The Mystery of Easter Island

An occult investigation of Easter Island and its enigmatic monolithic statues.

Introduction

Easter Island or Rapa Nui as it is more commonly known today, is an island in the south-eastern Pacific Ocean. Katherine Routledge in The Mystery of Easter Island, published in 1919, tells us that it is "a volcanic land, and in the earliest days of the world's history great lights and flowing lava must have gleamed across the expanse of water, then gradually lessened and died away, leaving their work to be moulded by wind and tide. The island, as the forces of nature have thus made it, is triangular in shape and curiously symmetrical. The length of the base — that is, of the south, or strictly speaking south-east, coast — is about thirteen miles, and the greatest width about seven miles; the circumference, roughly speaking, is thirty-four miles. The apex, which is the highest ground, is a volcano over 1,700 feet in height whose summit is formed of a cluster of small craters; the eastern and western angles are each composed of a large extinct volcano." It is no coincidence that we are publishing this article on Easter Sunday 5 April 2026, 304 years after Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen discovered the island.

There can be very few among our readers who have not heard of this mysterious isle, or the nearly 1,000 gigantic long-eared stone statues called moai which cover it. Most of them are between 12 to 28 feet tall, and once stood on stone platforms called ahu, which are located around the island's coast. Some moai still bear a cylindrical headdress known as a pukao carved from reddish stone, as you can see in the image heading the sidebar. The eyes were made from cut coral carefully fitted into their faces. Nearly all the statues are made from yellowish volcanic rock, quarried at the volcanic crater of Rano Raraku on the island. Work seems to have stopped suddenly, for dozens of statues remain uncompleted, and thousands of stone pickaxes were found scattered around the quarry. Another enigma is the island’s still undeciphered hieroglyphic script, known as Rongorongo, the study of which forms the subject of our Afterword.

A very mysterious island

The conventional view is that Easter Island was discovered accidentally by Polynesian migrants in the 4th century A.D. Wikipedia smugly informs the reader foolish enough to consult that fountainhead of academic orthodoxy, that their descendants, living in isolation and having nothing better to do, decided to carve giant statues which bear no resemblance whatsoever to themselves or any other Polynesian people, and place them on huge platforms. They then rapidly mastered advanced stone-carving techniques and the transportation and erection of statues and stone blocks weighing several tons — all without the use of rollers, levers or cranes. For over a thousand years they maintained a peaceful, stable, constructive society which supported a large class of master-builders and master-sculptors, and was ruled by a hereditary hierarchy of sacred priest-kings. Such is the conventional theory. Facts, on the other hand, are somewhat thinner on the ground. All we know for certain is that during the recent past, overpopulation and a deteriorating environment resulted in intertribal warfare, and by the late 17th century the population had dwindled to just 2,000 souls. Amidst the turmoil all the statues standing on the platforms were toppled. This practise continued into the 19th century, by which time very few moai were left standing. Hundreds have since been re-erected.

One modern authority writes: "It was one of the latest landmasses to be settled by humans, according to radiocarbon dating, between 1150 and 1280 A.D." Unfortunately, as we explained in our article about Stonehenge, "C14 dating is now seen as an increasingly unreliable tool for dating objects containing organic material." Furthermore, as H. P. Blavatsky and other occultists have shown, the island was inhabited long before the 12th and 13th centuries of our era. Wikipedia, on the other hand, trots out the orthodox and conventional view: "The inhabitants created a thriving and industrious culture, as evidenced by the island's numerous enormous stone moai and other artefacts. The island was populated by Polynesians who most likely navigated in canoes or catamarans from the Gambier Islands (1,600 miles away) or the Marquesas Islands (2,000 miles away). According to some theories...there is a possibility that early Polynesian settlers arrived from South America due to their remarkable sea-navigation abilities." This equates to a distance of over 3,700 miles, or further than London is from New York — a most remarkable feat of sea-navigation indeed! The lengths the arbiters of scientific orthodoxy will go to avoid the elephant in the sea that land emerges from the oceans and is again submerged by them, is truly astonishing. In the name of not-so-commonsense, is it not more likely that Easter Island is one of the mountain tops of a submerged continent, and that the inhabitants who survived the cataclysm which sunk it, retreated to the highest parts that remained? We learned from a previous investigation about Atlantis that this is exactly what happened there. The descendants of the few survivors, like the Guanches of the Canary Islands, may have been marooned on a mountain top that afterwards become an island in a desolate and inhospitable sea. We shall consider these possibilities in the next part of this investigation.

