Lemuria, the Pacific Atlantis
Lemuria [Mu or Mu’A for short] was a huge continent or several large islands said to have existed in the South Pacific, and which, according to Edgar Cayce [the American psychic, famous for his “readings”], began to vanish “even before Atlantis”, in 10,700 BC. About this time, the last Ice Age ended rather abruptly. The cause was probably an asteroidal impact wreaking climatic and geological havoc, including violent vulcanity, and sea level rises due to ice sheet [most of them were a few km thick] melting.
In Polynesian legend their “paradise”, the continent of Hawiki or Havaiiki [located in Indonesia] was destroyed, seemingly Krakatoa and Thira style, by a cataclysmic volcaniceruption. Similarly devasted was the Hindu “paradise” [their Eden] of Atala, Patala [“Pure Land”] or Sutala [“the Sunken Land”], which lay far to the east. The culprit was Atala’s lofty Holy Mountain, Meru or Atalas [the original Greek Atlas]. [India and Eden have the same Sanksrit root, “ind”, meaning “fire”.]
The capital, Tripura, enclosed by metal-coated triple stone walls, is reminiscent of Plato’s Royal City and the Greek Hadean realm of Tartarus. The palaces and temples, like those of the Incas and Minoans, were covered in precious metals [gold symbolised the Sun, silver the Moon]. In the Hindu epic, the Ramayana, Lanka [“Queen of the Waves”] was, like Tripura, sited on Meru, the cause of its ultimate fate. Regarding the glacial meltwater, Bruce Heezen, an oceanographer of the Lamont Geological Observatory, demonstrated that, globally, sea levels rose about 100-150 metres. Consequently, Poseidia and Antilla were “drowned”, as was most of Mu. Plato, in his Critias, likened the remaining islands to
“the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth having wasted away, and only the bare framework...left.”
If you examine a seabed map of the Pacific you can see where “fat” now lies. There are sunken plateaus bounded by a) the Caroline, Gilbert, Marshall and Solomon Islands, and b) Fiji, the New Hebrides and Samoa. More “submarine” land lies around Christmas and Easter Islands, the Galapagos, the Marquesas, New Caledonia, and Pitcairn Islands. Thus, it will comes as no surprise that the “ruins scattered...on islands across the Pacific” are situated in these locations. Several have truncated step pyramids [curiously Mayan in appearance]: Bora Bora, Malden Island, Kiribati, the Marquesas, the Society Islands, Tahiti and Yap Island. Then there are the enigmatic stone heads or moai on Easter Island, about 600 or so.
One of the most interesting sites is Nan Modal, near the island of Pohnpei [sounds a bit like Pompeii, doesn’t it?]. This metropolis is built on about 100 artificial islands and covers an area of 11 square miles! Buildings line dikes and canals, and are constructed from volcanic basalt, varying in length from 3 to 25 feet. In weight they range from 5 to 25 tons! The city was divided into 3 areas. The religious centre was in the Upper City, the royal residence [containing a palace and feasting hall] in the Lower City, and, within the immense perimeter walls, tombs. Charles Berlitz suggested that, because of its scale in relation to its location, “part of an even greater metropolis” [The Dragon’s Triangle, London, 1990, pg 171] had been submerged. This calls to mind the extensive sunken ruins in the Caribbean.
According to Berlitz, remains of other cities have been sighted near Nan Modal.
In 1939, Herbert Rittiger, a German writer, claimed that
“divers had observed well preserved streets, pillars, monoliths, and vaults, and that Japanese divers...brought up...precious stones and jewels from the site.”[Ibid, pg. 171]
In 1980 Dr. Arthur Saxe wrote that a line of boulders had been discovered, while other dives had found columns and inscriptions. David Childress’s Ancient Micronesia & the Lost City of Nan Modal [Illinois, 1998] has wonderful colour photos of all these features, taken by the author. Two of the glyphs shown are a square and cross. The writing transcribed on Oleai Island by John Macmillan Brown [pg. 93] is an odd mixture including Celtic runes, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Greek letters and several ancient Middle Eastern and N. African scripts [including Phoenician]!
This gives weight to the theory of Prof. Barry Fell, a Harvard lecturer, who not only argued, in America BC, that the earliest Pacific settlers were the Egyptians, but also that Native American peoples were descended from the cultures those scripts originated from. Another point in Fell’s favour is the Pacific-wide worship of the Egyptian Sun God Ra. Worldwide's similarities are an indication of close trading links or a global “Super Culture”, such as Atlantis. The third idea is global migration.
