Science: Mystery of the Flying Heads

The huge stone heads, some of them weighing 50 tons, stare out at the empty Pacific with bland, archaic, sneering expressions. No one knows who carved these enigmatic faces—or why, or how, or when. Scholars have ransacked Easter Island, photographed its relics, cross-questioned its modern natives (there are less than 500)—aii to no avail. It has never seemed possible that the people of a small, barren island 1,100 miles from the nearest inhabited land (Pitcairn Island) should have carved several hundred weighty stone ornaments and lugged them up & over the rim of a volcano. Because of these stone heads, Easter Island has remained one of anthropology’s most cherished mysteries.

In a new book, Island of Death (J. J. Augustin; $7), Dr. Werner Wolff, professor of psychology at Bard College, N.Y., tackles the problem with a “psychological” approach. There is plenty of scattered information about Easter Island, says Dr. Wolff. Why not fit the pieces together and use psychological insight to reconstruct the island’s ancient culture? Then the mystery of the statues might be solved.

Laboriously and learnedly, Dr. Wolff assembles his data. Quoting many languages (including several kinds of Polynesian), he describes the Easter Islanders as they appeared to early explorers. They were rather good-looking people, but by modern standards they were not nice. For one thing, they ate one another—enemies, friends, relatives “and neighbors—with gusto. Parents ate their children; children ate their fathers. They drew the line at mothers.

Long-Legged Fish. Behind this round-robin anthropophagy, Dr. Wolff detects the outlines of a weird and dreadful religion. According to ancient legends, death and the fear of death ruled Easter Island. It was good to eat people, for into the eater then flowed the life of a “long-legged fish.” Human sacrifices, piously (and frequently) performed on the tops of volcanoes, gave new life to the sun.

The Easter Islanders were bird fanciers, in a way. Every year, when the sooty tern returned to the island to nest on the volcanoes, there was a bloody struggle over finding its first egg. The man who found it ran to the top of the mountain while the others shouted, “Shave your head, you have the egg.” He shaved his head and painted it red while the losers slashed themselves with sharp instruments.

Littered over the island are many “cultural” objects. There are caves full of bones and weird mural paintings. There are stones carved with phallic symbols and strange pictures (men with wings and birds’ feet). Neither the living natives nor modern scholars can read the tantalizing hieroglyphics that remain, but Dr. Wolff makes a desperate attempt. Some of the symbols, he thinks, had their origin in India, 11,000 miles away, more than 5,000 years ago.

Long-Eared Artists. With affectionate meticulousness, Dr. Wolff retells the island’s ancient legends. Most of them, characteristically, have to do with slaughter and gluttonous cannibalism.

Brooding over this bloody scene stood the unearthly stone faces. According to native legends, they were made by a tribe called “the Long-Ears,” who were eventually massacred by “the Short-Ears.” According to Dr. Wolff’s psychological analysis, the statues were set up to protect the souls of the dead, or to protect the volcanoes (symbolizing rebirth) from the spirit of death. The statues were carved in the crater of a volcano. Several, as if just completed, lie there still. Others lie unfinished, as if their long-eared carvers had dropped their crude tools just before being killed and eaten.

How did the ancient islanders, who had no metal or even timber, manage to transport the statues over the steep rim of the crater and down the rugged mountain? Their hideous religion may have supplied the motive, but not the means.

The natives have an easy answer: the statues flew into place. Even the heaviest statues, they say, if imbued with enough mana (life force), can fly like sooty terns.

Dr. Wolff has thought about it long and earnestly (in half a dozen languages); psychological symbols clash in his fact-crammed presentation. Toward the end of the book, as if drugged with an Easter Islander’s point of view, he wonders whether the statues really did fly. Maybe the volcano erupted every now & then and blew them out.

Mystery lovers can be grateful to the learned Dr. Wolff. With all his painstaking erudition, he has not solved, but has deepened the fascinating mystery of Easter Island.