Aside from where the tourists go, there are buildings whose origins are riddles and whose purpose is still not understood, such as those in the expanses of the blue Pacific. That is where Pohnpei is located, which is, at 540 km2, the largest of the Caroline Islands. Various small islands surround Pohnpei, and one of them, a mere 0.44 km2 in size, is called Temwen. This diminutive, tropical islet is a little bit smaller than Vatican City, yet it bears a monumental riddle: the ruins of Nan Madol.
These buildings consist of tens of thousands of hexagonal basalt columns stacked on top of one another, block house style, like heavyweight matches. Is there historical information about Pohnpei and its island satellites? (Image 1)
• In 1595, the first European man, the Portuguese Pedro Fernandes de Quiros, circumnavigated the island group in the San Jeronimo and dropped anchor off Nan Madol. The walls of Pohnpei appeared in the faint light like an other-worldly palace. Not a human soul anywhere.
• In 1826, the Irish seaman James O’Connell was shipwrecked off Pohnpei. He succeeded in reaching the safety of land with six other survivors. He married the 14-year-old daughter of the king of the island and remained there for 11 years, until a ship picked him up and took him back to Ireland.
• In 1851, the indigenous people massacred the crew of an English ship. In response, the British navy created a bloodbath on the island.
• From 1880 onward, Christian missionaries from various groups traveled to Temwen. Stone tablets with unfamiliar writing were destroyed in the ruins of Nan Madol; the ancient customs were forbidden.
• In 1886, the whole island group was annexed by Spain. The new owners called it the Caroline Islands, because Charles II was on the throne.
• In 1899, Spain sold the Carolines to the German Empire.
• In 1910, the native inhabitants rebelled. Missionaries and officials were murdered. Only a few Europeans escaped the massacre.
• In 1911, the German cruiser Emden shelled the islands. The rebels were slaughtered without mercy, their leaders hanged from palm trees.
• In 1919, Germany had lost the First World War, and Japan received a mandate to administer all the Caroline Islands.
• In 1944, during the Second World War, the American navy occupied the islands. Wealthy Japanese were expelled.
• In 1947, the islands were declared a trust territory of the United States.
Anyone who visited the ruins of Nan Madol in their checkered history was faced with a riddle. How did the tens of thousands of basalt blocks arrive on the tiny island? What methods were used to lift the blocks, weighing up to 20 tonnes each? The highest wall still stands at 14.3 meters high, higher than a three-story building. (Images 2–5) What did the ground consist of? A substrate of coral will not bear heavy buildings of the dimensions of Nan Madol. Indeed, what was the purpose of the complex? What was there to defend on a tiny island very distant from any civilization in the South Pacific?
Basalt is cooled lava, and there is, indeed, a basalt quarry on the north coast of Pohnpei. It is about 25 kilometers distant from Nan Madol. Basalt can come out of the earth in various forms—in Pohnpei, it is in the form of polygonal columns. It is thought that the builders of Nan Madol suspended the basalt columns under their canoes or rafts to reduce their weight. Then they waited for high tide and rowed the heavy cargo to Nan Madol. Why were the buildings not erected directly on the “basalt island” of Pohnpei itself? What was so important about Nan Madol? Furthermore, Nan Madol consists of numerous canals, some of them as small as 2 meters in width. How were the basalt transporters supposed to have been maneuvered around the bends into the canals? This transport method relied on the alternation of high and low tide to work. The workers had to wait for low tide to attach the basalt columns under the rafts, then for high tide to transport them. How many rafts might have been in use at the same time in this endless exercise with low and high tides? How many ropes made of coconut fiber were required; how many trees were felled for the rafts?
Nan Madol is a mighty complex consisting of canals, ditches, tunnels, staircases, earthworks, and walls. (Images 6–13) The rectangular main district is stepped in terraces and surrounded by more than 80 smaller sub-districts. I took the trouble to count the basalt blocks on one side of a building. There were 1,082 columns.
The complex is square, which means that the four walls are made up of 4,328 columns. Then there is the floor, also made of basalt, the staircases, and terraces. In total, there are about 10,000 blocks for a single structure. An estimate for the total Nan Madol complex produces about 180,000 blocks—not including the substructure lying under water.
