Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 Years Ago (1886)

I read the Bancroft Library copy, University of California, in the Internet Archive scan of Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 Years Ago. The title page adds the subtitle “Their relation to the sacred mysteries of Egypt, Greece, Chaldea and India” and the line “Free Masonry in Times Anterior to the Temple of Solomon.” It says illustrated, by Augustus Le Plongeon, New York, Robert Macoy, 4 Barclay Street, 1886. The title page itself has no printed page number. The copyright page says the book was entered according to Act of Congress on March 15, 1886, by Augustus Le Plongeon, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress. The dedication to Pierre Lorillard is dated New York, May 20, 1886. The year 1886 is before 1929, so I treat the book as public domain and quote consecutive sentences where the page is clear.

This is one continuous essay. It has a preface, a list of illustrations, the essay, and an index. It has no chapter divisions. The headings below follow the order of his argument. Printed page numbers are the running heads. The preface opens on a leaf with no number; the next page is numbered vi, and the preface runs through xiii. I treat that opening leaf as p. v. The illustration list ends on printed p. xvi. The essay is printed pages 1 through 153. The index runs through printed p. 163. This scan has 231 file pages because blanks and plates sit between some leaves, so a file page is not the printed page.

I will set his Maya and Quiche names, places, rites, and the Atlantic claim he actually makes beside the account he takes from Plato, the same narrative read on Timaeus and Critias. I will not treat Queen Moo as a lost continent. In this volume she is a woman, queen of Chichen, whose totem is a macaw. I will not import a land called Mu or a land called Lemuria. He does not print either name. The mother-land phrase on p. 34 is the Land of Kui. He points the reader to his Monuments of Mayax and their Historical Teachings for a longer history of the same family. I stay with what this volume prints.

The book at a glance

• Title: Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 Years Ago. Subtitle on the title page: their relation to the sacred mysteries of Egypt, Greece, Chaldea and India. Free Masonry in times anterior to the temple of Solomon. Illustrated.
• Author: Augustus Le Plongeon. The title page lists earlier pieces, among them Vestiges of the Mayas and The Monuments of Mayax and their Historical Teachings. I do not use those other works as evidence for this one.
• Edition I read: New York, Robert Macoy, 4 Barclay Street, 1886. Entered March 15, 1886. Dedication dated May 20, 1886. Drawings and photographs by the author, engraved by the Moss Engraving Co.
• Length: Preface through p. xiii, essay pp. 1 to 153, index through p. 163. No chapters.
• What he claims: The sacred mysteries, and through them modern Free Masonry, began in Mayax, which he calls the primitive land, and were carried by Maya colonists to the Nile, the Euphrates, and the shores of the Indian Ocean not less than 11,500 years ago. The Quiche book Popol Vuh preserves the trials at Xibalba. A royal family of king Can, read off the sculptures at Chichen-Itza and Uxmal, is the history behind Osiris and Isis, Cain and Abel, and the Ramayana. Plato’s island is real. He calls it Atlantis and, later, Atlan. It sank in the Atlantic and was the third part of a western kingdom with North and South America. He does not describe a Pacific continent.

Findings worth setting beside other writers

• No Mu and no Lemuria in this volume. The mother-land name he prints, beside two small glyph groups, is the Land of Kui, “the mother-land of the gods and of the ancestors of the Egyptians,” identified with the Lands of the West (p. 34). Queen Moo is Moo the macaw, sister and wife of Coh, queen of Chichen, later the goddess of fire at Izamal (p. 78). A reader who wants a continent named Mu will not find that claim here.
• 11,500 years, counted to his own day. The title puts the mysteries 11,500 years ago. On p. 22 he says Maya colonists carried the rites to the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Indian Ocean not less than 11,500 years ago. On p. 41 the monuments of Mayax existed 11,500 years ago. On p. 106 the lower part of a sceptre at Tiahuanuco stands for the island that sunk about 11,500 years ago. He also keeps Plato’s figure: the priests told Solon, who visited them 600 years before the Christian era, that communication had been interrupted for 9,000 years (p. 41).
• Atlantis is an Atlantic island, and he says Plato is mainly right. One night, the large island disappeared under the ocean (p. 41). The Troano manuscript, which he calls a Maya book on geology, confirms it. A large continent in the middle of the Atlantic was destroyed within the memory of man (p. 92). On p. 137 the three prongs of Poseidon’s trident are North America, South America, and Atlan, now under the Atlantic. Poseidon, he says Plato says, was the first king of Atlantis. He also calls Chaldea the twin sister of Egypt and the daughter of Poseidon, king of the lands beyond the sea, and Lybia (p. 53).
• Not a universal flood. Egyptian priests derided the Greek story of Deucalion. Their greatest recorded cataclysm was Atlantis. Nearly all the nations of the western continent kept the tradition, but they do not pretend that all mankind was destroyed (p. 92). He still lists seven heroes who escaped a deluge, beside the seven caves of the Nahualts and the seven cities of Cibola, as places where the number seven turns up (p. 148).
• Mayax. The Troano author, he says, calls the peninsula Mayax, the primitive land, the terra firma. The name covered the Maya empire from the isthmus of Darien on the south to Tehuantepec on the north. The seat of government was Uxmal. The heart of the arts was Chichen-Itza (p. 70).
• The peninsula as he measures it. Cape Catoche is 120 miles (193 kilometers) from Cape San Antonio, the western end of Cuba. Yucatan lies between 17° 30’ and 21° 50’ north, and between 88° and 91° west of Greenwich, 260 miles (418 kilometers) north to south and 180 miles (289 kilometers) east to west. Limestone, a few feet above the sea, about 70 feet (21.34 meters) at the highest interior point. He reaches that coast by going due south 480 miles (772 kilometers) from the mouths of the Mississippi (p. 69).
• The family he reads on the walls. King Can (Serpent), founder or restorer of Chichen-Itza and Uxmal, had three sons, Cay (Fish), Aac (Turtle), and Coh (Leopard), and two daughters, Moo (Macaw) and Nicté (Flower) (pp. 77 and 78). On p. 143 the mother of the five children is a wife he names Zoo. The law was that the youngest brother married the eldest sister, so Coh married Moo. After Can died, Moo was queen of Chichen. After her death she was the goddess of fire, worshiped on a pyramid at Izamal (p. 78).
• Xibalba, in the mountains of Guatemala. Quiche applicants crossed a river of mud and a river of blood, then four roads, white, red, green, and black, to twelve veiled priests and a wooden statue (p. 42). The houses of the trials are the Dark house, the House of Spears, the Ice house, the Tiger house, the Fiery house, and the House of the bats, where Camazotz beheads the careless (pp. 43 and 44).
• The lost land drawn as a black man. The Maya author of the Troano, he says, figures it with red lips, which would imply that black men mostly inhabited it, and would account for black populations on the western continent before the Spaniards (p. 92). He also says pictures of black people are in the mural paintings at Chichen, and that black people were on the isthmus of Panama when the Spaniards arrived (p. 87).

