Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

by Graham Hancock

  Meggers, Evans and Estrada published their revolutionary thesis in Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology in 1965. Their ideas, which they themselves stick by, have been neither universally accepted by scholars nor conclusively rejected.

  In Japan I found that Sahara Makoto was not a supporter of the ‘Valdivia’ connection, preferring to put down to coincidence all the numerous similarities between Jomon and Valdivia pottery. Conversely, Yasuhiro Okada, Chief Archaeologist at Sannai-Muryama, feels it is ‘very likely’ that the pottery of Valdivia was influenced by Jomon migrants 5000 years ago. ‘More and more’, he told me, ‘I am coming to realize that we cannot understand the Jomon if we view them only in the context of Japan. They were Pacific voyagers. They used the sea.’ Professor Mozai Torao of Tokyo University agrees:

  It may be assumed that, before the dawn of history, ancient peoples were well-travelled, going far and wide on the earth by way of navigation or drift, that they in fact covered distances quite unimaginable for modern people.

  Stone boat

  I visited Cape Ashizuri on the invitation of a Japanese politician, Senator Sadao Hirano of Kochi Prefecture on the island of Shikoku. He had heard of my interest in the possible Jomon origins of Japan’s veneration of big stones and wanted to draw my attention to the existence of large groups of iwakura scattered like sentinels along the hilly margins of the Cape, all of them overlooking the Black Current. Showing us around were volunteer members of a local amateur historical association, the Ashizuri Jomon Kyoseki, who are making a long-term study of the megaliths and who are convinced that they were the work of the Jomon.

  On several occasions over those two days as I was guided from rock shrine to rock shrine in the tree-covered hills I had the strange sense that I was diving again. This was because many of the Ashizuri megaliths are lost in the depths of forests where even at midday the bright light of the sun hardly penetrates. Standing on the floor of such a forest feels like standing on the bed of a deep green sea.

  In one enchanted glade I came upon the carved figure of a turtle’s head jutting out of a boulder. Elsewhere, a group of twenty megaliths, like smaller versions of the sarsens of Stonehenge, lay scattered around, overgrown by weeds and grass. In a clearing I found a stone circle made up of six large slabs. Near by, at the bottom of a narrow defile, a phallus-shaped menhir stood erect, surmounted by a second smaller boulder seemingly representing the glans. I walked on, climbed a forested hillside and arrived eventually at a grey stone block, 10 metres long, that had been carved into the shape of a boat with a high prow.

  As I stood silently amongst the trees and the rock, looking up at the distant sun, I felt the prow of the stone boat beneath my fingers and was reminded again of the very many ways in which the Jomon are still alive today – alive through their pottery, alive through their sacred mountains, alive through rock shrines in deserted forests and in the depths of the sea, alive as great and powerful ancestral kami, alive as ideas embedded within the mysteries of the Shinto religion. And as I thought through everything I had learned about the Jomon I realized how far I had moved from the original preconceptions I had held about them. For here were a people who had explored their world by land and sea – reaching the Americas at least twice between 15,000 and 5000 years ago. Here were a people who had used pottery millennia before anyone else and gone on to refine it into a beautiful art form. Here were a people who engineered their landscape to create sacred mountains, circles of stone, temples of rock. Here were a people who lived in harmony with their environment, who made use of an intelligent mixture of strategies to ensure comfortable survival and security for the future, and who successfully avoided the pitfalls of militarism, materialism, conspicuous consumption and overpopulation that so many other cultures of the ancient world lost their way in. Here, above all, was a people whose civilization remained intact and flourished – decently, humanely, even generously, as far as we can know these things from the archaeological record, for more than 14,000 years.

  If they could only speak to us, despite the lapse of time, what secrets would the Jomon have to tell of the true story and mystery of ancient Japan?

  26 / Remembrance

  When Sosano went up to Heaven, by reason of the fierceness of his divine nature there was a commotion in the sea, and the hills and mountains groaned aloud.

