The Gold of the Gods (9 page)

The man who seeks for gods will find them.

Hanging in the museum was a piece of wood 28 inches wide by 10 inches high. Once upon a time, when hung on a hut, it meant: the chief lives here! To the left of the four striking concentric circles
float
two figures, who are wearing the by now classical “aprons” of prehistoric astronauts, of the land to be found, for example, on the Toltec monoliths in the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin. Both figures are wearing a kind of overall, and shoes. The being on the left wears a helmet and extended ultra-short-wave antennae.

A wooden sculpture represents a being with large genital organs, whose head is protected by a close-fitting helmet. A small triangle is engraved on the helmet, perhaps the emblem of his astronautical formation. A snake twines round his helmet. Symbol of loathsomeness in biblical times, in the sagas of the Mayas the snake rose again into the air as a “feathered creature,” and now it crops up again here among forgotten tribes in the mountain ranges of Formosa. All over the world we find snakes, flying snakes, in traditional popular art! Why did the Paiwan paint their canoes with snakes, why are the heads of the “divine figures” round like helmets, why are they in (antenna) contact with each other and why do the contacts end in a “sun” with a series of toothed wheels inside it? Why do snakes, twined round stars, gaze steadily heavenwards with their triangular heads? Why does a Paiwan god hold a snake that passes above him and his helmet? Why in particular is a
female goddess
concealed in a mask, why does she wear clumsy goggles and why is there a snake above and around her head? Obviously this outfit was never chic, but it was suitable for a space flight and the snake symbolized a limit to cosmic flight.

All this should be interpreted in terms of early religions, say the archaeologists. They say that snakes were divine “symbols of reverence.” If so, why did not the Paiwans use fish, sharks, waves or turtles as models, when they painted their canoes with symbols of religious provenance? Why did not the chief pin a shield that bore the sign of his tribe (there were some beautiful ones) on the wall of his house?

The carvings, which are often half-rotten, are extremely lovely. They all have concentric circles and spirals, and they continually emphasize the connection between man and snake, with the snake always hissing heavenwards
above
the figure. Frequently the figures are carved in a floating, as opposed to a standing position, as if they were weightless. I do not think such reproductions were the products of artistic imagination. The first ancestors of the Paiwan must have seen that it was possible for beings to
float
in the air and told their descendants so. The Paiwan are still primitive even today. In their masterly carvings they represent both real things from their environment and also the stereotypes which come from a kind of collective unconscious going back to time immemorial Their contemporary woodwork shows that the Paiwan carvers are quite up to date. They perpetuate men in Japanese uniforms, with their weapons. They have
seen these men
. They are not straining their imaginations. They have never done so; in all ages they represented what they had actually seen in artistically perfect combination with traditional motifs.

An especially remarkable motif is a three-headed being flying in a snake—a motif that recurs in a silk manuscript of the Chou culture (1122-236 B.C.).

Mr. Y. C. Wang, Director of the Historical Museum, Taipeh, showed me round his collection of representations of mythological beings, half men, half animals, often with bird’s heads on winged bodies, parallels to the Assyrian and Babylonian winged gods. Seals from the Chou period are as numerous as the rings in a jeweler’s showcase. Up to 1 centimeter in size they do not appear to have been simply decorative ornaments. Under my magnifying glass, they looked remarkably like integrated circuits.

There were also some “bronze mirrors” from 2 3/4 inches to 5 inches in diameter engraved with symbols and characters that have been partially deciphered.

The translated text of an engraved inscription from the Chou dynasty reads:

“Wherever suns shine, there is life.”

For amusement’s sake, I have reproduced the square in the center of this bronze mirror in comparison with two integrated circuits from the firm of Siemens.

The geologist Thuinli Lynn told me about a discovery that is unknown to the western world.