Nan Madol is not a “beautiful” city, although today it is described as “the Venice of the South Pacific.” There are no reliefs, no sculptures, no statutes, and no paintings. The architecture is cold, forbidding, in some ways raw and threatening—not something we associate with a royal palace. Was the whole thing a defensive complex? Why, then, do broad staircases send out exactly the opposite message? Welcome! At the center of the complex, there is a “well,” which isn’t one. A well in this location, surrounded by salt water, does not make any sense at all, because it could only supply salt water. The native inhabitants describe the “well” as an entrance to the start or end of a tunnel. Today the opening lies almost 2 meters under water, even at low tide. Where is this tunnel supposed to have gone? How were the native peoples supposed to have built it under water? Everything in Nan Madol is a contradiction.
I read in Herbert Rittlinger’s book, Der maßlose Ozean, that, thousands of years ago, Nan Madol formed the center of a glorious empire. The reports of fabulous treasure had attracted pearl fishers and Chinese traders to explore the ocean floor secretly. The divers had returned from the depths with incredible tales of “streets and stone arches, monoliths and the remains of houses.”1
In 1908, a German expedition explored Pohnpei and Nan Madol. Dr. Paul Hambruch focused his work particularly on Nan Madol and the indigenous sagas and myths.2 According to Hambruch, two young magicians once wanted to build a large cultural center for gods and spirits. They tried at various sites on the coast, but each time the wind and waves destroyed their work.
Finally, they found the right place on Temwen. In response to a magic incantation, the basalt columns flew by themselves from the island of Jokaz to Temwen and put themselves in the right order without any human intervention. That was how Nan Madol was created. (Images 14–21)
Originally, the German ethnologist Paul Hambruch writes in the second volume of his Ergebnisse der Südsee-Expedition,3 a fire-breathing dragon had been the symbol of Nan Madol. The mother of the dragon had scooped out the canals with her mighty snorting. A magician had ridden on the dragon. When he spoke a particular incantation in verse form, the basalt columns from the neighboring island had flown there by themselves and had formed themselves into the walls.
Dragons? Fire-breathing? Magic incantations? Total nonsense at first sight. But how were Stone Age peoples supposed to have imagined a noisy monster, as excellently demonstrated in the science fiction film Avatar? A technical monster for which their language had no words? Incidentally, the dragon motif is a global element of many myths. The most ancient sagas of the Chinese refer to fire-breathing dragons, as do the Maya in Central America, the pre-Inca tribes in Bolivia, the Tibetans in their highlands, and even the Swiss in the Bernese Oberland. Excuse me?
I live in a small village, Beatenberg, a delightful place in the mountains above Lake Thun. There is a limestone cave below me in the rock: the dwelling of the former dragon. So an artificial dragon was put at the end of the cave, with dramatic lighting for the tourists. And the emblem of my village shows a picture of the dragon.4 Other legends about Nan Madol say that the ruins were the remains of the fabled kingdom of Lemuria.5
Before the Second World War, Japanese divers are said to have discovered sarcophagi with platinum bars in the depths under Nan Madol. Tall tales? It has not, to date, been possible to solve the riddle of Pohnpei with the ruins of Nan Madol. And there is a connection with legends and structures on various islands in the South Pacific. (“South Pacific” is used here only as a collective term; it refers to the gigantic area of the Pacific south of the equator.)
As long ago as 1880, the ethnologist John White collected traditions from the South Pacific, which take on a completely new meaning when looked at from a modern perspective. Thus the Rongomai legend refers to a tribe called Ngati Haua, which sought protection against attack in a fortified village. Finally, they asked for help from their god Rongomai: “His appearance was like a shining star, like a fiery flame, like a sun.”6
Rongomai descended to the village square: “The earth was churned up, clouds of dust obscured the view, the noise was like thunder, then like the murmur of a sea shell.”7
Compare that with a legend from a completely different geographical area:
…strike down the enemy before you in the briefest time. Thereupon Hor-Hut flew up to the sun in the form of a sun disc with wings attached…when he saw the enemy from heavenly heights…he charged down upon them with such might that they neither saw with their eyes nor heard with their ears…Hor-Hut, shining in many different colors, returned to the ship Ra Harmachis in his shape as a large, winged sun disc.8
Is that allowed? To compare an ancient Egyptian account with a legend from the distant South Pacific? We have to! We no longer live in an age of isolation.