  Nihongi

  A haunting refrain, played softly, winds its way through the myth-memories of ancient Japan. It is the story of a journey to the realm of gloom that lies beyond death – to the Land of Yomi, the Underworld of the oldest Shinto texts. It is also the story of a sojourn on an enchanted island. And it is the story of a voyage underwater to the Kingdom of the Sea King.

  The plots and characters differ. However, the story always involves a love affair; the female partner always remains in the mystical kingdom; and the male partner always returns to the sublunary world. Such shared details do not feel accidental. But where do they come from? More specifically, is some sort of association implied between the enchanted island, the submerged ‘towers’ and ‘palaces’ of the underwater kingdom, and the Underworld of Yomi in which the soul must tarry after death?

  In my search for the Jomon, described in chapter 25, I travelled very widely around Japan visiting a series of important Jomon sites all the way from Kyushu in the south to Hokkaido in the north and listening to the wisdom of the leading field archaeologists. These experiences equipped me with some sense of the Jomon way of life, of their relationships with each other and with nature, of their unique ceramic art, of their spiritual system centred upon the veneration of stone and mountains, and of their belief – attested in burial practices at Sannai-Muryama and elsewhere – that the soul survives death.

  But still I seemed to be only scratching the surface: the Jomon did not make use of a written language, and a thousand years of Yayoi and Kofun culture separated the end of the Jomon period from Japan’s earliest surviving written collections of scriptures, myths and traditions. It seemed impossible, therefore, for the Jomon to ‘speak for themselves’ – and I often felt as though I was dealing with a civilization that was completely mute.

  Or was I missing something?

  The unrecognized legacy of 14,000 years

  Japan, of course, has texts, scriptures, myths and traditions in abundance, but scholars have consistently treated them as irrelevant to the problem of Jomon – and the Jomon as irrelevant to the texts.1 And while there is no archaeological evidence that a complete ‘cultural replacement’ took place in Japan at the transition from Jomon to Yayoi (quite the contrary, it was a long process of assimilation and syncretization), most scholars and members of the public nevertheless continue to behave as though a complete cultural replacement did in fact occur – and thus feel justified in ignoring or underplaying the possibility that 14,000 years of continuous Jomon culture must surely have left some mark, and perhaps a very deep one, on almost everything and anything that is truly Japanese.

  As I began to suspect the extent to which Japan might still be a Jomon country I therefore also began to look from a new perspective at the handful of Shinto texts, centred around the famous Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, which together provide almost the only surviving repositories of authentic Japanese myths, legends and traditions. If so much else goes back to the Jomon, including some of the root concepts of Shintoism itself, as we saw in chapter 25, then it is absurd that the stories and ideas preserved in the ancient texts should continue to be treated as though they are exclusively the innovations of the Yayoi or later cultures – and thus immune from Jomon influence. This habitual posture of scholars has the effect of compressing Japan’s entire classical ‘myth bank’ -and the search for its origins – into that period of just over 1000 years that separates the earliest archaeological evidence of the Yayoi in Japan, at around 400 BC, from the first written codification of the myths in the Kojiki, at around AD 712. Within such boundaries, scholars happily discuss influences that have come from as far afield as China, t
he South Pacific and India. But the possibility that some of the classical myths might have Jomon origins has never been seriously considered.2

  Are we to suppose then that this extremely old and gifted culture accumulated no mythology of its own during the vast span that it held complete possession of the land of Japan? That doesn’t seem reasonable. Yet how else are we to explain the alleged silence of the Jomon in the historical and mythical testimony of that land?

  One possibility might be that the gods, myths and spiritual ideas of the latecoming Yayoi were so powerful that they not only displaced Jomon mythology but also annihilated it so completely that not a word of it would ever be remembered again.

