Signs of Ancient Intelligence or Random Noise?

Atlantis in the East.

For centuries, stories of ancient cataclysms have whispered the same unsettling melody: warnings ignored, civilizations drowned, and a chosen few guided to safety by dreams, visions, or signs no one else understood. Just as Plato gives us the destruction of Atlantis, the Chinese have preserved a remarkably similar tale — the fate of the island of Maurigasima and the salvation of the righteous Peiruun, the “Atlantis of the Eastern world.”

According to the 17th-century scholar Engelbert Kaempfer, Maurigasima once flourished. Its soil was so exceptional that its clay became the foundation of the porcelain industry — a treasure the islanders used to enrich themselves. But prosperity bred decadence, irreverence, and a contempt for the sacred. In the myths, this moral decay provoked the gods, who decreed the island’s destruction.

Only one man was innocent: Peiruun, the reigning king. The gods revealed the coming catastrophe to him in a dream and instructed him to abandon the island when he saw the faces of the two idols at the temple entrance turn red. Obedient to the warning, he publicly announced the danger. Instead of gratitude, he received mockery — just as Noah did — ridiculed by a people too comfortable, too corrupt, to imagine consequences.

Sometime later, an idle troublemaker crept into the temple at night and painted both idols red to humiliate the king. By morning, Peiruun saw what he believed was a divine sign, and, with all who would listen, fled aboard his ships toward Foktsju on the Chinese mainland. Only after their departure did the sea swallow Maurigasima, the scoffers, and a vast store of porcelain beneath the waves.

The survivors reached China safely. To this day (in the days of Faber), coastal communities commemorate their arrival with a festival: fleets of boats racing across the water as participants shout the name Peiruun — a reenactment of their desperate escape. The Japanese inherited this tradition as well, celebrating it along their western shores.

This remarkable account was recorded by the brilliant mythologist George Stanley Faber in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Faber observed that the story of Maurigasima appears to be a regional adaptation of the Atlantean archetype. Just as the Greeks and Phoenicians associated the primordial flood hero with Atlas, the Chinese revered the same figure under the name Peiruun or P’Arun — the arkite patriarch.

Anyone familiar with ancient flood traditions will see the unmistakable parallels.
Noah is mocked by his people.
Peiruun is mocked by his subjects.
Xisuthrus — the Babylonian flood hero — receives his warning in a dream from Cronus, just as Peiruun does.
Each figure is righteous in an age of corruption.
Each is instructed to escape by sea.
Each becomes the founder of a renewed world.

Different cultures, different continents, yet the same bones of the same story.

At what point does similarity stop being coincidence?

In the Maurigasima legend, the “sign” for the coming disaster was the reddening of the two idols’ faces. If those idols symbolized the Sun and the Moon — whose “faces” glowed red from atmospheric disturbances preceding or after the cataclysm — then the narrative becomes not simply myth but encoded observation.

Are these fragments of a once-unified memory deliberately scattered across the world?
Are they emanations of an ancient intelligence trying to preserve a message through story, symbol, and myth?
Or are we meant to believe all these parallels arose by sheer accident?

The odds, to me, seem vanishingly small.

I’d love to hear your thoughts — feel free to leave any comments below. And in my upcoming book, I’ll be exploring this topic and many others in far greater depth. There is far more hidden in these flood traditions than we’ve dared to imagine.