Preface

The preface is a complaint about American neglect, not a history of Atlantis. The forests of Yucatan and Central America are, for most people in the United States, as much a terra incognita as America was to Europe before Cristobal Colon. He dates that sighting to 1498, when Colon first came in sight of the northern coast of South America and sailed from the mouth of the Orinoco to Porto Cabello in the Golfo Triste. Readers of Stephens and Norman, he says, still call the builders little removed from savagism, without writing, science, or anything to set beside Egypt, Chaldea, Greece, or Rome.

Against that he sets the Societe des Americanistes in Paris, a premium of 25,000 francs for an alphabet or key to the Yucatan and Central American inscriptions, and Desire Charnay sent for molds. Casts from those squeezes are in the Trocadero. Duplicates were given to the Smithsonian by Pierre Lorillard of New York, the only American, he says, who has spent his wealth on the question. He puts Lorillard’s outlay at 25,000 dollars. The Congres des Americanistes meets every four years in a European capital. At Cambridge in England, General Sir Henry Lefroy has told him, a building holds the casts and photographs of Mr. Maudslay from Honduras and Guatemala.

In the United States he finds the Peabody Museum at Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a letter of July 23, 1885, from a man who has seen the ruined cities, fearing the trustees will refuse his casts. Casts from Uxmal, offered to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, have been put in the cellar for want of wall space. Frescoes from Chichen-Itza were refused as of no value. Learned societies told him their people were not interested. Mrs. Le Plongeon lectured on the monuments at Columbia College, under Dr. John Stoughton Newbury of the School of Mines, on the 2nd of March last, and again for Mrs. Francis B. Arnold at 21 West 12th Street. Two works he and Mrs. Le Plongeon have written, Monuments of Mayax, and their historical teachings and Yucatan, its ancient palaces and modern cities, have been refused by publishers. He prints a Maya hieratic alphabet, which he says he discovered, in a column beside the Egyptian hieratic alphabet of Champollion le Jeune and Bunsen. The letters are a table, not a sentence I can usefully quote. He says this small book gives only facts that can be proved by well-known writers and by inscriptions carved on stone by Maya learned men. If American readers will not hear him, he quotes Mark 6:11 and says he will shake off the dust.

The preface adds no Atlantis claim and no Mu claim. It does fix his method: mural inscriptions, an alphabet he equates with the Egyptian, and a dedication to the man who paid for American casts.

Modern Masonry, from the Temple to London

The essay opens on the origin of modern Free Masonry, before he reaches Yucatan. Some writers, he says, give it to the followers of Pythagoras, some to the Essenes and the first Christians, some to the building of Solomon’s temple, some to Adam. He is among those who believe Masonry existed before Adam was created, because he is convinced that this pretended ancestor of man is a myth and has never existed (p. 1). Thomas Payne, as he spells the name, gives it to the Druids. Dance of Villoison gives it to Herculaneum. Michael Andrew Ramsay, in a discourse in Paris in 1740, suggested the crusading Knight Templars.

He then tells the Templar story as a historical preface, not as an American rite. Clement V and Phillippe le Bel destroyed the order. Jacques de Molay was burned on March 18, 1314, with Guy of Auvergne and other officers. A bull of April 2, published May 2, 1312, abolished the order. Knights who escaped to Portugal became the Knights of Christ. De Molay named Johan Marcus Larmenio his successor. Knights who fled to Robert Bruce in Scotland refused Larmenio, and in 1314, under the allegory of Architects, laid the foundation of the Free and Accepted Masons of the Scottish Rite. The oath to avenge de Molay became the allegory known to the Knights of Kadosh. Biblical words entered later. Under Charles I the initiations drew notice. Enemies of Cromwell created the degree of Grand Master. William III was initiated. Preston says the craft was neglected under James II until George I in 1714. In February 1717 a committee of the four London lodges met at the Apple Tree tavern and nominated Anthony Sayer, elected Grand Master on June 24, St. John the Baptist, who became patron of the order.

He follows the craft through the bulls. Clement XII, April 28, 1738, issued a prohibitory bull which he entitles In Eminently, and excommunicated all Masons. The Cardinal Vicar of Rome decreed death in 1739. Benoit XIV renewed the bull on May 18, 1751, in Providas Romanorum Pontificum. France received the order in 1725 and banned it on September 14, 1732. Lord Coleraine founded a lodge at Gibraltar in 1727 and at Madrid in 1728. Philip V sent Masons to the galleys in 1740. Fernando VI renewed the ordinance on July 2, 1751, and made Masonry high treason. Ireland, 1730. America, 1732, a lodge at Tun tavern in Philadelphia, Henry Price the first provincial Grand Master from England on April 30, 1733, Boston the birthplace of American Free Masonry. Francis of Lorraine was initiated in 1735. Frederick II of Prussia took the title of great master universal. His constitution, signed at Berlin on May 1, 1786, saved the German craft after the Rosicrucians and the Illuminati had nearly split it. The 18th degree, Rosa Cruz, has the mottoes “we have the happiness of being in the pacific unity of the sacred numbers” and “in the name of the holy and indivisible Trinity,” which he calls Jesuit in origin.

None of this stretch is an Atlantis claim. It is the ladder he means to climb backward: Scottish Rite to Templars to Egyptian priests to Mayax.