During excavations in the “Valley of Stones” in July, 1961, Chi Pen Lao, Professor of Archaeology in the University of Peking, came across an underground cave system. At a depth of 105 feet he found entrances to a labyrinth in the spurs of the Honan mountains, on the south shore of Lake Tung Ting, west of Yoyang. He located passages that undoubtedly led under the lake. The passage walls were smooth and glazed. The walls of one hall, into which several passages led, were covered with paintings. They represented animals, all fleeing in one direction, driven by men who held “blowpipes” to their lips. Above the fleeing animals, and this is the sensational part of the account as far as I am concerned, flies a shield on which stand men holding weapon-like implements which they are aiming at the animals. The men on the “flying shield,” says Mr. Chi Pen Lao, wear modern jackets and long trousers. Mr. Lynn thinks that scholars have probably succeeded in establishing the date when the tunnel was built, but news from Red China only emerges sparingly and after long delays.

The report of the “flying shield” and the men aiming at the animals from above at once reminded me of a museum piece which had left an indelible impression on my memory. It was the skeleton of a bison, whose brow had been pierced by a neat shot, and I had seen it in the Museum of Paleontology in Moscow.

The original home of the bison was Russian Asia. The age of my fossil bison was dated to the Neolithic (8000 to 2700 B.C.), when weapons were still made by flaking stones, and the most modern weapon created in that period was the stone axe. A blow with a stone axe would inevitably have shattered the bison’s skull, but under no circumstances could it have left a bullet hole. A firearm in the Neolithic? In fact, the idea seems so absurd that the experts could dismiss it with a wave of the hand, if it were not for the fact that the Neolithic marksman’s bison trophy is on show in Moscow.

On the eleventh and last day of my stay in Taipeh, President Ku Cheng Kang, Member of the National Assembly, gave a dinner for me. I was surrounded by distinguished politicians and scholars: B. Hsieh, Professor at Fuyen University, Shun Yao, still UNESCO Secretary-General representing the Republic in January, 1972, Hsu Chih Hsin and Shuang Jeff Yao of the Public Relations Department, Senyung Chow of the Government and of course my museum friends, Chiang, Lynn, Wang and Wu.

These gentlemen’s names are supposed to be as common as Smith, Jones and Brown. I tried hard to identify all the happy smiling faces, but I could not manage to put the right name to them.

While I was flying to the Pacific island of Guam by TWA, I drew up a balance of my visit. I had not been able to see the report on Baian Kara Ula, but I had been able to eliminate a white spot on my map of the abodes of the gods on Chinese territory.

PS.: My film
Chariots of the Gods?
has been bought by Comrade Mao’s State Film Lending Library. Perhaps he will help me to make a study trip to Peking. With a postcard in my hand, I’ll easily find my way to the Academy with the historical archives.

Besides I have been wanting to visit the Gobi Desert for a long time.

With its 183 square miles, Ponape is the biggest of the Caroline Islands, three times as big as the Principality of Liechtenstein and with roughly the same population of 18,000 inhabitants. The climate is tropical and most of the island is mountainous and uninhabitable. Ponape is surrounded by a girdle of other islands, islets and coral reefs. One of the tiny islands, about as big as the Vatican City, is called Temuen, according to the atlas. Temuen is the site of the mighty ruins of Nan Madol, which occupy nearly the whole of the island and account for its importance and fame, so that Temuen has long been known colloquially as Nan Madol. The ruins of Nan Madol go back to the remote past; but its prehistoric layout has not been dated and the origin of its builders is unknown.

These are the historically established dates concerning the island of Ponape and its satellite islets:
1595—
Pedro Fernandes de Quiros, a Portuguese, landed from the
San Geronimo
. The first white men set foot on the island and saw the ruins of Nan Madol.
1686—
The whole archipelago became a Spanish possession and was called Carolinas after King Charles II.
1826—
The Irishman James O’Connell landed on the island with other survivors of a shipwreck. He was given a friendly reception by the people of Ponape and married a native girl.
1838—
As from this year, the island’s annals record several visits by white men.
1851—
Natives massacred the crew of a British ship. A punitive expedition turned Ponape into a bloodbath.
1880—
Missionaries of various Christian persuasions descended on the island like a swarm of locusts, burnt age-old inscribed tablets and banned traditional popular customs.
1889—
Spain sold the archipelago of Ponape (together with the Marianne and Palau Islands) to Germany.
1910—
The islanders killed missionaries and government officials. Very few white people escaped the massacre.
1911—
The German cruiser
Emden
shelled the island; the rebels were subdued and their leader publicly hanged.
1919—
The Caroline Islands, including Ponape, became Japanese mandated territory.
1944—
The Americans occupied the group of Islands during the war in the Pacific.
1947—
The Islands became American Trust Territory.

