Laird Scranton - Decoding Maori Cosmology: The Ancient Origins of New Zealand’s Indigenous Culture

DECODING
MAORI
COSMOLOGY

Decoding Maori Cosmology is sure to be controversial. Its major premise claims that an archaic, matriarchal tradition, or great Mother Goddess culture, gave birth to parallel mythological systems all across the globe after 10,000 BCE. Continuing his series that researches the evidence for cultural diffusion, Laird Scranton uses comparative linguistics as well as corresponding cosmologies, concepts, architectures, and artifacts in order to link the Maori of New Zealand with Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, the Sakti Cult of Tamil India, dynastic and predynastic Egypt, Skara Brae in Northern Scotland, the Dogon tribe of Mali, and the Buddhism of Tibet and elsewhere. In addition, he clearly and skillfully demonstrates how these diverse peoples of long ago fully understood the fundamental principles of quantum physics and string theory. This book is an essential piece of the puzzle showing the true picture of our ancient past.

GARY A. DAVID, AUTHOR OF JOURNEY OF THE SERPENT PEOPLE: HOPI MIGRATIONS AND STAR CORRELATIONS

With every book Laird Scranton writes, he take us deeper into understanding our origin and ourselves. Using his solid foundation of Dogon, Egyptian, Chinese, and Scottish cultures he again displays to the reader the complexities inherent in ancient civilizations and provides additional insights into our obscured past. Laird continues to broaden our understanding of the advanced technical concepts that are fundamental to world myths, concepts so advanced that we are only rediscovering many of them today. He suggests that there is an archaic connection between these diverse cultures, with the ancient cosmology of the Maori of New Zealand further validating this interconnected web of language, culture, science, and tradition. Decoding Maori Cosmology presents intriguing correlations and compelling arguments that cause you to stop and think.

RITA LOUISE, PH.D., COAUTHOR OF THE E.T. CHRONICLES: WHAT MYTHS AND LEGENDS TELL US ABOUT HUMAN ORIGINS

Acknowledgments

I t goes without saying that this volume owes a debt of thanks to my sister, Lizzy Thoresen, who reached out into the world to make New Zealand her home and has long championed its beauty, the sensibilities of its people, and its greater significance in the world. I would also like to acknowledge my nephew, Rafael Arenos, who has always connected with my interests and steadfastly supported my efforts. Thanks are due again to my wife and best friend, Risa, my son, Isaac, and my daughter, Hannah, who each bring their own significant influences to the work that I do and allow me to use them as sounding boards for each new obscure nuance of my research. I would like to thank John Anthony West, who continues to be an avid promoter of my work, even when it may skirt the fringes of his own well-formed outlooks. In particular, I would like to thank the many people who take the time to read my books, attend my presentations, and otherwise introduce themselves into my life.

Introduction to the Maori

I initially undertook to write this book in the summer of 2003, shortly after having self-published Hidden Meanings: A Study of the Founding Symbols of Civilization (later republished by Inner Traditions as The Science of the Dogon). The manuscript for Hidden Meanings had begun simply as an organized set of working notes that I had kept for my Dogon studies. Over time, these notes grew in length to the point where they approximated a book, and so I made the decision to self-publish them. During this same period of self-study, I had acquired a copy of New Zealand ethnographer Elsdon Bests Maori Religion and Mythology, had noticed similarities between the Dogon and Maori cosmologies, and had been reading it for comparison to the Dogon. Although outwardly the Dogon and the Maori are distant cultures with no obvious links of heritage (one located in Northwest Africa and the other in Polynesia), I could see that the Maori concept of the po as an atom-like component of matter was a match for the similar Dogon concept. Likewise, details of the Maori esoteric tradition and how it was passed down from generation to generation were quite similar to the Dogon tradition. These practices implied that, despite the great distance between cultures, the symbology of this tribal culture from New Zealand must have arisen out of a system of cosmology that was substantially similar to that of the Dogon.

By this early point in my studies, I already understood that language could be a key to correlating ancient concepts between cultures, so I did a cursory review of a Maori-English dictionary to test the limits of possible correspondence. The dictionary revealed certain areas of linguistic overlap, but it also reflected significant differences in word forms that I was not yet competent to explain. Year after year, as each new book in my series on ancient cosmology was brought to completion, it again became my intention to take up these studies and develop a book about Maori cosmology. But inevitably, some logical next phase in my comparative work from Africa to Egypt, India, Tibet, and China would assert itself and convince me to set the Maori project aside, with hopes of continuing it at some future date.

More than a decade later, I now look on these delays in process as having been fortuitous ones. Each project that pushed its way ahead of the Maori book brought with it a degree of familiarity with yet another era of ancient cosmology that I now see as having direct bearing on the Maori tradition. Moreover, each cosmological era was characterized by certain key terms and mythic themes drawn from its own related language.

For example, I believe that insights into the archaic era of Gobekli Tepe can often be found in Turkish word forms. The matriarchal era of the Sakti Cult is perhaps best reflected in Tamil roots of the Dravidian languages in southern India. The Vedic, Buddhist, and Hindu eras express themselves in Sanskrit. Terms of the Neolithic era of the cosmology can be recognized through comparison to words of the Faroese, Icelandic, and Scottish-Gaelic languages. Similarly, the Dogon era of the cosmology came into focus for me through the correlation of Dogon words and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic words, which often take the same form as Hebrew words. The Maori system of cosmology, which is rooted in a relatively recent historical period, is couched in a language that seems to be an effective clearinghouse for the cosmological words of each of these prior eras. To find these words commingled within the Maori language implies that each era is likely to have had an ancestral influence on the Maori tradition.

For those who may not be familiar with regions in Polynesia, New Zealand is a spectacularly scenic island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, situated to the southeast of Thailand and just east of the continent of Australia. It consists of two main landmasses, known as the North Island and the South Island, along with a number of other smaller islands. Because of its remote location, New Zealand was one of the last lands on our planet known to be permanently occupied by people. The Maori (maow-ree) are a native tribal group of New Zealand and are considered by many to have been the original inhabitants of these beautiful islands. Maori tribal groups were found to be living in New Zealand when European explorers first arrived. In 1642 the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman became the first European explorer to happen upon New Zealand, at which time he reported finding a population of nearly one hundred thousand Maori residing there, located primarily in the northern regions of the North Island. In 1769 the English sea captain James Cook landed in New Zealand and made the first efforts to map the islands. It was not until 1814 that Christian missionaries arrived in New Zealand and attempted to convert the native population to Christianity. Although the Maori culture rested on many of its societal advancements, these missionaries also brought outside education and skills of literacy to the natives, along with instruction in techniques of agriculture.