. 35, 138, 228, 230 to 232).
• Seven cities. Mu had seven sacred cities with golden gates. Atlantis had seven great cities. He also lists seven sacred cities of the Uighurs, seven Antilles for the Carians, and seven people saved from the flood in a Marquesan count (p. 162).
• Plato’s pillars. A Greek record of about 11,000 years concerns the pillars of the temple dedicated to Poseidon of Atlantis. Plato, as Churchward reports him, says the people of Atlantis met every fifth and sixth year by turns, sacrificed bulls, and swore to keep the sacred inscriptions on the temple pillars (pp. 146, 152).
• Who came from where on Mu. The seven-headed cobra, Naga, belonged to the lower western half, and on a later page to the south of the Quetzals. The feathered serpent belonged to the northern half. The Nagas took their name from the cobra. The Quetzals took theirs from the feathered serpent. The Quetzals were the first people on American soil, a blond race with light flaxen hair, and their last king was called Quetzal (pp. 61, 63, 196 to 197).
• America, not by the Bering bridge. Pueblo, Kootenay, Haida, and Nootka forefathers came from Mu in boats, from a land toward the setting sun. He rejects Asia and the Bering land bridge. They have been in America more than 12,000 years. Mountain-raising, not a loss of the old knowledge while Mu still stood, is why the Pueblos later lived by legends (pp. 200 to 203, 209, 212).
• The sun was not worshipped. Ra is the monotheistic symbol. Kin is the sun as the orb, in the motherland’s language. Horus, Apollo, and Belmarduk are later names of the orb. A six-rayed sun is Mu’s royal escutcheon. A half orb with rays is a colonial empire. A half orb without rays is a colony that is not yet an empire, and also the setting sun. “Son of the Sun” is a title Mu gave the ruler of a colonial empire, not a claim of virgin birth (pp. 25, 50, 57, 123).
• Man’s age, and the age of the writings. Man’s beginning, if the astronomical evidence is accepted, is 200,000 years before the archaeologists of more than 15,000 years ago. Mu’s religious teachings lasted 200,000 years. The Sacred Inspired Writings are cited at 70,000 years ago, and geometry is already perfected in writings of that age. India, he says, has exhibits of geometry perfected 35,000 years ago, and he allows that the science may go back 100,000 years or more (pp. 18, 23, 245, 257).
• After the sinking. A gap of about 5,000 or 6,000 years with almost no history except scraps in India and Egypt. Symbols were still readable on entering Egypt 6,000 years ago, but Egyptianized. Polytheism, idolatry, a devil, and hell come after the motherland’s control is gone. The word sacrifice was coined for her destruction. Before that, the altar took fruit, flowers, and field offerings (pp. 15, 33 to 35, 134, 234).
• Eden. The Field of Aarru, chapter 110 of the Book of the Dead, is a conventional map of Mu: three lands, each ringed with water. He reads the Biblical Pison, Gihon, and Hiddekel as those waters, and the garden eastward in Eden as Mu in another vestment (pp. 176 to 178).

Preface

The preface is one page, signed J. C. He compiled the book at the suggestion of the late Irving Putnam. He thanks the public for his first two books on Mu. His personal view of why religion is chaotic is that there are over three hundred religions and sects, and only one God. The preface adds no site, date, or sinking beyond that.

Chapter I. Introduction

He is not explaining symbols in the clothes they wear now. He wants the origin and the first meaning. Until Mu’s submersion, symbols kept those meanings. From the destruction he then passes over about 5,000 or 6,000 years, when seemingly no history was written except scraps in India and Egypt. Mankind was reviving and repeopling the earth after the submersion of Mu and other lands, and after gas belts and mountains formed.

Entering Egypt 6,000 years ago, many original symbols had survived, but they were Egyptianized in pattern, with a theology he calls incomprehensible, and a multitude of new symbols with hidden meanings. When Upper and Lower Egypt became one kingdom the two sets were merged and none were discarded, so there were at least two symbols for every conception. In Egypt 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, hardly half the priesthood understood the symbols of a temple a few miles away.

Under the Ptolemies, Greek philosophers learned the Egyptian Sacred Mysteries and took them home, beginning about 600 B.C. Greece added names and theology, and he says the familiar Greek myths come out of the legends of Egypt and India. Mu’s destruction removed her control of religion and science. Each colony then made its own laws and changed religion to suit itself. Without the motherland, countries fell back until the First Great Civilization was forgotten and only myths remained.

He has studied archaeology for over fifty years and says he is not a professional. When Mu went down, the school of archaeology went with her. More than 15,000 years ago there were colleges for it, and the further back one goes the more profound the knowledge. Modern archaeologists, as he describes them, dig the remains of people who lived from 1,000 to 5,000 years ago. The ancient study included man’s whole history from a beginning 200,000 years before, if astronomical evidence for such dates is accepted (p. 18).

Nature shows the origin of life, man’s tie to the Great Source, and the Cosmic Forces. True science is the twin sister of religion. The first chapters of the Bible were meant to teach those forces and failed because the Mosaic writings were mistranslated. They were in the tongue and characters of the motherland, copies of the Sacred Writings of Mu, which Moses expounded as high priest of the temple at Sinai. The esoteric temple writings of Egypt, he says, told the real cause of the Flood. What has been recovered of the original writings gives creation through the making of man and woman, the movements of celestial bodies and the source of the forces that move them, what life is and why types changed as the earth developed, geological phenomena and their causes, and man as the coping stone.

He rejects the word miracle. What looks miraculous is man’s own Spiritual Force, given “to enable him to rule the earth.” Master was the title of someone who had mastered that force.

On religion he quotes Max Muller, and then places Muller’s period in the Pleistocene, after the submersion of Mu. What Muller found, on this reading, were shadows of the motherland’s religion, passed orally among descendants of people saved when the mountains went up and cataclysmic waves flooded the lowlands (p. 22). Muller is also quoted on a primitive Aryan, Semitic, and Turanian religion, and on Dyaus, Zeus, Jovis, and Tiu as one name for the highest god, with Dyaus Pitar, Zue Pater, and Jupitar as Heaven Father. Churchward answers that in the Sacred Inspired Writings of Mu, 70,000 years ago, the deity is often called Heavenly Father and Father in Heaven, more often than any other name, and that the religion was based on the Fatherhood of God. Jesus, whose teachings he calls purely those of the First Religion, opens the Lord’s Prayer with Our Father which art in Heaven (p. 23).

He rejects Kant and Schiller on myth as advancement. Myths, for him, are legends, legends are oral history, and history is a record of facts, so a myth is a decline. He sends Taylor’s Anthropology to the North American Indian, the Polynesians, the Maoris, South African peoples, and the teachings of Jesus. He suspects De Brosses, on a path from fetishes to polytheism to monotheism, of toying with a simian origin. His own order is the reverse. Man started with monotheism. Polytheism and idolatry come after Mu’s destruction.

A sentence he quotes, that in Egypt, Babylon, Mexico, and Peru the sun god gained supremacy, is contradicted by all ancient writings as he reads them. The sun was never a god. It was the monotheistic symbol of the Deity, the most sacred of the sacred symbols, and it existed tens of thousands of years before settlement in those four lands (pp. 25 to 26).

Chapter II. Religions

The first records of religion are more than 70,000 years old. Trained masters from Mu, called Naacals, carried copies of the motherland’s Sacred Inspired Religion to colonies and colonial empires. They founded colleges for the priestcraft, the religion, and the sciences. In Babylonia the colleges were called Chaldis. An ancient writing he cites says everyone was welcome, prince or slave, that inside the temple they were equal before the Heavenly Father, and that no payment was charged. In the colonies the teachings were the Sacred Mysteries. In the Orient they were also the Books of the Golden Age. Later Maya and Egyptian writings entrusted the Mysteries only to the high priesthood and the heir to the throne. Clement of Alexandria said the same. Churchward says that is not exactly true, because Solon, Plato, Pythagoras, and Thales were taught the Mysteries in Egypt. Naacal writings are sometimes called Neferit.

Before 70,000 years ago the earliest symbols were plain lines and simple geometrical figures. By 70,000 years ago, on his records, man was already using vignettes that puzzle modern scientists. Religion was taught in six stages. There is one Supreme Being, the Creator, and man is his son. A spirit or soul was placed in the body and never dies. The body returns to the earth and the soul waits to occupy another body. The soul’s task is to rule the body. One life is too short, so there are many incarnations, and those incarnations are the salvation of the soul. The Heavenly Father is the Great Love and is to be approached without fear. All mankind are brothers and sisters. The earthly duties are Truth, Love, Charity, and Chastity, with love and confidence in the Heavenly Father. The fundamentals are the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man. He does not take brotherhood as blood kinship. He prefers the golden rule, and he points to the forty-two questions of the Osirian Ritual. Charity includes thoughts, not only feeding and clothing. No symbol, however sacred, was to be worshipped. It was only a focus.

Mu’s religion had no theologies. Theologies crept in after the submergence, when her control was gone. He says religion has fallen twice before through theology, and that the present churches are crumbling. The first great outrage he has found recorded was in Atlantis 22,000 years ago, “extravagances in the priestly teachings.” Osiris dispelled them and restored the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man. Religion was named after him as a monument.

Thoth of Atlantis founded the colony on the Nile Delta, and Egypt’s history began. Thoth built the first temple at Sais and taught the religion as Osiris had purged it 6,000 years before (p. 33). At the destruction of Mu, Ra Mu, king and high priest of the motherland, told the pleading crowds they would die together with their servants and their riches, and that from the ashes new nations would arise. If those nations forgot that they are superior by what they put out, not by what they put on, the same would befall them. A second quotation from Ra Mu is only “Did I not predict all this?” Churchward reads this as the people turning from the spiritual to the material, not as a priesthood leading them astray (p. 34).

The Egyptian priesthood then spread false gods, idolatry, and a devil named Set, with a Hell of everlasting flames and brimstone. He says the soul is a spirit and sulphur cannot touch it. The four archangels are a new vestment of the Four Great Primary Forces, so none of them has fallen, and the Lucifer story fails. Before that invention, man had been taught two influences, material from the body and spiritual from the soul, and many incarnations until the spiritual dominated. The Osirian religion with which Egypt began, “10,000 years before,” was dragged into the mud and the nation fell to foreign conquerors (p. 35). Hindu priests followed. They first drove the Naacals into the snow-capped mountains of the north, then invented their own devil, Siva, which he says is pronounced Sheva. From that grafting, the Hindus fell from the civilization they had held since the motherland.

He quotes Universal History and Voltaire, 1758, volume 3, page 13, on the school at Benares that still cultivated a sacred language called Hanferit, the most ancient of languages, and on symbols as emblems of the Deity which the priests hid from the people. His own bracket says the Naacal writings are in that tongue. India was the cradle of Greek philosophy. Greeks were still going there for learning up to 500 B.C., and he guesses they may have started a thousand years earlier. He quotes W. Robertson, An Historical Disquisition of India, 1794, page 274: the Brahmins borrowed religion and the other sciences from the Nagas, and afterwards persecuted them.

One Hindu invention is that man was first a grass, then a fish, an amphibian, a reptile, a mammal, and then a man, and that everything is a part of God. He uses that to mock the claim that idolatry is a sin. A few thousand years ago, priesthoods added human sacrifice. He names the Inquisition, the burning of witches, and Islam as later bloodshed, and he says hanging, shooting, and electrocution are the same lust under law. God’s law, in his words, is that thou shalt not kill.

Mu’s cosmogonic diagram. It is the mother of every later cosmogonic diagram. Hindu, Babylonian, Assyrian, Chaldean, and Egyptian copies added a hell, a small circle below the main figure, far from the earth. The devil was unknown in Mu, so her diagram has no hell (p. 40). Children of the motherland learned it as their spiritual convictions.

The construction, as he reads it: a central circle inside two crossed and interwoven triangles, one figure, enclosed in a second circle, making twelve divisions. A third circle leaves a space between. Outside it, twelve scallops. A ribbon of eight divisions falls from the scallops. The central circle is the sun and the symbol of the Deity, whose abode is Heaven. The twelve divisions are the gates to Heaven and the twelve great earthly virtues, among them Love, Hope, Charity, Chastity, and Faith, with Love at the head. The space between the second and third circles is the world beyond. The twelve scallops are the gates to that world and the twelve great earthly temptations. The ribbon is the eight roads to Heaven. The belief he puts into present language is a soul that travels the eight roads, shows that the body overcame the twelve temptations, crosses the world beyond, shows the twelve virtues, and passes to the Throne of Glory. This was the religion of Mu and the first religion of man (p. 42).