On the island of Raivavae in French Polynesia, the ancient temple of Te Mahara is still today deemed to be the point at which the mythological god Maui landed after his space flight.9 The same applies to the original inhabitants of Atuona, a small island in the Marquesas group. There, mount Kei Ani is considered to be a temple, although there are no buildings at the site. The original Polynesians called the mountain Tautini Etua, literally, “mountain on which the gods landed.”10
It is said about the creator god Ta’aroa of the Society Islands in the Pacific: “Ta’aroa sat in his sea shell, in the darkness for all eternity. The sea shell was like an egg which drifted in endless space. There was no heaven, no land, no sea, no moon, no sun, no stars. All was darkness.”11
And on the Samoan islands this is reported about the original god Tagaloa: “God Tagaloa swam in the void; he created everything. Before him there was no heaven, no land, he was all alone and slept in the expanses of space. Neither was there any sea, nor was the earth at that time. His name was Tagaloa-fa’atutupu-nu’u, which means ‘Origin of Growth.’”12
Does the Bible say anything different? Genesis 1:1–3 says, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light…”13 Later the Biblical god created plants, animals, and the human being. Growth only came after the landing. No different from Tagaloa-fa’atutupu-nu’u.
The originator of Melanesian culture, Suganainoni by name, is said to have descended from heaven in “smoke and fire”14 and to have disappeared again in an equally spectacular fashion. At the time, giants are said to have tried to build a giant stairway to heaven, an endeavor that was thwarted by the god Suganainoni. Is this a parallel to the Tower of Babel?
The South Pacific Islands are full of similar legends, and it is always possible to find a connection with the traditions in other parts of the world. Such a job was actually undertaken several decades ago. In an extensive tome, the ethnologist Karl Kohlenberg published hundreds of mythological links spanning the world.15 No discipline in ethnology has ever shown any interest in this. Ethnology appears to have become stuck in the century before last.
Thirty years ago, I spent some weeks on Kiribati, a group of 16 islands which, until 1977, were part of the British crown colony of the Gilbert Islands. Then the islands became independent and changed their name. Even today, the native inhabitants mostly live in simple straw huts with roofs made of palm leaves. (Image 22) At only about 973 km2, the Kiribati islands ride the Pacific and provide solid ground underfoot for about 60,000 Micronesians. According to the latest research, Kiribati has been inhabited for at least 3,000 years. Three thousand years without written records is a long time. In Tarawa, the main city of the islands, I immersed myself in the legends. They were not collected and published until the last century by indigenous researchers. And once again, it all started in space.16
A long, long time ago, there was the god Nareau. No one knows from whence he came or who his parents were, because Nareau flew alone and sleeping through space. In sleep he heard his name being called three times, but the caller was “nobody.” Nareau woke up and looked around. There was nothing but emptiness, but when he looked down, he saw a large object. It was Te Bomatemaki, meaning “Earth and sky together.” Nareau’s curiosity led him to descend and carefully set foot on Te Bomatemaki. There were no living beings there, no animals, no humans. Just him, the creator. Four times he circumnavigated the world he had found from north to south, east to west, and he was alone. Finally Nareau dug a hole in Te Bomatemaki, filled it with water and sand, mixed both into rock, and ordered the rock and the void to give birth to Nareau Tekikiteia. Thereupon Nareau created the plants, animals, and human beings, whom he taught language. Then he decided to separate heaven from earth.
The ethnologist Arthur Grimble provided an important addition: “And when the work was done, Nareau, the creator, said: ‘Enough! It has been done! I go, never to return!’ So he went, never to return, and no one knows where he has been since then.”17
The first beings endowed with reason had to memorize words, which give us food for thought:
• Nabawe meaning “the essence of age.”
• Karitoro meaning “the essence of energy.”
• Kanaweawe meaning “the essence of dimension.”
• Ngkoangkoa meaning “the essence of time.”
• Auriaria meaning “the essence of light.”
• Nei Tewenei meaning “comet” or “movement in the sky.”
I keep hearing arrogant critics who don’t know anything—or at best might have studied a few semesters of ethnology, and then only in relation to a restricted geographical area—say that common features are of no significance. They can be explained psychologically. Here Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) is always cited to lend support. He saw the myths of ancient civilizations as “archetypical developments of consciousness” in which the “collective unconscious” found its correspondence of good and evil, joy and punishment, life and death. For his theories of “individuation” and the “archetype,” Jung has to fall back on innate behaviors. Human beings had always wanted to be like birds. So the legends about flying had arisen.