Now you see them; now you don't

The legends of Easter Island relate that the first settlers arrived there after their native land had been submerged, They tell of a giant named Uoke who, in a fit of anger, caused the subsidence of a large continent, of which Easter Island is a remnant. Similar traditions of vanished continents are found throughout Polynesia and Melanesia, and in other areas bordering the Pacific. For instance, Hawaiian legends relate that there was once a great continent stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand, but it sank, leaving only its mountaintops as islands. Such narratives do not specify when the various landmasses are supposed to have existed. Although it is certain that no large continents in the Pacific have been submerged during the past few millennia, several writers believe that islands of reasonable size have done so.

When the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen discovered Easter Island on Easter Sunday, 5 April 1722, he was actually searching for Davis Land. An English buccaneer named John Davis reported sighting this island in 1687 in latitude 27°20'S. He said it was 500 miles from the coast of Chile, low, flat, and sandy, but with "a long tract of pretty high land" to the northwest. This description in no way applies to Easter Island. The general belief today is that Davis had misjudged his position, which was by no means unusual with early mariners, and that Davis Land was Mangareva, the chief island in the Gambier archipelago, far to the west of Easter Island. However, in the early 20th century the occultist Lewis Spence (1874-1955) and Scottish academic John Macmillan Brown (1845-1935) argued that land had also been submerged in several other parts of the Pacific within the last few thousand years. They held, for instance, that the Caroline archipelago could be the remains of a vast island-empire in the eastern central Pacific. The ruins of Nan Madol on the island of Pohnpei, with its massive walls, earthworks, and great temples, intersected by miles of artificial waterways, would have required a workforce of tens of thousands to construct. Brown pointed out that within a radius of 1,500 miles there are no more than 50,000 people today, and added: "It is one of the miracles of the Pacific unless we assume a subsidence of twenty times as much land as now exists." On the little coral island of Woleai, some 1,000 miles west of Pohnpei, he found a written script still in use, quite unlike any other in the world.

Quite a few islands that mariners have reported on their travels have since gone missing. For instance, in 1879 an Italian captain announced his discovery of Podesta Island, just over half a mile in circumference, 860 miles due west of Valparaiso, Chile. The island has not been found since, and was removed from navigation charts in 1935. An island near Easter Island was sighted in 1912 but was likewise never seen again. Sarah Ann Island northwest of Easter Island was removed from naval charts when a search in 1932 failed to find it. The need for caution in interpreting such accounts is underlined by the following incident: in 1928 the captain and two officers on a British luxury liner announced that Easter Island itself had vanished. A Chilean gunboat was hastily despatched and found it in its usual place! In 1955 US military pilots sighted an island 380 miles west of Honolulu, but it disappeared within a few weeks, leaving only sulphurous streaks on the surface. In February 1946, a British warship witnessed the birth of two volcanic cones 200 miles south of Tokyo; they rose to a height of 50 feet and spread out over an area of about 1.5 square miles. Two months later they had dissolved into a shoal considerably larger than their initial size. In addition to temporary volcanic islands that suddenly appear in deep ocean basins, there are also islands that rise and fall in more shallow regions. Fonuafo’ou, also known as Falcon Island, part of the Ha'apai group in Tonga, was born in 1885 when an eruption raised a shoal 290 feet above sea level. Over the next 13 years it disappeared, only to re-emerge again in 1927. In 1949, another eruption caused the explosion and collapse of the island, which disappeared underwater. New eruptions were recorded in 1970 and 1993. Today it is about 50 feet high. Metis Island, 75 miles from Fonuafo’ou, popped up in 1875 and vanished again in 1899. The three Tuanaki Islands, part of the Cook group in the South Pacific, suddenly disappeared around the middle of the 19th century. These islands were inhabited by Polynesians, but in 1844 a missionary ship failed to locate them.

The Polynesian enigma

Archaeologists regard the moai as representations of the living faces of the deified ancestors of the present-day inhabitants of Easter Island. As we said earlier this nonsensical theory can easily be dismissed by the fact that the moai bare not the slightest resemblance to the native population as we can see in the photo of some charming Easter Island girls shown at left. This begs the question of who the Polynesians are. Where did they come from? How were they able to reach the far-flung islands of the Pacific ocean? These questions have both vexed and intrigued scholars and students of Pacific culture since the discovery of the Pacific islands. They continue to do so today, without any of them coming up with satisfactory or convincing answers. Katherine Routledge writes: "In Easter Island ... the shadows of the departed builders still possess the land...The whole air vibrates with a vast purpose and energy which has been and is no more. What was it? Why was it?"