Jesus was a Master, the greatest who has been on earth, and he did not teach a new religion. He taught the first religion as written in the Sacred Inspired Writings of Mu. The Lord’s Prayer is in those writings. Jesus condensed it. Churchward says not five percent of professing Christians follow it. The rest follow what a conclave of priests made years later, which he calls the Athenasian Creed, with some of the extravagances Egypt grafted onto the Osirian religion (p. 46).

Virgin birth. The origin is the Fifth Command of the Creation. Cosmic eggs are “the virgins of Life.” The sentence is Hoi Hu Kal, which he divides as closed, virgin womb, and to open. The waters were called the mother of life because life first appeared there and opened that womb. The Four Great Creative Forces, later also called gods, were said to be of virgin birth for the same reason (p. 49). Modern priesthoods, within the last two thousand years, invented virgin births for men, including Jesus, and then gave Jesus a pedigree back to David. Scholars who say ancient kings were of virgin birth because they were Sons of the Sun are wrong, on his reading. Son of the Sun was a title Mu, the Empire of the Sun and suzerain of the world, bestowed on the ruler of a colonial empire (p. 50).

An old Rishi, whom he calls his friend, treats the Lord’s Prayer as a condensation of the whole ancient religion, objects to “Lead us not into temptation” as a mistranslation, and prefers a line from the Sacred Writings asking the Heavenly Father not to let temptation overtake us. The Rishi says reincarnation was a cardinal theme of Jesus and is almost omitted from the Biblical account. A legend the Rishi calls universal is set in Lahore, where Jesus stays with a pupil, Ajainin. Wandering minstrels play. Jesus says they are not prodigies. Ten thousand years ago they had mastered harmony, and they have come again to learn other lessons. Temple legends say that during a sojourn in a Himalayan monastery Jesus studied the Sacred Inspired Writings, the language, the writing, and the Cosmic Forces of the motherland.

The last cry on the cross, as the New Testament spells it, is not Hebrew and not a tongue of Asia Minor in Jesus’s lifetime. Churchward calls it the pure tongue of the motherland, badly pronounced. His spelling is Hele, hele, lamat zabac ta ni, and his English sense is that he faints and darkness is coming over his face. Don Antonio Batres Jaurequi, in a History of Central America, says the words were Maya, the oldest known language, and spells them Hele, Hele, lamah sabac ta ni, with the sense that he is fainting and darkness covers his face. Churchward’s line is Naga-Maya of eastern Asia. Jaurequi’s is the modern Maya of Central America (pp. 54 to 55).

Chapter III. Symbols of the Deity and His Attributes

He divides the symbols into classes. First the sun as Ra, the collective symbol of the Deity with all his attributes, and the only symbol that does that. Then symbols of the attributes. Then the creation, because every creation symbol was sacred and used in ceremony. He is extending the tale he told in The Lost Continent of Mu so that it sits nearer the original. Compound symbols come in the next chapter. This is the third book of the trilogy, and he does not repeat every deciphering.

In the early history of man there were no gods but the One Great Infinite. Gods began when the Four Great Creative Forces were given that name. A temple dedicated to the sun was dedicated to the Almighty, either as the one Lord God or as his male attribute in creation, not to the orb (p. 57).

The two principles. To produce anything, male and female were required, so the Creator has two principles. The sun is the male. The moon is the female. The dual glyph is Lahun, a circle with a bar through the center. His English is “two in one, one in two,” and by extension “all in one and one is all.” Mexican Tablet No. 150 shows the sun as male and the moon as female, and he reads it: the Creator made one, one became two, and two produced three, from whom all mankind descended. The upper face with rays is the sun. The lower face without rays is the moon. Temples were often built as a pair, the larger to the sun and the smaller to the moon (p. 58).

Isis. Egypt was not content with the moon as the female attribute, so Isis is a symbol of a symbol. In procession she wears a moon and cow’s horns. Cow’s horns mean motherhood. Sati of Upper Egypt and Hathor also wear cow’s horns, and Hathor has a moon like Isis. He thinks all three symbolize the same thing in different vestments. Babylon has Astoreth, the Hittites Hepet, Greece Aphrodite, Rome Venus. He quotes Papyrus Ani: before priests froze thought into stone and built shrines to a thousand gods, many held there was only one God.

The Creator as an attribute. The favorite figures are adorned serpents. Two are prominent.

The cobra is Naga, in the motherland’s name, with seven heads for the seven stages of creation and the seven mental planes. It originated in Mu. From the colonies where it is found, he places its use in the lower western half of the motherland. The people who used it were called the Nagas (p. 61). He shows it at Angkor Thom and at Anuradhapura in Ceylon, and in a Hindu picture of Vishnu supported by the serpent Ananta with seven heads, the symbol of the Seven Commands of Creation.

The other serpent is feathered instead of scaled. In the motherland it was called Quetzacoatl. He says it still lives, very rarely, in the swamps of Yucatan and Central America, and that he has seen one, the most venomous serpent known. Its region on Mu was the northern half. One tribe took the name Quetzals from it. Designs vary. The dragon of northern eastern Asia is the extreme conventional form: a crest it did not have, wings it did have, and long legs instead of claws. The Pueblo of Arizona and New Mexico call it the bearded serpent as well as Quetzacoatl. The Quiche, in the Popol Vuh, speak of the serpent covered with feathers, and of the name Gucumatz. Gucumatz here is not the Creator. It is the Four Great Creative Forces, which is why the text says “they” (p. 65). A Nootka tableau has a serpent with a plume, and the Indians omit its name while naming everything else. These symbols stood next to the sun. In the tomb of Seti I there is a serpent with three heads, four human legs, and feathered wings.

The Sacred Four. Found in the Sacred Inspired Writings. They are the Four Great Primary Forces from the Almighty. They brought order out of chaos, created the universe and all life in it, and now control the physical universe and all physical life. Early temples were dedicated to them as the Creator’s executors. Most were later dedicated to the sun and the moon. Still later, temples were dedicated to the Seven Great Commands, symbolized by an adorned serpent.

He has over fifty names for the Four. Among them: the Four Great Ones, the Four Powerful Ones, the Four Great Kings, the Four Great Maharajas, the Four Great Builders, the Four Great Architects, the Four Great Geometricians, the Four Great Pillars, and today the Four Archangels (p. 66). About 6,000 or 7,000 years ago, keepers called Genii were added to the Pillars. He does not find Genii in any writing of the First Civilization, so the addition is after Mu’s destruction. The Pillars stood at the four corners to teach the cardinal points. The earth’s symbol is a square. Sides parallel means the earth as earth. Set on a point, it marks the cardinal directions. Egyptians used the crossing of the two squares for the eight roads to Heaven. He treats Genii as a new vestment of the Pillars, not a new idea (p. 67).

Birds. The Mexican tablets tell what bird symbols mean. The Egyptian god Seb, in the Book of the Dead, is Father of the Gods, Bearer of the Gods, Leader of the Gods, and the Great Cackler who produced the mundane egg. He carries a goose, and Seb is the Egyptian name of that goose. Ellis’s Polynesian Research gives a Sandwich Island tradition: nothing but water, a big bird lays an egg in the sea, the egg bursts, and Hawaii comes forth. Niven’s Mexican tablets include over fifty with birds. On Tablet No. 1086 the eye is the Uighur form of the monotheistic symbol, a projection from the breast is the hieratic letter H of Mu’s alphabet, the alphabetical symbol of the Four Great Forces, and the body is a pod, the home of the primary forces. The figure reads as the Almighty with the four forces coming out of him. Easter Island has bird symbols and conventional animals with birds’ heads, one with an egg in its claw, which he matches to the Hawaiian conception. North American legends favor the Thunder Bird. Babylonians, Chaldeans, and Hittites use a bird for the Sacred Four. Assyrian genii include a bird, Egyptian records include a bird, and the Bible includes a bird. A Haida chief of Queen Charlotte Island says the winged creature on a totem is the Thunder Bird and represents the Great Creator. Churchward would rather say the Great Creative Forces. He thinks the winged circle was inspired by a bird, which is why heavenly beings are still drawn with wings. A plate of the Hittite bird symbol faces page 68.

Crosses. The mother of all crosses is a plain cross with four equal arms, in the Sacred Writings, as the symbol of the Sacred Four. Mexican Tablet No. 672 duplicates the cross in the Oriental copies of those writings. It evolved along four lines.

1. The Pyramid Cross, the shortest line. He names it because the arms are four triangles, like the four sides of a pyramid, and the points are covered with the monotheistic symbol. The base of a pyramid is square. The pyramid and the cross are both on astronomical lines. These crosses were drawn before the submersion of Mu. He knows of no pyramid built before that date, and he asks whether pyramids were evolved out of these crosses (p. 73). The tablets write the Four Great Pillars, the Sacred Four, the Four Great Architects, the Four Great Builders, and the Four Powerful Ones. Tablet No. 777 puts the glyph for Pillar inside the triangle. During the life of Mu the Four Great Pillars sustained the universe. After the destruction, the universe was forgotten and the earth was given the honor. A pillar stood at north, south, east, and west.

2. The Loop Crosses. They start from the plain cross and end with the Deity added to four loops, the names of the forces written in the loops. The Nagas specialized the circle of the Deity with a dot in the center. The Uighurs used an inner circle. A loop means a divine order has been carried out and the force has returned to the giver. “Builder” is a two-sided square. Other crosses are not the Sacred Four. The original Sacred Four cross is solid. The others are open. One open cross reads U-luumil, “the Land of,” “the Country of,” “the Empire of.” Four lines drawn across each other, sometimes with the ends joined, mean slowly, little by little, slow progress.

3. The Swastika, “the good luck symbol.” It was the favorite symbol of the Sacred Four, who have charge of the physical universe, so it was associated with good luck and with man’s physical welfare. It is among the oldest universal symbols, and its origin and meaning have been lost for 3,500 years, since the Brahmins drove the Naacals into the northern mountains (p. 77). He found the origin in Naacal writings brought from the motherland, and the Mexican stone tablets confirm it. The evolution he draws is a plain cross, then a circle around it so that the cross is inside the Deity, which makes the full Godhead of Five, the Deity plus the Four. North American cliff writers let the arms pass beyond the circle. The next step bends the ends at right angles into the two-sided square, Builder, the Four Great Builders. The circle was then dropped so the glyph could name the Four without forcing the Five. A cross made of the hieratic letter N is the diphthong Sh in the motherland’s alphabet, not a swastika. If the ends are curved, it is not a swastika. The arms must turn at a perfect right angle. He quotes Clement of Alexandria on the Four Powerful Ones, the Four Canobs, the Heavenly Architects, emanating from the Great Supreme Infinite One and evolving the material universe from chaos.

4. The Winged Circle. He sees one step between the plain cross and the winged circle, unless the Mexican butterfly-winged circle is counted as a step. He labels an ancient Oriental and Mexican form the Dhyan Choans, as this scan spells it. The butterfly-winged circle existed before Mu went down. The other winged circles, he believes, came after the destruction. Egypt made the most gorgeous feathered designs.

Truncated figures. Over one hundred in Niven’s tablets, conventional, not portraits of natural lives. They symbolize two of the Great Primary Forces. The trunk is the direction of their work. The body is a chrysalis or pod, the home of the forces. The lines are Uighur numeral writing. Legs and arms mark positions of the forces under given conditions. The plate is the one the list places at page 81.

Chinese symbols. A mountain called Yo may be the Sacred Four, or the Four Genii, or both. A jade ornament from Peking is one symbol of the Sacred Four.

The Scarab. Not Egyptian in origin. It was a symbol of creative energy in the motherland tens of thousands of years before anyone settled in Egypt. A tableau on a knife handle shows the scarab in rays of glory, with two deer called Ceh kneeling. Ceh is the ancient symbol for first man, in Hindu and Maya writings. The knife was worn by Prince Maya of India, son of the first ruler of the Naga Empire. Traditions put him at 25,000 years ago, and other traditions at 35,000. Temple histories show the Naga Empire in existence 25,000 years ago. The handle says the knife was made before India was turned into a colonial empire. A tradition says it was made in the motherland and brought back after Prince Maya finished at a Naacal college. He was given the knife by an Indian prince, with a written history of the kings who had worn it (pp. 82 to 83). Upper Egypt was colonized from India, and the colonists brought the symbol. A vignette in the Book of the Dead is a reflex of it. The god Khepra, from the Egyptian word kheper, to create, is another. On the tablet of Ramses II at Kuban, Ra is like the king in his limbs and Khepra in creative force. Anana, 1320 B.C., says the scarab is no god. It is an emblem of the Creator, because it rolls a ball of mud and sets its eggs in it, as the Creator rolls the world and causes it to produce life.