Egypt, Eleusis, Mithra, and the book of Henoch

From p. 10 he argues with J. G. Findel, who denies that lodge symbols come from the ancient mysteries. If one looks only at passwords taken from the Bible, Solomon’s temple, and events after the mysteries had ended, Masonry is not derived from Egypt. If one looks at the same symbols in the temples of Egypt, Chaldea, India, and Central America, a link exists. Through Ramsay’s Architects and the Templars he traces it to Christians who had already been initiated in Egypt: Julian, the bishop he names Synnesius, and Clement of Alexandria. Krause’s operative masons of the Middle Ages may descend from the Roman collegia, who called themselves Collega or Incorporatus, not Brothers. Those collegia, he thinks, had the tokens from Chaldean magicians or from lesser Egyptian priests who went to Rome when the old priesthood lost its wealth.

Herodotus is his witness that a man who divulged the Egyptian rites was put to death. He reads the book of Henoch, which he believes was written at the beginning of the Christian era, as an initiate’s account put into Henoch’s mouth so that it would survive the bishops of Alexandria. He names George, Theophilus, and Cyril, “the murderer of the beautiful, learned and noble Hypathia, daughter of the mathematician Theon,” who whitewashed the sculptures and turned the temples of Isis and Osiris into churches. Masonic objects under Cleopatra’s needle, now in Central Park, show him that builders in Egypt used many of the same emblems at least 1,900 years ago. He does not accept all of Dr. Fanton’s conclusions.

Strangers were rarely admitted. He lists Thales, about 587 years before the Christian era, for geometry and astronomy; Eumolpus, king of Eleusis, who instituted the mysteries of Ceres; Orpheus; Pythagoras, after severe ordeals; Plato; Herodotus. The daughters of Danaus brought the Thesmophoria from Egypt to the Pelasgic women. The Pelasgians initiated Samothrace. Samothrace taught Athens the mysteries of the Cabiri.

The greater mysteries required purification in the lesser, and at least a year as mystai. The candidate, crowned with myrtle instead of acacia, entered the Mystikos Sekos at night, washed in holy water, and heard the mysteries read from a book called Petroma, two stones cemented together. He says he found such stones, the year before this book, in the mausoleum of the high pontiff Cay at Chichen-Itza. The place seemed to quake, to burn, and to go dark. Thunder, cries, and apparitions tested the nerves. The faint-hearted were refused the Epopteia and given narcotics so that they woke believing they had dreamed. He sets Henoch’s crystal house, hot as fire and cold as ice, beside those trials.

Those who resisted to the last the trials of the Autopsia, as the initiation was called, were then dismissed with these three words: Kon-x Om Pan-x, which, strange to say, have no meaning in the Greek language.

Augustus Le Plongeon. Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 Years Ago (1886), p. 21

Captain Wilford’s essay on Egypt, he says, matches those words to Cansha Om Pansha, which the Brahmins pronounce every day when the ceremonies are over. The usual translation is “retire, O retire, profane!” like the ite missa est of the Catholic Church.

These words are not Sanscrit, but Maya.

Augustus Le Plongeon. Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 Years Ago (1886), p. 22

"Con-ex Omon Panex," go, stranger, scatter! are vocables, of the language of the ancient inhabitants of Yucatan, still spoken by their descendants, the aborigines of that country.

Augustus Le Plongeon. Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 Years Ago (1886), p. 22

He has studied the ruins fourteen years, he says on this page. The priests of those temples probably dismissed their own societies with the same words. From here he states the thesis of the book. He will trace the mysteries, and therefore Free Masonry, to America, from where Maya colonists carried the rites to the Nile, the Euphrates, and the shores of the Indian Ocean, not less than 11,500 years ago (p. 22).

He still finishes the Greek side before he crosses the ocean. The mysteries were greater and lesser. An inscription of a high priest at Memphis, given by Samuel Birch, says the priest knew the arrangements of the earth and of Heliopolis and Memphis and hid in his breast all he had seen. Osiris, whose name the initiates did not dare pronounce, appeared to the candidate, as he appeared at Heliopolis to Pianchi, king of Ethiopia. When Persians, Greeks, and Romans ruled Egypt, more men entered the lesser mysteries, still grade by grade. He names Thales, Eumolpus, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, and Herodotus again.

Mithra he treats shortly. Porphyrius, on Eubulus, says Zoroaster dedicated a cavern near Persia to Mithra, the sun, and divided it into figures of climates and elements. Candidates were ordered to kill a man, a test of docility. Plutarch’s life of Pompey brings the mysteries west with Cilician pirates about sixty-eight years before the Christian era. Under the emperor Adrian they were popular enough that Pallas wrote a poem. Human victims were sometimes offered. The priests imitated the motions of the heavens. Initiates took the names of constellations and dressed as animals. There was purification by water for the goddess he names Ardvi goura andhita, “She of the celestial waters,” confession, and an offering of bread still kept by the Parsis. He says Mithra had become the state religion in the last years of the Roman empire and reached Gaul and Britain, which is another path into the lodges. Zoroaster, author of the Zend-Avesta, he places at least 1,100 years before Christ, though Hermippus put him 5,000 years before the taking of Troy.

This block adds the dismissal words, the 11,500 years, and the Petroma stones at Chichen. It does not yet describe the Atlantic island.

India, the Magi, and the Land of Kui

In India he finds the Mahatmas, or Brothers, whose leading fraternity is in Tibet, with the high pontiff of the Lama religion among them. Chelas may spend twenty or thirty years and still be in the early degrees. These Brothers succeed the secret colleges of Brahmins, built on high mounds, which Alexander could not take. Philostratus says they hid in clouds and threw tempests. Le Plongeon’s gloss is that they had gunpowder, or something like it, and exploded mines. The Brahmins claimed to have taught the Egyptians and the Chaldeans.

The Magi, he says, were strangers at Babylon. Daniel gives them a special learning and a peculiar tongue. Every priest had to be a Chaldean, but not every Chaldean was a priest. Astronomy was their favorite study. They prophesied, read dreams, and read entrails. Parents taught children. Their high pontiff’s title was Hob-mag, Venerable, which in Maya he reads Lab-mac, “the old man.” Their rites are unknown, but Chaldea and Egypt were twin sisters, offspring of the same parents (p. 31).