The origin of the Polynesians remains controversial. The prevailing theory in the late 1800s and early 1900s was that the Polynesians were an Indo-European group who came to the Pacific via India; this was partly based on linguistic evidence. Nowadays the Polynesians are generally believed to have originated in East Asia or Melanesia. Genetic studies are said to show that about 94% of Polynesian mitochondrial DNA is of East Asian origin and 6% of Melanesian origin. It is further thought that the ancestors of the Polynesians originated in China and Taiwan and migrated south to the Philippines some 6,000 years ago. Some researchers argue that genetic data as a whole favour an origin in island Southeast Asia approximately 10,000 years earlier. It might equally well be argued that both Polynesians and East Asians are descended from the same, primitive stock, the origin of which is to be sought in Lemuria. This at least might explain the various genetic and cultural similarities between the Polynesians and the Indians of Alaska and Canada — something not readily accounted for by any current mainstream theories. In addition to the link between Polynesian and Sanskrit, a strong Libyan influence on the early Polynesians' language has been identified. We know that Libyan sailors were employed on Egyptian ships, which travelled to the Indo-Pacific region for trading purposes, just as they travelled to the British Isles for the same reason. Unfortunately, none of this solves the mystery of who the Polynesians were originally, or where they came from, and when, unless we accept the existence of Lemuria.

The brood of mighty sorcerers

The monolithic human figures which have intrigued and fascinated visitors to Easter Island for hundreds of years are called 'moai'. The word means statue or figurine. Almost all have overly large heads which account for three-eighths of the size of the whole statue. One curiosity is that none of them have any legs. The mainstream explanation for this anomaly is that the head and upper body were considered more significant by the Easter Islanders. Another explanation is that natural erosion and sediment accumulation over time have obscured the lower parts of the statues, making it appear as though they have no legs. We are not told why the heads and torsos were not similarly affected. Based upon what H. P. Blavatsky had to say about the moai (which we shall come to in a moment), we think it more likely that the absence of lower limbs was intended to reinforce the fact that the statues were intended to represent a race of powerful magicians firmly rooted in the Earth — 'the brood of mighty sorcerers', as Blavatsky calls them — in contradistinction to the Heaven-born Lords of Wisdom; the former being 'sons of darkness' and the latter 'sons of light'. The bases of the statues are about where the hips would be; the arms hang stiffly at the sides, and the hands, with long slender fingers, extend across a protruding abdomen. The heads are elongated and rectangular, with heavy brows and prominent noses; small mouths with thin, pouting lips, prominent chins, and elongated earlobes, some of which are carved to represent inserted ear ornaments. As we said earlier their physical features bear no resemblance to any known Polynesian type.

The modern visitor, gazing upon these massive, brooding faces for the first time, is struck by how eerily alien they look. Taken as a whole they express haughty scorn, cruelty and imperious self-will; it is the expression of ruthless warriors and empire-builders. In The Secret Doctrine, Madame Blavatsky writes: "The Easter Island relics are the most astounding and eloquent memorials of the primeval giants. They are as grand as they are mysterious; and one has but to examine the heads of the colossal statues, that have remained unbroken on that island, to recognise in them at a glance the features of the type and character attributed to the Fourth Race giants. They seem of one cast though different in features — that of a distinctly sensual type...Compare these with the faces of some other colossal statues in Central Asia — those near Bamian for instance. These 'Buddhas', though often spoilt by the symbolical representation of the great pendent ears, show a suggestive difference, perceived at a glance, between the expression of their faces and that of the Easter Isle statues. They may be of one race — but the former are 'Sons of Gods', the latter the brood of mighty sorcerers." Sadly, the Bamian (also spelled 'Bamiyan') Buddhas were destroyed by the Taliban in March 2001, as we pointed out in our article on Giants. Nonetheless, enough drawings and photographs of these colossal statues remain to clearly show the difference between their serene, spiritualised faces and those of the Easter Island moai, the former being accurate representations of the great Sages of Atlantis, and the latter the wicked sorcerers whose evil practises ultimately led to the destruction of their shared continent.

Several of the archaic Stanzas of Dzyan — many of which Blavatsky included in The Secret Doctrine — refer to the giants of Easter Island, we quote: "Then the Fourth [race] became tall with pride. We are the kings, it was said; we are the gods. They built temples for the human body...they cut their own images in their size and likeness, and worshipped them. They built great images nine yatis high [27 feet], the size of their bodies." Now, it so happens that 27 feet is the size of many of the moai on Easter Island. Fortunately, we do not have to travel halfway across the Pacific Ocean to see exactly what Blavatsky meant when she described the moai as representations in stone of 'the brood of mighty sorcerers' who once ruled over Atlantis. The British Museum in London has one of these monumental statues on display, as you can see in the photograph reproduced below. This also gives us an idea of what the giant Atlantean magicians who once walked the Earth may have looked like; not a pleasant prospect!

