Hawaiki

Hawaiki is the mythical island that the Polynesians trace their origins to. Polynesian legends say that the spirits of Polynesian people return to Hawaiki upon their death.

Spellings

The name "Hawaiki" is specifically Māori and figures in Maori legends about their arrival to Aotearoa (New Zealand). The same concept appears in other Polynesian cultures, and the name can also be spelled Hawaiiki, Hawai‘iki, Hawaii‘iki, Havai‘i, Hawai‘ti, Savai‘i, in the various Pacific island languages, though Hawaiki appears to be the most common variation used in English. (The ii, i‘i, ii‘i variants are attempts to phonetically reflect a long I sound, with a glottal stop in the middle replacing the "k" in some variants.)

The Polynesian island of Hawaii, written Hawai‘i in Hawaiian, some say, is named in commemoration of Hawaiki. Some pseudohistorical theories connect Hawaiki with the lost continent of Mu.

THE AROI SUN KINGDOM OF THE PACIFIC

The ancient civilizations are that of the virtually unknown ancient culture of the Aroi Sun Kingdom of the Pacific. While the so-called lost continent of Mu sank over 24,000 years ago in a pole shift, the Pacific was later repopulated by a racial mixture of all civilizations, coming from Rama, China, Africa and the Americas.

An advanced island nation, with larger areas of land than are currently in the Pacific, grew up around Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia. Ancient legends in Polynesia attribute this remarkable civilization to the Aroi Kingdom that existed many thousands of years before the European rediscovery of the Pacific. The Aroi allegedly built many of the megalithic pyramids, platforms, arches, roads and statues throughout the central Pacific.

When some of the more than 400 gravel hills on New Caledonia were excavated in the 1960s, cement columns of lime and shell matter were carbon dated by Yale and the New Caledonia Museum as having been made before 5120 B.C. and 10,950 B.C. These weird cement columns can be found in the southern part of New Caledonia and on the Isle of Pines.

According to the Easter Islanders, the statues of the islands walked or levitated in order to move in a clock-wise spiral around the island. On the island of Pohnpei, the Micronesians claim that the stones of the eleven-square-mile city were levitated into place.

The Polynesians of New Zealand, Easter Island, Hawaii and Tahiti all believe that their ancestors had the ability of flight and would travel through the air from island to island. Was this the Air Atlantis flight that stopped in Malta, Ba'albek, and Rama destined for the remote but popular convention center at Easter Island?

Yet most sources claim Lemurians were much more like modern humans, living in an idyllic paradise, largely agrarian with lush forests and an abundance of flowers and fruit trees. Feminine principles of sharing, cooperation, and creativity produced a society virtually free of crime, strife, and warfare. Lemurians were vegetarians and lived in harmony with nature and other creatures, and they had highly developed psychic and telepathic senses, which were applied in practical endeavors such as horticulture. People believed in 'mind over matter' and were adept at manifestation and other 'reality creating' techniques. This tradition survives, some claim, in the Polynesian concept of mana and various fire-walking ceremonies throughout the region.

Even traditional anthropologists are puzzled by a pre-Polynesian culture that stretched across most of the Pacific. Widely separated locales displayed astonishing similarities in village life, religious cults, myths, and foods such as coconuts, bananas, and taro. Over time each area, such as Polynesia, grew more diverse and distinctive and eventually lost contact with the other. The languages of this culture were thought to be Austronesian which includes hundreds of related tongues still found today from Polynesia to distant Madagascar.

Author James Churchwood

Modern science and practical testing of theories

Until recently, many anthropologists had doubts that these legends described a deliberate migration, preferring to believe that the migration occurred accidentally because seafarers became lost and drifted to uninhabited shores. In 1947, Thor Heyerdahl sailed the Kon-Tiki, a balsa wood raft, from South America to show that Polynesia could have been settled from the east, with sailors using the prevailing winds and simple construction techniques.

However, DNA evidence indicates that the Polynesians likely originated from islands in eastern Asia, possibly from Taiwan, and moved southwards and eastwards through the South Pacific Ocean. The common ancestry of all the Austronesian languages, of which the Polynesian languages are a major subgroup, also supports this conclusion. This evidence indicates that at least some of the migration occurred against the prevailing winds and had to be deliberate rather than just accidental. The existence of uninhabited islands may have been predicted by observing migratory patterns of birds.

In recent decades, boatbuilders (see Polynesian Voyaging Society) have constructed ocean-going craft using traditional materials and techniques, and sailed them over presumed traditional routes using ancient navigation methods, showing that such deliberate migration was very possible.

External links

• Hawai'iki - The Ancient Land - Hawaiian Legend.
• Oceania history websites, profiled