Ganesha. The attribute who cares for crops and fields, “the Lord of the crops and fields.” A man’s body painted red, with an elephant’s head. He originated in the motherland. In India he sits on a stone at the crossroads, and no one passes without putting a flower in his arms. In Java he is also good luck, over doors and on bank windows, and he is given four arms for the Four Great Primary Forces (pp. 84 to 86).

Chapter IV. The Creation

He opens with sixteen vignettes from the Sacred Writings, and names each one.

1. Fine straight horizontal lines: Space.
2. The seven-headed serpent as the Deity moving through Space, the circle around him the Universe.
3. Wavy horizontal lines: earthly waters.
4. The circle: the monotheistic symbol of the Deity.
5. The plain cross: the Sacred Four.
6. The full Godhead of Five: the Deity and his Four Great Primary Forces.
7. Lahun: the dual principle of the Creator.
8. The fires of the underneath: the earth’s center. 9 and 10. Vertical lines from the sun: the sun’s affinitive forces to the earth’s light forces. One set is dotted, one is straight.
9. Vertical wavy lines: the sun’s affinitive force to the earth’s heat. 12 and 13. The sun’s life forces striking cosmic eggs in the waters, and on the land.
10. The waters as the Mother of Life.
11. The Tau: resurrection and emersion.
12. The Tree of Life and the Serpent. The serpent is the waters. The tree is Mu, the mother of man, the only life. Nature’s other lives are illusion and do not continue. Only man is life, and life is everlasting.

Mexican Tablet No. 1231 is, for him, the most valuable writing that has come down from the First Civilization, for religion and for science. All forces in the universe originate in the Deity and control life and the movements of matter down to the atom. Atomic forces are indirect workings of primary forces through atoms. The arms of the cross are primary forces, all pointing east, and the four form a circle, so the forces work in a circle from a center, eastward. The full deciphering is in The Lost Continent of Mu, page 34, which I do not open. He cannot say how long ago the tablet was written, but certainly more than 12,000 years (p. 91). Tablet No. 988 confirms the direction: lines from the outside to the center, the centripetal force. The same glyph, without script, is on many Yucatan and Central American inscriptions. Pedro Beltram, Le Plongeon, and others said it was the movement of the sun. He says the tablet states that it is a primary force. Tablet No. 339 shows the Four as a butterfly flying through space, bringing law and order out of chaos, the Creator’s first command.

Another tablet, whose number the scan does not settle cleanly, is read as universe, waters, earth, and the fires of the underneath, with land about to be raised. He sends the full deciphering to The Lost Continent of Mu, page 37. Tablet No. 328 is the actual first life. The full compound reading is in The Children of Mu, page 76.

The seven commands. From Oriental Naacal writing, supplemented by the Mexican tablets. Originally the universe was only a soul or spirit, without form or life, and only the Supreme Spirit, the Seven-Headed Serpent, moved in the abyss. Desire came to create worlds and the earth. The seven-headed serpent gave seven commands to the Four Great Primary Forces.

The first: let the gases scattered in space be brought together and form worlds. They became whirling masses. Mexican No. 339.

The second: let the gases solidify and the earth be formed. Volumes were left outside the crust, for the waters and the atmosphere, and volumes inside the crust. Darkness, and no sound, because neither atmosphere nor waters existed yet.

The third: let the outside gases separate into waters and atmosphere. The waters covered the earth and no land appeared. The shafts of the sun met the earth’s light in the atmosphere, and there was light. They met the earth’s heat, and there was heat. He numbers these Naacal 10 and 11.

The fourth: let the fires within the earth raise land above the waters. That was the dry land.

The fifth: let life come forth in the waters. The shafts met in the mud and formed cosmic eggs, and life came forth. He sets Naacal, Egyptian, Hindu, and Mexican No. 328 together here.

The sixth: let life come forth on the land, from cosmic eggs in the dust. The glyph he translates as arrows or shafts is the one he has been calling the sun’s affinitive forces.

The seventh: the Seven-Headed Intellect says, let us make man after our own fashion and endow him with powers to rule this earth. Man is given a living imperishable spirit and becomes like the Creator in intellectual power. “After our own fashion” is not “in the image.” A little further on, the writings say the Creator is incomprehensible, and can neither be pictured nor named. He is the Nameless. If “image” were right, man would be a picture of God, which those lines forbid. “Like the Creator” means intellect and mystic powers (p. 99).

Mexican Tablet No. 1584: man was created with the dual principle, male and female. The Creator caused this man to pass into a sleep, which the ancients used for death, and while he slept the Cosmic Forces severed the principles. When he awoke, which is being born again, he was two, man and woman (p. 101). The frontispiece is this conception. The plate caption is faint. The text layer calls it “The First Man, Dual Principle,” credits a Kosloff, and places it in the ancient Uighur capital beneath Karakhota, in the Gobi, at an age the caption’s text layer gives as over 20,000 years. In this chapter he says the Uighur capital was destroyed about 18,000 to 20,000 years ago, and that Chinese records say 19,000. He calls the frontispiece probably the oldest record of the dual principle (p. 104).

The Bible, Genesis 2:21-22, the rib, is Ezra’s translation of Moses, 800 years later. Moses’s writings were copies of the Naga, in the language and writing of the motherland, and Ezra was not yet a Master in the Chaldi at Babylon before he was released.

Egypt received the Sacred Writings from two sources, and the creation of woman is in both. First from India, brought by the Nagas to their first settlement at Maioo, in Nubia, Upper Egypt. Second from Atlantis, brought by the Mayas under Thoth, who settled at Sais on the Nile Delta, Lower Egypt. That, he says, probably accounts for two creation stories in the early Bible, one from the India line and one from the Atlantis line (p. 102). The Naacals brought the writings to India, and from India to Babylonia on the Euphrates and to Maioo. Chaldean and Egyptian are reflexes of the Hindu, and the Hindu is a reflex of the motherland, so the legend of woman coming out of man originated in Mu.

Hawaii: Taaroa made man out of red earth, Araca, and breathed into his nostrils, and made woman from man’s bones and called her Ivi. In Polynesian every letter is pronounced, so Ivi is Eve-y. Because Mu was destroyed about 12,000 years ago, the legend has been oral for at least that long (p. 102).

The Greek legend, which he gives as Plato’s: human beings were created with man and woman in one body, four arms and four legs, round, rolling. They treated the gods badly and threatened to roll up Olympus. The gods cut them in half so they would offer twice the sacrifices and spend their time looking for the other half. He adds that some people still know each other at a glance, which vulgar writers call the man call. He calls it the souls’ call, mates, and he separates it from dislike at a first meeting, which would be explained if past incarnations could be seen.

A common glyph, usually a circle and sometimes an oblong, with two parallel lines through the center, is Niven’s Mexican Tablet No. 2379. It is in cliff writings of the western states, on the pyramid at Xochicalco, in Maya writings of Yucatan, on Inscription Rock in northeast Brazil near British Guiana, and among Uighurs, Hindus, Babylonians, and Egyptians. In the Naacal Books of the Golden Age it is one of three glyphs. Hun: the Creator is one. Lahun: he is two in one. Mehen: these two engendered the son, man. Lao Tzu, in the Tao te King, about 600 B.C., just before Confucius, writes that Reason Tao made One, One became two, two produced three, and from these three all mankind descended. Churchward says Lao Tzu took that from the Sacred Writings. The three words that persist in every ancient explanation are made or created, became, and produced.

The Mysterious Writing. Six small circles or disks in a triangle, counting one, two, three. That is the Naga form. Circles or disks were a matter of taste. Uighurs generally used a bar. The same conception as Tablet No. 2379.

The Kara inscription in Brazil. A great rock on a plain in northeastern Brazil, near British Guiana, covered with old inscriptions in the characters of the Karas, or Carians. One inscription is a universal symbol plus the northern or Uighur numerals 1, 2, and 3. The 3 is left open at one end, which means unfinished work still being carried on. The legend: one became two, two produced three, and from these three life continued. He notes that the Cara glyph for 1, an enclosed bar, was the Naga glyph for 5. Naga counts are made of fives. Ten is two fives. Ten, the numeral of the Infinite, was too sacred to be used (p. 108). The same passage is on the Xochicalco pyramid, in Uighur writing: the numerals with their hidden meaning, then man with the dual principle, then man as the male principle only. When mankind was meant, the Uighurs used the plain letter M. He draws the evolution of that letter: Naga Mu, Uighur Mu, a form with the right leg longer, and the last pattern handed down to the Chinese.

The waters, the Mother of Life. First life was marine, which he says geology confirms. Life can only start below 200 degrees F. He has been unable to produce life over 175 degrees. During the cooling, the waters were always ahead of the rocks, so life could start in the water first. The first lives were tiny marine grasses and lichens, the foundation of the House of Life. Man, the special creation, is the divine coping stone (p. 110). A plate of the waters faces page 110.

Serpents fall into two classes. The adorned serpent is the creative attribute. The plain serpent is the waters, and the symbolic water serpent was called Khan. A vignette of the Fifth Command shows a serpent with a nest of eggs in her coils, which he allows as marine life. Tablet No. 328 is the actual first life in the waters. The usual water symbol has no eggs.

An Egyptian papyrus of about 3,000 B.C. shows Horus, the sun, fighting Aphophis, the waters. That is a symbol without the scientific explanation. Tablet No. 328 is at least 7,000 years older. The same obtuse teaching appears as Apollo killing Python, Krishma killing Anatha, and Belmarduk overcoming Tiamat. He keeps those spellings. A tablet from the library of Assurbanipal says that when neither heaven nor earth existed there was the watery abyss, the first of seed, the mistress of the depths, the mother of the universe, and that Belmarduk overthrows Tiamat. Tiamat is a Naga word: water everywhere, nowhere land. Belmarduk is the Babylonian name of the sun as the orb, not as Ra. The South Sea Islanders, isolated after Mu went down, still say creations are marriages, meaning a commingling, of gods, meaning forces. That explanation has been oral for 12,000 years, and he prefers it to the combat myths (p. 113).

Moses based his religious laws on the Pure Osirian as taught by Thoth. In the Great Hall of Truth, forty-two gods ask the soul forty-two questions. Moses condensed them to forty-two commands and then to ten, applied to the living instead of the dead, because of the condition his people had fallen into. The ten commandments are in the Sacred Writings more than 70,000 years ago, as questions, not commands (p. 114). He does not know who wrote the writings of Mu. They are called Sacred and Inspired. Diodorus is quoted for the parallel claims: Egypt, Menevis from Hermes; Crete, Minos from Zeus; the people he spells Lycedaemonians, Apollon to Lykurgus; the Aryans, Zathraustes from the Good Spirit; the Getae, Zamolxis from Hestia; the Jews, Moses from Iao (p. 115).

Inscriptions on old Akkadian ruins in Babylonia, expressing ideas of 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, make man a special creation and God the Creator whose forces control the universe. He sets them with the Mexican tablets and the North American cliff writings as witnesses that the first religion was pure monotheism (p. 116). Writings from western Thebes by a priest, Amenemopet, are word for word the Proverbs of Solomon and are dated hundreds of years before Solomon. Solomon was a scholar and an Osirian. His temple follows the Hall of Truth, and the porch has two pillars with the same names and the same ornament.

Chapter V. Symbols Used in Religious Teachings

These are the symbols popularly called the Sacred Symbols. At first a symbol only held the mind on the Infinite One. Man was taught not to worship it. There was one Deity, with many attributes, looking after health, strength, rain, sunshine, crops, and the whole welfare of mankind. In the beginning only three symbols were used. When they were understood, they were compounded. By Egypt of about 3,000 or 4,000 years ago, scarcely one temple understood half the symbols of another. The three originals are the circle, the equilateral triangle, and the square.

The circle. A picture of the sun, the symbol of the Infinite One, and, because it held all the attributes, the monotheistic symbol, the most sacred of all. Legend says the sun was chosen because it was the most powerful object primitive man could see. Having no beginning and no ending, the circle also means everlasting and infinity. It was soon used for so many things that the monotheistic circle had to be specialized. The Nagas added a dot. The Uighurs added an inner circle.