According to Stephen Oppenheimer, 20,000-18,000 years ago the continent of Sundaland, as it’s known, was
“twice the size of India, and included what we now call Indo-China, Malaysia and Indonesia. The South China Sea, the Gulf of Thailand and the Java Sea, formed the connecting parts... .”[Eden in the East, London, 1998, pg. 10]
There are also sunken tracts of Pacific coastline, which once covered the East China and Yellow Seas, and linked China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. Apparently, the present location of Hong Kong and other Chinese ports were “hundreds of miles inland during the last Ice Age” [pg 10]. These areas were submerged by the Great Flood. Oppenheimer says there is “ample oceanographic evidence” [pg. 7] showing there were in fact “three sudden ice melts” [pg. 10], rather than a single massive one. He dated these to “between 14,000 and 7,000 years ago” [pg. 10]. In the latter stages, Oppenheimer argued, a sea-level rise of 120-130 metres led people to abandon their doomed homeland.
At the end of the nineteenth century Augustus le Plongeon, an explorer of Mayan sites, interpreted one of that cultures surviving texts, the Troano Codex. He claimed that one section detailed the destruction of Mu. His ideas were apparently supported by the discovery in the 1930s of the so-called “Naacal” tablets by James Churchward, an American businessman and explorer. He claimed to have copied them in a Tibetan monastery at Brahmaputra. His sketches show that
“increased levels of solar radiation cause the overheating of the landmass, the release of subterranean gases and the sinking of the land itself.”[Maurice Cotterell, The Tutankhamun Prophecies, London, 1999, pg. 25]
The Sun expanded the trapped gases and caused them to escape, and, once this happened, Mu destabilised and sank. Not exactly the volcanic cataclysm described in Polynesian legends, is it? Le Plongeon said that Mayan texts and buildings proved they sailed from Meso-America to establish civilization across the Pacific and Indian Ocean, ending up in Egypt. Churchward went further. The Muvians, he believed, travelled from Mu to Atlantis 25,000 years ago, taking pyramid building technology with them. Like Edgar Cayce, Churchward said that Atlantean knowledge subsequently spread to Egypt and Mexico, hence apparent cultural similarities.
Their ideas are lent credence by Oppenheimer’s linguistic studies which show that Muvian migrants dispersed as far afield as “China, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean” [Eden in the East, back cover], including Crete. These influxes greatly affecting the Neolithic cultures of those places. Cotterell has found evidence suggesting that, c. 10,600 BC (Cayce’s date for the end of Lemuria), Egypt was settled by three migrant peoples:
“Africans from central Africa, an unknown people from the heart of Asia, and a group from Libya thought to have journeyed from ... Atlantis.”[Tutankhamun Prophecies, pg 37]
Oppenheimer says that the Sumerians had “an electrifying effect” [Eden in the East, pg. 9] on the native Ubaidian’s. As an examples, he cites the innovations in farming, pottery manufacture and metallurgy. The first and third he considers “great revolutions” [pg. 5]. His third “great revolution” is the “simultaneous flowering” [pg. 5] of Near Eastern civilizations, such as Sumer, Upper Egypt and the Indus Valley, between 3,200 and 2,500 BC. Egyptian unification under King Narmer [Upper - the south - and Lower - the north - has been dated to c. 3,000 BC].
The social arrangements of the migrants were different from their Neolithic predecessors and those whose lands they settled in. They erected great buildings, such as ziggurats, pyramids, palaces and temples, located in city states governed by a hierarchy. Their rulers were god-kings and priests, their language written in glyphs and pictograms.
Based on their “discoveries” archaeologists and academics have opted for independent developments [through evolution of ideas]. However, Oppenheimer favours the theory of ideas developing in “one cultural region over a long period” [pg. 5], then spreading via trade, communication and migration by land and sea. He says that archaeologists have been playing safe,
“rather than risk ridicule by having to prove how inventions were transmitted over a great distance.”[Ibid., pg. 5]
One catalyst, he argues, is catastrophic geographical destruction, such as that of Sundaland. Another example he cites is the Krakatoa-like devastation of Thira in the Mediterranean, which J.V. Luce, Peter James and others claim was Atlantis. The final eruption has been dated by dendrochronology [tree ring dating] to 1,628 BC, and is said to have destroyed Minoan cities on Crete. Pottery and other evidence, though, suggests c. 1,450 BC, and, for me, this fits with David Rohl’s date for the Exodus.
One thing is becoming clear. Despite what archaeologists and academics say, there definitely existed thousands of years ago a Super Culture or Cultures that influenced and shaped the course of global cultural development. In short, ATLANTIS AND MU WERE REAL PLACES!
