The Missing Lands Page 2

  So what happened 11,000 years ago? Who were these gods, where did they come from and what did they want with us?

  2. LAST MINUTE ON EARTH

  "There have been and there will be many and diverse destructions of mankind, of which the greatest are by fire and water, and lesser ones by countless other means. For in truth the story that is told in your country... has the fashion of a legend, but the truth of it lies in the occurrence of a shifting of the bodies in the heavens which move around the earth, and a destruction of the things on the earth by fierce fire, which recurs over long intervals." — an Egyptian priest to Solon 1

  Had you been living on Earth 11,700 years ago, today would be particularly challenging, shocking, potentially fatal and, if you survived, indelibly memorable.

  The Wichita of Oklahoma describe their experience: "There came to the people some signs which showed that there was something in the north that looked like clouds. And the fowls of the air came, and the animals of the plains and woods were seen. The clouds... were a deluge. The deluge was all over the face of the earth."2 Fortunately one wise man was forewarned, by shamanic dream or godly intervention, to prepare for the impending flood by selecting seeds and animals which were to be housed in a protective vessel. After the waters subsided, he and his wife descended from a mountain, discovered domesticated corn, and together repopulated the Earth.

  In another corner of North America, the Chocktaw faced the same plight: "The earth was plunged in darkness for a long time... a bright light finally appeared in the north... but it was mountain-high waves, rapidly coming nearer."3

  As the oceans consumed the Earth, the Chiglit of Canada saw their dwellings blown away by terrific winds, and as they lashed their boats together, gale-driven waves traversed the Rocky Mountains, followed by intense heat, killing most people; the Sun and Moon disappeared, like all the land, and the few survivors faced a prolonged and bitterly cold climate. The Shokomish people made ropes of cedar limbs to fasten their canoes to the hills, all to no avail, because the flood waters rose higher and higher into the Olympic Mountains — to the west of today’s Seattle — snapping ropes and casting the canoes adrift. Neighboring tribes in Oregon were luckier, their canoes came to rest upon the summit of Mt. Jefferson, 10,000 feet above sea level.4

  A righteous man of the Yakima tribe was warned of such events in a vision which he shared with others: “I have heard from the Land Above, the land of the spirits, that a big water is coming that will cover all the land. Make a boat for the good people, let the bad people be killed by the water... The Earth will be destroyed.”5

  To the south, the Ute describe the Sun shivering into a thousand fragments that fell to Earth. One supernatural being caught in the conflagration ran from the blazing Earth, and as his own body began to burn, tears gushed forth creating a flood that engulfed the planet and put out the fires.

  One factor corroborating such accounts is the Great Salt Lake that covers a goodly part of the high plains of northern Utah, allegedly the remnant of a massive body of freshwater created by glacial melt that once stretched into neighboring Idaho and Nevada. Evidence shows people once fished around its shores. It is claimed in geological circles that its saltiness was acquired from tiny amounts of mineral salts accumulating over time from streams feeding into the lake. The problem is, the salt in the Great Salt Lake is composed of sea salt, and the change occurred some 10,000 years ago — around the time tsunamis from the great flood are supposed to have overrun North America.

  The Great Salt Lake, Utah. The salt was introduced by a tidal wave of seawater that swept North America around 10,000 years ago.

  Traveling south along the American continent, the predecessors of the Maya recorded the event in great detail: "It was ruin and destruction... the sea was piled up... it was a great inundation.... People drowned in a sticky substance raining from the sky.... The face of the earth grew dark and the gloomy rain endured days and nights.... And then there was a great din of fire above their heads.”6 Survivors, which were few, describe the falling debris as a black viscous residue similar to bitumen, “much hail, black rain and mist, and indescribable cold.”7 Finally, as calm began to return, the K'iche' migrated inland after crossing a sea enveloped in a somber fog.8

  The conflagration was not restricted to the Atlantic coastline of Central America, both coasts were simultaneously transgressed, "the sea, breaking out of its bounds following a terrifying shock, began to rise on the Pacific coast. But as the sea rose, filling up valleys and the plains around, the mountain of Ancasmarca rose too, like a ship on the waves. During the five days that this cataclysm lasted, the sun did not show its face and the Earth remained in darkness."9