Papyrus Anana, or Ani, or Ana, as he spells the same scribe, was chief scribe and king’s companion to Seti II, about 1320 B.C. The long passage he gives from that roll teaches many lives, a veil of darkness between them, eternity as a circle so that living forever implies having always lived, many faces of God of which each worshipper swears his own is the only one, the Ka as the spiritual self, the scarab as an emblem and not a god, and the chance that souls of one incarnation meet again in another. He then numbers the sun glyphs. The original monotheistic symbol, the Naga change, the Uighur change, a form in the headdress of some Egyptian gods, and a red sphere on pillars and on monuments to the dead, are all Ra.

The sun as the orb, not as Ra, is a different set.

• A six-rayed sun is Mu’s symbol on her royal escutcheon. In the motherland the orb was Kin. In Egypt, Horus. In Greece, Apollo. In Babylonia, Belmarduk.
• Rays all around: the sun at his meridian.
• A rising sun, half the orb above the horizon, with rays: the escutcheon of a colonial empire of Mu.
• Half the orb, without rays: the setting sun, and also a colony of Mu before it became a colonial empire.
• The Lands of the West in darkness. A three-pointed figure is Mu’s numeral symbol. A rayless sun says no light reaches her. From the Book of the Dead.
• The sacrifice of Mu. The lotus, her floral symbol, is withered. A rayless sun stands between Mu and the altar. She is dead, in the region of darkness, on the altar as a sacrifice.
• “Peaks only remain above the water.” Mu is dead and in darkness, and Kin no longer shines on her. Also from the Book of the Dead (p. 123).

The equilateral triangle. Its origin is the emersion of the three lands that formed the Land of Mu, the Lands of the West. Those lands were a huge continental island and two small ones, separated by narrow seas, called canals in the Egyptian. Tradition says the big island emerged first and the two small ones later, at different times. The triangle explained three lands raised by one Creator, each by a separate command and, to make it plain to primitive man, by a separate attribute. That was the first Triune Godhead, and the pantheons of later ages were built on it (p. 124). Because the Creator dwells in Heaven, the triangle also means Heaven. An Egyptian glyph puts the monotheistic symbol inside the triangle. Wherever the equilateral triangle appears, it refers to the Triune Godhead, or to Heaven, or to both. About 500 B.C. the Chinese, in place of the triangle, used a glyph like a capital Y, called the Great Term, the Great Unite, and the Great Y. It has neither body nor shape. It comprehends three: one in three, and three in one.

The square. The third of the original symbols, chosen so the earth would not be confused with the circular sun, and so primitive man could be taught north, south, east, and west. The four corners later became the stations of the Four Great Pillars. Keepers of the Pillars, the Genii, came next.

Compoundings follow. A triangle with three stars: Heaven, and the Triune Godhead dwelling there. A triangle with five stars: Heaven, and the full Godhead of Five. A triangle on a square: Heaven above earth, meaning a higher plane, not a higher altitude. The same with three stars inside is on the end wall of an end room in a temple at Uxmal, called the Temple of Sacred Mysteries because an inscription says the people came from Mu and brought the Sacred Mysteries. The postulant received his second degree in that room. An inscription says the temple was erected as a monument to Mu, and he dates the building about 11,500 to 12,000 years ago (p. 127). The opposite room has the triangle with five stars. There the postulant received the third degree and was prepared for the Holy of Holies. That ends the compounding of the three original symbols. Circle, triangle, square, and pentagon became the foundation of Mu’s geometry, and they tied religion to science.

Symbols of mortality. A cornice above the sanctuary door at Uxmal repeats them. Mayas, Quiches, Egyptians, Hindus, and Babylonians used them to remind the postulant of the end of the body and of the life he must live before the soul passes on. The Egyptian rite is a reflex of the Maya, and the Maya teaching came direct from the motherland. In a chamber of the temple inside the Great Pyramid, a sarcophagus has the emblems of mortality beside it. The postulant was placed in it and told that another life waits. Freemasons still use the ceremony.

The Tau, which he also writes Ta-oo. One of the oldest symbols, repeated in the oldest writings of the motherland. It means both resurrection and emersion. Emersion is a resurrection of land. He knows of no country that has not been under water several times. The name has not changed. It means “the stars which bring the water.” Ta is stars. Ha is water. The Marquesas still say Ta-ha, which he calls the pure motherland pronunciation. The Tau is a picture of the Southern Cross. When that cross stood at a certain angle over Mu, the rainy season began, and life was resurrected in plants and grain (p. 130). Mayas often drew the Tau as a tree with two branches bearing flowers and fruit. A Troano vignette describes the rainy season in Mayax. Three cuts show the Tau as emersion. One is from the Sacred Writings, Mu as the emerged land. Two are Naga vignettes from Hindu carvings 25,000 years old: children of Mu leaving the motherland by water, and children leaving by air and by water. In both, the Tau is Mu emerged (pp. 132 to 133). The list of illustrations gives those two plates at page 133.

The double triangle. Two triangles joined at the base, the ancient symbol for an offering, often on an altar shaped as a Tau or carved with a Tau. The rain the Tau brought made offerings possible. Offerings were flowers, fruit, or field produce. Before the destruction of Mu, sacrifices were unknown. Sacrifice was a word coined for the destruction of the motherland (p. 134). The double triangle stood under the arms of the Tau, and the ritual reads, place thine offering upon this altar.

The two-sided square. Masons know it as the mason’s square. It reads Builder. It was first used in the crosses of the Sacred Four when those forces were named the Great Builders. Until Mu’s destruction it was used only for that. In Egypt, thousands of years later, it became justice and uprightness: right from wrong, to act on the square, according to Maat. Only the initiated and the priesthood knew the older meaning. Ptah’s titles include the Divine Artificer and the Divine Builder, and his symbol is this square. Seats of gods and goddesses are built of it, including the seat of Osiris in the Great Hall of Truth. Egyptian pillars, in all their designs, still carry the old meaning (p. 136).

The cube. Especially interesting, he says, to Arch Masons. It is in chapter 64 of the Book of the Dead, the oldest and one of the most important chapters, written by Thoth at Sais at the start of Egyptian history, about 14,000 B.C. (p. 138). He gives several translations of the “I am yesterday” sentence, from Paul Pierret’s Turin copy and from a London papyrus. The rubric says the chapter was found at Khemennu on a block of iron from the south, inlaid with lapis lazuli, under the foot of the god, in the reign of Men-Kan-Ra, by the royal son Heru-Ta-Ta-f. He dates that London papyrus 3733 B.C. and says the thing found was the cube. Pierret’s Turin wording puts it at Hermopolis, on a burnt brick written in blue, under the feet of Thoth, found by Prince Har-titi-f in the time of Menekara. Papyrus Mes-em-neter, dated 4266 B.C., says the chapter was found in the foundation of a plinth of the shrine of the Divine Hennu Boat by the chief mason, in the time of King Hesepti.

The interlaced triangles. The oldest record he has is in Mu’s cosmogonic diagram. He did not find the figure in the Sacred Writings he personally read. He has seen about 3,000 tablets out of more than 10,000, so he does not treat his silence as proof. The central circle is the Deity, the triangles are Heaven, the outer circle is the Universe, and the twelve divisions are the twelve gates, each a virtue. Love first, then Faith, Hope, Charity, and the rest (p. 140). A vignette he prints with this discussion is the flight of the soul to the region of incarnation: the deceased sailing his boat through the field of stars to Amenti, the domain of Osiris, for judgment and reincarnation.

The feather. Truth. Three feathers adorned the crown of Mu, and three adorned the headpiece of Ra Mu, king and high priest. That is Niven’s Tablet No. 1780. Among the Mayas, color marked rank. In Mu, yellow was royalty, blue the priesthood, and red the soldiers and nobility. Yellow was the royal color throughout the world in those times. Dark blue, still the mourning color in the Orient, was adopted when Mu was sacrificed, and it matches her burial shroud, the blue water of the Pacific (p. 141). North American war feathers with red tips correspond to the red of Mu’s soldiers. Egypt used a straight feather in early times. About the time of Menes, new symbols took a curled ostrich feather. Osiris and Maat wear it. In the Hall of Truth an ostrich feather is weighed against the heart. Legend says the feather was chosen because a puff of wind blows it away, and truth is just as easy to frighten off. The ancient name was Kukum, Ku, or Kuk. Kukul Khan, among a Maya people of North America, he divides as Khan, king, Kuk, feather, and ul, covered: the king of serpents covered with feathers. He matches that to the Popol Vuh.

Pillars. His opinion is that they go back to the first temple of the Infinite One, more than 70,000 years ago. They are one of the many symbols of the Four Great Creative Forces, and they stood at the temple door. From old tablets and fallen ruins he reconstructs a pair as they stood 20,000 years ago. The left pillar is square, capped with the glyph for strength. The right is round, capped with the glyph H, which in a general way means established, built up, and by extension finished or accomplished. Both are in four sections, for the Four. A pillar cross reads, the Pillars have established in strength. Niven’s Tablet No. 50, over 12,000 years old, is a temple porch. The dedication over the arch is the hieratic H, so the temple is dedicated to the Four. Each pillar has four sections. The ground plan shows the left pillar square and the right round (p. 146).

A written Greek record of about 11,000 years refers to the pillars of the temple dedicated to Poseidon of Atlantis. Egyptian pillars of about 1,000 to 4,500 B.C., from the Book of the Dead and the papyri, do not keep the old patterns. Pillars came to Egypt with both lines of colonists, the eastern and the western, and new conceptions grew up between them. The Egyptians called them Tat pillars, better known, he says, as totem pillars. Tat means “in strength.” Tattu means “to establish.” Together: in strength this place is established for ever. Four horizontal bars still mark the Four, whom the Egyptians more often called the Four Great Gods. In Papyrus Anana, two Tats form the entrance to Tattu, the gateway to the region where the mortal soul is blended with an immortal spirit and established in the mysteries of Amenti for ever. The plate is the one listed at page 150.

Solomon’s porch, 1 Kings 7:21-22, sets up Jachin on the right and Boaz on the left. Churchward says the names, the meanings, and the lily work match the pillars of the Osirian Hall of Truth. Both changed the pattern and both kept the meaning, the work of the Four.

Totem poles of the Indians of the northwestern states and western Canada, and of the Maoris at the entrances of villages, belong here. The legends and carvings confirm, for him, that those Indian forefathers came from Mu, and from the part of the motherland where the bird was the symbol of the Creator. The Karangs of Java, from Forbes: old men and youths go four times a year to a sacred grove, terraces marked with stones, erect pillars, and especially a pillar inside a square. They repeat a litany they do not understand. He says that litany is in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and he puts the custom at about 12,000 years (p. 151). Israelites in Egypt had two pillars of red brick at their poor temples. Some synagogues still set two pillars at the door and say they are the pillars of fire and smoke of the exodus. He asks what the Egyptian pillars symbolized.

Plato, as he reports him: the people of Atlantis gathered every fifth and sixth year alternately, and with sacrifices of bulls swore to observe the sacred inscriptions carved on the pillars of the temple (p. 152). In the Troano manuscript a passage translated “Can the King” is, on his reading, “The Four Pillars of the Earth.” The glyph is the hieratic letter M, the alphabetical symbol for mother, earth, and land, with the symbol for a pillar. The whole plate, he says, is a mistranslation.

The eight roads to Heaven. First found in Mu’s cosmogonic diagram, so it is very old. It is a symbolic teaching, not a map of eight real roads. It was universal, and every ancient people had its own design. A plate is listed at page 153.

The life symbol, the crux ansata, or ankh. Known now as Egyptian, but, like the scarab, much older. It is in the writings of the First Civilization and cut on stones of the North American cliff dwellers or their predecessors. It compounds two symbols. The loop is a mouth or gateway. The looped cross of Venus came from the Egyptian form, and Venus gave it a new vestment, the triumph of the spirit over bodily matter. Venus is the Roman, Aphrodite the Greek. On the base of the seat of Osiris in the Hall of Truth it is repeated many times, plain. Cliff writers tend to curve the upright, which has led archaeologists, he says, to a wrong meaning.

The roadway of the soul. His own temporary name for figures he keeps finding on the outside, the walls, and the ceilings of burial chambers, and for which he has never found the ancient name. A spiral from New Grange, County Meath, Ireland, lies on the line of the great Uighur migration. He reads it as the hidden meaning of the hieratic letter N, or as that letter highly embellished. Open ends and closed ends differ. Closed, the line returns to the start and is the equivalent of a circle. Anana, 1320 B.C., says that if we live on we continue forever, and if we continue forever, like the circle and eternity, man had no beginning. Three spirals at New Grange run into each other without an end. He takes the third as the passing of the soul into the world beyond, or into some other body in the universe prepared to receive it (p. 157). He will not write a legend for New Grange without seeing the stones. Draughtsmen, in his experience, never copy these figures identically.

