The Gold of the Gods (11 page)
The East Polynesians navigated by the stars! “If the Southern Cross is on the horizon at midnight, we must steer to the left to reach Bora-Bora.”
How did the culture-bearers know where Bora-Bora lay? Had someone been on the many hundred islands before them? In what way did the “discoverers” receive from their home island the reports that were necessary for fixing their positions?
Today
the seaman knows that his goal exists (unlike the prehistoric discoverer); he knows where it lies and on what route it is to be found. The original Polynesians lacked all the necessary knowledge. If they reached an island, a lucky chance had put it in their way.
The intelligent and skillful inhabitants of New Zealand, the Maoris, have a saga which gives cause for reflection.
It tells us that in early times there was a King Kupe, who undertook what was obviously a land of scientific expedition in company with his two daughters and two birds. Kupe discovered the East Coast of New Zealand, went ashore and sent the two birds off to reconnoiter. One bird was given the task of measuring the marine currents and the drop in the rivers, the other had to analyze berries and plants to see if they were edible. The first bird broke its wings while measuring a waterfall and being lame could no longer fly. The second bird, so the Maori saga goes, discovered such a delicious kind of berry that it decided to spend the rest of its life in the forest. Kupe never saw it again. Consequently, it continues, King Kupe and his daughters could not return home.
Why couldn’t they?
The king still had the canoe with which he began the expedition. Both daughters, presumably athletic young ladies, were with him. In spite of this, the journey home was impossible. Did he use the clever birds, which could do far more than just fly according to the saga, for navigation?
The remarkable nature of this tale is far exceeded in the oldest Maori legend, which claims that New Zealand was fished from the waters of the deep by the god Maaui!
The legend relates that Maaui hooked a fish that fought and bit and snapped so wildly that the god got into a rage and cut and hacked the fish to bits . . . and that is why New Zealand is in pieces the way it is.
Today the Maoris still call the North Island Te Ika-A-Maaui, the fish of Maaui, after the traditional legend of their forefathers, while the South Island (Stewart Island) is the god’s boat to them. The Mahia peninsula, Te Matau a Maaui, is the fishhook, the Wellington region, Te Upoko O Te Ika, the head, and the North Auckland peninsula, Te Hiku O Te Ika, the fish’s tail.
That is a story that bears thinking about. When the god Maaui caught land, there were no maps in existence. But one look at the atlas confirms how accurately this legend outlines the shapes of New Zealand. You can see the ray-like fish with its open mouth in the south, and the long tail in the north with one fin on the hook.
From time immemorial the Polynesians have been fishermen themselves, they have caught the “fruits of the sea” of all lands on hooks or in nets, and probably like fishermen everywhere they told tall stories about their catches. But they always knew that it was impossible to angle or fish for
land
. Nevertheless, legends on all the islands claim that the god Maaui was the “fisher of land.”
With a touch of our magic wand let us turn the god Maaui into that valiant aviator Charles Lindbergh who flew the 3,750 miles from New York to Paris in 33 hours on May 20 and 21, 1927. Alone in the wind lashed, one-engined machine, all he could see below him was water, water, water. One and a half days all alone high above the water—a nightmare! Way down below Lindbergh saw a dark spot. A big fish? An island? A shoal of fish? An archipelago? Lindbergh slowly reduced altitude until he recognized that the dark spot in the Atlantic consisted of islands. The lone aviator’s tension relaxed; he had “fished” a bit of land. Very funny, I shall be told, because the Polynesians in the remote past had not mastered the art of flying.
I am convinced with a probability bordering on certainty that the earliest Polynesians could fly.
