N: Naacals to Nyoe 203
Nirai-Kanai
A culture hero cited throughout the oral traditions of the Ryukyu Islands,
south of Japan. Nirai-Kanai was said to have arrived very long ago from his en-
lightened kingdom, far over the sea, where it was swallowed in a tempest of fire
and storm. He taught the natives how to cultivate cho-mei-gusa, the “plant of
immortality,” and built the first stone castles in the islands. Coincidentally (?), his
legend is venerated at Okinawa and Yonaguni, where underwater ruins were dis-
covered in the mid-1980s and late 90s. Nirai-Kanai is also “The Homeland Very
Far Away In The Sea,” regarded as a kingdom from which the forefathers of the
Japanese Ama arrived after it was engulfed in the western Pacific Ocean.
(See Ama, Horai, Mu, Yonaguni)Noah
Although he appears in Genesis, Noah is certainly not an original biblical
conception. Virtually his entire story was lifted from Assyrian, Babylonian,
Akkadian, Eblamite, Sumerian, and other Mesopotamian traditions which predated
the bible, sometimes by thousands of years. He was cited to lend legitimacy to the
pedigree of the Hebrew patriarchs, who claimed to trace their lineage from Noah.
The name is a corruption of Nu, or Nun, the Egyptian god of the primordial
deep, who submerged the first “mound” on which gods and men once lived in
harmony. “Noah” was taken directly from Ma-Nu, Nun’s cohort and goddess of
the ancient ocean, and embodiment of the Great Flood, as it was known both in
the Nile Valley and the Indus Valley. The Hebrew letter, nun, means “fish.” Even
the Hebrew “ark” was originally the Sumerian arghe, a “moon vessel” that rode
out the Deluge millennia before the Old Testament version was composed.
(See Nowah’wus)Noatun
Literally, the “Enclosure of Ships,” a variant in Germanic myth of Atlantis;
palace of the Norse sea-god Njord, at the bottom of the ocean. “Noatun” is also a
segment in the Nordic zodiac equivalent to Pisces, the Fish, a sign that concludes
on the vernal equinox, March 21, Njord’s feast day. Noatun’s philological similar-
ity to the biblical Noah suggests it is a variant on an original Atlantean name both
Norse and Hebrews received independently from a common source—namely, one
of the Atlantis catastrophes.Nostradamus
Born Michel de Nostredame in Saint-Remy, France, December 14, 1503, he is
history’s most famous astrologer. During his mid-40s, Nostradamus began making