  Alternatively – in this as in Japan’s age-old veneration of divine mountains and sacred rocks – the myth-memories preserved in the ancient texts might conceal a profound Jomon legacy.

  The surviving records and their limitations

  First and foremost, if we discount rumours of two texts said to have been compiled in more ancient times but unfortunately lost,3 it is essential to register that nothing of a mythical nature seems to have been written down – nothing at all - until the early years of the eighth century AD.4

  Before that, as was the case in India, the old stories, religious teachings and histories were preserved and constantly repromulgated within what seems to have been entirely an oral tradition. Although a professional corporation of ‘reciters’ (Kitari-be) did exist in Japan,5 giving cause for hope that much might have been saved, it is not clear how reliable or systematic the oral tradition was, to what extent it was subject to change and corruption, or at what pace such processes may have occurred. However, by the year 682, the fortieth emperor Temmu-Tenno, who reigned from 673 to 686, was sufficiently concerned to order the collection from all reliable and accepted sources of ‘true traditions and genealogies’.6 Before Temmu-Tenno died in 686 the compilation had been committed to memory by a professional reciter who, it was said, could ‘repeat with his mouth whatever his eyes saw, and remember in his heart whatever struck his ears’.7 The project was then shelved for twenty-five years. Then at last the Empress Gemmei ordered that such of the ancient lore as the reciter still remembered should be written down.8

  The end result, completed around the year 712, is the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters), the fundamental scripture of the Shinto religion.9 Although it expounds at length on the ‘Age of the Gods’ before history began, and on legendary emperors whom archaeologists do not recognize, it is also a historical document that tells the story of historical Emperors and of the Japanese people down to 628.10

  Second in importance to the Kojiki is the Nihon Shoki (also known as the Nihongi), which issued forth from the court in 720.11 Conceived of as a history and royal chronicle, it presents the annals of Japan from the earliest times down to 697.12 In practice its subject matter is often identical or very close to the subject matter of the Kojiki, however:

  the older material is amplified and reclassified, and the whole recital is perceptibly tinctured with Chinese philosophy. Some few legends are omitted and others added, while variants are given of the main episodes.13

  Other texts that carry down small or large fragments of the myths that were circulating orally in Japan in the eighth century are the Manyoshu (the first great anthology of Japanese poetry, which includes mythological tales) and the Fudoki (Records of Wind and Earth). Though only five Fudoki have come down to us intact, these texts were once part of a huge archive of books compiled by regional authorities to record local traditions after a government edict in 713.14

  Early in the ninth century the Kogo-shui, or ‘Collection of Omitted Sayings’, was compiled by Imibe-no Hironari. As well as giving eleven myth stories not included in either the Kojiki or Nihongi, it continues the history of Japan down to 807.15

  Finally, though their contribution is not so large, the Shojiroku (ninth century) and the Engi-sheki (tenth century) are the other principal sources of authentic Japanese myths.16

  We need to understand the limitations of these sources:

  They are not and cannot be comprehensive. What they do is ‘flash-freeze’ a particular selection of Japanese mythology – no doubt driven and shaped by the subjective concerns of the individual compilers – at a particular moment in history.

  There is no way of knowing how representative they are of the whole body of Japanese myths just prior to the era of codification. Most authorities agree that a great deal must be missing.

  Likewise when even rice – so long assumed to have been exclusively a Yayoi innovation in Japan – turns out to have been grown by the Jomon in pre-Yayoi times (see chapter 25), then one has to wonder on what basis it is possible for scholars to conclude anything worthwhile at all about the epoch or epochs in which the original myths originated. The problem is worsened by the ways in which – like a badly damaged archaeological site – the strata of the traditional stories were ploughed and jumbled by corrupted retellings while they were still within the oral tradition, with further confusion and even political agendas introduced at the stage of compilation.17

  Myths and memories

  Mythology has been described by Robert Graves as ‘the study of whatever religious or heroic legends are so foreign to a student’s experience that he cannot believe them to be true. Hence the English adjective “mythical”, meaning “incredible”.’18