Other glyphs on those stones, as he names them: a spiral with the end to the right, an ancient Uighur symbol, “going to somewhere,” also in Mexico and among North American Indians; a spiral ending to the left, “coming from”; a square lying flat, the old picture of the earth; the same square on end, the cardinal points and the Four Pillars; a square inside a square, on end, something has gone from it; the Uighur mountain, the Chinese Yo, equivalent to the triangle, freely read “ascended”; a zig-zag or herring-bone, the universal symbol for a tank of fire, an abyss of molten fire without flames, prominent in Egypt. Another figure, along the Maya and Carian lines running east from the motherland, is two hieratic letters H joined, the second reversed, meaning a return. It too is found at the entrance of burial chambers.

The Tree and the Serpent. Legends call the tree the Tree of Life and the serpent the Tempter, or Satan. He says it started as a legend, drifted into myth, and reached its climax when the tree was given a crop of apples so that Satan could tempt Eve and Eve could tempt Adam. The Eve alibi has stood for nearly 3,000 years and must now be set aside. Had Ezra been able to read the symbols in the writings of Moses, the serpent and the tree would have come out differently. The vignette in the Sacred Writings teaches that the only real life on earth is the soul of man, also called The Man and The Inner Man. The body is a temporary house. Every other form called life returns to the earth. Man first appeared in the Land of Mu, so the first actual life appeared in Mu. Man is spoken of as a fruit. The Land of Mu was the Tree of Life, and Mu was symbolized as that tree. The serpent coiled around it is unadorned, so it is Khan, the symbol of Khanab, “the Great Waters.” Mu was surrounded by water and had no land connection with any other continent (pp. 159 to 160). What Moses wrote, on this reading, was history in symbols. The translations perverted it.

Numerals. Three is the lucky number because it is the symbol of Heaven, of the Triune Godhead, and of the motherland. The Rishi’s answer, when asked, is that man was lucky to have a motherland and luckier to know he will not meet her fate. Four is the lucky numeral because it is the Four who care for material bodies, and in ancient times it stood among the most revered numbers. Seven is the sacred number. The original sacred seven was the Seven Great Commands, given to the Four to carry out.

His list of sevens, which I keep because several of them are Mu or flood claims: Chaldean, seven days of rainfall that produced the Flood; Hindu, seven days in Vishnu’s prophecy of the flood to Satyravata; the Bible, seven days in the prophecy to Noah; Babylonian, seven vases in the sacrifices; Persian, seven horses of the Aryans drawing the chariot of the sun, seven Apris or shapes of flame, seven rays of Agni; Hindu, seven steps of Buddha at birth, and seven Rishi cities; Egyptian, seven days of creation, seven days of the week, seven classes of Egyptians; Greek, seven islands sacred to Proserpine, and the seven-headed Hydra killed by Hercules; Norse, seven families who accompanied the mythical Wotan, founder of the city of Nachan; Hebrew, seven lamps of the ark, seven branches of the candlestick, the seven days’ feast, seven years of plenty and seven of famine; Christian, the sevens of the Apocalypse, candlesticks, churches, angels, heads of the beast, seals, trumpets, vials, and plagues; Nahualt, seven caves from which the ancestors emerged; Zuni, the seven cities of Cibola; Uighur, seven sacred cities; Atlantis, the seven great cities; Carian, the seven Antilles; Marquesan, seven people saved from the Flood; the seven Marouts or genii of the winds in Mazdeism; seven rounds of the ladder in the cave of Mirtha, as he spells it; and Mu, seven sacred cities with golden gates (p. 162).

The hidden meaning of one to ten, in the Naga and Maya columns as he prints them, reads as one sentence. Hun, the Universal One. Ca, or Naga Cas, the Dual God. Ox, who by his power caused. Can, or Naga Zan, which the Hindu writes San, the Four Powerful Ones. Ho, to come. Uac, to arrange things in order. Uuac, to create. Uaxax, or Naga Uaxac, to make man, to stand erect. Bolan, to make his parts revolve on themselves. Lahun, he is two in one. They counted in fives to avoid saying ten. Ten was the numeral of the Deity, too sacred to mention. Twice five was ten, three times five was fifteen, and so on to twenty (p. 163).

Thirteen is unlucky, especially with Friday, because Mu was destroyed on a Friday, the 13th day of the month Zac.

Mu, the Motherland, was destroyed on a Friday, the 13th day of the Month of Zac (the white month). The memory of that day, the 13th, has been carried down as an unlucky day for mankind.

James Churchward. The Sacred Symbols of Mu (1932), p. 164

Chapter VI. Symbols Relating to Mu

The sacred lotus. The most sacred flower because it was chosen as Mu’s floral symbol. It was the first flower to beautify the earth, and Mu was the land where man first appeared, so the two became symbolic synonyms. After the destruction, the Egyptians, as love and mourning, never drew the lotus open and living. They drew it closed and dead. Elsewhere it stayed open and conventional down to Solomon’s temple, where the tips of the petals turn in. The lotus was indigenous to Mu. Colonists carried it, so wherever it grows the parent stock came from Mu, as the parent stock of man did (p. 165).

He then numbers a plate of symbols relating to Mu.

• The hieratic letter M: Mu as the motherland of man.
• The second of the four glyphs for M: Mu as the mother of man.
• The numeral 3, very much used as her numeral symbol.
• Two lotus buds: the two islands adjacent to Mu. Together with Mu they are the Lands of the West.
• An open lotus with the petal ends turned in: death, used in temple traceries when the reference is to Mu.
• A compound the Maya writings constantly use. It joins the second M to an imix, the breast, at the end of each arm, drawn distant from the mother so the breasts are not physically attached. Cortez, as Bishop Landa reports, asked what it meant, and the answer was Mother. That is correct and not enough. The imix says the breast of Mu. In many ancient writings the two islands are called the breasts of Mu. A free reading is Mu, the Mother of Man, and, because the islands are included, the Lands of the West. The Troano manuscript draws the imix as a side view and as a front view.
• The withered and dying lotus: the floral symbol after she was dead.
• The Lands of the West while she was above water.
• Mu submerged. No light shines on her. She is in the region of darkness.
• The Lands of the West in darkness.
• Mu, the Lands of the West, in Maya writing.
• That Land of Kui, Maya writing.
• Peaks only remain above the watery abyss. Codex Cortesianus.
• The ten tribes submerged with Mu. Troano manuscript.
• Mu is sacrificed. She lies in the region of darkness. Book of the Dead.
• The light of day has gone from Mu. Cliff writing, Nevada.
• Mu lies beyond the horizon, over the great waters. Cliff writing, Nevada.
• The Tree and the Serpent, Nevada, and the same as it appears in the Sacred Writings.
• One form of the letter M.
• The royal escutcheon of Mu (p. 168).

An altar painting. The legend: the temple is dedicated to the Sacred Four, the forces which issue from the mouth of the Almighty and are his commands. They evolved law and order, created all things, and now have charge of physical welfare and of the movements of the universe. The temple is under the mother church of Mu, whose high priest is Ra Mu, mouthpiece of the Almighty. Because the temple is under Mu’s jurisdiction, Mu was above water when it was built. Mu was submerged about 10,000 B.C., so the temple is more than 12,000 years old, and he has found nothing that tells him how much older (p. 170).

Mexican Tablet No. 684 reads, Mu, the Motherland, the Lands of the West. Mexican Tablet No. 1005 reads, God speaks through the Mouth of Mu (p. 172).

Legends on the vignettes: Mu, the Empire of the Sun, the Lands of the West, has fallen into an abyss. She is in the region of darkness, where the sun never shines. Her crown no longer rules the earth. He has found scores, even hundreds, of writings on the destruction, and only two tableaux that depict it. The first is Egyptian. The second is North American. The legend of the second: the Creator considered the destruction of the motherland of man, and the Four Great Forces caused the waters to swallow her and carry her into a watery abyss.

Three vignettes from the Book of the Dead show the other phase, the fall into a tank of fire. Flames rose and enveloped her. The first shows no pillars. The second shows the eastern pillar. The third shows all four. Arizona supplies pecked pictures of the same destruction. A glazed Mexican stone tablet, glyphs cut into fine sandstone, uses very ancient priestly characters, all of them found among the Nagas only. It cannot be over 12,000 years old, because it describes the destruction. It was bought from an Indian in Mexico City who said he found it in a ruin. The legend names her Kuiland, the Great Ruler of the Earth. Earthquakes shook her. The land rolled. The pillars gave way. She sank into a fiery abyss. Flames from the fires of the underneath enveloped her. The waters rolled in. Kuiland was submerged (p. 176).

The Field of Aarru, chapter 110 of the Book of the Dead, a large vignette. He says neither Ezra nor any modern Egyptologist has understood it. The lower part is a conventional map of Mu. Three cartouches name three waters, and the lower part shows three lands, each surrounded by water. Egyptologists read the waters as Power of waters, Innumerable waters, and Great place of waters. Ezra’s Genesis 2 reads Pison, Gihon, and Hiddekel. The garden was planted eastward in Eden. Churchward says a land covering Ethiopia, Assyria, and the Euphrates valley cannot be read as a literal island or garden, that the description is symbolical, and that the garden eastward in Eden is Mu in another vestment. The river that parts into four heads he ties to the Four, another vestment of the Sacred Four and of the Four Great Pillars (pp. 178 to 179).

The Genii. Another vestment of the Sacred Four, who were also the Four Great Pillars. He does not find their names before the demise of Mu. For the past 10,000 or 11,000 years they are prominent. The oldest record he has is Maya, from Yucatan and Central America, where they are the Keepers of the Pillars. The earth is a square. Stood on a point, it makes a diamond and brings the corners to north, south, east, and west. Theology put a pillar at each point to sustain heaven, and a genius at the foot of each. The Maya named them by color. Kan-Bacab, the yellow, in the south. Chac-Bacab, the red, in the east. Zac-Bacab, the white, in the north. Ec-Bacab, the black, in the west (p. 180).

Hindu genii preside at cardinal points, but the Hindus used the points symbolically, wherever one might be, not as fixed spots. Rouvera, god of weather, north. Yama, judge of the dead, south. Indra, king of heaven, east. Varona, god of the waters, west. The Hindus also called them gods. I keep his spellings.

Chinese genii are Yo’s, mountains, the four mountains Tse-Yo, also the four quarters. Tai-Tsong, east. Saing-Fou, west. How-Kowang, south. Chin-Si, north. The symbol is a triangular mountain with an eye at the apex looking down.

Egyptian theology has four genii in Amenti, in charge of the pillar at each cardinal point. Amset, east. Hapu, west. Tesautmutf, north. Quabsenuf, south. Chapter 125 of the Book of the Dead shows them near the seat of Osiris, as men in mummy form, with the heads of a man, a monkey, a hawk, and a jackal, which he identifies with Anubis.

Chaldean belief has four genii protecting human beings, which he takes as close to the original, because the Sacred Four watch man’s welfare as executors of the Creator. Sed-Alap, or Kirub, a bull with a human face. Lamas, or Nigal, a lion with a man’s head. Ustar, after the human likeness. Nattig, with the head of an eagle. Hittites, Assyrians, and Persians engrafted the genii into their cosmogony. Ezekiel 1:10, the four faces of man, lion, ox, and eagle, was written while Ezekiel was a captive among the Chaldeans. Churchward thinks the vision is an embellishment of figures Ezekiel would have seen at the foot of temple and palace steps. A set of four from the king’s palace at Nineveh is in the British Museum (p. 182).

Hieratic letters from the alphabet of Mu.

• A, pronounced Ahau. The monotheistic alphabetical symbol of the Deity.
• H. The alphabetical symbol of the Four Great Primary Forces, called in the Sacred Writings the Sacred Four.
• M, pronounced Ma and Mu, the u as in German. The alphabetical symbol of Mu the motherland, and also of mother, earth, land, country, empire, and anything pertaining to the soil.
• N. The alphabetical symbol for the Serpent of Creation.
• T, pronounced Tao. Resurrection, and also emersion. Used in the Sacred Writings for Mu’s emersion.
• U, pronounced as oo in moon. An abyss, a deep hole, a valley. Inside a word, another u glyph is generally used as a Y (pp. 183 to 184).