However, you may need to be quick, as this statue, named "Hoa Hakananai'a," which means "stolen, hidden, or lost friend" in the present-day language of Easter Island, may not be in the museum for very much longer. In 2018 a Chilean social media 'influencer' whom, we are led to believe, boasts no less than 8.9 million followers on Tiktok, started an online campaign to have the "Stolen Friend" returned to Easter Island. At the time we wrote this article in March 2026, the 'Friend' remains safely ensconced on his bespoke plinth in room 24 of the museum. Visitors to Easter Island throughout the years have noted that although the sensual arrogance and haughty look is common to the faces of all the moai, it is never the same on two statues; each one looks as if it had been intended to be an individual portrait. If so, and we have no quarrel with this suggestion, then these monumental memorials of a vanished race may well represent actual individuals — an astonishing thought.

Unlike her contemporary counterparts, who, wedded to a rigid system of which they are the Praetorian Guard, are unable or unwilling to entertain the idea that the mysterious moai are the work of an extinct race who inhabited Easter Island tens of thousands of years ago, Katherine Routledge acknowledges this possibility. She writes: "It has been seen that any knowledge which exists on the island with regard to the origin of the monuments is of the most vague description, and it is therefore necessary, in the attempt to solve the problem, to rely principally on indirect evidence. It becomes in particular essential to collect all possible information about the present people; not only for its intrinsic anthropological interest, but in order to find if any links connect them with the great builders, or if we must look for an earlier race" (our emphasis). That race can only have been the Third or Lemurian Root Race which we briefly mention in our article about Giants: fact or fancy?

Routledge goes on to tell us that the accounts the islanders give of their origin and history fall into "three legends, which, though they touch at some points, are in reality separate, and their relation to one another in point of time cannot be ascertained for certain." It need hardly be said that, like all such legends, they are a mixture of fact and fiction, with a good deal of fancy added for good measure. The first legend concerns the arrival of the islanders under one Hotu-matua; the second deals with the destruction of the Long Ears by the Short Ears; and thirdly with the war between the two factions on the island, led by Kotuu and Hotu-iti respectively. We should interject at this point that almost all the moai found on the island have long ears, as can be seen in the images accompanying this investigation. We incline to the view that, allowing for artistic license, the long-eared statues are accurate representations of the earliest sub-races of the Fourth Atlantean Root Race, at a time when it was still mixed up with the Lemurians. If this is correct, and we see no reason why it should not be, the legend of the wars between the Short Ears and the Long Ears may reflect and record the conflict between the last representatives of the Third Root Race and the emerging Atlantean Root Race. In one legend recounted by Katherine Routledge, she mentions a man named Kainga who had three young sons, one of whom had been born with two faces, one of which looked before and the other behind. We were immediately struck by this description which tallies with what H. P. Blavatsky relates about the Lemurian Race, namely that "It lived an inner life in which the psycho-spiritual element was interfered with in no way by the hardly nascent physiological senses. Its two front eyes looked before them without seeing either past or future; but the third eye embraced Eternity." In other words the Lemurians were what we nowadays would call innate or natural-born clairvoyants.

Regrettably, but perhaps quite understandably, Katherine Routledge was no fan of Blavatsky or of Theosophy. In chapter XII of The Mystery of Easter Island she writes: "Theosophists, indeed, contend that it has been revealed by occult means that Easter Island is the remaining portion of an old continent named 'Lemuria,' which occupied the Pacific and Indian Oceans." This is a little unfair, not to say disingenuous. Routledge may have said it to downplay the importance of the historical, geological, anthropological and linguistic evidence marshalled by Theosophists in support of the existence of Lemuria. She goes on to quote from The Secret Doctrine — a book she clearly didn't favour — in which Blavatsky cites a statement from The Countries of the World by Robert Brown, published in 1876, in which the author writes: "But who made the great stone images which are now the chief attraction of the island to visitors? It is more than likely that they were here when the present inhabitants (a handful of Polynesian savages) arrived. Their workmanship is of a high order." Blavatsky adds: "The images at Ronororaka — the only ones now found erect — are four in number, three deeply sunk in the soil, and one resting on the back of its head like the head of a man asleep. Their types, though all are long-headed, are different; and they are evidently meant for portraits, as the noses, the mouths and chins differ greatly in form, their head-dress, moreover — a kind of flat cap with a back piece attached to it to cover the back portion of the head —showing that the originals were no savages of the stone period. Verily the question may be asked — 'Who made them?' — but it is not archaeology nor yet geology that is likely to answer, though the latter recognises in the Island a portion of a submerged continent' (The Secret Doctrine, vol. II. p337)." The fact that geologists no longer do so is a testament to the opprobrium with which the subject of 'lost continents' is now regarded. Many of the moai have singular carvings on their backs. While no two are exactly the same, one motif recurs. This consists of a triple girdle with a circle (or sometimes two) above it and an M-shaped design below it, as shown below.

