Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization (25 page)

MOTHER OF ALL MOTHERLANDS

Lemuria, the term for a lost continent in the Pacific or Indian Ocean, came to life in the 1860s when geologists found a striking similarity between fossils and sedimentary strata in India, South Africa, Australia, and South America. These geologists surmised that a great continent or at least a land bridge or series of islands must have existed in the Indian Ocean, and this landmass was named Lemuria by the English biologist Philip L. Scalter after the lemurs of Madagascar.

Madame Helene Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, wrote extensively in the late nineteenth century of Lemuria and, in the 1920s, Colonel James Churchward claimed to have discovered certain ancient tablets in India describing long-lost Mu (Lemuria), a golden civilization said to have existed in the Pacific. Churchward devoted his life and study to bringing the lost Lemurian culture to life in a series of books.

Continental drift theory, which proposes the extremely slow drifting of continents, and then the concept of plate tectonics, did away with Lemuria in the minds of many, while satisfying one of the essential tenets of modern scientific thinking about origins. This essential tenet is called uniformitarianism, which holds that all natural developments on Earth come about extremely slowly, incrementally, and in a more or less uniform fashion. Great floods, global cataclysms, and the submergence of continents in recent prehistory smack of the biblical, and so the anti-biblical Darwinists of bygone days imposed the doctrine of uniformitarianism upon the early geologists and archeologists. The idea that grand-scale cataclysms had anything to do with prehistory, once considered heretical, only recently came into fashion on the heels of evidence that a large-impact asteroid struck the Yucatán area, causing the extinction of the dinosaurs many millions of years ago.

But consider the ancient south Asian traditions that mimic the findings of early geologists, those that say an inhabited continent once existed in what is now the Indian Ocean. This is a belief that thrives, to this day, among peoples of southern India, in Sri Lanka, and in the islands of the Andaman Sea off Malaysia.

One tradition emerges from the writings of ancient Ceylon that refers to a lost civilization in the area now occupied by the Indian Ocean and a landmass that connected the Indian subcontinent with the island of Sri Lanka—the kind of tradition dismissed as fable by the modern-day intelligentsia.

“In a former age,” an ancient Ceylonese text states, “the citadel of Rawana (Lord of Lanka), 25 palaces and 400,000 streets were swallowed by the sea.” The submerged landmass, according to one ancient account, rested between Tuticorin on the southwest Indian coast and Manaar in Ceylon, not a landmass of the size once envisioned by the early geologists, but—if it actually existed—a submerged portion of the Indian subcontinent just the same.

Another cultural tradition, cited in Allan and Delair’s
Cataclysm! Compelling Evidence of a Cosmic Catastrophe in 9500
B
.
C
.
E
.,
that of the Selungs of the Mergui archipelago off southern Burma, also speaks of a sunken landmass: “Formerly [the] country was of continental dimensions, but the daughter of an evil spirit threw many rocks into the sea . . . the waters rose and swallowed up the land . . . . Everything alive perished, except what was able to save itself on one island that remained above the waters.”

One of the Tamil epics of southern India, the
Silappadhikaram,
frequently mentions a vast tract of land called Kumari Nadu, otherwise known as Kumari Kandam (and later identified as Lemuria by European scholars), stretching far beyond India’s present-day coasts into the Indian Ocean. Ancient south Indian commentators wrote in detail of a prehistoric Tamil Sangham, a spiritual academy, situated in that ancient land. They also wrote of the submersion of two rivers, the Kumari and the Pahroli, in the middle of the continent, and of a country dotted with mountains, animals, and vegetation.

The
Silappadhikaram
tells of a country with forty-nine provinces, and mountain ranges that yielded precious gems (Sri Lanka and other parts of India are sources of precious gems to this day). This Pandyan kingdom, according to tradition, reigned from 30,000
B.C.E.
to 16,500
B.C.E.
At least one lineage of modern-day south Indian mystics claims direct descent from those extraordinarily ancient times, when their spiritual progenitors achieved extremely long lives through yogic mastery, walking as virtual gods. This was a phenomenon said to have been duplicated successively to the present, carried on in remote regions of the Himalayas.

In addition, India’s epic poem the
Mahabarata,
dated by some nonanglicized Indian scholars to the fifth millennium before Christ, contains references that place its hero, Rama, gazing from India’s present-day west coast into a vast landmass now occupied by the Indian Ocean. These Indian epics also allude to advanced technology in the form of
vimana,
aircraft that were used to transport the society’s elite and to wage war. Less celebrated ancient Indian writings describe these aircraft in detail and at great length, puzzling both scholars and historians. What’s more, the great Indian epics vividly describe militaristic devastation that can be equated only to nuclear war.

The Sanskrit scholar and the renowned physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the hydrogen bomb, apparently interpreted the ancient epic as having described a prehistoric nuclear conflagration. After the first atomic test in Alamagordo, New Mexico, Oppenheimer chillingly quoted the
Mahab
harata,
saying, “I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.” In a later interview, when asked if the Alamagordo test was the first time an atomic bomb had been detonated, Oppenheimer replied that it was the first time
in modern history
.

Oppenheimer notwithstanding
,
are tales of flying machines, lost continents, and prehistoric nuclear war merely mythical or do these ancient references provide us with a historical record, long forgotten and then dismissed by modern science, with its modern prejudices, as fantasy?

THE KNOWLEDGE FILTER

To begin to answer that question, we must first look at the history of scholarship as it pertains to India.