The mysteries everywhere, he says, existed to cultivate science, to better man’s moral and physical nature, and to study the laws of the material and spiritual worlds. Strabo and Gregory of Nazianzus are quoted for the use of mystery: holy things are kept obscure so that divinity stays venerable, and the less men understand the more they admire. The rites match from country to country, as lodge ritual matches because travelers carried it from the Grand Lodge of England. So where did the ancient rites begin? Egypt and Chaldea gave them to Greece and Rome. The Brahmins said the Magi and the hierophants were their disciples. Who taught the Brahmins?

His bridge is language and the shape of the lodge. Plutarch and other Greeks preserved the words with which the Eleusinian priest closed the rite, and the shape of the meeting place. Brahmins use words that are not Sanskrit, said to be Akkadian, the speech of the lower Euphrates, and that speech, he says, has many affinities with Maya, still the vernacular south of the peninsula. The words con-x om pan-x mean nothing in Greek and are pure Maya, with the same meaning Captain Wilford gave Cansha Om Pansha (p. 33). The temple of the initiates was a rectangle and represented the Universe. Modern Masons, he says, wrongly translated that idea by the Sanskrit loga, from which “lodge” was derived. The shape is the Egyptian letter M, called ma, place, country, and by extension the universe. Ma is also the radical of Mayax, and in Maya it means the country, the earth. The Mayas chose the oblong square because it is the figure nearest the contours of the Yucatan peninsula (p. 34).

On that page he says the oblong has led him across the water to the birthplace of the mysteries, in the Lands of the West, the Land of Kui, the mother-land of the gods and of the ancestors of the Egyptians, where Osiris reigned over souls freed from matter. Two small glyph groups stand in the sentence, one before “Lands of the West” and one before “Land of Kui.” I do not pretend to read the glyphs. The English he prints is Kui, not Mu.

The forests of Central America then hide ruined cities. At Uxmal there is an artificial mound. The list of illustrations calls the pyramid the House of the Dwarf. The text measures it. The whole structure is 29 metres, about 95 feet (28.96 meters), high; 66 metres, 214 feet (65 meters) 6 inches, long at the base; 33 metres, 107 feet (32 meters) 3 inches, wide. The lower part is the frustum of an elliptical cone 14 metres, 45 feet (13.72 meters) 6 inches, high (p. 34, continued on p. 35).

The mound at Uxmal

The upper work is the sanctuary, or Holy of Holies, facing west, its ground plan a cross with a double set of arms, and a truncated rectangular pyramid 6 metres high. On that stands a crowning edifice 6 metres high, 29 metres long, and 7 metres wide, emblem of the Lands of the West. Three apartments, each 2 metres 25 centimetres wide, originally did not communicate. The end rooms are 5 metres 50 centimetres long. The middle chamber is 7 metres 25 centimetres. Its door faced west and a small stair led to the roof of the sanctuary, where priests and astronomers could watch the stars in the clear skies of Yucatan. The other doors faced east. Ceilings are triangular arches, not because the builders could not make a circular arch, since they roofed some buildings with domes, but because of teachings tied to the numbers 3, 5, and 7 (pp. 35 to 37).

He finds the same arch in Chaldean tombs at Mughier, in the center of the great pyramid of Ghizeh, in the treasure room at Mikene, and in Etruscan tombs. Henoch, with his son Mathusalath, built nine vaults in the land of Canaan in imitation of nine vaults shown him by the Deity, each with a keystone of mirific characters, one letter for each of nine names of the Deity. Henoch made two triangles of gold. One went in the deepest arch. The other he gave to Mathusalath. Le Plongeon prints a salutation, “Thou art Bait (the soul); thou art Athor, one of the Bia; and thou art Akori. Hail, father of the world! hail, triform God!” The triangular arches are landmarks of one doctrine in India, Egypt, Chaldea, Greece, Etruria, and Central America (pp. 37 and 38).

In the north and south rooms, semispheres ten centimetres across stand for stars. Those in the north room form a triangle. Those in the south room, five of them, form a trapezium with one in the middle. The middle chamber is 7 metres long and is, for him, the only remaining sign that the third degree was practised there. A stair 9 metres wide rose from the courtyard of the priests’ palace to the sanctuary. A smaller stair, 2 metres 40 centimetres, on the north side of the sanctuary, reached the roof and the middle chamber. The north and south rooms were reached by a stair of ninety-six steps, each 20 centimetres high, on the east side of the mound, 14 metres or 45 feet (13.72 meters) 6 inches wide, steep enough to need practice. Rings under the cornice held curtains that hid the Holy of Holies. On the cornice, many times repeated, are symbols, and later he names crossbones and skeletons with arms and hands lifted.

In August 1880, in the debris at the foot of the mound, he found pieces of a priest’s statue. From waist to knee the figure wore an apron with an extended hand, which he says Masons will recognize (p. 40). The ornaments on the sanctuary walls are, for him, inscriptions in Maya, in characters identical with those on Egyptian temples and with the same value, mixed with symbols of the Egyptian mysteries and of modern Free Masonry.

Plato, the island, and 11,500 years

The Atlantic claim enters as soon as the apron and the cornice are on the page.

We must not forget that Plato informs us that the priests of Egypt assured Solon, when he visited them 600 years before the Christian era, that all communications between their people and the inhabitants of the "Lands of the West" had been interrupted for 9,000 years, in consequence of the great cataclysms, during which, in one night, the large island of Atlantis disappeared, submerged under the waves of the ocean.

Augustus Le Plongeon. Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 Years Ago (1886), p. 41

Are we not then right if we surmise that the monuments of Mayax existed 11,500 years ago, and that mysteries, similar to those of Egypt, were celebrated in them?

Augustus Le Plongeon. Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 Years Ago (1886), p. 41

The supports he names are the symbols in the chambers, the construction of the chambers, the crossbones and skeletons on the cornice, and emblems on the priests’ residence next door. This may be, he says, the oldest known edifice consecrated to secret rites, and its builders the founders of the mysteries, carried from Mayax to India, Chaldea, Egypt, and Etruria by colonists or missionaries (p. 41).