Some scholars have interpreted this as a rainbow with the sun above and rain beneath. One visitor was told by a native that they represent the elements of life: sun, moon, and thunder, with thunder signifying electricity. There may well be something in this from an occult scientific perspective, though we doubt whether the 'native' in question was aware of the significance of what he or she related. The Sun, occultists contend, is the source of all Life in our Solar System, both materially and spiritually, while the Moon is the regulator of that life, illustrated by its role in the cycles of reproduction and fertility common to all vegetable, animal and human life. Other authorities argue the signs represent the three elements of the universe according to the present-day inhabitants of the island, namely: sunlight, water or sea, and mountain or earth. Here we have three of the four basic elements of Occult Science — Fire, Water and Earth. Quite why Air is missed out is not clear. Some writers, including H. P. Blavatsky, have drawn attention to the overall resemblance of these three symbols to the Egyptian ankh which among many things, signifies life, regeneration, and the descent of spirit into matter. This, as we shall see in a moment, is a good deal closer to the occult meaning of these carvings than the prosaic scholarly view we quoted earlier. If we study the back of one of the moai shown above, we can identify at least four significant occult symbols.

At top centre, we find what may either be a crown or an open flower, possibly a lotus. Immediately beneath this there is a bird with folded wings. Below this are two indistinct forms that may either represent stylised serpents or birdmen, the latter being the more likely, as this zootype is seen on many of the moai. On either side of the central bird there are two faces with what appear to be protruding, elongated tongues. These have generally been interpreted as 'oars' which seems somewhat dubious to us. With the best will in the world we find it difficult to find any symbolical meaning in oars proceeding from mouths. Hence, we are tolerably sure they are what the appear to be, namely tongues. Whether the makers intended them to signify some sacred utterance or other we cannot know, but it seems a more plausible possibility than a mouth emitting oars! The crowned bird may have signified the arisen soul (Higher Mind in our terminology), or the attainment of enlightenment. We can only speculate, basing our speculations, as always, on the known, fixed occult laws and principles discussed in so many of our articles, but especially in our detailed survey of the true Teachings of Hermes. Thus our interpretation is based on a good deal more than mere guesswork — or 'gasworks' in the case of the archaeologists, antiquarians, linguists, palaeontologists, and other champions of the odium historicum. It is also possible, as Blavatsky hinted, that the principal carving of the girdle, circle, and M-shape was intended to represent the triple forces of Life, Light and Love emanating from the Infinite Deity. To say much more would take us into the realm of unsubstantiated speculation, so there we must reluctantly leave the subject of the moai and their enigmatic decorations, for there is another mystery we have yet to touch upon. During the 1920's and 30's James Churchward published a series of books on Lemuria which he called "Mu." These are, in order of publication:

The Lost Continent of Mu, the Motherland of Men
The Children of Mu
The Sacred Symbols of Mu
Cosmic Forces of Mu
Second Book of Cosmic Forces of Mu

All are well worth obtaining and studying, especially the third book in the series — The Sacred Symbols of Mu. You can read more about this remarkable author and the books he wrote in the Afterword to our Links: Wisdom on the Web page. Below, we reproduce the map of Lemuria James Churchward included in his books about the vanished continent. We include it mainly for the sake of completeness. Although we make no claims for its accuracy we are in no doubt that a vast continent did exist in the approximate location the map covers.

