Mythos Sites: Nan-Matol

Nan Matol is special to the Cthulhu Mythos. This ruined city in the Western Pacific, resting on the largest of the Caroline Islands, is a place which the readers of Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” recall with a chill of excitement — Ponape. The Esoteric Order of Dagon, the mysterious Ponape Scriptures, the evil Marsh family, who married the strange brides from this strange South Sea island. Lovecraft chose wisely for the home of the evil Deep Ones, a place rich in mystery.

The History

Despite the familiarity of the name, few people commonly know much about Ponape. 164 square miles (426 sq. km) of jungle island, it lies about 1200 miles (2000 km) north of Australia and 4000 miles (6800 km) south-west of Hawaii, surrounded on all sides by other small island chains. The original settlers were the Micronesians, the same people who populated Hawaii, Papua and Fiji. They came from the east in outrigger canoes from other island chains like the Marshall Islands. At first only small fishing colonies, the island kingdom grew to a population of eight thousand by 1400 AD.

About that time (while Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, and Henry V fought the French at Agincourt) there rose among the prosperous tribal fishermen a chief who made himself king over all the other chiefs, and called himself “Satalur’ or emperor. The Satalur began the construction of a special temple to house the sacred Turtle god as well as the other divine beings of Ponapean Mythology. The holy city grew with each new ruler and is the ruin we know today as Nan Matol. For four hundred years the temples were used, until, shortly before the Europeans came, some great mysterious event emptied the holy city, leaving it to rot in the jungle.

The first Europeans to sight Ponape were the Spanish, under Alvaro de Mendana. Mendana and his crew searched for “Terra Australis”, the Unknown Southland, which was thought to fill the entire Southern Hemisphere. Their four ships left Peru in 1595, discovering the Solomon Islands, where Mendana died. One ship, the San Pedro, continued under Fernandez de Quiros, who sighted Ponape on December 23, 1595, while trying to reach Manilla. Quiros traded peacefully with the natives, then sailed back to Guam.

The next European to visit Ponape was an Irish sailor, James O’Connell, who was shipwrecked in 1826. O’Connell lived on the island for eleven years, in which time he married and fathered two children. He also visited Nan Matol. Once rescued and returned to England, O’Connell wrote a book with a section about the forgotten city, making him the first white man to record its existence.

In O’Connell’s book The Life of James F. O’Connell, Pacific Adventurer (1853), he describes how Ponape was divided into five kingdoms: Jokaz in the north, U in the northeast, Metalanim in the southeast, Net in the south and Kit (or Kiti) in the west. These five separate kingdoms were no longer ruled by a single Satalur, but separate warring chieftains.

O’Connell’s book is responsible for more misinformation than true fact for it started a wave of fanciful speculation. Fortunately, other Europeans visited Ponape in the late 1800’s, including, a German Pole named Johann Stanislaus Kubary. Kubary wrote a lengthy manuscript on Ponape’s history, based on local informants, a practice that had become exceedingly difficult with the loss of local culture to European and American missionaries. Kubary had four wives, all on different islands. He committed suicide before the publication of his work when one of his wives ran off with another man. The manuscript was passed down as a family heirloom, but accidentally destroyed in a fire in the 1930’s.

Kubary’s work was lost, but another German succeeded in his place. The 1908-10 Thilenius expedition set out to study all of Micronesia. From that expedition, Paul Hambruch began research that would eventually lead to the three volume Ponape, published between 1933 and 1936. Since the study was written in German, it did not immediately curtail the wild theories begun by O’Connell’s readers.

What Hambruch did learn was there had been twelve Satalurs, and perhaps one of the earliest had built Nan Matol. A portion of the island, Metalalim, which includes Nan Matol, was conquered by the king of the neighboring island of Kusae, who refused to pay the Satalur’s tribute. These new rulers called themselves the Nan-Markis. Their usurping of the holy city eventually lead the people to split into five different groups, those that James O’Connell had found in 1826.

Not all of Ponape’s visitors were as peaceful as James O’Connell. The Russians fought with the locals when they tried to sail a longboat into Kiti harbor in 1828. A British crew was massacred on the beach, and the natives slaughtered in retaliation. The Confederate raider, Shenandoah destroyed Yankee whaling ships resting in Ponape’s lagoon. Whalers, deserters and beachcombers came to the island along with American and Spanish missionaries. Rats and pigs displaced the local fauna. With the whites came disease and assimilation. The original population dropped to a mere one-hundredth of its former size in little over a century. The native culture, like that of other Pacific islands, was lost forever.

