Read Online Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet by Ted Nield - Free Book Online Page B
Book: Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet by Ted Nield
Read Free Book Online
Authors: Ted Nield
Ads: Link
does its conception of Lemuria, though largely on the ethereal plane of the World Wide Web.
Mystic Mu
The Indian Ocean had its Lemuria, and the Atlantic had of course its Atlantis. But what of the largest ocean of all, the last surviving remnant of Panthalassa? The potential financial rewards for this kind of work are great, as Blavatsky had shown; and as any scientific fraud or unscrupulous journalist knows, it is a lot quicker to make things up than find things out. Crucially too, the Pacific is the closest ocean to California, the best place in the world to found new religions. Madame Blavatsky herself recognized this, and in her later writings began edging her Lemuria out of the distant Indian Ocean and into the Pacific for this sound business reason. Yet despite her tweakings , the Pacific Ocean still represented a huge vacant lot to the would-be supercontinent maker, and before long one was duly ‘discovered’. The odd thing is, by the time its name broke upon the public in the twentieth century, it had already existed in the minds of (some) men for centuries.
Mu is perhaps the maddest of all imaginary lost continents. Its origins , however, lie not with the sciences of zoology, botany or geology, but with archaeology; and the very unscientific analysis of some very ancient writings.
Its existence was first proposed by one Charles Etienne, Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg (1814–74). The Abbé travelled much of Europe and Central and South America in the service of the Catholic Church, and apart from missionary zeal his main life interest lay in the ethnography of the native peoples of America. In his later years he became convinced of pre-Columbian connections between American and Eastern races, connections for which the existence of the Pacific Ocean constituted something of a geographical snag.
The Mayans left very few written documents, and deciphering them has always presented acute difficulties in the absence of any equivalent of the Rosetta Stone that offers the linguist parallel texts of whichat least one is known. Nothing daunted, the Abbé set about the task of reading the Troano Codex. This codex consisted of half of one of three surviving Mayan manuscripts, and it is now part of what is today known as the Madrid Codex. In his reading he thought he discovered references to a sunken land by the name of Mu, and leapt at the idea because it solved his ethnographical problems by bridging the Pacific. So Mu started life, rather like Lemuria, as a means of explaining a distribution pattern – only this time, of people.
The Abbé’s references were next picked up by a widely (though uncritically) read Philadelphia lawyer and Minnesota congressman, Ignatius Donnelly (1831–1901), author of Atlantis: the Antediluvian World (1882). Unhappily for Donnelly, his literary judgement failed him over the de Bourbourg ‘translation’ of the Troano Codex on which he, the Abbé and the supposed continent of Mu depended. For the translation was, in fact, nothing of the sort.
De Bourbourg had ‘interpreted’ the Codex, having himself discovered a ‘Mayan alphabet’ devised by a Spanish monk by the name of Diego da Landa. Arriving in America with the Conquistadores, da Landa was among the first scholars to come across the vivid pictograms of the Mayan people. His so-called alphabet was nonsense; the Mayan writing system was not letter-based at all.
The Abbé’s Troano Codex ‘translation’, which supposedly described (in highly elliptical terms) some great volcanic catastrophe, was nothing more than a figment of the Abbé’s fevered imagination, spurred on by the application of da Landa’s bogus alphabet. And, crucially for this story, during the process of his creative decipherment de Bourbourg came across two pictograms that he could not at first identify. Thinking, though, that they bore a slight resemblance to the symbols that da Landa asserted to be the Mayan equivalents of the letters M and U, the Abbé
Mystic Mu
The Indian Ocean had its Lemuria, and the Atlantic had of course its Atlantis. But what of the largest ocean of all, the last surviving remnant of Panthalassa? The potential financial rewards for this kind of work are great, as Blavatsky had shown; and as any scientific fraud or unscrupulous journalist knows, it is a lot quicker to make things up than find things out. Crucially too, the Pacific is the closest ocean to California, the best place in the world to found new religions. Madame Blavatsky herself recognized this, and in her later writings began edging her Lemuria out of the distant Indian Ocean and into the Pacific for this sound business reason. Yet despite her tweakings , the Pacific Ocean still represented a huge vacant lot to the would-be supercontinent maker, and before long one was duly ‘discovered’. The odd thing is, by the time its name broke upon the public in the twentieth century, it had already existed in the minds of (some) men for centuries.
Mu is perhaps the maddest of all imaginary lost continents. Its origins , however, lie not with the sciences of zoology, botany or geology, but with archaeology; and the very unscientific analysis of some very ancient writings.
Its existence was first proposed by one Charles Etienne, Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg (1814–74). The Abbé travelled much of Europe and Central and South America in the service of the Catholic Church, and apart from missionary zeal his main life interest lay in the ethnography of the native peoples of America. In his later years he became convinced of pre-Columbian connections between American and Eastern races, connections for which the existence of the Pacific Ocean constituted something of a geographical snag.
The Mayans left very few written documents, and deciphering them has always presented acute difficulties in the absence of any equivalent of the Rosetta Stone that offers the linguist parallel texts of whichat least one is known. Nothing daunted, the Abbé set about the task of reading the Troano Codex. This codex consisted of half of one of three surviving Mayan manuscripts, and it is now part of what is today known as the Madrid Codex. In his reading he thought he discovered references to a sunken land by the name of Mu, and leapt at the idea because it solved his ethnographical problems by bridging the Pacific. So Mu started life, rather like Lemuria, as a means of explaining a distribution pattern – only this time, of people.
The Abbé’s references were next picked up by a widely (though uncritically) read Philadelphia lawyer and Minnesota congressman, Ignatius Donnelly (1831–1901), author of Atlantis: the Antediluvian World (1882). Unhappily for Donnelly, his literary judgement failed him over the de Bourbourg ‘translation’ of the Troano Codex on which he, the Abbé and the supposed continent of Mu depended. For the translation was, in fact, nothing of the sort.
De Bourbourg had ‘interpreted’ the Codex, having himself discovered a ‘Mayan alphabet’ devised by a Spanish monk by the name of Diego da Landa. Arriving in America with the Conquistadores, da Landa was among the first scholars to come across the vivid pictograms of the Mayan people. His so-called alphabet was nonsense; the Mayan writing system was not letter-based at all.
The Abbé’s Troano Codex ‘translation’, which supposedly described (in highly elliptical terms) some great volcanic catastrophe, was nothing more than a figment of the Abbé’s fevered imagination, spurred on by the application of da Landa’s bogus alphabet. And, crucially for this story, during the process of his creative decipherment de Bourbourg came across two pictograms that he could not at first identify. Thinking, though, that they bore a slight resemblance to the symbols that da Landa asserted to be the Mayan equivalents of the letters M and U, the Abbé
Similar Books