The objects cataloged as masks will easily be recognized as poor copies of one-man flying machines by anyone who does not obstinately claim in the face of all prehistoric evidence that they are “religious masks,” “ritual garments” or “ritual requisites” (whichever suits the anthropologists best) and who is also prepared to interpret the finds on Polynesian islands (and elsewhere) from the modern point of view. The “masks” were pulled over the head from above; the movable flat wooden side pieces were nothing more or less than wings. One can see the holes for fitting the arms through at the other end. Even the arm and leg supports, yes, the whole “corset” into which the aviator had to squeeze himself, have remained a memory to Polynesian folk artists for millennia. Obviously they no longer know why they decorate and equip their gods and kings with such complicated apparatuses. No one has been able to
fly
with this gear for many, many thousands of years. But in the remote times when Maaui “fished” the islands, certain specialists among the population
could
fly with these machines!
In the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, which houses the biggest Polynesian collection in the world, several long passages are full of these flying machines. Large numbers of similar machines are stored in the Museum in Auckland. These admittedly poor copies of very early flying machines have been promptly and without exception declared “ritual attributes” on all sites and in all museums.
The four-winged beings in Assyria were ritual beings. Pottery artifacts with technical drawings of circular and spherical ornaments were ritual objects.
The technical-looking objects in the hands of the statues of Tula were ritual objects.
The space traveler on the tombstone at Palenque was an Indian in a ritual pose.
The clearly recognizable packs and tubes (supply systems) on the backs of Mayan priests were ritual accouterments.
And naturally the fiber frames on the Polynesian islands were also turned into ritual masks.
Such stupidity reminds me of the title of a novel by Mosheh Y. Ben-Gavriel,
Camels Drink from Dry Wells, Too
.
The Polynesians did not discover the key to the art of flying on their own. They had teachers, who spent some time on earth in ages unknown to us. Since they came from an extremely advanced civilization, I assume that technical trifles were a spare-time hobby for them and that one of their inventions was the rocket-belt. Americans and Russians use these one-man flying machines, originally constructed for space travel, to take individual commandos to their destination over hills and rivers. Even one-man helicopters are no longer a Utopian idea. Rotor blades are mounted on a motor carried on the back, on the chest is a small box with the controls. If a child was given some wood and straw and asked to knock up a strange aviator like those that he had seen on television, a “ritual mask” would certainly result. But the child would consider it as “his” flyer.
Now it would clearly be exceeding the ration of audacity I have allowed myself if I were to claim that the earliest ancestors of the Polynesians had teachers from an alien technologically advanced civilization from the cosmos . . . if the South Seas peoples’ legends did not do precisely that.
In his
Ancient History of the Maori
, New Zealand, 1889, John White has assembled South Sea legends with the scrupulous care of a scholar. When he began his work in 1880, he was told many prehistoric stories at first hand by the priests. The subjects in the first volume alone show where the origin of prehistory is to be sought:
“The god’s family tree
The story of the creation
War in the universe
The creation of man and woman
The Flood and stories about the Ark
Marriages between gods and men
Journeys between the earth and other stars
Food that fell from heaven.”
“His appearance was
like a shining star,
like a fiery flame,
like a sun.”
“The ground was stirred up,
Clouds of dust blocked our gaze,
The noise rolled like thunder,
Then like the rushing sound in a mussel shell.”
The warriors were given fresh courage by this display of strength by the god and overran their astounded enemies.
In the Tawhaki legend the maiden Hapai descends from the seventh heaven to earth to spend the nights there with a “handsome man.” This chosen man knows nothing of the maiden’s origin; not until she is pregnant does she reveal the “truth” that she came from a distant world beyond his ken where she held the rank of goddess. Then, no longer a maiden, she brings a daughter into the world and after giving birth returns into the cosmos.
The multiplicity of aids with which the mystery-enshrouded deities return to the universe is bewildering. Sometimes endless ladders are used, which then disappear and are never seen again, sometimes towers are present to aid the start, sometimes spiders’ webs or vine tendrils are strong enough to set the travelers moving heavenwards, but they are also often carried by birds or dragons, or enter the void on ropes. But whatever the variant an old woman is always present at take-off. Crouching on the ground, she counts potatoes. She warns the deities of “winds that blow earthwards” and then she throws the potatoes into the fire, one after another, nine, eight, seven, six, five . . . The old woman organized a regular countdown, just like they do at a Space Center.