The vanished continent

The fact that H. P. Blavatsky links the civilisation which once flourished on Easter Island with both the Lemurians and Atlanteans does not mean that its present archaeological remains must be millions of years old. As we quoted earlier from the Stanzas of Dzyan: "They (the Atlanteans) built great images, nine yatis high (27 feet) — the size of their bodies." Blavatsky adds that most of the gigantic statues discovered on Easter Island are 20 to 30 ft high, and those found by Captain Cook were nearly all 27 ft tall and 8 ft across the shoulders. She dismisses the standard view that they were made by the Polynesians and are not very old as "one of those arbitrary decisions of modern science which does not carry much weight." We would say it carries no weight at all! She adds that the statues could only have been made by giants of the same size as the statues themselves. This is possible, even likely. We may supplement what this eminent occultist writes about Easter Island with the testimony of an additional source. In the Histoire des Vierges: Les Peuples et les Continents Disparus by Louis Jacolliot, published in 1874, the author says: "One of the most ancient legends of India, preserved in the temples by oral and written tradition, relates that several hundred thousand years ago there existed in the Pacific Ocean an immense continent which was destroyed by geological upheaval, and the fragments of which must be sought in Madagascar, Ceylon, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and the principal isles of Polynesia."

The final conclusion of Louis Jacolliot, who personally visited all the islands of Polynesia mentioned in his book, and devoted years to the study of the religion, language, and traditions of nearly all the peoples, is as follows: "As to the Polynesian continent which disappeared at the time of the final geological cataclysms, its existence rests on such proofs that to be logical we can doubt no longer. The three summits of this continent, the Sandwich Islands, New Zealand, Easter Island, are distant from each other from fifteen to eighteen hundred leagues, and the groups of intermediate islands, Viti, Samoa, Tonga, Foutouna, Ouvea, the Marquesas, Tahiti, Poumoutou, the Gambiers, are themselves distant from these extreme points from seven or eight hundred to one thousand leagues."

Needless to add, neither Blavatsky's statements nor the evidence we have put before you in this investigation carries the slightest weight with the arbiters of scientific orthodoxy who parrot the statements of Wikipedia on the subject of sunken continents. These may be summed up by the remark of a 'modern expert': "Read my lips: the islands of Polynesia are not, nor have they ever been, a part of a sunken continent." Truly, the hubristic smugness of some scientists knows no bounds. The sole exception to this disdainful denial being the continents science itself has invented such as 'Gondwana' and 'Zealandia' to shore up its shaky theory of 'continental drift', now rebadged in the interests of 'political-correctness' as "Plate tectonics." This is not to deny that the surface of our planet (including the ocean floors) is in a constant state of movement, sometimes gentle, at others violent and destructive. On this point Occult Science is in complete accord with material science. Where they differ is that the former is founded on the understanding and application of unchangeable, Divine laws, whereas the latter clings to the whimsical theories of men which change with every passing scientific fad. We hope to discuss the vexed subject of Plate tectonics and sunken continents in a future article. Meanwhile, we trust that our readers will have found much food for thought in this investigation.

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An enigmatic script

In our customary Afterword, we examine the enigmatic ideogrammatic script discovered on Easter Island known as Rongorongo.

Second only to the mysterious origins of the moai discussed in our article, Easter Island presents us with another, equally enigmatic puzzle: a system of writing known as Rongorongo discovered in the 19th century which to all intents and purposes appears to be a written language.

The Rongorongo glyphs appear carved into wooden tablets, staffs, and objects. Their shapes — stylised humans, animals, plants, and geometric forms — carry the promise of a language frozen in time, waiting to speak to us. And yet, they remain silent. No scholar has managed to unlock their meaning. They taunt us with the possibility of a record of the island’s past, and more importantly, that of Lemuria.

The greatest obstacle in deciphering this ideogrammatic script is the absence of a bilingual text, a "Rosetta Stone" similar to that which unlocked the meaning of the ancient Egyptian language — a key that could provide a direct translation. By the time the script was recorded in the 19th century, the knowledge of how to read it had already vanished from the Easter Island community. Although oral traditions persisted, they no longer held the key to the enigmatic glyphs.

Among the many puzzles Rongorongo presents us with is its striking similarity to the Indus Valley script, as we can see in the table below (mouse over to enlarge). However, as the latter has not yet been deciphered either, it is of no help to linguists.

The story of Rongorongo begins not with the islanders themselves, but with European colonisers. In 1864, Eugène Eyraud, a French missionary, was the first outsider to report the existence of inscribed tablets on Easter Island. He noted that nearly every household seemed to possess one. The locals, however, no longer understood the inscriptions. Eyraud dismissed the strange glyphs as mere decorative markings without significance; a tragic mistake which was to have disastrous repercussions.

For, within a few years, most of these objects vanished. Some were burned, repurposed, or lost during the upheaval of colonial contact, disease, and forced labour raids that devastated the island's population. Only about two dozen authentic Rongorongo artefacts survive today which makes interpretation extremely difficult. Each piece is a fragment of a much larger puzzle, and together they form an incomplete chorus of an ancient voice, now silenced, perhaps forever.

