240 The Atlantis Encyclopedia
Rongo-mai
Still venerated in the Lake Taupo districts of New Zealand as a war-god who,
in the deep past, attacked the world in the guise of a comet. After bringing great
destruction upon humankind, he transformed himself into a gigantic whale which
sank into the sea.
(See Asteroid Theory)Rongo-Rongo
An indecipherable written language preserved by the natives of Easter Island,
in the eastern Pacific Ocean, on wooden tablets known as kohau. Most of the
thousands of such tablets were burned by Christian missionaries, but very few
surviving specimens are virtually identical to the no less mysterious Indus Valley
script from nearly 13,000 miles away, precisely half-way around the globe. In
between India and Easter Island, rongo-rongo appears only in rarely isolated
characters among the Gilbert and other scattered Pacific islands. Comparison
between the two syllabaries is less complicated by the great distances dividing
them than by their broad separation in time. The Indus Valley script was in use by
the late fourth millennium B.C., dying out with the Aryan invasions of 1500 B.C.,
while the kohau have not been dated earlier than the fifth century A.D. These are
apparently copies made of earlier “talking boards.”
Variations on the name “Rongo” are associated throughout Polynesia with a
fair-haired flood hero from a sunken kingdom. The culture-bearer, Hotu Matua,
was said to have brought a library of 67 kohau to Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, from
Marae-Renga, an island satellite of the larger kingdom, Hiva, which sank beneath
the sea. His “talking boards” were alleged to have included histories, proverbs,
songs, and genealogical tables. Because traditions in both India and Easter Island
describe arrivals of culture-bearers from a high civilization destroyed by a natural
catastrophe, the written languages unique to either location are probably legacies
from the sunken land of Mu. No other conclusion better explains the close resem-
blance of these two written languages otherwise parted by thousands of miles and
several millennia.
(See Hotu-matua, Mu, Rongo-mai)Root race
An Anthroposophical term for an ancestral race of modern man. The
Atlantean is one of several such races.
(See Steiner)