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In nearly all known creation legends the primordial truth is repeated that the word came from the light. There was a rich oral tradition on the Polynesian islands long before the first white man landed. A select circle of priests watched carefully to see that not a word of the old philosophical and astronomical wisdom was changed, but western civilisation and Christian missionaries stifled the rich tradition that the original population had possessed. In 1930 the Bishop Museum of Honolulu, which was the largest Polynesian collection in the world, sent two expeditions to the islands. Their aim was to safeguard the genealogies and songs that had survived the dubious blessing of western colonisation. Years later the Swedish scholar Bengt Danielsson, who had crossed the Pacific on the Kon Tiki raft with Thor Heyerdahl, visited some of the South Sea Islands with his wife and wrote down the of Tahiti, Danielsson met an old sage whose name was Te-Yho-a-te-Pange. Danielsson tells us how this priest droned out the history of his people like a gramophone record. It is staggering: In the beginning there was only empty space, neither darkness nor light, neither land nor sea, neither sun nor sky. Everything was a big silent void. Untold ages went by...’ Could the account be more pertinent? Do we have to leave it to a primitive man in a loincloth, who lives on coconuts and fish, and has absolutely no technical knowledge, to explain to us what it looks '... Then the void began to move and turned into Po. Everything was still dark, very dark, men Po itself began to revolve...’ Have we reached the solar system now, have we entered the field of the orbits of the planets? (The void began to move.) Darkness still reigned. A sphere—called Po here—became visible. It begins to revolve. A telling description. Now the attraction of the planet is at work (... new strange forces ...). We are sinking into the atmosphere. It grows bright as day. ',.. the new matter was like sand, the sand became firm ground that grew upwards. Lastly "Papa", the earth mother, revealed herself and spread abroad and became a great country Then people were on terra firma, which extended far and wide. But before they reached the earth's surface, which 'grew upwards' (an impression that arises when one comes on it from above), matter that was ‘like sand' had to be traversed. Is that another way of describing the powerful frictional forces that the envelope of air exerts on the exterior of the space-ship? to a word of command. traditions that were still alive in the consciousness of the islanders. On the little island of Raroia in the Tuamotu group in the Pacific Ocean, 450 nautical miles north-east like in space? But let Te- Yho-a-te-Pange go on talking: "New strange forces were at work. The night was transformed ...' Te-Yho-a-te-Pange continues: