Were Lemurians also in Asia?

Here are some of the connections drawn by researchers about Lemurian influences in Asia. Sand paintings by a number of Native American tribes, some of which narrate important folk memories, have been described as “transparently Lemurian.” They “portray the deluge which was responsible for bringing tribal ancestors to America.” As an aside, I wonder whether these ancestors were Caucasoid or Asian.

Ritual sand painting is also a feature of Tibetan Buddhism. A sacred art shared between cultures as widely spread as Southern America and near-Central Asia does suggest a common origin as most likely.

The swastika is another signifier of a culture shared by Tibetan Buddhism and Native Americans, and which Churchward identified as a Lemurian emblem. It is also held by Hawaiians as the Cross of Teave, signifying the ‘Almighty Flame of Creation.’ As said by Frank Joseph, “The creative flame … in so many mythic traditions around the globe implied a shared source … “

Yet, in my view, cultural diffusion is not adequately indicative of a shared source or origin. For instance, some religious symbolism in our major religions would seem to have been adopted or adapted from earlier cultures. A proximity of cultures will also lead to behavioural cultural diffusion, as in, say, modern Malaysia.

Further, “The natural catastrophes which battered the Motherland and eventually overwhelmed it were dramatically documented in ancient China” in a colossal encyclopaedia in its imperial library. Frank Joseph’s Motherland is Mu. He also states that “The sudden appearance of the sophisticated bronze-working Shang dynasty on the plain of the Yellow River suggests it was the mixed offspring of native Asians and refugees from Mu.”

As well: “A flood myth known in Laos tells how a semi-divine people long ago dwelled on a distant island of great splendour and renown until celestial powers threatened with a global deluge.” Frank Joseph also refers to a “unique relic from their vanished homeland … a central pillar from the chief temple … “ which was set up in the kingdom Ayodhya in Thailand. A duplicate of this pillar, Lak Mu-ang or holy stone of Mu, is now in a temple in Bangkok.

What is significant is that each November there is a celebration which, in part, pays homage to the spirits of an ancestral people whose splendid kingdom was drowned. Japan’s “nocturnal Bon Odori” and the Roman ‘Lemuria’ seem linked to this historical cultural memory.

Is it also relevant to note that earthernware shards in Thailand have been dated as 6,000 years old; that is, 500 years before the Mesopotamian culture centres? Or that there is evidence of agriculture in Thailand 2,000 years before farming began in Mesopotamia?

So, there you have it. Are the above selected examples of apparent contributions by Lemurians to some Asian cultures sufficiently persuasive? Or, was there also another source of civilisation for some Asian societies?

Advertisement

Were there Lemurians in America?

The legends of the peoples of the Andes indicate that, following “ … a terrifying period when the earth had been inundated by a great flood and plunged into darkness by the disappearance of the sun … and the people suffered great hardship … “ there arrived a bearded tall man clothed in a white robe, bringing with him a number of viracochas. He was on a civilising mission, teaching love and kindness, as well as such skills as medicine, metallurgy, farming, etc., including  …  terraces and fields to be formed on the steep sides of ravines, and sustaining walls to rise up and support them.” (Graham Hancock in ‘Fingerprints of the Gods’).

Were the terraces similar to those constructed on Luzon by those who were believed to have operated Nan Madol’s cyclone-control system? If so, were Kon Tiki and his Viracochas Lemurians? Did those legends of the Andes also refer to those who had created the huge buildings constructed of megaliths, and how this had been done? Had these been built by an earlier culture with access to ‘magic’?

In a comparable manner, Mexican and Maya legends refer to Kukulkan and his companions bringing civilisation to Central America from the east in boats. The previous practice of human sacrifice was forbidden, while he “ … caused various important edifices to be built … “ (Hancock). Did that include the step-pyramids, which would have required ‘magic’?

Like Viracocha, Kukulkan eventually left the peoples he had led to civilisation, promising to return. Why did they leave? Reference to the East (as the direction from which he had come) is confusing, for Lemuria would have been in the West of the Americas. Was Kukulkan then an Atlantean? According to other legends, Atlantis had been established in the Atlantic Ocean by earlier expatriate Lemurians!

However, the folklore, as well as some totem poles, of sundry Native Indian tribes in northern America seemingly suggest a more direct connection to Lemuria. Indeed, on the basis claimed by Churchward of the image of the deer and the Tree of Life being key elements of the faiths of a number of cultures, it has been claimed that the Lemurian influence, through immigration, had extended not only to the Maya, but also to the Navajo Indians in the American Southwest, to the Japanese (Jomon and Ainu), and to China!

Claims such as this appear to be based on the apparently unchallengeable fact that, when Caucasoid people (that is, obviously light-skinned, but also long-headed with high-bridge noses?) are found in the Americas, and in Asian terrain as far inland as Tibet, Xinjiang, and Central Asia, they must be of Lamurian origin. Indeed, there are some who claim that the Garden of Eden was Mu (Lemuria); and that the escapees from a drowning Motherland had travelled, progressively, all the way to India, and then to the Persian Gulf!

Was this track traced purely on skin and hair colour? If so, compare the skin colour of modern North and Central Asians in the temperate zone, beginning from the Mediterranean Sea. Would it not be strange were the Caucasians to have originated, not around the Caucasian Mountains, but in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?

Or, had there been a mother civilisation of advanced humans which established Lemuria, as well as the suddenly-arrived, fully-developed civilisations of Egypt, Sumer, Harappa, pre-Inca Andes, and pre-Olmec Mesoamerica? How could they have known enough maths and astrology (without guidance), to build pyramidal structures reflecting the layout of the Earth’s surface, and Earth’s alignments with certain star configurations?

Lemuria as mother civilisation

Examining what has been written about Lemuria (Mu) is like discussing Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny with non-Christian Asians. However, when an author describes his experiences (not speculations) when investigating cross-cultural links, in the context of the reported movements of peoples across the globe; or the probable existence in the distant past of an advanced civilisation spread over the Pacific, I cannot but keep an open mind. I am assured that no harm will come to my knowledge-bank.

The following represent the observations of Frank Joseph in his book on Lemuria. In Lima, Peru, at the Herrera Museum, he saw the blond and red-haired mummies of a pre-Inca (non-Indian) people. In Chicago’s Chinatown, he watched a Chinese lass executing her people’s ‘most ancient dance,’ dressed in attire almost identical to those of Aymara Indian girls in the Andes of Peru. In Minnesota, USA, at a celebration of the Cambodian New Year, he saw ‘the most Polynesian-performance’ outside Honolulu performed by Cambodians dressed in simple loin-cloths and sarongs, the men bare-chested.

Further, a Malaysian government representative told him about a legend of her people (obviously Malay) which referred to a great kingdom far to the east; and as that territory slid under the waves, another territory (Malaysia) rose from the sea to receive the survivors.

In Italy, the author learned that Lemuria is the name given by the proto-Romans (Etruscans?) to ‘their oldest ceremony,’ conducted every year on the 9th, 11th, and 13th of May. The ‘Lemuria’ was intended to propitiate the restless spirits of people who had died violently or prematurely. He wrote: ‘These troubled souls, the Romans believed, were accompanied by those of an ancestral people who perished tragically when their distant homeland, by the same name, was overwhelmed by a natural catastrophe in some far-off sea.’

Then there are the submerged massive stone ruins of a ceremonial building rising in tiers from the bottom of the ocean near Yonoguni Island of Japan. The author investigated these ruins often in the company of Prof. Yoshida, President of the Japan Petrograph Society, and has dived about 50 times to inspect the ruins. What he has to say should surely carry more weight than those of any armchair experts of the conservative kind.

How can an honest sceptic counter such undeniable observations by an author well-accredited as a researcher?

Sundaland – the mother civilisation?

The publisher of ‘East of Eden: the drowned continent of Southeast Asia’ by Stephen Oppenheimer says this about the book: “The biblical flood did really occur at the end of the last Ice Age. The Flood drowned for ever the huge continental shelf of Southeast Asia, and caused a population dispersal which fertilised the Neolithic cultures of China, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the eastern Mediterranean, thus creating the first civilisations.

“ … “The Polynesians did not come from China but from the islands of Southeast Asia.” … “The domestication of rice was not in China, but in the Malay Peninsula, 9,000 years ago.” So, there we go! Yet another fantastic scenario.

The evidence? From oceanography, linguistics, genetics, and folklore, says the author – as archaeology is relatively silent on this issue, unless one digs under the sea.

Oppenheimer says “It is beyond doubt that during the Ice Age, Southeast Asia was a single huge continent – a land mass which included Indo-China, Malaysia and Indonesia.” This would effectively be a substantial appendage, a peninsula, to continent Asia. Without writing, or archaeological finds, pre-history could seek to trace the family trees of languages to identify population movements (but not necessarily the ethnic or tribal links), aided by genetics. Folklore may be a starting indicative point in this search. This is what Oppenheimer has done to reach what he admits is a theory.

Thus, 3 sudden floods approximately 14,000 years, 11,500 years, and 8,000 years ago resulted in a rise in sea levels of 500 feet (120 metres). “Rapid land loss was accompanied by great earthquakes.” Contrary to the prevailing paradigm that everything important that has affected us commenced relatively recently – I am not sure how that view arose – Oppenheimer claims much longer histories; for example, for rice growing.

He concludes thus: “The final and most compelling evidence – that the present inhabitants of Southeast Asia have been there since the Ice Age, and started moving in all directions at the time of the floods – comes from the genes they carry ... Gene markers reveal Aboriginals of Southeast Asia at the root of the Asian family trees, and spreading to all parts of the compass as far as America and the Middle East. One particular marker – called the ‘Polynesian motif’ because such a high proportion of Polynesians carry it – originated in the people of Maluku (the Moluccas) in eastern Indonesia during the Ice Age. The fact that this marker has not been found in China, Taiwan or the Philippines contradicts the conventional theory, and allows a much older view of Southeast Asian prehistory.”

So, contrary to the post-colonial view that civilisation went from West to East, did it go from the East (via Sundaland) to the West, as Oppenheimer asserts?