Miscellaneous glyphs close the chapter. Four circles, each with one side incomplete, symbolize the Sacred Four. Another, a favorite of the Uighurs and still revered in China, appears as dress ornament among South Sea Islanders, especially Polynesians. Plates show dress ornaments from the Society Islands and the Marquesas. A rarer glyph is used where the ten tribes who went down with the motherland are spoken of. A Maya symbol he has found in no other writing reads, peaks only rise out of the abyss, and refers to islands formed between the gas chambers. An equilateral triangle with the monotheistic symbol inside reads, the Deity dwells in Heaven. The same triangle with an eye is the Deity looking out of Heaven. Egypt changed that into the all-seeing eye of Osiris. A large dot in a small circle is an occasional Egyptian equivalent for an eye. A conventional map of the Lands of the West after submersion comes from the Troano manuscript (p. 188).

Chapter VII. Sacred Symbols Connecting North America to Mu

Two sculptured slabs. William Niven found them in an ancient grave on the Rio del Oro, in Guerrero. The text layer heads the section in words I will not treat as a settled place name. The plate says the find was near Placeres del Oro, and gives Slab A as 28 inches long, 18 inches wide, and 2 inches thick. They are not as old as the work at Chimalpa, Remedios, and similar sites. This civilization occupied Mexico less than 12,000 years ago, shown by an inscription, “returned to the region of darkness,” which was submerged Mu. He cannot estimate the actual age. Each slab is divided by a horizontal line. The central figure in each upper half is a conventional head of Quetzalcoatl, the bearded or feathered serpent, the symbolic serpent of the Creator in one part of Mu, corresponding to Naga, or Narayana, the seven-headed serpent of the Orient (p. 189).

North American names for the Serpent of Creation: the Quiche called it Gucumatz, the serpent covered with feathers. The Mayas called it Ac le Chapat, the plumed or feathered serpent. On a later page he also writes Ac-la-Chapat. The Quetzals, the first men who trod American soil, called it Quetzalcoatl, the bearded serpent. The Pueblo of Arizona and New Mexico still use that name, which he takes as proof of an old religious connection with the people of the Rio del Oro, and he asks whether the connection was also by blood.

The slabs are full of hieratic letters from the alphabet of Mu. He cannot find the people’s name.

Slab A, upper half. Portions of the head of Quetzalcoatl. The eyes are too mutilated to read. The beard is intact, and that is enough to identify the serpent. The mouth is an oblong square, the hieratic M. Nose and eyebrows are a pair of serpents gliding away. The head rests on the hieratic U, an abyss. The ends of the U bend outward and end in the sun as Kin, not Ra, so the tableau is about the earth, not heaven. The bottom of the division is an urn, the body of the earth. Inside it, two squares point downward, engraved with “lost light,” which he translates, the light has gone forth from the day.

Slab A, lower half. A grave. The body lies in rest and darkness. Two halves of a head are set back to back. The eyes are again Kin. Two conventional mouths are the hieratic M, a form used by both Mayas and Egyptians. Inside the mouths is N, the alphabetical symbol of the Serpent of Creation, universal in the ancient world. The American serpent is adorned with feathers or a beard. The Oriental has seven heads. In every case an adorned serpent is the Creator and Creation, and N is its letter. The legend: Quetzalcoatl, the Creator, the Bearded Serpent, called him, and his soul passed to the region of darkness, submerged Mu, to await the call of the great serpent for reincarnation (p. 193).

Slab B is the companion, life where A is death. The two serpents that form the nose bend their heads toward the eyes. Their double tongues curve around the eye and do not strike. The tongues are the symbol for speech, so they are giving a command. Above the head is the hieratic diphthong Dz, three steps, the three steps to the throne. In the lower right corner Dz plus Am reads Dzam, he who sits upon the throne. At the foot of the throne is the monotheistic symbol, so the one who sits there is the Creator. The urn again opens as a U. Its border is a string of the letter N. Inside are glyphs of darkness, submerged Mu. The lower half joins the two halves of the head, with open, light-seeing eyes: soul and body joined, the reincarnation. The face is repeated, the second time as an adjective of the accomplishment. Both mouths are the oblong square, Mu, so the reincarnation has taken place in Mu. That is the same conception as the Egyptian return to Amenti, the region of darkness, the domain of Osiris, submerged Mu, and it is the conception of the Mayas of Yucatan and of some Oriental countries still. The left border is the third glyph of H. The right border reads, the great serpent who created all things, he who sits upon the throne, he who embodies the Sacred Four. The legend: when Quetzalcoatl calls, the eyes closed in sleep are opened, the time of reincarnation has come, and they come forth into a new day. The glyphs connect these people with the ancient Mayas of Yucatan and with Arizona and New Mexico. The cosmogony of all three is identical (p. 195).

Quetzal and Quetzalcoatl. A popular mistake, parallel to the mistake that the ancients worshipped the sun, is to confuse the people with the serpent. Quetzals was the name of the first people whose feet trod American soil. They were blond, with light flaxen hair. Their last king was called Quetzal. They took the name from their chief symbol of the Creator’s commands, the serpent Quetzalcoatl, feathered and winged. South of them in the motherland, the corresponding symbol was the cobra-de-capella, called Naga, with seven heads for the Seven Commands or the mental planes of creation. Early settlers in North America, coming generally from the northern parts of the motherland, kept the feathered serpent (pp. 196 to 197). The Popol Vuh, written in Guatemala, calls Quetzalcoatl the serpent covered with feathers and the symbol of creation. Guatemalan legends call Quetzal the last king of the blond white race of Central America and southern Mexico.

Later Mayas of Yucatan used both serpents. The seven-headed one they called Ac-la-Chapat. The feathered one they called kukul-khau. He divides kukul from kuk, a feather, and ul, covered with. The Aztecs scrambled Quetzal and Quetzalcoatl into a god, and gave that serpent-man a son, Tescat, an avenger because the land had been taken from the Quetzals and they had been driven out. The only way to appease Tescat was human sacrifice. An old Spanish book from about the time of Cortez says more than 50,000 human sacrifices were carried out each year when Cortez invaded Mexico. Churchward says the Spanish writers were inaccurate and the number should be discounted. It might have been more or less. The point he keeps is that the number was immense, and that the priesthood held life and property by terror (p. 198).

The Oriental dragon is only a conventional Quetzalcoatl. He has never found the Naga among North American Indians, and only a few tribes have the feathered serpent, so far as he has learned. The serpent is not mythical. He describes one he refers to as shot with a soft-nosed 30-30, so mashed that it is hard to describe. Body about the size of a duck or a small goose. Head and neck the snake-like part, the neck about five feet. Head broad, flat, and V-shaped. No snake-like tail, but a tuft of short feathers. Neck covered with short hair-like feathers. Color almost white, mottled with grey. Upper wing feathers long, drooping, with a prismatic sheen. Flight clumsy, and only a few yards. The Indians would go no farther, and the explorer returned. Indians say it is occasionally found in the unexplored swamp forests of Yucatan and Guatemala, and is very scarce. Niven’s tablets show it used as a symbol in the Valley of Mexico more than 12,000 years ago (pp. 199 to 200).

The Red Indian. Nearly all, if not all, of them keep large numbers of Mu’s original sacred symbols, with almost the same meanings, and their legends show that they came from Mu in boats. He rejects the scientific record that they came from Asia by the Bering land bridge. European writers, on his account, dumped origins on the Caucasian plain and the mountains of Central Asia, and have since turned on Africa. He starts with the Pueblo of Arizona and New Mexico and works north to British Columbia and Alaska. His keystones are two Indian writings, not legends, written by the Indians, telling where they came from and how. He does not print those two texts as separate documents in this chapter. What he does print is the ceremonial and the rock record.

At a Pueblo dance the chief’s blanket was covered with the sacred symbols of Mu. One matched the central figure of the Hindu cosmic diagram, the Sri Santara, and the motherland’s diagram, with one exception. In Mu the twelve gates to the world beyond are twelve scallops. The Pueblos, like the Hindus, use twelve triangle points. When he read the blanket and the meanings agreed with what they themselves understood, he was received as a brother. Their legend: far back they did not live in America, but in a land toward the setting sun, across the great waters, and their forefathers came in boats. A flood legend is very complicated and varies in minor details, but the essential points agree. Many of their words are in Mu’s vocabulary, or have roots in the mother tongue. Certain symbols run from the north of Yucatan through Mexico to Nevada, Utah, and Colorado, which suggests that Pueblos or near relatives once held all that ground. Coming by boat means they have been in America more than 12,000 years. They arrived highly educated. Their legends show more geology than scientists knew fifty years ago.

The reason for their later state is mountain-raising. Volcanic gases tore the outer crust and forced it into ridges. Rocks were thrown from ridge to ridge and covered the valleys. Earthquakes shook cities into ruins and buried tens of millions. Then fire, lava, and smoke buried the country. Few escaped. An Oriental legend says nearly a billion lives were lost in Asia during the raising of the Asiatic mountains. In America one lava flow, from one crater among many, is twenty-six feet thick and nearly thirty miles long. He finds no record of the American death toll, but it was great. Survivors had to live by primitive methods and could carry the past only in legends (p. 203).

Nevada. Symbols carved on the rocks. Some were etched before the mountains they now stand on were raised. Some were written after. Thousands of years lie between the two dates. Three distinct sets. He numbers forty-two and then five more, A to E, which are new to him and for which he has no key. I list the ones he names, because this is his index of Mu’s symbols on American stone.

1, 2, and 3. Rising sun, setting sun, and sun at meridian. Universal. 4. The Sacred Four, a solid cross. Universal. 5. The sun as Ra, the earliest pattern. Universal. 6. A plain colored disk without rays: the sun has sunk and gives no light. 7. A colored disk with three feathers: darkness, and the three feathers are Mu. Free reading, Mu is in the region of darkness, dead, submerged. 8. An open cross inside a circle: U luumil Kin, the land of the sun, the empire of the sun. Here the sun is Kin, not Ra. The cross is open, unlike No. 4. 9. The hieratic A, Naga pattern: the great ruler, the Creator. 10. Another symbol of the Sacred Four, one step toward the swastika, two steps short of it. It superseded No. 4. 11. Mu lies beyond the horizon across the great water. The serpent is Khan. The arc is the horizon. Three feathers are Mu. Her numeral is three. 12. He cannot read it. 13. An inscription, Chi-po-ze: a mouth opened, fires came forth with vapors, the pillars gave way, the land went down. 14. An unadorned serpent, water, perhaps a guide to water. 15. One glyph of H in the motherland’s alphabet. 16. The Mysterious Writing, the same import as the cardinal number 1. 17. The Tree and the Serpent. 18. The great ruler, the empire of the sun. 19. The contour of some land with two adjacent islands. 20. The life symbol, hundreds of times in the Book of the Dead, and repeated at the base of the chair of Osiris in chapter 125. 21. A lotus bud, Mu’s floral symbol. 22. An Uighur symbol: gone down from the sight of the sun. 23. An Uighur symbol, Mehen, man. 24. The original symbol of the Sacred Four, from the Sacred Inspired Writings. Universal. 25. The ancient symbol for water. Universal. 26. The hieratic U, an abyss, a deep hole, a valley. Universal. 27. A guide to a temple dedicated to the Sacred Four. 28. An Uighur symbol he cannot read. 29. An Uighur letter X. 30. An Uighur symbol for hard. 31. An Uighur symbol, heaven above earth. 32. An Uighur pattern of the feather, Truth. Universal. 33. One glyph of N. 34. A human hand, not a symbol. 35. The active and passive elements in nature. Universal. 36. An Uighur symbol, fires of the underneath. 37. An Uighur pattern for multitudes. The Egyptians reversed the leaf and put the stem on top. 38 to 41. An animal, a skin, tracks, and a head. Not symbols. 42. One glyph of H.

The collection mixes Naga and Uighur characters and sits close to Yucatan and to the writers of Niven’s tablets. Two eras, written by neither Nagas, Uighurs, nor Yucatan Maya. Probably one or two of the ten tribes of the motherland, who in Mu lived close to all three (p. 208).

The Klamath of Oregon have several legends, one of a great flood. The Kootenay of Washington and British Columbia, whom he also spells Kooteney and Koteney, say their forefathers came from the Land of the Sun. Land of the Sun and Empire of the Sun were the common names of Mu before she was submerged. A ceremonial dress has a border of the hieratic M, and over the left breast an eight-rayed sun, the central figure of Mu’s escutcheon. The sun is pale yellow, the rays a warm pinkish red, the points a pale blue. Blue was Mu’s symbolic color (p. 209).