Control of the Carolines has changed many times among the Western powers. First declared Spanish territory, the islands were seized by the Americans during the Spanish-American War, but were returned after the conflict. Spain sold the islands to Germany. The German rule was so unpopular the Ponapeans revolted in 1910. The rebellion was ruthlessly crushed and the leaders hung. Shortly after, the Japanese annexed the area during the First World War, only to lose them to the U.S. in the Second World War. The Carolines have been under U. S. control since 1944.

The Site

Nan Matol does not rest on the main island of Ponape but on a small island in Metalanim Harbor called Temuen. The island is naturally flat, unlike most of Ponape, and perhaps was chosen for this reason. The uninhabited isle when O’Connell visited it was covered with fruit trees and jungle, whose product lie rotting and unclaimed. The local guide could not remember who had built the ruins, saying they were the work of fearful spirits.

O’Connell in his treatise, called Nan Matol “The Venice of the Pacific”, with a good reason. The site is criss-crossed with natural canals which rise and drop with the tides. Mangroves and other tropical trees grow along the watery channels. The temples and inner harbor are separated from the ocean by a northern and eastern breakwater, and entirely surrounded by a barrier of stones. These are made of the same material as the habitations, prismatic basalt. Prismatic basalt is a multi-sided rock produced by crystallization deep in the ground, and forced to the surface by lava. This “grey stone” is similar to the rock used in other famous ruins such as The Giant’s Causeway in Ireland.

The natives quarried their basalt in Jokaz, 15 miles (24 km) along the northeast coast of Ponape, breaking the long tubes of rock off into the desired lengths, and rafted them to Temuen. The evidence along the sea bottom suggest not all the rafts arrived safely.

Once at Nan Matol, the stone logs were stacked to form walls, much like timbers in a log cabin. To these bare walls, no plaster or finish was added, leaving large gaps, some as large as a human head. No hieroglyphs or literary markings were cut into the stones. The over-all effect is one of simple crudity. Nan Matol is not an architectural achievement of a lost race as early speculators thought.

The different building within the boundary of the stone barrier served many varied purposes. Some were temples to the different deities. Other buildings formed the home of the Satalur, who along with his family and the priests of the different cults were the only people to dwell at Nan Matol. One section served as the crypt of the dead Satalurs, with walls over 30 feet (9 m) high, as well as the home of the acolytes of the Sacred Turtle.

Nan Matol grew like most cities, slowly. Each new Satalur added to the holy temples and widening the natural inlets into canals, lining the waterways with stone. In four centuries the small island went from jungle to a walled city with several harbors, only to be abandoned mysteriously.

Creepy Connections

Lemuria

Ponape had its own supernatural history, long before Lovecraft tied it to the Cthulhu Mythos. In fact, it is this reputation that probably made him select it as the home of the Deep Ones. With the publication of O’Connell’s The Life of James F. O’Connell, Pacific Adventurer, speculations about the island of Temuen and its forgotten city ran like wildfire through European society. Some speculators claimed it to be the actual Garden of Eden from which Adam and Eve were cast out. But more popular was the idea that Nan Matol was the remains of a vast Pacific empire known as Lemuria.

The original idea of Lemuria came not from the mystics, but the scientists. William T. Blandford noted that landforms in India and South America shared a common form. He proposed the idea that a land-bridge might have existed there at one time. A German biologist, Ernst Heinrich Haeckel used Blandford’s theory to explain the distribution of lemurs in both Africa and Asia. From Haeckel, this hypothetical land mass got its name … Lemuria.

Madame Blavatsky

Now the ideas of these men were serious scientific propositions. It took a mystic, the greatest of the Nineteenth Century, to put these concepts to use. Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891) was a con-artist of no mean talent. Early on in her life she had been a circus bare-back rider, professional pianist, and spiritualist medium. In the 1870’s she came to New York City from her native Russia, to play mistress to a string of influential people. Under the guise of mystic and persecuted virgin, the large

middle-aged woman mixed Western magic with confused East Indian philosophy and established the Theosophical Society (1875) which espoused insights directly from the divine. These insights, Blavatsky claimed, she had learned from the Mahatmas of India.

Touring the world, Blavatsky sold her brand of parlor-room magic in a book, The Secret Doctrine (1888). Blavatsky said the book was adopted from a mystical tome belonging to the Mahatmas, called The Book of Dzyan. The Russian mystic wrote the many volumes of The Secret Doctrine in Europe, after escaping from India, where two co-horts in her faked spiritualism scam, betrayed her secrets.