The Rongorongo glyphs are carved into wooden tablets. They are arranged in neat rows, read in a distinctive reverse boustrophedon style, that is, one line runs left to right, the next right to left, and so on, with each line rotated 180 degrees relative to the one before. This unusual pattern of reading adds to the complexity of interpretation and demonstrates a sophisticated writing system rather than casual markings as Eugène Eyraud thought.

The glyphs themselves are mesmerising. As we can see in the example above, they depict human figures with distinctive postures, birds with elongated beaks, fish, plants, stars, and abstract forms. What strikes the observer in the examples shown in this Afterword, is the vividness of the imagery. The human figures often sit cross-legged or gesture with raised hands. Birds — significant in the iconography of Easter Island — appear prominently. Each glyph seems charged with esoteric meaning, yet locked away behind a veil of lost knowledge. What is particularly amazing to an occultist is that we may well be looking at writing which is a direct descendant of one of the written languages of Atlantis.

As with most undeciphered scripts such as Cretan Linear A or Etruscan there are many fanciful interpretations and claimed translations of Rongorongo. However, apart from a portion of one tablet which has been shown to have to do with a lunar calendar and a possible genealogy, none of the extant texts are understood. Scholars cite three main obstacles to decipherment: one, the assumption that Rongorongo is true writing; two, the small number of remaining texts; and three, the lack of context in which to interpret them.

While we have no quarrel with the second and third of these propositions (limited texts and lack of context), the first so-called 'obstacle' sounds perilously close to splitting hairs to us. Either Rongorongo is a bona fide written script, like Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese ideograms, or it is not. How these 'experts' love to hedge their bets, presumably from fear of putting their linguistic foot amongst the chickens of archaeological orthodoxy, and coming a cropper when their scholarly suppositions are summarily rejected and derided by their peers, if our readers will forgive the mixed metaphor.

To our amateur eyes this script, a clearer example of which is shown above (mouse over to enlarge), is reminiscent of the petroglyphs found in central and southern America, some of which we discussed in part three of our three-part investigation of The legacy of Atlantis. Could Easter Island have been settled by Atlantean explorers or even colonists? Given its remote location in the middle of the Pacific Ocean we think this is unlikely. A more probable hypothesis is that it was once part of Lemuria, before that continent was broken up.

Even orthodox researchers have conceded that Rongorongo constitutes a genuine enigma. A mystery compounded by the fact that it now survives only as markings on 27 pieces of wood scattered around the world's museums, though the possibility cannot be ruled out that other tablets might still be hidden in the island's sacred family caves.

Some signs also survive on paper in crude pamphlets from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The glyphs contain about 120 basic elements consisting of human figures in a variety of positions, birds, animals, plants, celestial objects, and geometrical shapes, an example of which is shown below. These are combined to form between 1,500 and 2,000 compound signs. Many of the motifs are also found in the island's rock art, but none are found on any moai or their supporting platforms.

The prevailing view today among scholarly 'experts' is that Rongorongo represents a rudimentary phonetic writing system, in which picture symbols were used to express ideas as well as objects. According to John Flenley and Paul Bahn, the authors of The Enigmas of Easter Island (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), "the individual glyphs do not represent an alphabet or even syllables, as in other scripts, but are 'cue cards' for whole words or ideas, plus a means of keeping count, like rosary beads. Each sign was a peg on which to hang a large amount of text committed to memory." This, at least, is an improvement on the asinine speculations of Eugène Eyraud mentioned earlier!

Many of the same criticisms were levelled at Egyptian hieroglyphs before their decipherment by Jean-François Champollion. Some researchers have even gone so far as to argue that the Rongorongo script is not ancient at all but was invented by the inhabitants after the Spanish visited the island in 1770, when a written proclamation of annexation was offered to the chiefs and priests for them to sign. Because some of the symbols used by the natives in signing the proclamation resembled the Rongorongo glyphs we are supposed to believe that the rest of the script was invented later!

The last truly literate islanders died either as a result of the 1862 slave raid or the subsequent smallpox epidemic. Natives who later claimed to be able to read Rongorongo appeared to be either reciting texts they had previously memorised or were merely describing the figures rather than actually reading them, and sometimes gave contradictory renderings of the same text.