What age are we living in? These psychological explanations not only stick in my craw, they are also totally divorced from reality. They attempt to destroy the common narrative of ancient peoples with the drip of psychological acid. All that remains is meaningless smugness.
On the basis of the knowledge we have today, the pattern associated with the creator Nareau (and others!) makes sense. Imagine a spaceship in which the pilot (presumably with the whole crew) lies in deep sleep. This option of deep sleep to keep astronauts alive over long distances has long been the subject of discussion in space medicine. At some point, the ship’s sensors determine that a solar system has been reached and the on-board computer wakes the pilot. Nareau flew alone and sleeping through space, in sleep he heard his name being called three times, but the caller was nobody.
The commander, who has now awoken back to life, still sees the blackness of space around him but below him also a planet. Nareau awoke and looked around him. There was nothing but emptiness, but when he looked down he saw a large object. It was Te Bomatemaki, meaning “Earth and sky together.”
Nareau risks a landing, and examines the ground and the composition of the air. He determines the absence of any life. Nareau’s curiosity led him to descend and carefully set foot on Te Bomatemaki. There were no living beings there, no animals, no humans. Just him, the creator. The initial exploration is insufficient. What do the other continents look like? So he circumnavigates the whole planet several times to assure himself that he has not invaded foreign sovereign territory. Four times he circumnavigated the world he had found from north to south, east to west, and he was alone.
With the technology he had available, Nareau quickly found ways to water the earth. Plant seeds, of which there were plenty on board, were taken down, and finally living beings were created. A genetic seed bank is required to create life forms. That, precisely, is likely to be part of the standard inventory on an interstellar space ship. The space travelers are unlikely to be able to tell from their distant home planet which planets provide the conditions for life, but do not have life on them. But why create life at all? The space travelers must survive, replenish their food stocks. That requires food and drink—organic material.
The Biblical creation story reports exactly the same thing. In it, God collects water and creates grasses, herbs, and trees. (Genesis 1: 9–12) Only then did the animals in the water, air, and on land follow—each one after their kind. And as the crowning event, he creates the human being—in his own image.
Astonishingly, the creation story of Nareau includes concepts such as “essence of energy,” “essence of dimension,” “essence of time,” and “essence of light.” Under “essence of light,” we might imagine a photon drive which can propel a spaceship to incredible speeds. But each acceleration is tied to the “essence of dimension.” Bridging huge distances is, in turn, linked to the “essence of time” and the age—the survival—of the crew (the “essence of age”). Makes a lot of sense, actually. For millennia, we were simply unable to understand it. Looked at from the perspective of the dawning space age, the veils are lifting.
Even today the inhabitants of Kiribati fear certain locations on the islands which are deemed to be “taboo points,” because “mighty spirits” were once at work there. With the assistance of the inhabitants, I was once allowed to visit two such taboo points on the southern tip of the island of Arorae. (Arorae belongs to Kiribati. Not to be confused with the island of Aurora.) There was a square hemmed in with stones on the ground. (Image 23) That was supposed to be a taboo point? As I tried to step into the rectangle, my companions held me back: “No! Please don’t step in there!” When I enquired further as to why not, I was told that anyone who walked over the square fell ill. The birds did not fly over it either. Indeed, not even weeds were growing inside the square. I obeyed the warning.
The second taboo point turned out to be a low, rectangular wall. An opening had been left in the middle like a well. (Image 24) I looked inside, but there was no water. The native inhabitants declared that if I held my hand over it, the hairs on the back of my hand would rise. I tried it and did indeed feel something like a pulsation.
The island of Arorae is just 4 kilometers long and a few hundred meters wide. At its southern tip, weather-worn rectangular stone blocks rise from the ground. Each block has a groove on its top edge, and each stone points in a different direction. My companions enlightened me that these were “navigation stones.” (Images 25 and 26)
What on earth were they? Two or more were made of granite, which is not found on the island; the others showed characteristics of basalt. Each stone, I learned, pointed to a different island. The ancestors had taken a bearing on distant destinations using the navigation stones before paddling off in their decorated canoes.
In my black bag, which has accompanied me for decades, there is also a map of the Pacific region and a compass. I aligned the map and compass and stood behind the stones. One groove indicating south pointed without deviation toward the island of Niutao, 1,800 kilometers away (linear distance). Niutao is part of the Ellice Islands. A longer line pointed precisely to West Samoa, a distance of 1,900 kilometers away (linear distance) to the east of the Fiji Islands. With a third line I took a bearing on the 4,700 kilometer-distant (linear distance) Tuamotu Islands in the southern Pacific. How could that be? Did the inhabitants of Kiribati know about the compass?