Since the nineteenth century, Western scholars have routinely dismissed the historical significance of the cultural traditions of ancient peoples, those of southern Asia included. With a decidedly ethnocentric bias—the intellectual stepchild of Western colonialism—the experts reinterpreted Eastern history, casting whole systems of ancient philosophy and science, in the experts’ minds, into the historical dustbin. This historical dustbin is the repository of all things conflicting with European models, such as biblical Christianity and scientific materialism. Here we find the very inception of the “knowledge filter,” now well known to students of alternative archeology, geology, and other disciplines involved with the search for lost origins.

India, with her treatment by the West and her acquiescence to that treatment, typifies the way in which Western intellectualism conquered the world. Call it the “West is best” model: a strict adherence to European doctrines that deny traditions and attempt to offer decidedly more ancient theories regarding the origins of civilization than those of the Western scholars. On top of this, add a scientific materialism that denies all nonmaterial theories regarding the origins of man, life, and reality.

Having found, for example, that root words of India’s ancient Sanskrit turned up almost universally in the world’s major languages, Western scholars devised an ethnocentric scheme to explain the phenomenon—one that India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and many other modern Indian intellectuals came to accept. A previous European people must have once existed, the scholars told us, an Indo-European race upon which the world, and India, drew for its linguistic roots and genetic stock.

The scholars also expropriated the now mythic Aryans of ancient India to flesh out this scenario. This mythic race, we were told, derived from Europe and then invaded the Indus Valley, in the north of India—making Sanskrit and Vedic culture a product, rather than a progenitor, of Western civilization—and rather young at that.

But the Aryan invasion theory has since fallen into disrepute, after being downgraded to a
migration
theory. James Schaffer, of Case Western University, a noted archeologist specializing in ancient India, had this to say on the matter: “The archeological record and ancient oral and literate traditions of south Asia are now converging,” Schaffer recently wrote. “A few scholars have proposed that there is nothing in the ‘literature’ firmly placing the Indo-Aryans outside of south Asia, and now the archeological record is confirming this. . . . We reject most strongly the simplistic historical interpretations, which date back to the eighteenth century [the time of the British invasion of India]. . . . These still-prevailing interpretations are significantly diminished by European ethnocentrism, colonialism, racism, and anti-Semitism.”

None of this, of course, speaks well of Western scholarship.

Southern India, a land whose cultural roots are said by some to stretch into an even more profound antiquity than that of the north, suffered a similar fate. Speakers of a proto-Dravidian language, the forerunner of a family of languages spoken in the south—and some say of Sanskrit itself—entered India from the northwest, we were told. Both theories were necessitated by Western beliefs, at first about the supremacy of the Garden of Eden theory of origins and then, with the arrival of the Darwinists, the widely held “out-of-Africa” theory—the doctrine that man evolved from a more primitive form in southern Africa and slowly made his way across Asia, then to the New World, just 12,000 years ago.

But the Aryan invasion theory has been debunked. No skeletal evidence shows any difference between the supposed invaders and the indigenous peoples of India. And satellite imagery now shows that the ancient Harappan civilization of the Indus Valley and Mohenjo-Daro probably declined and disappeared due to climatic changes—that is, the drying up of the
mythical
Saraswati River—rather than the descent of imaginary Aryan hordes. Burying the Aryan invasion theory, however, opens a Pandora’s box for orthodox scholars regarding the prehistory not just of India, but of the world. If Sanskrit predates the world’s other languages, along with India’s genetic stock, how to explain prehistory in conventional terms?

David Hatcher Childress attributes the demise of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro to something far more controversial than climate change:
a prehistoric nuclear conflagration
involving aircraft and missiles (Rama’s highly destructive “flaming arrows”). This is a picture that may seem bizarre on the face of it, but it is represented convincingly in the ancient writings—as Oppenheimer observed—and with some geological evidence, according to Childress.

Meanwhile, even orthodox thinking dates Indian village culture, thought to be the forerunner of Mohenjo-Daro and the Harappan civilization, to an extremely ancient age. Excavations at Mehgarh, in modern-day Pakistan, have pushed back that date in India to 6000
B.C.E.
, before the so-called advent of civilization in the Middle East. Some orthodox scholars credit India not only with the first alphabet, but also as the cradle of civilization whence sprang Mesopotamia, Sumeria, and Egypt. Linguistic evidence, moreover, offers intriguing clues: The indigenous languages of places as distant as Kamchatka and New Zealand bear a similarity to Tamil, the language of southern India. Tamil words turn up, furthermore, in the world’s great Classical languages: Sanskrit, Hebrew, and Greek.

But how far does the knowledge filter go? How much of the actual history of India still lies in the dustbin created by Western ethnocentrism, colonialism, and scientific materialism?

The demise of the Aryan invasion theory may represent only the tip of the iceberg of misconceptions about the age and nature of the ancient Indian subcontinent, its culture, its people, and its accomplishments. It has long been claimed that Mother India holds a history that stretches into the dim and forgotten mists of the past, to a time before all myth began, when great
rishis,
men of profound wisdom and phenomenal spiritual attainment, walked the earth.

This ancient India, said to be a product of the gods, dates to the times out of which grew the epic poems the
Ramayana
and the
Mahabarata
and the ancient traditions of Tamil Nadu in southern India. This ancient India was a land whose culture was said by some to predate that of the north, having once existed as part of Kumari Kandam, a great southern continent thought to have stretched from present-day Madagascar to Australia and dating to a staggering 30,000
B.C.E.

Obscure texts of the Siddhanta tradition of Tamil Nadu reportedly say that a great deluge inundated Kumari Kandam. This is a notion that is echoed in the writings of Colonel James Churchward and of W. S. Cervé, both of whom claim knowledge of texts, Indian and Tibetan, respectively, that speak of a long-lost continent situated in the East.