Those are the undisputed historical data about Ponape. In other words, it is clear that the mysterious ruins on Nan Madol existed long, long before the first visit by white men in 1595. It is not true that the history of the islanders only began to form part of the legend of Nan Madol after they themselves were discovered. Their history since 1595 is more or less completely documented, but the legends about Nan Madol have far more to tell us than these recent facts, which implies that they are infinitely older. Are scholars trying to blind us with science simply because they cannot offer any convincing explanation of the mystery of Nan Madol?

After I had spent over a week in the hot humid hell of Nan Madol with measuring tape, cameras and notebook, I can only give a tired smile when I read the previous “explanations.” I prefer to stick to the legends, because their contents are more plausible.

We shall see why.

When I landed on Ponape in a Continental Airlines-Air Micronesia Boeing 727, I had no idea what hard work my curiosity would let me in for, but neither did I guess what surprises were in store for me.

The Hotel Kasehlia helped me to charter a small motorboat, no bigger than a native canoe, and in it I chugged through the overgrown canals that separated the many islands from each other. It was oppressively hot and the air was so humid that I could hardly breathe.

With my two native guides, I passed several islets and then Nan Madol lay ahead of us, looking exactly the same as all the others, except for the strange burden it bore. This tropical island is the site of the small basalt city, the pantheon and legendary retreat of the prehistoric inhabitants, which is no bigger than a football stadium. These evidences of prehistory confront one abruptly; there is no preparation for the “encounter.”

The ground plan of the layout is clearly recognizable amid the confusion of the ruins, once you have had a good look round. Countless staves are piled on top of each other as in the game of spillikins. It cannot have been an easy game, for the staves are basalt slabs or blocks weighing tons. Until now scholars have claimed that these basalt slabs were formed by lava that had cooled. That seemed a lot of nonsense to me as I laboriously verified with my measuring-tape that the lava had solidified exclusively in hexagonal or octagonal columns of roughly the same length.

As basalt columns actually were extracted on the north coast of Ponape, I am prepared to look beyond the inane explanation of lava columns solidified in uniform sizes and admit that this first-class, accurately worked building material was quarried and dressed on the north coast. So far, so bad, for the blocks, which vary in length from 10 to 29 feet and often weigh more than 10 tons, must have been transported from the north coast of Ponape all the way through the labyrinth of jungle canals, past dozens of equally serviceable islands, to Nan Madol. Transport by land is excluded, because since the remotest times downpours have flooded the dense jungle several times a day and in addition Ponape is mountainous. Even if we assume that roads were hacked out of the jungle and that there were means of transport that could surmount the mountains and force a way through the marshy morasses, the heavy loads would still only have reached the southeast corner of the island and would then have had to be loaded on to ships.

I was told by locals that the transport problem could easily have been solved by using rafts. This explanation contradicts another one which a scholar seriously tried to “sell” me, namely that the original inhabitants suspended the basalt blocks from their canoes, thus reducing the weight, and rowed them to Nan Madol one by one.

I took the trouble to count the basalt blocks in one side of the main building. I counted 1,082 columns on a facade 195 feet long. The building is square and the four outside walls contain 4,782 basalt blocks. I got a mathematician to calculate the volume of the walls from their breadth and height and the number of basalt columns necessary to fill it. The main building “swallowed up” about 32,000. Yet the main building is only part of the layout.