He does not here give a latitude for the island, a list of Plato’s kings, or a wall of orichalcum. The island is the large island of Atlantis, gone in one night, and the reason Egypt lost touch with the Lands of the West.

Xibalba

What the Maya ceremonies were is hard to recover. All their books except four that still exist were destroyed by the monks who came with the Spanish adventurers, or soon after the conquest (p. 42). The rites must have resembled those of the Quiches, a branch of the Maya nation.

But they must have been similar to the rites of initiation practiced by the Quiches, a branch of the Maya nation, at Xibalba, a place in the heart of the mountains of Guatemala.

Augustus Le Plongeon. Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 Years Ago (1886), p. 42

We learn from the Popol-Vuh, sacred book of the Quiches, that the applicants for initiation to the mysteries were made to cross two rivers, one of mud, the other of blood, before they reached the four roads that led to the place where the priests awaited them.

Augustus Le Plongeon. Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 Years Ago (1886), p. 42

The roads were white, red, green, and black. The council was twelve veiled priests and a wooden statue dressed as a priest. The applicants had to salute the king, and the statue was pointed out, to try their discernment. They had to name each person without being told. They were asked to sit. If they sat, the stone seat was burning hot (pp. 42 and 43).

The second trial was a night in the Dark house, guarded, with a lighted torch of pine and a cigar that must not go out and must be returned whole at sunrise. Death awaited the man who let them be consumed. The third trial, the House of Spears, required four pots of certain rare flowers, produced without outside help, and a night’s defense against the best spearmen, one for each candidate. The fourth was a night in the Ice house. The fifth was a night with wild tigers in the Tiger house. The sixth was the Fiery house, a furnace from sunset to sunrise. The seventh, the most severe, was the House of the bats, the house of Camazotz, the god of the bats, full of death-dealing weapons. Camazotz came from on high and beheaded the candidates if they were off their guard (pp. 43 and 44).

He sets these beside Henoch: the blazing crystal house, hot and icy; the bow of fire, the quiver, the sword of fire; the babbling stream and the river of fire; the extremities of the earth full of huge beasts and birds; one of great glory on the orb of the sun. The tamarind, the Tree of Knowledge in the midst of the earth, finds its simile in the calabash tree in the middle of the road, where those of Xibalba placed the head of Hunhun Ahpu after sacrificing him for failing the first trial (p. 44).

Over the bust of the high pontiff, prince Cay Canchi, son of king Can, at Uxmal, he reads the title Hach-mac, “the true, the very man,” and recalls the chief of the Magi at Babylon (p. 45). The Xibalba list, the wooden king, the hot seat, the torch and cigar, the flowers, the spears, the ice, the tigers, and the furnace, he also sets beside the feats told of the Mahatmas and beside passages in Daniel, who had been initiated among the Chaldeans or Magi. Eubulus divided those into three classes, the highest the most learned.

If someone says the mysteries were imported from Egypt, Chaldea, India, or Phoenicia into America, he asks when, and by whom, and why the words of dismissal at Eleusis and among the Brahmins are Maya rather than Greek or Sanskrit. Sacred mysteries in America from times immemorial are, for him, beyond doubt (p. 46).

Peru, the Zunis, and the twelve orders

Garcilasso de la Vega is his witness for Peru. Learning was illicit for anyone not noble. Science was the privilege of priests and kings, as in Egypt, Chaldea, Etruria, India, and Mayax. Before a young man entered the Society of the Amautas, or wise men, he passed severe ordeals. The rites were imported by the ancestors of Manco Capac, founder of the Inca dynasty, who were colonists from Central America. The source is an unpublished manuscript by a Jesuit, the Rev. Father Oliva, written at Lima at the beginning of 1631, now in the British Museum. The name Quichua, the general language of Peru, points directly to the Quiches as the Maya branch that carried civilization there (p. 47).

In New Mexico the Zunis and other Pueblo Indians shook off the Spanish yoke early, he says, and live as their ancestors did, teaching the children a pure language and keeping the old rites. Frank Cushing, sent by the Smithsonian, has been adopted and is one of their influential chiefs. Cushing found twelve sacred orders, with priests, initiations, and guarded rites, and has been initiated into many, through ordeals almost as severe as those of Xibalba. Le Plongeon derives them from Xibalba by way of Maya colonists and later Nahualt invaders. The Nahualts held Mexico and some of the north of Central America until the aborigines expelled them. They scattered about the beginning of the Christian era. Some reached the Gulf of California and Arizona. The Yaqui, neighbors of the Mayos, on the Yaqui and Mayo rivers in Sonora, are descendants of a Nahualt tribe. From them, probably, the inhabitants of the seven cities of Cibola, the Zunis among them, learned many practices and the twelve orders, which recall the twelve priests at Xibalba (pp. 48 and 49).

Following the mysteries from country to country has brought him to the Lands of the West, where the Egyptians believed the souls of good men dwelt among the blessed, and where Osiris reigned. Masonry, he says, seems to be the great-grandchild of those mysteries. His own work among the Maya ruins has given him the esoteric meaning of some symbols, and the origin of the mystification of the numbers 3, 5, and 7 (p. 49).

The numbers, before he tells the family story

Priests everywhere claimed learning as a caste privilege, bestowed by the Ruling Spirit of the universe, and hid discoveries under symbols. The public got an exoteric explanation. He quotes Roger Bacon, confined by his brethren for his erudition, on the need to keep the discoveries of philosophers from the unworthy. Brahmins, Buddhist priests of Tibet, Adepts of India, and, lower in knowledge, the Jesuits, still keep the secrecy. The priests of Mayax were as addicted to symbols as their fellows. Study of the relics has shown him the source of primitive traditions that reached the sacred books of the Hindus, the Chaldeans, the Egyptians, and the Jews. The Jews, having them from both Chaldees and Egyptians, put them in the Pentateuch, long attributed to Moses, but now, he says, believed by Matthew Henry and other orthodox commentators to have been written after the Hebrew monarchy was founded (p. 51).

