Easter Island: Riddles of the Navel of the World
In many world maps and geographical atlases, it doesn't appear at all. It's smaller than the island of Elba, lost in the Pacific Ocean, 1,600 km from the nearest inhabited place and nearly 4,000 km from the Chilean coast in South America. It has a population of just 2,000 people: it's Easter Island, Rapa Nui, belonging to Chile. Yet, this insignificant little island of only 162 km2 is one of the most famous places in the world for mysteries.
It was discovered in 1686, but it was only on Easter Day of 1722 that the Dutch admiral Jacob Roggeveen had the courage to challenge the warlike natives with a proper exploration. The local population considered the island te pito te henua (the navel of the world) because they believed it was all that remained of the world in terms of survivors and emerged lands after the universal flood and destruction.
The island is full of gigantic statues made of volcanic stone, the moai, which were regarded with great disdain by the indigenous people. Currently, there are around 600 of them. More than half, at the time of discovery, had been overturned, while others lay unfinished in quarries. It is believed that a large number of moai were thrown into the sea or destroyed by the indigenous people, and in recent times, others have been stolen.
What remains standing today of the array of moai, in their original positions, stand with their backs to the sea and face towards the interior of the island. These sculptures vary in size, ranging from 90 cm to 11 meters in height. The largest, which are 20 meters tall, remain unfinished and lie in the quarries of the Rano Kao volcano, still surrounded by the tools necessary for their creation. They almost obsessively reproduce the same model (perhaps a deified ancestor) and were originally adorned with a red hat. There is no trace left of the sculptors who apparently abandoned their work in great haste. The island itself is an impenetrable mystery: how did the indigenous people reach such a remote place with such primitive navigation tools?
The white color of the skin and the beard of the original inhabitants is even more perplexing because it implies ethnically distant origins. How did they manage to reach such a distant place by sea and acquire the skills necessary to manufacture these large statues of hard stone? Some scholars, including Thor Heyerdahl, believe that the islanders are the result of a mixture of Nordic, Peruvian, and Polynesian civilizations who somehow survived a long journey using rafts and landed on the island. Unable to repair their boats due to the lack of trees on the island, they settled there. Initially, the knowledge they brought from their places of origin enabled the construction of the moai. However, weakened by isolation and the scarcity of resources on the island, they regressed, forgetting even the original purpose of those works.
According to another theory, the island was subsequently deforested precisely for the construction of the moai and to sustain the population, leading to an ecological disaster that caused desertification and cultural decline among the inhabitants.
Another hypothesis suggests that Easter Island is a remnant of Atlantis, Mu, or Lemuria (ancient analogous continents that supposedly sank in ancient times), and the moai represent its original inhabitants or ruling class. According to a variant of this theory, the moai represent beings from another world (extraterrestrials) who brought civilization to the lost continent before the universal flood. This civilization and technological progress, of which few survivors around the world, including the Easter Islanders, have almost completely lost the memory, preserving sporadic testimonies in artifacts and ancient buildings far more advanced than their current level of knowledge.
It is undeniable that the moai bear a strong resemblance to Incan art, both in structure and craftsmanship. It is also undeniable that the islanders have white skin and physical characteristics of both Europeans and Polynesians, although they are lost in the Pacific Ocean.
It is certain that a strong religious motivation and an organized social structure capable of mobilizing many people were necessary for the construction and placement of these large statues. It is equally certain that technical expertise was required to quarry the stone, carve it according to a precise design, transport it to the installation site, and then raise and orient it in the desired position.
Something significant must have happened in the island's history, leading the islanders to lose their historical and cultural memory. This original culture of Easter Island also included knowledge of writing, which has been lost and forgotten since the indigenous people are no longer able to decipher the ancient rongo-rongo inscriptions on sacred tablets. Perhaps, however, local priests are still able to decipher them but prefer to keep the secret, given the absolute prohibition for foreigners to enter certain sacred caves where inscriptions are engraved. It is precisely on this script that the most fascinating mystery of Rapa Nui resides. Its hieroglyphs are practically identical to those of the ancient city of Mohenjo-daro, in distant India. As seen in the illustration below, the similarity is such that it excludes a simple coincidence, especially considering that India is literally on the other side of the world from Easter Island.
To reach it by sea, one must circumnavigate half of South America, pass beneath Africa, and then sail back up to the destination: a nautical feat utterly inconceivable for a raft or canoe! This involves navigating halfway around the world by sea (once reaching India, there's still a considerable overland journey to make along the Indus River valley). The two inscriptions have remained undeciphered, although in 1996 an American scholar, Steven Fisher, announced in the New Scientist magazine that he had deciphered 22 tablets from Easter Island.
According to Fisher, these are sacred writings that describe the creation of the world through a series of myths with a distinctly erotic character. It's a pity that the journalist from the well-known Roman daily who mentioned the discovery, caught up in declaring the mysteries revealed, did not bother to describe any of these texts or address the intriguing and significant similarities with Indian inscriptions. In fact, the mysteries of Rapa Nui remain stubbornly intact to this day.
In their rituals, the islanders give great importance to the cult of the birdman. A cult that resurfaces persistently in numerous ancient myths of Celtic, North African, Arabian, and Middle Eastern populations. The rare wooden sculptures depict the bodies of ancestors displayed for ritual defleshing, a funeral ceremony closely linked to the bird cult (especially the vulture) recurring in ancient Middle Eastern and North African civilizations. Rock carvings depict the birdman holding an egg, recalling when men competed to collect the first egg laid on an islet facing the beaches of Rapa Nui, the same birdman found in North Africa, the Middle East, and Celtic culture.
Are these merely ceremonial coincidences or scattered remnants of an ancient common culture worldwide? Nowadays, more and more scholars are inclined to hypothesize that there was a pinnacle of scientific and technological achievement in human evolution around 10,000 years before Christ, followed by a sudden barbarization of the few survivors who had to start over from scratch due to a global catastrophe. Over centuries and millennia, survivors slowly transformed memories of their past into myths. This theory would explain a certain common cultural and mythological heritage throughout the ancient world.
To cite an example, the worldwide myth of a continent sinking into the sea from which ancestors came, connected with another worldwide myth of a universal flood from which only a few chosen ones were saved.