As one of my companions assured me with visible pride, yes! The ancestors had received the compass and instructions on how to use it from a god. He had been so large and strong that he could pick coconuts from the crowns of palm trees and also crush them in his hand. He had also “imprinted” his footsteps in the soil as a reminder.18 They had venerated these footprints long before the Christian missionaries arrived. I photographed them. (Image 27)
Evidence in stone honoring the gods exists throughout the scattered islands of the South Pacific. These structures, which are not understood, are mostly called marae and the reason for their existence is disputed. There is such a marae, a holy site, even on the world-famous tourist island of Tahiti. (Image 28) On the island of Raiatea in French Polynesia, there is a monolith in the center of the marae, which is said to be ensouled by mana. (Images 29–32) Mana is here considered to be a pulsation that can heal disease.
A terrible yet instructive legend throughout the South Pacific region, which is ascribed to the Maoris in New Zealand, is the story of the bird Rupe. Hina, a sister of the divine bird Rupe, is said once to have been made pregnant by a human being. He hid Hina on a distant island, in a house which was surrounded by a “protective screen.” This protective screen prevented any access from outside and made it impossible for Hina to leave her prison. As the hour when she was due to give birth neared, no one was able to assist her. In her suffering, she called out “Rupe! Rupe! Please help me!”19 Soon there was a loud noise over the house, and the divine Rupe called to his sister, “Hina, I am here.”
But Rupe was only able to reach his sister after he had broken through the “protective screen.” After giving birth, Hina asked her brother to fly her back home. But first he was to evacuate the inhabitants of the island. Rupe said that in order to do so he would have to make the flight three times, because there was not enough space on his back. So the islanders seated themselves on Rupe, who flew them far out over the ocean where he tipped them into the water. Finally, he collected Hina and her infant. Flying high up, Hina saw pieces of clothing that had belonged to the islanders floating on the ocean waves and asked her brother Rupe why he had killed the people. He answered, “They wronged you while you were living on their island. They locked you up and no one helped you at the birth. That is why I grew angry and threw them all into the ocean.” A brutal way to teach people to be helpful!
In the mass of literature on ethnology, I keep stumbling upon preconceived doctrines which were set down in these books in the last century or earlier, and which no one dares to challenge. Eyes have become blind, thoughts dull. Science, I read, cannot accept fantastical solutions, because they have no empirical foundation that can be verified. In fact, there are most certainly artifacts which can be verified by looking at them and which support the myths. Outdated views, no doubt espoused 60 years ago by learned scholars, are in my eyes growing more fantastical and incredible by the day, while a contemporary way of looking at things is gaining a solid foundation. Three prerequisites form the basis of all research: freedom of thought, the gift of observation, and a sense of context. I would like to add a fourth one to that: overcoming the spirit of the times.
It is not just in Indonesia that the multi-purpose bird Garuda—the mount of the god Vishnu—haunts the immortal traditions. (Image 33) Garuda independently dropped bombs, extinguished conflagrations, flew to the moon, and also transported people—as required. His depictions and reliefs in innumerable temples belong to the empirically verifiable foundation of Garuda research. Why should the same principle not apply to the gods of the South Pacific such as Rupe, Nareau, Tagaloa, Rongomai, or Pourangahua? The latter is part of the Maori legends of New Zealand and belongs as much to the flyers of antiquity as Garuda.
The god Pourangahua flew on a “magic bird” from Hawaiki to New Zealand. Tradition tells about this god Pourangahua: “I come and an unknown earth lies beneath my feet. I come and a new sky revolves above me. I come and the earth is a peaceful resting place for me.”20 The empirical foundation is provided by comparative mythology and the depictions of these gods in wood and stone.
