Printed in the Fall 2022 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "From the Editor's Desk" Quest 110:4, pg 2
It’s natural to associate the idea of other worlds with life on faraway planets as well as the subtle levels of reality described by the esoteric traditions.
Lately, though, my thoughts have been going toward the other worlds that may have existed on this planet. I’ve just finished a fascinating new book by Carole Nervig entitled The Petroglyphs of Mu: Pohnpei, Nan Madol, and the Legacy of Lemuria.
Nervig started out as a Peace Corps volunteer on Pohnpei in the late sixties. Pohnpei (in case the name isn’t instantly familiar to you) is one of the islands of Micronesia in the South Pacific, 1,339 miles northeast of New Guinea.
Pohnpei has some sites featuring ancient megaliths and petroglyphs (as usual, made when and by whom is unknown). One site, Nan Madol, on the east coast, is well-known to archaeologists. Nervig, who has traveled to Pohnpei intermittently since her Peace Corps days, has delved into ones that aren’t as well documented.
At one point, Nervig was told in a dream to climb Takaieu Peak in the center of the island. Although it’s only 164 feet high, a journey there has a number of impediments, notably mud. Nervig says that the interior of the island gets an unbelievable 400 inches of rain a year.
Nervig was told to climb it alone, but in the end a local family sent their two sons along with her as guides. Alone with them in the wild, she grew uncomfortable with their sexual banter, which is common among Pohnpeians, but only adults.
She had thought they were between eight and twelve, so she was led to ask how old they were. Eighteen and twenty-six, as it turned out. “Are you guys some of the aramas tiktik (little people or pygmies) of the legends?” she asked. Yes, they were. “This was flesh-and-blood proof that oral history must be taken seriously” (emphasis Nervig’s).
The story proceeds in more detail, and Nervig produces many illustrations showing the petroglyphs and their similarity to similar carvings from far-flung locations.
Similarly, James Churchward’s books on Mu in the 1930s argued that this commonality of symbols points toward the existence of a lost continent in the South Pacific called Mu. By this view, Mu was home to an advanced civilization. It was submerged in a cataclysm, but outposts of its civilization can be found everywhere from Taiwan to Mesoamerica and points beyond. Churchward discussed this theme in a number of books, including The Lost Continent of Mu, The Children of Mu, and The Sacred Symbols of Mu.
If you want something more scientifically grounded, you can look up Zealandia online. Some geographers class it as a continent, though a submerged one: 94 percent of it is under water. The part that isn’t includes the two main islands of New Zealand (hence the name) and New Caledonia. On average, it’s about 3,500 feet below sea level.
It seems possible that Zealandia was above water recently enough to house an advanced civilization whose remnants were disseminated after the continent sank in prehistoric times (although Churchward considers Zealandia to have been only a colony of a much larger Mu).
How would Mu relate to the Lemuria known from the Theosophical literature? A map of Mu was commissioned by King Kalakaua of Kauai in 1886. It is reprinted in the book, and it shows Mu extending from the southwest coast of Alaska all the way to Africa. Thus Mu and Lemuria would have been part of the same megacontinent. But it may make more sense to think of them separately. Lemuria has traditionally been placed in the Indian Ocean, and there is a great deal of lore about it, particularly among the Tamils. If you want to delve into this subject, I recommend The Lost Land of Lemuria by Sumathi Ramaswamy.
Then we have to consider the relation of these civilizations to other worlds in the interstellar sense, since many tribes contend that their ancestors came from star systems such as the Pleiades.
My reaction to this information is complex. In the first place, like many such books, Nervig’s contains such a welter of details and ideas that it’s hard to sort through them. I come away from this work overloaded and unsure of quite what to do with it all. At the same time, I can’t avoid seeing some truth here. It is becoming increasingly evident that prehistory, even in comparatively recent times, differs greatly from conventional views.
It is not easy to relate these traditional ideas to archaeological discoveries. As Nervig writes, “Due to a contemporary cultural/intellectual bias, these oral accounts as input for analyzing incomprehensible archaeological or sacred sites are systematically ignored, discounted, and ridiculed by academia.”
A veil of silence separates history—what we know since written records start, around 3000 BC—from prehistory. This veil partly consists of what we think we know about these subjects versus the actual truth.
Possibly as the generations turn over in such fields as archaeology and archaeoastronomy, some of this veil will begin to lift.
Richard Smoley