The same mysticism of 3, 5, and 7 cannot have been invented separately. It is too abstract for the first steps of the mind. It began in something the senses could grasp, then was altered as it passed, in the secrecy of initiations, to peoples far from the nation that conceived it (pp. 52 and 53).

A sole omnipotent Deity was, he says, the early belief of highly civilized nations. Egyptian priests called the Divine Intelligence Kneph and placed him above the triads. Damascius, teaching at Athens about 526, said they celebrated the first principle as a thrice unknown darkness. Proclus, director of the school of Athens in 450, said the Demiurgos is triple: he who exists, he who possesses, he who beholds. Those three intellects are the Demiurge, the same as Plato’s three kings, and the same as the three Orpheus celebrated as kings of the great Saturnian continent in the Atlantic ocean (p. 53). That is his second Atlantic phrase, still without a map of the island. The names of Orpheus’s three kings are not clean enough on the printed line for me to fix a spelling beyond what he clearly ties to that Atlantic continent.

Chaldea, “the twin sister of Egypt, daughter of Poseidon, king of the Lands beyond the sea, and Lybia,” looked polytheistic, but Pythagoras, Democritus, and others could resolve the gods into powers of nature. Above the pantheon was a superior deity, Ea, so far from the first triad that they did not know how to worship it. Historians say Ea means God emphatically. In Egypt that name was given to the sun. La, in Maya, means “that which has existed forever. The eternal truth.” He then writes Ra as the supreme being of the Chaldeans, to which the triads were subordinate (pp. 53 and 54). I keep both spellings as they stand on those pages, Ea and then Ra, rather than smoothing them into one.

India, through Colebrooke on the sacred books: the Niroukta thrice affirms that there are only three gods, and that these three designate one deity. Their mansions are earth, the intermediate region, and heaven, that is fire, air, and sun. Pradjapati is their collective god. There is but one God, the great soul Maha-atma, called the sun because the sun is the soul of all beings. China: Lo-pi, under the Songs dynasty toward the eleventh century, on the Hi-tse, says the Great Term is the Great Unit, and tradition says the Great Term comprehends three, one is three, and three are one. Hiu-chin, under the Hans, near the beginning of the Christian era, in the dictionary Choueven, says reason subsisted in unity and made heaven and earth. Tao-tse, the Tao-te-king, more than five hundred years before Christ: reason, Tao, produced one; one produced two; both produced three; three produced all things (pp. 55 and 56).

Peru: Pacha-camac, an unseen creator, not represented by any figure, with a temple on the coast that rivaled the sun temples at Titicaca and Cuzco. He stood at the head of a trinity, himself, Con, and Uiracocha (p. 56). The Popol Vuh says all that exists is the work of Tzakol the Creator, whose names are Bitol the maker, Alom the engenderer, and Qaholom, he who gives being (p. 56).

The same triune doctrine among the civilized nations of America, Asia, and Egypt means, for him, that they once communicated. Philostratus is his witness for commerce between Egypt and India. Eusebius says that under Memnon, king of Ethiopia, Ethiopians from the Indus settled in the Nile valley. Chinese bottles in the tombs of Thebes, of inferior porcelain, prove contact at a remote time. A vase with Chinese inscriptions in the lowest stratum at Hissarlik, partly read by Emile Burnouf and then by the Chinese scholar Fi-Fangpao, ambassador at Berlin, mentioned samples of Chinese gauze, so China traded with Greece and Asia Minor before the siege of Troy (pp. 57 and 58).

Christian councils, he says, took the triune God from pagan philosophers, called it a revelation, and forbade inquiry. Through them it entered Free Masonry, on the columns of one degree: “In the name of the holy and indivisible Trinity,” and “We have the happiness to dwell in the pacific unity of the sacred numbers” (p. 59). The lesser mysteries received only metaphysical fog. God as number and harmony is Pythagoras, who had it from the Egyptians and named gods with numbers and diagrams. The Egyptians likened nature to the equilateral triangle and, according to Servius, assigned the perfect number 3 to the great God. The Chaldees symbolized the Eusoph, or great light, by an equilateral triangle. In the Sri-Santara of the Hindus the nameless great Aum is an equilateral triangle. The same triangle, with the eye, stands over the main altar of ancient Catholic churches as the eye of Osiris, and in the lodges as the Great Architect of the Universe (pp. 60 and 61).

Guided by the three Maya words of dismissal, he looks again at the Lands of the West. The triangle is the three semispheres in the northern chamber at Uxmal, and the triangular arches of Mayax, Palenque, and the rest of Central America. Ground plans are an oblong square, their letter M, pronounced Ma, contraction of Mam, the ancestor, the earth, and by extension the universe, and the radical of Ma-yax. The shape of the peninsula suggested the letter both to the Mayas and to the Egyptians. In both hieroglyphic systems that figure stands for earth and universe. The same oblong is the plan of apartments in Chaldea, Egypt, and Greece, of Etruscan tombs, and therefore of Masonic lodges. The triangular ceiling is the Triune God, the Ruling Spirit, resident in the heavens, which is why constellations are carved on ceilings. Zoroaster’s fire, sun, and light, the later Platonists’ power, intellect, and soul, Macrobius’s theologians who invoked the sun as power, light, and spirit of the world, and Plutarch’s intelligence, matter, and kosmos, are the same triangle (pp. 61 to 63).

The end of each apartment, ceiling, sides, and floor, makes a pentagon, the mystic 5. Penta in Greek conveys the universe. Ho in Maya means 5 and is the radical of Hool, the head, hence the Deity. The planes of a room are seven: two of the ceiling, two of the sides, two of the ends, and the floor. That is why they chose the triangular arch rather than the circular, and why pyramids, courses of stone, terraces, and stairs follow 3, 5, 7, or their multiples (p. 63).

Only two Maya buildings differ. One, at Mayapan, was shattered by a thunderbolt in 1848 and is now ruined. Bishop Landa says the place was destroyed in 1446 by the lords and nobles, to end the dynasty of the Cocomes. The other, still standing though injured, is in the most ancient city, Chichen. Both were for astronomy and for rites of the sun, moon, and other bodies. They were circular. The ground plan was three concentric circles, the zodiac. The vertical section, he thinks, was meant to suggest the mastodon, venerated as the image of Deity on earth because it was the largest and most powerful creature in the land (p. 64).