  More worryingly, the Maya describe the Sun rising only partially above the horizon and standing still for days, while the Moon also stood uncharacteristically motionless in the sky,10 as though the Earth, hit by some stupendous cosmic impact, stopped rotating on its axis. Maya recordkeeping describes this era as the destruction of the Fourth Sun, a time when the world was plunged in darkness, literally and metaphorically, for twenty-five years. Amid this profound obscurity, ten years elapsed before the appearance of the Fifth Sun, the period marking the regeneration of humanity.11

  Meanwhile in northern Mongolia, the Buryat were experiencing a particularly bad-hair day. A heavenly source forewarned a fellow named Shitkut to go into the forest to build a great ship into which he was to deposit specimens of all animals. Only one refused because it deemed itself so large that no flood could kill it. Alas, the flood that followed was so overwhelming that even this largest of creatures — the mammoth — became extinct.

  Their neighbours to the west, the Tartars of central Siberia, add that a man called Nama built a ship with eight cables, each eighty fathoms long. Over the course of seven days the waters rose 480 feet, the cables reached their structural limit, snapped, and the ship floated free. All that could be seen from aboard were the tops of mountains. To the north, the Ugrians and Ostiaks describe how the few survivors were saved on their rafts or by clinging on to logs, settling in different parts of the Earth when the waters receded, and for this reason, different languages developed over time across the world.

  By no means was the great flood restricted to a wall of mountain-high water, the event was accompanied by hurricane-force winds. As the Middle East was being ravaged, the flood — Arabs call it tufan (deluge) — was chaperoned by a mighty strong west wind, the tyfoon. Samoan islanders describe an accompanying acrid smell which "became smoke, which again became clouds... The sea too arose, and in a stupendous catastrophe of nature the land sank into the sea... new earth arose out of the womb of the last Earth" — referring to the islands of Tonga, Samoa, Rotuma, Fiji, and Uvea and Fotuma that subsequently rose out of the Pacific Ocean.12

  The account from the Polynesian island of Takaofo describes how “the sky was low, then the winds and waterspouts and the hurricanes came, and carried up the sky to its present height."13

  Over in Mesopotamia a man named Utnapishtim was minding his business when a god named Enki warned him to construct a giant boat with a height of one acre, in which he was to house his family, various craftsmen, animals and seeds, and prepare for a tumultuous ride. As he was about to close the hatch Utnapishtim saw what appeared to be a massive black cloud rising along the horizon to the south, which turned out to be a wall of mud-laden water. A great flash of light was followed by twelve days of darkness and hurricane-force winds, while the waters rose and overwhelmed the distant mountains. The land, he said, was smashed like a cup: “On the first day the tempest blew swiftly and brought the flood... No man could see his fellow. Nor could people be distinguished from the sky.”

  For six days the wind blew while torrent, tempest and flood raged at one another like sparring hosts overrunning the Earth. Utnapishtim’s boat finally ran aground on the hills of Nisir, and for seven days he looked out and saw water everywhere. When land re-appeared it was flattened like a terrace, with destruction evide
nt everywhere: "Desolation... stretched to heaven, all that was bright was turned into darkness... the hurricane, deluge, and tempest continued sweeping the land... and all human back to its clay was returned."14

  Utnapishtim’s experience is almost identical to that of his Sumerian neighbor Zin-Suddu, king of Shuruppak prior to the flood, who may have served as the model for Noah that future Israelites would borrow during their captivity in Babylon. The figure of a gargantuan eroded hull still lies on the slope of Mt. Ararat, deposited, strangely enough, along the same latitude as Mount Tomaros in Greece, landing place of Deucalion, the hero of the Greek flood narrative.

  Manu leading Seven Sages during the flood. Identical groups of learned people are found throughout most indigenous flood stories.

  Somewhere in the Middle East another righteous man by the name of Enoch was forewarned of this impending catastrophe some two hundred years ahead of the event. He describes being admitted into the company of seven beings who led this scribe “to a mountain, the point of whose summit reached to heaven. And I saw the places of the luminaries and the treasuries of the stars... and beings came forth from heaven who were like white men, and four went forth from that place and three went with them. And those three... grasped me by the hand and took me up, away from the generations of the earth, and raised me up to a lofty place, and showed me a tower raised high above the earth... And one said to me, ‘Remain here till you see everything that befalls.’” 15

  Enoch was subsequently shown the impending impact of a disintegrating comet, “seven stars like great burning mountains... a star fell from heaven... I saw many stars descend and cast themselves down from heaven... I saw how the earth was swallowed up in a great abyss, and mountains were suspended on mountains, and hills sank down on hills, and high trees were rent from their stems and hurled down and sunk into the abyss.... And the sea... is driven forward and disperses amid all the mountains.... And water gushed forth from above, rushing like a copious watercourse towards the northwest.”16

  One of the beings explains to Enoch how such meteorites “transgressed the commandments of the Lord in the beginning of their rising,” essentially telling the flabbergasted scribe how these space rocks periodically become dislodged from their regular course, with the Earth in the wrong place at the wrong time. Enoch watched the futuristic vision of a wall of water swallowing animals and trees, sweeping across a desert to the east and reaching the mountains.

  He was not alone. Somewhere in the region of the Indus Valley a man named Manu was washing himself when a similar god — this time disguised as a fish — warns him of an impending deluge that would sweep away all creatures. To save himself, Manu was instructed to build a boat, which he did, and when the floodwaters began to rise Manu fastened a rope to the fish’s horn and the boat was steered over the Mountain of the North.

  So strong is the memory of this event that it survived as an oral tradition for thousands of years in the high Andes. A herdsman saw his llamas staring in the direction of the Sun. Protecting his eyes with his hand, he looked up and saw a cluster of large objects between the Sun and Moon. The animals told him this was a sign that the world was about to be destroyed by a great deluge, so the herdsman gathered his family and animals and took refuge on the summit of a high mountain just as the waves rose and swamped the land. Many days passed before the waters receded, and in all this time the Sun was hidden by a great darkness.17

  Two brothers and their families were similarly advised to take five days' worth of food and climb to the summit of the high mountain Huillcacoto, where they found a number of animals already ensconced in the safety of its caves. They moved their flocks and soon the rain began. It poured and poured. As predicted, all mountains were covered by water except the summit of Huillcacoto. Looking down into the valleys they heard the cries of dying humans overwhelmed by the waters. Miraculously, the mountain grew taller and taller as the waters rose. Even so, water lapped at the door of the cave, but still the mountain grew. For the next five days the Sun was said to have died and it remained night for five days.18

  Those living on the edge of Lake Titicaca, 12,500 feet up on the altiplano of Bolivia, had to contend with the consequences of brusque tectonic shifts resulting from impact shockwaves generated by incoming aerial projectiles, for they witnessed the breaking of bulwarks on the lakes situated at greater altitude to the north, causing the release of a second unstoppable wall of water that overwhelmed the temple city of Tiwanaku, tossing its megaliths like matchsticks, crushing and jumbling its inhabitants along with fish, marine life, mammals, utensils, jewels, tools, pottery and shells into one confusing heap.19

  When the story was transmitted to the Inca many thousands of years later, villagers were still paralyzed by the fear of a change in the appearance of the Sun because, they said, it foretold doom. A Spanish chronicler in 1555 described their trepidation: ”[when] there is an eclipse of the Sun or the Moon the Indians cry and groan in great perturbation, thinking that the time has come in which the Earth will perish.”20

  Had these people found themselves in a bar with the ancient Chinese, the latter would have nodded in agreement with the accuracy of the story: "When the sky becomes hostile to living things and wishes to destroy them, it burns them; the Sun and the Moon lose their form and are eclipsed; the five planets leave their paths; the four seasons encroach one upon another; daylight is obscured; glowing mountains collapse; rivers are dried up; it thunders in winter, hoarfrost falls in summer; the atmosphere is thick and human beings choked; the state perishes; the aspect and the order of the sky are altered; the customs of the age are disturbed."21 The Chinese recorded their most ancient knowledge in the Yih King, a book that is at least 5000 years old and whose origin is as mysterious as pyramids, yet at its core there are uncannily similar stories, for China has its own flood hero, Fu Hsi, who escaped the rising waters along with his wife and three sons and daughters to found Chinese civilization.