Every year, rituals in honor of the ancient goods take place on the Fiji Islands. The masks worn by the dancers are bird masks (Image 34)—not, as psychologists would have you believe, because people have always had the desire to be like birds, but simply because the people of the South Pacific imitated their ancient gods. And in their world of ideas, they could fly. Thus in the often small museums in the Pacific region, we find so-called ritual clothing, ritual masks, ceremonial masks, or ritual props, which refer to ancient one-man flying machines. Image 35 shows the upper part of the Indonesian (also Indian) god Garuda. Here the two vertical pieces of wood symbolize the wings. The same motif can be seen in several manifestations in the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawaii. Images 36 and 37 show such ritual masks, which the dancers pull on over their heads. The upper arms are passed through the semi-circles at the bottom, depicting the flapping of wings when they are moved up and down. Image 38 shows such a wing mask in the rest position. The arm and other supports, often the whole corset itself into which the dancers had to squeeze themselves, have been remembered in the folklore for thousands of years. Images 39 and 40 illustrate the seated position of the ancient flyers as imagined by the artists. Image 41 shows a rather technical-looking flying fish carrying three people. The posture of the central figure appears to indicate that this is the “pilot.” A comparison of the image of the god Maui on the “fish” and the (alleged) ruler Pacal on the lid of the tomb in Palenque in Mexico (Image 42) speaks volumes. The two pictures should be looked at both horizontally and vertically. As the Biblical prophet Ezekial said, “They have eyes to see and see not.”
The capital of Tonga, the island group of south-western Polynesia, is called Nukualofa. There, on the main island of Tongatabu, tourists can admire various temple terraces, several stories high, which are still considered to be holy sites today. The largest monolithic structure is called Ha’amonga (Images 43 and 44), a stone gateway through which the god Rongomai will ceremoniously step at some time in the future. His return is anticipated like that of all the other gods.
Easter Island belongs into the extensive South Pacific chapter as much as Kiribati or Temwen. But so much has already been written about Easter Island—including by me!—that I only want to touch on the subject briefly. In doing so, I will add to the list of questions that are still unanswered despite all the research and literature.
Whom did the Easter Islanders actually want to depict with their statues? Some chief? The deceased race of highly venerated ancestors? Foreign visitors? The statues are most certainly not images of themselves. The inhabitants of the island are people with soft features, the slightly thick lips and broad noses of all Polynesians. The eyes are almond-shaped, the chin softly rounded.
The Easter Island statues, by contrast, depict robot-like, dull faces with small lips tightly pressed together, long, pointed noses, and deep-set eyes. They do not fit in with any cultural image. Whom, then, did the Easter Islanders chisel into stone? Whom did they venerate or fear? Which force—or belief, if you like—spurred them on to such labor?
The statues are said to have been created “only recently”—about 800 to, at most, 1,500 years ago. Such dating is based on charcoal remains and bones. The only problem is that these dates do not in any way explain the meter-thick layer of rubble which covered the statues. (Image 45) When they were discovered, only the heads were sticking out of the ground. The actual body was buried in the earth. I am lucky enough to have photographed Easter Island 50 years ago, at a time when it was not yet a tourist destination. The pictures document it. Of course, I am aware that Thor Heyerdahl21 found hundreds of fist-sized rocks beside the unfinished statues. It was concluded from this that they had been used to hew the figures out of the rock. But the distances between the rock and statues are up to 1.84 meters. (Image 46) And one of the statues in the Rano Raraku crater is 31.4 meters long. That cannot be done with fist-sized rocks. Do the thrown-away rocks simply prove that the work could not be done with them? The work was not finished, after all; the unfinished statues show that.
The indigenous inhabitants describe their tiny island as the “navel of the world.”22 Such a name can only be given if there is an awareness of at least a few other countries. Within a radius of 1,500 kilometers, there is merely one other tiny island. Then there is nothing else for a long, long time.
A public festival is still held today in which brave young men have to find an egg on a small rocky reef off the island and bring it back undamaged to the main island. Originally, it is said to have symbolized the egg of a birdman. Several stone eggs have been found among the rocks on Easter Island. (Images 47 and 48) They have an impressive diameter of up to 1 meter.
Birdman? South Pacific legends? There are rock engravings on Easter Island which show a hybrid creature consisting of a human being and bird in a squatting position. (Image 49) There are other misunderstood rock carvings on small walls, cave walls, or large slabs of rock, which wait unnoticed by the coast to be deciphered. (Images 50–53)
The figures originally wore red hats with a respectable head size. (Images 54–56) Were these hats intended to indicate the same thing as the “helmets” or “haloes” which can be found in rock art throughout the world?