On the south facade of the north wing of the palace of king Can at Uxmal, seven turrets were dedicated to the seven members of his family. On the turret of the eldest son, Cay (Fish), the high pontiff, he reads two symbols. The first is an equilateral triangle, apex down, with a ribbon tied in a knot through it. The triangle here is the whole country, the Lands of the West, three great continents: North and South America, and “the great island,” called Atlantis by Plato, which disappeared in a cataclysm under the ocean, as the author of the Troano describes it, confirming the Egyptian priests to Solon (p. 65). The knot bound the initiates to each other, to secrecy, and to their oath. Hidden meaning: the triangle is Deity, ever creating the nature in which we live, and all things are bound.

The second emblem is on the slabs that cased the mausoleum of Cay, so he ties it to the highest degree. A ribbon forms three loops, one at each of three angles of an oblong square, image of the universe. The fourth angle has flat folds, emblem of Mayax, the seat or head of the government, arranged as the five steps of a throne. The three loops are the three great parts of the Lands of the West, which Greek mythologists figured by the trident of Poseidon. The sign O, in Mayax as in Egypt, is the sun, placed in the middle because the sun is the center and the vivifying soul, and so his representative, the Child of the Sun, the high priest, illumined the mysteries and was the fit ruler. O is also the first letter of the Maya and Egyptian alphabets, corresponding to Latin A, initial of Ah, the masculine article, and of Ahau, king (pp. 66 and 67).

Number 7 was the particular appendage of the third degree, the vehicle of life, containing soul and body, as Pythagoras says. The seven members of the founding family were collectively the Ah-ac-Chapat, the seven-headed serpent (p. 67). He does not yet tell why 3, 5, and 7 were chosen. He says natural causes, or events in the life of the nation or of the founders’ family, suggested them. The full family story waits until p. 77.

Landa’s Relation of the things of Yucatan is quoted for the priesthood. Sons or nearest relatives succeeded the high priest. With him was the key of their sciences. He named priests for towns that had none, examined them, and bade them give good example. Priests served the temple and taught writing. Sons of priests and the younger sons of princes were sent in childhood if they inclined to the profession (p. 68).

Mayax and the creation on the palace

To explain the numbers he describes the country. Due south from the mouths of the Mississippi, 480 miles (772 kilometers) across the Gulf, is the northern coast of the peninsula.

Its north-easternmost point, Cape Catoche, is one hundred and twenty miles from Cape San Antonio, the western end of the island of Cuba.

Augustus Le Plongeon. Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 Years Ago (1886), p. 69

It is comprised between the 17° 30' and 21° 50' of latitude north, and the 88° and 91° of longitude west from the Greenwich meridian.

Augustus Le Plongeon. Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 Years Ago (1886), p. 69

Length 260 miles (418 kilometers), breadth 180. Fossiliferous limestone, maximum interior height about 70 feet (21.34 meters), soil surprisingly fertile though often only a few inches of loam. From a pyramid the forest is a sea of verdure, palm clusters like islets, not a hill to break it (pp. 69 and 70). Anciently it was thickly peopled. Ruined cities and edifices equal, in his judgment, the beauty of Egypt and Babylon.

The author of the Troano manuscript, a very ancient treatise on geology, one of the four books that escaped Bishop Landa and the other monks, tells him that the peninsula was anciently called Mayax, the primitive land, the terra firma. The Spaniards, after a struggle of twenty years, became masters of the country in 1541 (p. 70).

It gave its name to the whole empire of the Mayas, that comprised all the countries known to-day as Central America, from the isthmus of Darien on the south, to that of Tehuantepec on the north.

Augustus Le Plongeon. Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 Years Ago (1886), p. 70

Government sat at Uxmal. The emporium of the arts, the heart of the civilization, was Chichen-Itza. Pilgrims worshiped there and even threw themselves into the sacred well from which the city took its name. Wise men came from afar to consult the Menes, learned priests, whose college still exists. Among the foreigners were bearded men whose features recall the Assyrians and the Afghans of today (p. 71). The index enters these priests as “Menes, wise men of the Mayas.”

The name Maya, he says, is met in Asia, Africa, Europe, and America, always with wisdom and power attached, and with vestiges of the language, customs, religion, and traditions of Mayax. Many of those traditions have been taken for the primitive history of mankind. The creation, according to their conceptions, is sculptured over the doorway on the east facade of the palace at Chichen-Itza. It could illustrate the opening of the Manava Dharma Sastra, which Colebrooke says was compiled about 1,300 years before the Christian era from older Brahmin books, completed by the Egyptian narrative in Eusebius (p. 72).

In the tableau a luminous egg, emitting rays, floats in the waters where the Supreme Intelligence deposited it. In the egg sits the Creator, body painted blue, loins girdled, a sceptre in his left hand, a plume on his head, surrounded by a serpent, symbol of the universe. Porphyrius, on Jupiter in the Orphic mysteries, says the initiated showed him seated, naked above because the skies are the uncovered part of the universe, clothed from the waist down because terrestrial things are hidden, the sceptre in the left hand because the heart, seat of understanding, is on that side. The Egyptians call Kneph the creative power. Kneph, or Kaneh, he takes as a cognate of can-hel, a Maya word for serpent or dragon. This god threw from his mouth an egg in which was produced another god, Phtha. Thah, he says, is Maya for the worker, hence the maker. Eusebius: Kneph was a man of blue color, girdled, with a sceptre, a crown, a plume, and figured as a serpent (pp. 72 and 73). These matching pictures, in India, Egypt, and Mayax, are not coincidence. The oldest civilization conceived them and taught the others, as Egypt taught Greece.

