New Zealand, old Lemuria

I've been writing a review of Jack Ross' book Fallen Empire  for the forthcoming 46th issue of the Kiwi literary journal brief. Fallen Empire was produced to accompany a recent exhibition by sculptor and draughtsman Karl Chitham, who is the creator of the Museum of True History, a sort of pretend-institution which has for several years now been offering up pieces of pretend-history to bemused gallery audiences. 

Jack's book collects fragments of three plays that initiates of a mystical sect called the Society of Inner Light supposedly performed in a private theater above a rundown storehouse in the small North Island town of Raetihi last century. In his introduction to Fallen Empire Ross sketches the ideology and history of the imaginary Society:

There's a lot about Atlantis and Lemuria in their surviving writings. They held some very revisionist ideas about the accepted chronology of world history...Polynesian culture was, to them, primary and almost inconceivably ancient. The emissaries of civilisation (for them) emanated originally from the Pacific - specifically from the lost continent of Mu, which now survives only in the form of scattered islands of the Oceanic archipelago...The main body of members came to New Zealand after WWI...The last one standing turned out the lights, leaving everything in situ, sometime around 1973... 

The lost continent of Lemuria, or Mu for short, was a popular fantasy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Madame Blavatsky, the con artist creator of the hyper-syncretic creed known as Theosophy, claimed that Lemuria had been the home of a technologically and spiritually backward, dark-skinned people who had managed to emigrate to Africa and Australia before the waters rose and drowned their villages. Rudolf Steiner, the  hallucinationist who set up a breakaway from Blavatsky's movement called Anthroposophy in Weimar Germany, claimed to have made astral journeys through space and time to Lemuria. In fin de siecle Australia a slew of fantastic novels imagined pale-skinned refugees from a drowned, technologically advanced Lemurian civilisation surviving deep in the Outback, despite the fierce climate and attacks by bands of Aboriginals.

Creeds like Theosophy and Anthroposophy may be in decline, but the myth of a sunken continent in the southern hemisphere is not going away. In recent years the cult known as the Universal Peace Nation of Waitaha, whose scams have been discussed on this blog before, has taken to offering tours of sites in New Zealand associated with 'ancient Lemuria'.

The Waitahans claim to be the descendants of extraterrestrials who arrived on earth from the star system of Sirius tens of thousands of years ago and built a technologically advanced civilisation in Egypt, South America and the Pacific. The Waitahan insistence that New Zealand is a surviving fragment of Lemuria would have seemed to strange to nineteenth and early twentieth century mystics, who tended to locate the continent beneath the waves of either the tropical Pacific or the tropical Indian oceans.

Here is the Waitaha cult's advertisement for its 2012 tour of Lemuria, aka New Zealand:

We will have the honor of spending time with the Waitaha elders. We will visit some of their most sacred places. We will be invited to stay in their Marae, where they greet their family members and dream with them. We will learn about their ancient traditions and witness through our hearts their deep connection on the physical plane to our Lemurian ancestors...A dedicated group will be formed to join this special journey energetically or physically. Your heart will know how deep is the calling in your awakening DNA layers to join. The codes of MU are ready to reveal themselves to us. It is indeed the time to reconnect fully to the wisdom of the most ancient civilization with our reawakened collective conscious Heart.

For the credulous foreigners who take the cult's tours, Lemuria is evidently a heady place. Here is an excerpt from one tourist's record of his peculiar pilgrimage through this country:

We are to attempt something which hasn’t been done since 1735, namely to revive an ancient pact with dolphins whereby they drive an ample amount of fish into the bay to feed the people, who agree not to disturb them in return. A ritualist has prepared the scene for our arrival. We direct our gaze into the centre of the bay and send forth the vibrations of our sacred sounds. This also restores an ancient mode of communing and stimulates us to remember the inner depths from which we call. We maintain our chant for roughly twenty minutes. Next day, word has it that the fishermen report a record catch.

That night we engage in further ceremony under the elders’ direction. This involves us men honouring the women of our group by painting their face and hands in a ritual setting of heightened consciousness and expectation. This empowers them to embody and us to serve the Sacred Feminine. The accord seals our collective adoption into the ranks of Waitaha.

A number of New Agers with no obvious connections to the Universal Peace Nation of Waitaha have also used the internet to proclaim New Zealand a surviving fragment of the ancient continent of Lemuria.  There is a certain irony to the tendency of twenty-first century mystics to associate New Zealand with humanity's antiquity. Except for Antarctica and a few Arctic islands like Svalbard, New Zealand was the last sizeable piece of dry land to be settled by humans. It is unlikely that people lived here in significant numbers even a thousand years ago.

The newness of New Zealand has fascinated and troubled generations of Pakeha Kiwis. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, poets like Charles Brasch and Allen Curnow were disturbed by the 'empty hills' and 'silent plains' they perceived in their underpopulated homeland, and sometimes longed for the deep history and big cities which are taken for granted by Europeans. 

But not all Pakeha were so melancholy. As James Belich and other historians have shown, the notion that New Zealand was a sort of divine gift to the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic races - a 'better Britain' or 'God's Own Country' in the South Seas - was widely and intensely held by early Pakeha settlers. 

For the new wave of believers in the Lemuria myth, though, New Zealand is a sacred country because of its supposed antiquity. 

I suspect that the willingness of the latest generation of mystics to associate New Zealand with an ancient civilisation has something to do with both the rebranding of this country in recent decades and the mood of Romantic anti-modernism which has been a feature of Western popular culture during the same period. 

At the same time that tens of millions of Westerners have become disillusioned with industrial society and the modern idea of progress, and begun to vote for Green Parties, buy organic veges, and idealise rustic societies like Tibet, movies like Lord of the Rings and advertising campaigns by our Tourism Board have seen New Zealand branded as some sort of antediluvian paradise, full of cheery hobbits, goblin forests, and pure cascading streams. It is surprisingly easy, in this sort of atmosphere, for romantic foreigners to imagine New Zealand as an ancient rather than a very new society - as a surviving fragment of Lemuria, rather than a better Britain. If ancient human societies were paradisal, and if New Zealand is a verdant, pre-industrial paradise, then musn't New Zealand be some remnant of the distant past?

[Posted by Maps/Scott]