In
Polynesian Mythology
, Wellington, New Zealand (undated), there is a legend which the Polynesian fishermen used to tell:
“The warrior Uenuku was walking along the shore by the sea when he saw a column of mist floating in the air above the beach. He summoned up his courage and approached the apparition. He saw two wondrous fair maidens who had descended from heaven to bathe in the sea. Driven by an irresistible force he went up to the maidens and greeted them respectfully. Delighted by the sight, he asked one of them to accompany him to his house and be his wife.
“The fair one answered:
‘I love this world.
It is not cold and empty
like the lofty space up there.’”
It is remarkable that the simple Polynesian fishermen should mention a cold, empty, lofty space “up there” in their legend. They knew a lot about land and sea, but how did they know about the lofty space up there?
The same source supplies a really grotesque legendary account:
Rupe, who also appears under the name of Maui Mua, set forth to seek his sister Hinaura. As he could not find her, he sought the advice of his ancestor Rehua, who lived in heaven in a place called Te Putahi Hui O Rehua.
Rupe girded and masked himself and climbed up to the heaven.
He reached a place where men lived and asked:
“Are the heavens above this heaven inhabited?”
“Yes, they are inhabited,” he was told.
“Can I reach these heavens?”
“No, you will never be able to reach them for these heavens were built by Tane.”
Rupe struggled up to the second heaven and again found men, whom he also asked:
“Are the heavens above these heavens inhabited?”
“Yes, but you will never be able to reach them because they were built by Tane.”
Yet again Rupe struggled upwards and again he found a place that was inhabited.
“Are the heavens above these heavens inhabited?”
“Yes, but you will never reach them, for your mask is not by Tane.”
Rupe did not give up, laboriously and with his last remaining strength he reached the tenth heaven where he found Rehua (also known as Hinaura).
The Ancient History of the Maori
tells us that this almighty Tane was the god of the forests and animals. One legend recounts that he created the first woman and another that after the
second great war in the heavens
Tane forced the rebel gods to descend to
other worlds in the darkness to live there in despair for eternity.
But Tane supplied the losers of the cosmic battle with all his knowledge and skills for their flight into damnation.
Is it necessary to explain this perfectly clear text any further? Need I point out that apparatuses and masks were necessary for a flight in the universe? Do I have to tell a generation that watched all stages of the moon flight live on television that one heaven after another has to be conquered? And that to do this tremendous know-how is essential, whether NASA or Tane is involved.
I should also like to remind readers of the main work of the Cabbala, the Book Zohar, which contains Rabbi Simon Bar Jochai’s report of a conversation between an earth-dweller and a being stranded from the world of Arqua. Refugees, who had survived a terrestrial catastrophe, were walking along led by Rabbi Yossé when they met a stranger who suddenly emerged from a crack in the rock. Yossé asked the stranger where he came from. He answered:
“I am an inhabitant of Arqua.”
The surprised Rabbi asked:
“You mean that there are living creatures on Arqua?”
The stranger replied:
“Yes. When I saw you coming, I climbed out of the hole to find out the name of the world on which I had landed.”
And he said that in “his” world the seasons were different from those in “their” land, that there seed and harvest would only renew themselves after several years and that the inhabitants of Arqua
visited all worlds and spoke all languages.
The Cabbala mentions seven different worlds, but it also says that only Arqua sent emissaries to earth.
These direct and unequivocal references to other worlds (other planets) are there in the legends. I cannot change them. They are always interpreted with the old exegeses that have led nowhere. Yes, say the exegetes, such legends cannot be explained unless one adopts the way of thinking of our remote ancestors. But do they do that? They
think
they do. In reality the conceptual world of prehistoric peoples, some of whom have vanished without trace, simply cannot be recreated in retrospect, we can only guess that they
must
have thought in such and such a way. It is only an assumption. Every interpretation is ensnared and caught in the way of thinking of the age in which it is made, but even then with limitations.