  This strikes me as quite an accurate general description of what most scholars who study myth think they are doing and also of their fundamental attitude towards their subject matter – i.e. that myths are ‘incredible’ fictions composed in the ancient world either ‘to answer the sort of awkward questions that children ask’ or ‘to justify an existing social system and account for traditional rites and customs’.19 In consequence, most published analyses of myth all the way back to Sir James Frazer tend to focus on its social, economic and psychological functions. There have been a very few notable exceptions,20 but as a rule those foolish enough to suggest that myths might in any way provide us with factual historical data have been ridiculed, abused and in some cases effectively excommunicated by their peers.21

  As a non-scientist with no peers to excommunicate me, and as an author who earns his own keep, I’m free to pursue any line of inquiry that I’m enlightened by and to find my own position on any matter. I have therefore often taken myths seriously – with good reason I believe.

  In particular I have tried to show that the universal myth of the deluge simply cannot be accounted for intelligently by the usual fatuous dismissals of professional mythologists, and that its manifestations again and again show remarkable correlations with what is known of the global meltdown at the end of the Ice Age. I can’t ‘prove’ my view that the flood myths are garbled memories of those events any more than the experts can ‘prove’ theirs that the flood myths are a universal archetype of the foetus floating in the womb – or whatever.22 Theirs is just a theory. Mine is just a theory. But time will tell which is right.

  Meanwhile, contrary to the orthodox line on these matters, I continue to look upon the myths of the world as an archive of treasures, among which the most precious of all may be a kind of ‘history of prehistory’. It is not so in the case of all myths, nor is it even necessarily so in the case of all flood myths. But my own experiences and research over many years – the research of a curious layman, not of a ‘scientific expert’ – have convinced me that the worldwide testimony of cataclysm, flood, and geological and climatic change preserved within the human heritage of myth is a precious thing indeed and may be the only memory and record of any kind that our species has managed to preserve of the great and terrible events that overtook our ancestors at the end of the Ice Age.

  The many faces of cataclysm

  On a global scale these events were undoubtedly dominated by flooding -horrific floods from the land to the sea as the great ice-sheets melted and the boundaries of glacial lakes gave way, and equally dreadful reverse floods, from the sea to the land
, as the oceans inexorably swelled. But we saw in chapter 3 that flooding was only part of the story. During the same 10,000-year epoch in which the ice melted and global sea-level rose by 120 metres – roughly from 17,000 down to 7000 years ago – our planet also experienced dramatically increased volcanism, dramatically increased frequency and magnitude of earthquakes, and a dramatically unstable climate that seesawed rapidly and unpredictably between extremes.

  Japan has no flood myth.

  Unlike so much of the rest of the blighted northern hemisphere Japan was never covered by an ice-cap – and even on the most northerly island of Hokkaido at the last glacial maximum only the mountain ranges were glaciated.23 This means that no part of Japan and none of the ancient inhabitants of Japan ever found themselves in the way of the sort of terrifying meltwater floods, 50 or 100 metres high, that rolled out periodically from the collapsing European and North American ice-sheets between 17,000 and 7000 years ago – and scoured the lands across which they flowed. Moreover, although Japan’s surface-area was significantly reduced by rising sea-levels – with the most notable effect being the birth of the three islands of Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu out of a single, much larger antediluvian island – a glance at the inundation maps reproduced in chapter 28 reveals that Japan was, in general, much less severely affected by post-glacial flooding than most other parts of the world. This was so, in the main, because its antediluvian coastlines were naturally precipitous, with few low-lying plains of the kind that were rapidly inundated (even by relatively minor sea-level rises) elsewhere in the region – for example around south-east Asia, where the Sunda Shelf was subjected to repeated catastrophic flooding, and in the basin between the Korean peninsula and the present coast of China that is now filled by the Yellow Sea.