In The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky incorporates the Atlantis and Lemuria ideas along with that other great mythological city, Hyperborea. She proposes that human evolution, through seven races, is progressing through seven stages or planes. The first stage was that of an astral form of jellyfish. The second stage took place in Hyperborea, which sank raising Lemuria. The third was the hermaphrodictic apes who created a vast empire called Lemuria, which in turned sank, raising Atlantis. Some of the Lemurians fled to South America and Africa, becoming the progenitors of the Incas and the Egyptians, both pyramid-builders. The present day humans are the fifth race, to be followed by a future sixth race in America, and the seventh and final race in South America.

Blavatsky’s incomprehensible gibberish had and still has many supporters, even despite William Emmette Coleman’s exposure of how HPB (as she was known by her friends) had stolen her ideas from a book on East Indian Mythology. He even proved that the Mystical Stanzas were all shamelessly lifted from the Rig-Veda. Even after her death in 1891, Blavatsky’s believers continued to support her ideas.

The Cult of the Turtle God

So much for the speculators. Nan Matol did at one time have its own religion and supernatural history. Nan Matol solitary reason for being was religious worship. The only people who lived there were the king (and his family) and the priests who served the numerous deities, of which we only know by name the Turtle God, Nansunsap.

Once a year, the priests of Nan Matol would select a turtle to serve as holy mascot. The turtle was kept in a special estate until the end of the year.   The animal was then anointed in coconut oil, bedecked with jewelry and floated about the canals of Nan Matol in a boat, with one priest staring at it the entire time. Every time the turtle blinked the priest do likewise. The animal was killed by smashing its shell with a club, cut up, cooked in a ritual feast and fed to the king and the priests of the cult.

The desertion of Nan Matol, according to Nanpei, an informant of Hambruch’s, was caused by the Sacred Turtle feast. One year during the reign of the Nan-Marki Luk-En-Mueiu (around the year 1800 AD.), one of the holy acolytes did not receive his portion of the holy meat. The priest became enraged and rained down such curses and blasphemies upon the whole of Nan Matol, that the entire island was vacated that night. The ceremony had been profaned and was abandoned.

The Dragon of Jokaz

Of the other possible cults that existed at Nan Matol, an earlier myth tells of a dragon (or giant lizard) that lived in Jokaz who gave birth to two beautiful girls. After these girls were married to the Satalur, they begged him to let their mother come to live at Nan Matol. The dragon moved into one of the many buildings, digging out the canals of the holy island in the process. When the king saw his mother-in-law for the first time, he burned her up in her house. The two wives were so stricken by his actions they threw themselves into the flames. The Satalur, in his own grief, did likewise. Some anthropologists feel the myth arose as an explanation of the New Guinean crocodile, a sea-going reptile that lives in the South Seas, often miles from land.

A. Merritt

Abraham Merritt had his first big success with a serialized novel called The Moon Pool (All-Story Weekly, February 15-March 22, 1919). Originally a short story, Merritt expanded the tale of Dr. Walter Goodwin and his wife and assistant who go beyond our world through a gate at Nan Matol. The gate is guarded by a human sorceress and her fish-frog servants. This novel was an inspiration to H. P. Lovecraft who surmised what would happen to a family of fishermen who inter-married with the frog-like beings. Thus the Marsh family of Innsmouth was born.

“A Shadow Over Innsmouth” was written in November-December 1931 but published in an altered form in 1942. Not because of its content but its unusual length and structure. Farsnworth Wright rejected it but August Derleth edited the tale down and Dorothy McIlwraith published it in two parts (Weird Tales, January–May 1942). (One has to wonder what Dorothy was thinking. She had an unpublished Lovecraft masterpiece but puts another story on the American cover by Gretta. The Canadian edition is much better served with a cover by Edmond Good.

Books of Interest

In recent years many fantasy novels have been set in Lemuria, like Lin Carter’s Thongor books. Here are some tomes that may be of interest:

James. F. O’Connell’s The Life of James F. O’Connell, Pacific Adventurer (1854)

Madame Helen P. Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine.(1888)

Johann Stanislaus Kubary’s Ponape Manuscript(circa 1890?)(lost)

Frederick Spenser Oliver’s novel A Dweller on Two Planets (1898)

A. Merritt’s novel The Moon Pool (1919)

Paul Hambruch’s Ponape (3 vols.) (1932-36)

L. Sprague de Camp, Citadels of Mystery. Ballantine: NY, 1964.

James Cornell,  Lost Lands and Forgotten People. Sterling: London, 1978.