The Haida totem, Queen Charlotte Island. Capped by the Thunder Bird. A symbolical fish, the Killer Whale, runs nearly the length of the pole. Halfway along, the Steel-headed Man thrusts a spear into the fish’s back. An old chief explains. The Thunder Bird represents the Creator. Lightning is the wink of its eyes, thunder the flap of its wings, rain the spilling of a lake on its back. Its talons are in the whale’s tail. Churchward reads the bird as the forces that carried out the Creator’s commands, and says thunder, lightning, and rain are the same teaching, nature as the will of the Supreme. Bird symbols for the Four are in Mexico, Central America, Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, India, and among the Hittites. The Killer Whale is the symbol for ocean waters among the Indians of the Northwest. Most ancients used an unadorned serpent, Khanab. The name Killer Whale was probably given because of the drowning when Mu was submerged. The figure on this page is the one he prints as 64,000,000 millions (p. 212).

The Steel-headed Man, in the chief’s account, was the leader of all men in the days of the great flood, beloved by the Thunder Bird, the Thunder God, and all other gods. When the flood swept the earth, the gods changed him into a steel-headed salmon. Churchward reads the leader of all men as the symbol of Mu. Ancient literature says Mu was the ruler of all mankind and that Mu rules the earth, and the Codex Cortesianus calls her the Great Ruler and says the Great Ruler exists no longer. The transformed leader lived in the waters of the Minkish River, gathered posts and timber, and lacked the strength to build. The Thunder Bird appeared, lifted his god mask, showed a human face, and said he was as human as the man and would put up the timbers and stay as protector. With four claps of thunder, warriors sprang out full armed. They and the Steel-headed Man were the nucleus of the Haida. Churchward calls this a myth so thick over a legend that the legend is hard to extract. Steel and steel-headed salmon were unknown in America until a few hundred years ago. The legend omits how the salmon became a man again, where the warriors came from, and any mention of women. In many Oriental pictures, emigrants leaving Mu by boat are drawn as fish jumping on the water. He asks whether the Steel-headed Man was one of those fish (pp. 212 to 213).

The base of the pole is the Killer Whale and the Sea Lion. The Sea Lion helped a warrior save his wife from the Killer Whale, which means drowning, and was struck down. Kolus, the protecting god of the household, saved him. The Sea Lion was made a member of the tribe and married the warrior princess, daughter of the Steel-headed Man. Churchward reads the Sea Lion as a man of another tribe, called by his totem, which was the usual ancient practice.

The Nootka tableau, west coast of Vancouver Island. One of only two pictures he has found of the manner of Mu’s destruction. The other is Egyptian. Hundreds of writings tell of it, and various Maya vignettes, but only these two pictures. The Egyptian shows her falling into an abyss of fire. The Nootka shows her submerged and covered with water. Both phases are correct, on his reading (p. 215).

Three divisions. Top: a serpent with a plume, Quetzalcoatl, the Creator dominating what happens below. Middle: the Thunder Bird with its talons in the Killer Whale. Birds were the favored symbol of the Four in the northern parts of Mu. In the south, crosses were more frequent. Birds were not excluded in the south. Bottom: the Killer Whale, purely conventional. The eye is the compound symbol of mother and land, so Motherland. The pupil is a solid black square, darkness, so the motherland is in darkness. The neck is broken. From the wings of the Thunder Bird, the symbol of an abyss and of magnetic forces falls into the broken neck, which means subsidiary forces from the Primary are doing the destruction. In the mouth, flowing water, then a passage, then the hieratic U, an abyss of water. Next, the Uighur numeral four, four bars. On the backbone, the Naga four, four disks. Above the backbone, five bars, the Uighur five, the numeral of the full Godhead. The legend repeats what the top and the middle say: the Creator commanded the submergence, the Four dispatched subsidiary forces, the land sank, and the waters covered it (pp. 216 to 217).

Chapter VIII. Religion in Egypt and India

Many present religious conceptions are reflections of the old Egyptian, and he says present religion came from Egypt by way of the Jews. The pantheon is made up from the Book of the Dead. Often more than one god is the same conception in a different guise. That comes from scrambling two sets of symbols when Upper and Lower Egypt were joined. He gives twenty-four figures, six to a page, and says these are the principal ones only. I keep the name and the meaning he assigns, and I pass over color unless the color is doing symbolic work.

Amen, at Thebes, “King of the gods,” Latinized Ammon, whom the Romans identified with Jupiter and the Greeks with Zeus, also “the hidden god.” Before the 18th Dynasty he was Amen simply, and afterwards Amen Ra, “the hidden Sun.” Light blue.

Kneph, “the moulder,” Greek Knonphis, one of the oldest, especially in Nubia and Philae. A ram’s head, a solar disk, and a uraeus. “The soul of the Universe” and “the Creator.” Bright green. His consort is Sati. Churchward thinks Kneph and Sati are the male and female principles.

Sati, the Egyptian Juno. Elephantine, Nubia, and Ethiopia. The crown of Upper Egypt and cow’s horns. Warm red.

Khem, one of the deified attributes of the Creator. Chemmo, or Panopolis, and Thebes. Two straight feathers. Blue.

Ptah the Opener, the oldest of the Egyptian gods, at Memphis. The creative power of the Deity, “the divine artificer,” and one symbol is the two-sided square. “The Father of beginnings.” The Greeks paired him with Vulcan. The Memphis name was Ptah-Sokar-Osiris. The regular Egyptian name was Ptah-Sekar-Usar. Blue. Without doubt, Churchward says, the symbol of the Four Great Primary Forces.

Neith, the Egyptian Minerva, goddess of the lower heavens, holding the heavens on her head. Special goddess at Sais. A Maya god in Yucatan likewise upholds the heavens on his head. Blue. She is the Four Great Pillars, the Sacred Four.

Maut, “the Mother,” consort of Amen Ra at Thebes, the Mother of all. With Amen Ra she is another symbol of the dual principle. Also at Chons with Amen Ra, and honored in Nubia and Ethiopia. Warm red.

Ra. The name of the sun as the monotheistic or collective symbol of the Creator. In the Litany of Ra he is “the Supreme Power” and “the only one.” To the initiated he symbolized the power of the Deity. To the populace he was stated to be a created god, the son of Ptah and Neith. Churchward says more errors have been made about this symbol than about any other the ancients used. Red.

Khepra. In the pantheon, but not of Egyptian origin. Brought to Upper Egypt by the Nagas from the motherland by way of Burma and India. The scarab is set over a human head. From the Papyrus Ani, king’s companion to Seti II, the scarab is no god but an emblem of the Creator. Up to Seti II, on this reading, the Egyptians still understood the ancient sciences and the Cosmic Forces. A very ancient Maya carving in India, thousands of years older than the first occupation of Egypt, shows the scarab in rays of glory, resting on the symbol of Mu, with first man, Kee the deer, kneeling on either side. The Book of the Dead vignette is man adoring the scarab. The god Khepra comes out of the Nagas and out of Kee (p. 223).

Atum, or Tum, also Amend: the setting sun, the sun below the horizon.

Shu, firstborn of Ra and Hathor, brother of Tefnut. A symbol of the Celestial Forces. Generally black.

Mentu, often Mentu-Ra, a deified attribute of the sun, a phase of Ra. With Atum he symbolizes rising and setting. Special protector of Egypt.

Osiris. One of the oldest. The Book of the Dead says he was the son of Seb and Nut. The history is later in the chapter.

Hathor. Another name for Isis, sometimes Isis Hathor. Nature, and all that was true and beautiful in it. The female principle.

Isis. In the triad Osiris, Isis, and Horus, she is the wife of Osiris.

Horus. Son of Osiris and Isis, and a symbol of the sun.

Seb. Father of Osiris and Isis, “the father of gods.” Consort Tefnut. Again the dual principles.

Khons. At Thebes, with Amen and Maut, the Theban triad. The moon. He wears the disk and the crescent.

Thoth. God of writing, learning, and medicine. He composed the early and most important portions of the Book of the Dead. Supposed to be the Egyptian Hermes.

Nephthys. Sister of Isis and Osiris, consort of Set.

Anubis. God of embalming. He embalmed his father Osiris.

Tefnut. Goddess of rain and dew. Conspicuous at Thebes.

Ma, or Maat. Goddess of truth, and of the truth and justice of the Supreme God.

Nu, or Nut. Nut is the feminine of Nu. Nu the father, Nut the mother, the life givers.

Bast. Wife of Ptah. With their son Tum, or Atum, the great triad of Memphis.

Set. Son of Nut and brother of Osiris. In the myth he murdered Osiris.

Anuka. Third member of the triad of the Thebaid, with Khnum, who is Kneph, and Sati.

Osiris the man. Egyptian myths make him a monarch of Upper and Lower Egypt, buried at Philae, or in other towns that claim the remains. Those myths would put him after the union under Menes, about 5,000 B.C. Against that, Thoth taught the Osirian religion at Sais, and this was 14,000 B.C. There were no kings of Egypt for an immensely long period after Thoth. Egypt was a sub-colony of the motherland under the direct control of the colonial empire, Atlantis (p. 230).

Two Naacal tablets, one in a Himalayan monastery in India and one in Tibet, are identical, copied from the originals in the motherland and brought to Asia by Naacal missionaries. They belong to the historical section. They relate that Osiris, on entering manhood, left Atlantis, came to the motherland, and entered a Naacal college. He studied the religion and the Cosmic Sciences, passed as Master and adept, and returned to Atlantis. There he taught the first religion of man and weeded out the extravagances that a rank priesthood had put into the religion of Atlantis. He became the hieratic head of religion in Atlantis and held that office through a long life. The people loved him and wanted to dethrone Ouranos and put Osiris on the throne. He would not allow it to be spoken of, and the idea was dropped. A brother murdered him out of jealousy, about 20,000 B.C. He was deified, and religion was named Osirian, as today it is named Christian. Churchward cannot find the brother’s name and thinks the Egyptians invented it. He finds nothing about Isis and Nephthys. A son became the hieratic head of Atlantis. The son’s name is not given. Osiris and Christ taught the same religion, some of it word for word, and both learned it from the Sacred Inspired Writings (pp. 230 to 231).

The religion of Egypt. An ancient record says that about 16,000 years ago Thoth, the son of an Atlantean priest, planted the colony at the mouth of the Nile, built a temple at Sais, and taught the Osirian religion. That religion was the religion of Mu after Osiris had cleansed the extravagances which had crept into it in Atlantis 22,000 years ago. When Osiris died, his son became the hieratic head and was supposed to be called Horus. Churchward cannot say whether Horus was a name or a title. A Horus was always the hieratic head down to Menes, about 5,000 B.C. From Thoth to Menes the colony was ruled by the church under a Horus. The last Horus is recorded when Menes took the throne (p. 232).

Manetho says that during the 11th Dynasty the priesthood began to teach the people to worship the sacred symbols instead of the Deity. That was the first step in the debauchery, which peaked in the 18th Dynasty in extravagance and idolatry. Islam wiped out the old religion. Christianity had made a little headway among the Copts.

Moses was the most proficient Master of his time and, at one time, high priest of the temple at Sinai, which was then an Osirian temple. His wife was an Israelite, and he threw in his lot with the Israelites in slavery. They elected him their head. He saw the Osirian religion being debased by idolatry and modified it. He discarded almost all the symbols of the attributes, keeping a few that could not well be worshipped, and he made the worship of one Lord God only. Osirian questions became commands. Forty-two questions became ten. The serpent he raised in the wilderness was not idolatry. It was a return to symbolism for the occasion, to concentrate thought on God as the Creator and the giver of all good things (p. 233).

Burnt sacrifice is one of the ceremonies he traces to the sinking. The Bible has the sons of Adam offering burnt sacrifices. Ancient records, as he reads them, say that 60,000,000 people lost their lives at one time in the same land before sacrifices were commenced.

Yet among ancient records we find that 60,000,000 of people lost their lives at one time in the same land before sacrifices were commenced.

James Churchward. The Sacred Symbols of Mu (1932), p. 234

He never found the word sacrifice, or an equivalent, in the writings of the First Civilization. The first time he saw it was in an old Maya book about 5,000 or 6,000 years old: during the night Mu was sacrificed. The First Civilization speaks only of offerings, fruit, flowers, and the produce of fields and gardens, placed on an altar inscribed with the Tau and, under each arm, a double triangle: place thine offering upon this altar. After Mu went down with her 60,000,000 souls, survivors commemorated her. The Quiche Maya had a fiery house. The Egyptians had a fiery tank. Burnt sacrifice, he thinks, was the form the Semites chose, and the Jews later put a theology on it. The Phoenicians adopted idolatry and offered human beings (p. 234).

Was Moses an Israelite? An Egyptian record would lead one to think not a pure Israelite. It says Moses was the son of an Egyptian princess who afterwards became the great queen Hatshepsut. Not a word, Churchward notes, about the bulrushes (p. 235).

The triad Osiris, Isis, and Horus is his example of priestly extravagance. Osiris was a man who lived about 22,000 years ago. Isis was the symbol of the Creator’s female attribute. Their son was Horus. Isis had a sister, Nephthys, and a brother, Set, so the female attribute is made to have three members. An earthly man marries a spirit and they have a son. The writings of the motherland say the Creator was Lahun, two in one, not four in one.

Early Egyptian religion ran somewhat parallel to the Polynesian. Both speak of marriages of gods. In Egypt the marriages only complicate theology. Among the Polynesians the marriages produce phenomena, light and sound, which is the correct account of the Cosmic Forces. The first four gods were the Four Great Primary Forces, a name given them during the First Great Civilization. The Polynesian account: in the beginning no light, life, or sound. A boundless night called Po, over which Tanaoa, darkness, and Mutu-Hei, silence, reigned. The god of light separated from Tanaoa, fought him, and confined him to the night. Ono, sound, was evolved from Atea, light, and banished silence. From the struggle Atauana, dawn, was born. Atea married Atauana, and they created earth, animals, and man (pp. 236 to 237). The Egyptian marriages he lists are Seb and Tefnut, whose offspring are Osiris, Isis, Nephthys, and Set; Ra and Hathor, whose offspring are Shu and Tefnut; Osiris and Isis, whose offspring is Horus; and the pairs Amen Ra and Maut, Kneph and Sati, Ptah and Bast, Set and Nephthys.

The Israelites. They left Goshen, part of the Nile Delta. Egyptian papyrus says they crossed the Sea of Reeds and passed into Asia. The Sea of Reeds, or rushes, is at one of the mouths of the Nile, shallow enough to wade. A submarine earthquake in the Mediterranean, off the Nile mouth, probably on the gas belt that runs down from Crete and a short way under Africa, first drew the water off. The Israelites crossed. The Egyptian army followed. The returning cataclysmic wave overwhelmed the Egyptians. The Bible, he says, mistakes the Sea of Reeds for the Red Sea. The Red Sea, at the point where the crossing is placed, is 200 miles (321 kilometers) from Goshen. The Sea of Reeds joined Goshen. Two hundred miles of enemy country, with an army in pursuit, would have meant they were overtaken (pp. 237 to 238). In bondage they set two brick pillars at the temple door, and only the high priest entered the Holy of Holies.

The word Hebrew, he says, comes from ebber, meaning further back. The Jews descended from four groups. Two tribes entered Palestine about 1375 to 1350 B.C. Ten tribes joined them from Egypt about 1200 B.C., 150 to 175 years later. About 953 B.C. the tribes separated. The two seceded and appointed Jeraboam their king. Reaboam was then king of the ten. He keeps those spellings. The Assyrians attacked the ten. History says the Assyrians destroyed them. He thinks not all were put to the sword. Some were assimilated, both peoples being Semites, and disappeared as the lost tribes. The Medes and Persians overthrew the Assyrians. The Babylonians later conquered the two remaining tribes, who survive as the Jews. Those Jews hold the Passover, but they descend from the two tribes who were not in Egypt. The ten lost tribes were the ones concerned in the Exodus and the Passover. Ezra and his associates wrote the Bible. The Book of Moses was written from documents of the ten tribes who were in Egypt. Moses’s writings were partly in Naga and partly in Egyptian. Ezra learned a little Naga in a Chaldi during the captivity. Neither he nor his associates were Egyptian scholars (pp. 238 to 239).

The religion of India. The religion of very ancient India was the motherland’s, brought by the Naacals. They were taught religion and the Cosmic Sciences in Mu and sent to the colonial empires to form colleges and perfect the local priesthoods, who taught the people. About 5,000 years ago Aryans began to drift into India from the bleak valleys of the Hindu Koosh, as he spells it, and the adjoining mountains. Their first settlement was among the Nagas in the Saraswatte Valley. They were hardy, uncouth, and uneducated. The Nagas, the most highly educated race in the world, took them into the schools. They were descendants of people who had multiplied in the mountains since the destruction of the great Uighur Empire. In time they dominated northern India, including the schools. Thinking they had learned all the Naacals could teach, they drove those teachers into the snow-capped mountains (p. 240).

A sect called Brahmins then usurped religious teaching and introduced perverted theologies. That was the start of India’s downfall. Caste began with three castes and was extended until the lowest were untouchables. A touch required purification. India fell from leading the world in religion, arts, and sciences. Then Prince Guatama, as he spells the name, went back to the Sacred Writings. His followers became the Buddhists, and Buddhism was carried through the Orient and was the universal religion. The Buddhist priesthood of northern India fell away from Guatama and introduced theologies in order to enslave the people. The south remained true. The center of Buddhism today, he says, is a small unostentatious temple at Kandy, in the mountains of Ceylon. This has been the history of the world for the past 12,000 to 15,000 years. The people crush the politicians, and the Lord, in his own way, weeds his garden (p. 241).

AUM. An inscription that has baffled scholars, Hindus included, for more than 2,300 years. The meaning was lost when the Brahmins drove the Naacals out. He quotes the Manava Dharma Sastra, book 2, sloka 74: in the beginning only the Infinite existed, called Aditi, and in that Infinite dwelt AUM, whose name must precede all prayers. The Book of Manu, sloka 77: the monosyllable AUM means earth, sky, and heaven. I. T. Wheeler, History of India, volume 2, page 481, reports Manu as saying the three letters form a symbol of Brahma, lord of created things. H. T. Colebrook, in Asiatic Research, cites Noruka, an ancient glossary of the Vedas, that AUM refers to every deity, and says the Brahmins may reserve a fuller esoteric sense. Churchward answers that Noruka was reading a Brahminical version. The Brahmins stole the Vedas from the Naacals, changed them, and passed them off as their own. The original Vedas are a Naacal writing. The Naacals acknowledged one Deity only, so “every deity” proves the text was altered (pp. 242 to 243).

AUM conveys the same meaning as the Mysterious Writing and as Niven’s Tablet No. 2379. The difference is the form of writing. Those two are old esoteric numeral writing. AUM is alphabetical. A, Ahau, masculine, Father. U, feminine, Mother, She. M, Mehen, the engendered, the Son, Man. U is used as the feminine pronoun because M would have been confounded with the M of Mehen. The Brahmins built an incomprehensible theology around it (p. 244).

The Tower of Babel, taken literally as brick or stone, is on his reading a symbol. The crux is confusion of tongues. The legend was not written during the life of Mu. It comes from the new civilization, when history was being recorded again. Each temple had its own theological words, and each college its own technical words, so that no temple understood another. Religion and science were the tower. Today he counts over one hundred sects of Christianity, and only one God. In Mu there were no sects and no theology. The wording was simple enough for the most uncultivated mind. Mu’s religious teachings lasted 200,000 years. When the present tower falls, the structure that rises will be the simple religion of Mu (p. 245).

The Flood. Not a myth, and not symbolical. It has been wrongly described, because the writers did not understand Moses. There was a flood which destroyed about half the earth and all life on that half. It was not caused by a heavy rain. It resulted from magnetic influences. The last magnetic cataclysm, the Biblical flood, and what he calls the geological myth, the glacial period, are one and the same thing (p. 245).

Chapter IX. The Twin Sisters, Religion and Science

The writings of the First Great Civilization treat religion and science as necessary to each other, and they use the same symbols for both. In the early days those symbols were all geometrical figures. Pythagoras, back in Athens from Egypt, taught his pupils to honor numbers and geometrical designs with the name of God.

The patterns came from flowers and leaves. He names four, drawn by Viola de Gruchy. The daisy, a circle, symbolizing the sun and its rays. The plate caption says “her Ray.” The syringa, a square, the Sacred Four, and the plate says the Four Primary Forces. The lily, a triangle and crossed triangles. The moonflower, a triangle surmounting a square. The plate of the moonflower is captioned as the pentagon, the full Godhead. I leave the text and the caption side by side (pp. 246 to 254). The ancients did not theorize. They followed the Creator’s lines. Nature was the finishing school. He recalls the steps of an old Hindu temple at Lahar, where the great Master, speaking of jungle minstrels, said there are no prodigies and all things result from natural laws. Early Egyptians built instruments to copy the voices of nature. The old Rishi’s parting words were to go forth and learn what is written by nature. Papyrus Ani, 1320 B.C., tells the reader of days unborn to read the roll if the gods have given the skill. Churchward’s answer is that the power to attain the skill is ours.

Nature’s laws are divine and cannot be improved. The ancients used basic geometric forms even for the most abstract religious ideas, and they borrowed those forms from flowers, leaves, and the like. In the past twenty to thirty years, scholars of nature’s geometry have begun to show how far the ancients applied that knowledge. He names A. H. Church on phyllotaxis, T. A. Cook, The Curves of Life, and D’Arcy W. Thompson, On Growth and Form. Floral symbols became myths when the new civilization forgot them, or when a priesthood changed them on purpose.

He quotes Royal Dixon, The Human Side of Plants, on races who believed in the spirituality of plants, and Dixon’s definition of spirituality as membership in the universal spirit of the Creator, the Infinite Substance, God. Greeks and Romans gave trees the spirits of gods and men. Adamson, Bonnet, Hedwig, and Edward Smith bestowed souls on plants, and Martins and Fechner in Germany defended that view. Churchward says this is not a suggestion. It is an actual truth, known and understood by the priesthoods 5,000 years ago, and probably for only half of that time after (p. 252).

Nearly every prominent attribute of the Deity had more than one symbol. A principal symbol was either a flower or a tree. Flowers were preferred for Divine Forces, trees for lands and countries. Flowers were popular for each of the Four, who were also called the gods, being the command, desire, or will of the Creator, and whom he has a few times found called “His executive children.” Lay the geometrical symbol on the floral symbol and the geometry follows the flower. Greeks and Romans, in their myths, show the flower as the foundation and the geometrical figure as the superstructure. Calling the flower divine was consistent, because the ancients meant the attribute, not the plant. Hindus, Egyptians, Mayas, and others symbolize Mu with a lotus. Egyptian writings, times without number, call Mu “the Lotus,” meaning the motherland, not the flower. Mu was also symbolized as a tree, the Tree of Life (p. 254).

One of the two oldest known bronzes is a symbolical figure of Mu as the mistress and ruler of the whole earth. The plate credit is hard to read. The chapter says the bronze was drawn and analyzed by Viola de Gruchy, that it is more than 18,000 years old, and that it was made either in Mu or in the Uighur capital. The list of illustrations says it faces page 255, and the caption’s text layer says over 18,000 years ago. The basic design is the equilateral triangle, kept through the whole figure and its parts. He asks whether it is only a coincidence that the triangle, the symbol of Heaven, was used for this Mother Goddess, Mu (p. 256). Any ancient statue, carving, or design from India, China, Mexico, Central America, Greece, or the other old civilizations will, on his test, rest on the oldest sacred symbols, prominently the oldest four: the circle, the triangle, the square, and the pentagon.

The last example is geometry. Modern geometry comes from Euclid. Euclid learned it in Egypt. The Egyptians inherited it from forefathers who came from the motherland. When it was fully developed in Mu is hard to say. Exhibits in India show it perfected 35,000 years ago. The Sacred Writings of Mu, 70,000 years old, show it perfected. Beyond that he does not know. Possibly 100,000 years or more (p. 257). Euclid’s first problem in the first book, to describe an equilateral triangle on a given finite straight line, uses the first two sacred symbols, the circle and the triangle. Euclid’s works were one dying ember of the First Great Civilization. That civilization received its death blow with the destruction of Mu. During its time, religion and science were completely intertwined. There can be no perfect religion without science, because science unfolds nature, and nature is the mouthpiece which unfolds the Creator and gives the proof of God.

The book ends with Confucius, whom he dates 556 B.C. Does God speak? The four seasons hold their course, and all things continue to live and grow, yet does God speak? The printed text stops on page 258. There is no separate conclusion and no index.