There still remains the riddle of the writing. At one time, some of the statues wore small wooden tablets around their neck. Two of them are exhibited in the anthropological museum of Santiago de Chile. The engravings show a certain affinity with the writing of Mohenjo-daro, an ancient Indus Valley civilization (modern-day Pakistan). Only the dating does not fit. The settlement of Easter Island is thought to have occurred about 350 AD; the Mohenjo-daro civilization existed more than 2,000 years earlier. Nothing adds up.
The latest theory about Easter Island comes from the German archeologist Kurt Horedt.23 He discovered a remarkable similarity between Germanic runes and the illegible characters of Easter Island. Two lines of inscription with nine runes were discovered near Gallehus in Northern Schleswig (Germany) in the 16th and 17th century. Seven of them reappear in almost identical form on the wooden tablets of Easter Island. How is that possible?
Did northern Germanic peoples end up on Easter Island 1,500 years ago? That would also explain the features of the statues on Easter Island, according to the archeologist Kurt Horedt. Even the red hats on the heads of the statues could be identical with the shock of red hair of the Teutons. Was it ancient Germanic peoples, then, who served as a model for the statues? Shipwrecked sailors, perhaps, who set up all the statues around the shore of the island to draw attention to themselves? Were they supposed to draw the attention of the crews of other Germanic vessels who happened to have strayed into the area? After all, radio did not exist at the time.
Nothing is impossible. The thing that puzzles me is merely the question: how did Germanic peoples—long before Columbus!—get from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific?
North of Dunedin in New Zealand, there are about 100 spherical boulders lying on Moeraki Beach. The largest has a diameter of 3.16 meters. These giant geodes are literally flushed out of the rock, roll a few meters, come to a halt, and are then washed over by the daily tides. (Images 57 and 58) Many have broken apart, crumbling away as the result of the action of wind and waves. No one has any idea how many of the boulders have already been swallowed by the surf, worn down over thousands of years. (Images 59 and 60) Yet the rock keeps flushing out new boulders from the sediment as if a rock mother were laying eggs.
Geologists assure us that this is a perfectly natural process. The boulders are formed through the deposit of calcite in soft sandstone. This calcite forms a core around which the rock solidifies over millennia, rather like a pearl around a grain of sand. The comparison is flawed, however, because the oyster with the pearl is constantly in motion in the water; the rock, by contrast, does not move. Why, actually, does this geological miracle not happen on many other beaches around the world? And why would rock solidify around the calcite core as a ball? (Images 60–63)
The Maoris, the original inhabitants of New Zealand, call these boulders Te Kai-hinaki. The composite word consists of kai, meaning “food,” and hinai, meaning “basket.” An infinitely long time ago, the ship Arai-te-uru had been destroyed while searching for valuable gems. A hill not far from the beach showed the petrified hull of the vessel. The boulders that keep emerging from the rock contain the food (energy?), which fell out of the baskets when the ship was destroyed. Strange story.
Even stranger is the story of a spherical rock that was found on February 13, 1961, 6 miles north-east of Olancha at the edge of the Amargosa desert in California. At the time, Mike Mikesell, Wallace Lane, and Virginia Maxey were looking for minerals and were particularly on the lookout for geodes. The three owned a souvenir shop in Olancha, and they knew very well that geodes could be sold for a lot of money. This is because there are magnificent crystals inside a geode. About 120 meters above Owens Lake, the three discovered an irregularly shaped geode and laboriously hauled their find home. The next day, Mike Mikesell wanted to saw the rock in half to get to the crystals on the inside. As always, he used a diamond saw. Suddenly the saw snapped. A new saw blade suffered the same fate. Now the hardworking finders suspected that there might be a particularly valuable mineral inside the geode, perhaps even a diamond. They finally succeeded in splitting the geode in half with a great deal of effort and the assistance of a hammer and chisel. Their surprise could not have been greater: The outer skin consisted of a layer of sea fossils. This was followed by a layer that reminded them of petrified wood. Finally, there were two rings of a porcelain-like material, which in turn contained a plain pin 2 millimeters in diameter and 17 millimeters in length. (Images 64 and 65) That is what had broken the diamond saw. Geologists, none of whom want to reveal their name, estimate the age of the geode at about 500,000 years.
What is it that does not fit about the earth’s past? It is completely impossible that the plain pin, whose composition has never been discovered, could have entered the geode from the outside. After all, the pin assumes a high level of knowledge of metallurgy of some kind—and of a workshop—500,000 years ago.