Rongorongo now survives on 27 wooden objects none of which are now on the island. Most were salvaged by missionaries in the 1860s and 1870s and sent abroad. But not all such rescue attempts were successful, nor were they always undertaken with the best of intentions. Some inscriptions were deliberately destroyed by missionaries hell-bent on 'converting' the inhabitants to Christianity. Similar depredations by the ruffianly Spanish in the Americas resulted in the loss of countless precious ancient texts.

The Rongorongo script has still not been deciphered, despite several claims to the contrary. For example, in 1995, an independent linguist, Steven Fischer, who also claims to have deciphered the enigmatic Phaistos Disc, announced that most of the tablets were religious chants taking the form of "god A copulated with goddess B begetting a particular animal, plant, or natural phenomenon." However, his claims to have deciphered the script have been roundly attacked by other researchers. Some folks will insist on finding a sexual meaning for everything — we blame the mad theories of Sigmund Freud!

The Norwegian explorer and ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl (1914-2002) argued that Rongorongo was related to several South American scripts. In support of this claim he cited the pictographic writing of the Cuna Indians of Panama and northwest Colombia, who recorded songs by painting on wooden tablets. Some of the symbols they used are identical with those of Easter Island. Moreover, they also wrote their script in boustrophedon style.

Some scholars believe that the similarities between Rongorongo and Egyptian hieroglyphs may point to a common origin for both. However, the comparative crudity of the Easter Island glyphs in comparison to Egyptian Hieroglyphs — even from as early as the IVth Dynasty (ca. 3,500 B.C.) — suggests that this must have been very far back in the distant past.

Both scripts utilise pictorial symbols to convey meaning, but while Egyptian hieroglyphs have a clear phonetic and ideographic structure which is largely understood, Rongorongo remains undeciphered. This has led some scholars to conclude that, unlike hieroglyphs, which were used for religious purposes, Rongorongo appears to have been employed to record oral traditions or familial genealogies. However, until, or unless the script is deciphered all such theories must remain purely speculative. The same caveats apply to comparisons between Rongorongo and the Mayan script.

The Mayan script is one of the most sophisticated writing systems in the pre-Columbian Americas, featuring a combination of logograms and syllabic signs, just like Egyptian hieroglyphs. Both were used to record historical events and preserve and convey religious concepts. However, while the Mayan script has been largely deciphered, allowing us to understand its structure and meaning, Rongorongo remains an enigma. Furthermore, the Maya left behind a wealth of inscriptions that contribute meaning to their language, while Rongorongo lacks such comprehensive context.

Although Rongorongo shares some characteristics with other ancient scripts, its unique features and the mystery surrounding its meaning set it apart. The comparisons with Egyptian hieroglyphs, cuneiform, and the Mayan script serve only to compound the difficulties in unlocking the hidden concealed in this enigmatic script.

The writing systems found among the Aymara and Quechua peoples of the Lake Titicaca area also used boustrophedon. The Incas reportedly had a writing system in which their history was recorded on 'boards' that were passed down through the generations and guarded by a caste of priestly sages. There is evidence that the Spanish invaders found some of these tablets stored in the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco. As was customary with these ruffianly thieves, they burned them, being more interested in the gold frames that enclosed them.

Most conventional researchers believe that the Rongorongo script is Polynesian, and that its signs reflect the local environment and culture. This is contradicted by the fact that, as Katherine Routledge states in The Mystery of Easter Island, "No light has yet been thrown on the origin of the script. No other writing has been found in the Pacific, if we except a form from the Caroline Islands, and a few rock carvings in the Chatham Islands, whose connection with the glyphs of Easter Island is as yet very doubtful."

Here we part company with the eminent archaeologist. The fact that glyphs resembling those of Easter Island have been found carved onto rocks on several isolated Pacific islands points quite conclusively to a common origin. Other writers have pointed to resemblances between Rongorongo glyphs and about 40 archaic Chinese ideographs, mostly dating from before the 8th century B.C. We ourselves, earlier in this Afterword, showed the close similarity between the Rongorongo glyphs and those of the Indus valley.

From this it follows that if there is a common origin for all these scripts, then that source can only have been Atlantis, which itself inherited the art and science of writing from the Lemurian civilisation that preceded it. Not, as we said in our article, that this cuts any ice with most authorities, who would be the first to complain that the facts we have put before you in this investigation lack the rigour of 'scientific evidence'.

Frankly, this is a bit rich coming from the same 'authorities' who declare with breathtaking insouciance that "Science is unable to offer any explanation regarding the nature of an electric charge," a statement we quoted in our investigation of the theory of gravity. We hope to write more about Lemuria in a future article.

occult mysteries