  What kind of sky phenomena causes such a conflagration? The Voguls speak of a Creator God who sent a sea of fire upon the Earth in order to destroy the wickedness that had befallen the human race, referring to the event as Fire-Water.22 It was a shared experience because the people of the East Indies speak of snegle-das (water of fire) that rained down from the sky and killed everyone.23 In what seems to be a description of a comet, the Voguls describe it as a recurring conflagration appearing in the eastern sky, accompanied by a tail stretching from one corner to the other and the sound of a fearful thunder.

  Given the vast expanse of the Australian continent, Aboriginal tribes saw the event from slightly different perspectives yet all agree on the same outcome. The Bundaba tell of a mighty noise coming from a cloud in the north that grew bigger and bigger until it covered the entire sky. Gradually a great sound like rolling thunder arrived, accompanied by hurricane-force winds and the pouring of the sea from the mountains in the north, covering the entire land for days. Two people survived on a raft and were guided to the safety of Mt Broome. The culprit was Yunggalya (Running Star) from which several pieces fell to Earth and made holes in the ground.

  But by far the most disturbing image comes from the Himalaya, the highest mountain range on Earth, hundreds of miles from the ocean. One would assume it was spared the ravages of monstrous waves, yet even this apparent safe haven of highlands was encroached by tidal waves claimed by Tibetans to have been generated by comets that regularly create upheaval on Earth.24

  Such events are recorded in dramatic fashion in the Kalevala of the Finns. Once in a while Ukko, the highest of deities, relinquishes support of the heavens, and hailstones of iron rain down on Earth, resulting in a generation of darkness. As a consequence the seasons do not return to their established order. The Icelandic tradition adds that a never-ending winter followed the last conflagration, with only a pair of humans surviving to reseed the Earth.25

  It seems that no matter who you were or where — the Chewong in Malaysia, the Karen in Burma, the Mechoacanesec in
Central America, the Chibca in Colombia, the Canaria in Ecuador, the Tupinamba in Brazil, the Araucnaia in Chile, or the Luiseno, Sioux and Chickasaw in North America — the shockwaves of this catastrophe were permanently engraved upon every culture.

  According to orthodox historians, humans did not get about much 11,000 yeas ago, so how did indigenous people on opposite corners of the globe come to own traditions sharing near identical details? The forewarning, the heat, gale force winds, the blotting out of the sky, Earth pausing on its axis, and so on. Most accounts agree that the wall of seawater rose as high as mountain summits, and in some cases actually surpassed them. The annals of Emperor Yao describe the waters reaching deep into the center of the Chinese mainland, "overtopping the great heights, threatening the heavens with their floods." The Vedas of the Tamil describe the highest mountains being "ground to powder and destroyed,"26 while in the Andes the ocean left the shore before submerging South America with a terrible dim, and the Sun failed to appear for five days and nights.27 Aboriginal cultures refer to this period as “the time of darkness,” when sufficient debris ejected into the atmosphere would have been capable of inducing solar radiation for up to a thousand years.

  THE MEMORABLE POWER OF MYTH

  Whereas the modern world equates myth with imaginative invention, ancient cultures used it as an instrument for recording important facts and events so they would be memorized and recalled generation after generation. Such stories may seem alien and abstract to us because their social point of reference and literary construct differ from ours, and yet events were observed, then poeticized to give them artistic color, intrigue and conflict, before finally being mythologized to imbue the scene with imagery so unforgettable it would be branded upon the listener's imagination. Thus myth became the memory stick of earlier ages, a mnemonic device for transferring knowledge, particularly during times of illiteracy. For example, the telling of a sea voyage by a group of men to retrieve an important object was not enough, the story had to be embellished into Jason and the Argonauts, later rewritten for another audience as Arthur and the Grail. When dissected, such myths reveal multiple layers of information: mathematics, astronomy, astrology, history, even a road map to self-awareness and transcendence. Myth is a method of making connections at a level beyond the obvious and the superficial, an efficient technique for encoding a complex series of facts, so much so that its storytellers were highly prized because they were, in effect, wisdom keepers.