Evidence of the Gods (6 page)

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 Heyerdahl
²¹
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.