Can, Cay, Aac, Coh, Moo, and Nicté

Genesis, at a very early period, has a man murder his brother through jealousy. The victim is Abel, the murderer Cain. The writer, he says, repeated what Egyptian priests taught about the murder of Osiris by his brother Set, and altered it so as not to break his oath (p. 74). Herodotus excuses himself from speaking of the mysteries. Plutarch’s On Isis and Osiris is a version for the lower degrees. Osiris, culture hero, left Isis, his wife and sister, with Thoth, and toured the world. Set, with seventy-two conspirators and a queen of Ethiopia named Aso, offered a beautiful chest to whoever it fitted. It fitted Osiris. They nailed the lid (pp. 74 and 75).

The same fratricide is in Valmiki’s Ramayana. The victim is Bali. Maya is his enemy. Le Plongeon says the recital matches the sculptures and paintings at Chichen-Itza and the second part of the Troano, so the story was carried to India by a Maya traveler or missionary, or by the colonists from Mayax who, Valmiki tells us, settled in very remote ages in the countries south of the Indo-Chinese peninsula, known today as the Dekkan (p. 76). They brought language, customs, and the tradition that the son of a primitive ruler murdered his brother through jealousy, to possess his wife and the government.

In Valmiki’s telling, Bali and Sougriva were sons of a king of the Monkey nation. Bali was elected sole monarch. A feud with Maya, over a woman, drew Bali into an ambush. Sougriva took the throne, was accused of treason, and was banished, deprived of home, wife, and rank. Sougriva met Rama, who promised to kill Bali. During the duel Rama sent an arrow through Bali’s breast while Bali was not looking. “And so Bali was treacherously slain” (p. 77).

We learn from the sculptures and mural paintings that adorn the walls of the palaces at Chichen-Itza and Uxmal that king Can (Serpent) the founder, or maybe the restorer, of these ancient cities, had three sons whose names were Cay (Fish), Aac (Turtle), and Coh (Leopard), and two daughters, Moo (Macaw), and Nicté (Flower).

Augustus Le Plongeon. Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 Years Ago (1886), pp. 77 and 78

That sentence begins at the foot of p. 77 and ends at the top of p. 78. It is one sentence.

It was the law among the Mayas that the youngest of the brothers should marry the eldest of the sisters to insure the legitimate and divine descent of the royal family.

Augustus Le Plongeon. Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 Years Ago (1886), p. 78

The same custom, he says, existed among the Egyptians from the earliest days and later became general, and also among the Ethiopians, the Greeks, the people of Mesopotamia in the time of the patriarchs, the Peruvians, and many other nations. Coh, the youngest, was the warrior who had to marry Moo, the eldest sister. She loved him. After king Can died, the country was parcelled among the children.

Moo became the queen of Chichen, and many of the lords swore allegiance to her.

Augustus Le Plongeon. Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 Years Ago (1886), p. 78

After her death she received the honors of apotheosis; became the goddess of fire, and was worshiped in a magnificent temple, built on the summit of a high and very extensive pyramid whose ruins are still to be seen in the city of Izamal.

Augustus Le Plongeon. Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 Years Ago (1886), p. 78

Aac, the second son, also loved her. His lot was Uxmal, “the three times rebuilt.” His headless and legless statue is still over the main entrance of the House of the Governor. The flayed bodies of his two brothers and his eldest sister are at his feet. Their heads hang from his belt. Ruins of his residence, ornamented with turtles, his totem, stand at the northwest corner of the second of the three terraces (p. 79). He was a courtier, not a warrior, envious of Coh and jealous of the people’s love and of Moo’s. He conspired to kill his brother, seize Moo, and rule the empire.

On the wooden lintels of Coh’s funerary chamber, and in the wall paintings, Aac is full of wrath, three spears in hand, in a terrible altercation with Coh. The mausoleum sculptures say Coh was stabbed three times in the back. The Troano author records the murder in the first section of plate XIV, second part. When Le Plongeon disinterred the statue he found, in an urn, Coh’s heart, partially cremated, and the flint head of the spear. A mural tableau shows the body prepared for cremation, surrounded by his wife, his sister Nicté, his children, and his mother. Heart and viscera were extracted to be kept in urns. High-ranking Egyptians, embalmed by the most expensive process, likewise placed the inner parts in four vases in the tomb (p. 80).

The country went into civil war, Aac’s party against Coh’s friends, who fought for the queen. Aac renewed his suit and sent a present of fruits. Queen Moo sits in her house in the middle of a garden. At her feet, outside the house, so that she does not accept it, is a basket of oranges. Her extended left hand refuses the messenger. Aac bows on a lower plane. Over his head a serpent, typical of his name Can, looks at a macaw perched on a tree above the queen, whose totem the bird is. A monkey guards the tree. The monkey, like the cynocephalus in Egypt, is the emblem of Moo’s preceptor, hence of wisdom (p. 81).

This tableau is his natural explanation of the temptation of the woman by the serpent: the garden, the woman, the tempter, and the fruit. The story, passing from people who did not honor woman as the Mayas did, or written by a misanthropical bachelor, became the version accepted by the author of Genesis. The Troano, plate XVII, second part, and the painter of the scene, say she refused, so the war continued. Moo’s party succumbed. Aac ill-treated her and put her to death, together with Cay, the high pontiff, his elder brother, who had sided with the queen of Chichen. In token of victory Aac set his statue, feet on the flayed bodies, heads on the belt, over the main entrance of the royal palace at Uxmal (pp. 81 and 82).

The basket of oranges was the offer of marriage. Among the aborigines of Yucatan who keep the old custom, a young man sends by a friend a fruit, a flower, or a sweetmeat. Acceptance betroths them. Refusal rejects him. In Japan a flower-pot stands on the window-sill. If the flower is watered in the morning, he may present himself. If it is uprooted and thrown on the sidewalk, he is not wanted (p. 83).

The family name of the kings of Mayax was Can, serpent, as Khan is still the title of the kings of Tartary and Burma and of governors in Persia, Afghanistan, and other countries of Central Asia. Can was therefore Aac’s family name. The serpent who spoke to the woman in Genesis is, for him, now easy to understand (p. 83). The accounts in Genesis, the Ramayana, and the Egyptian papyri are the feuds of king Can’s children. Nowhere except in Mayax is the story part of the nation’s history, and nowhere else are there portraits, marble statues, ornaments, weapons, and the mortal remains (p. 84).

He prints the certificate of Charles O. Thompson, Principal and Professor of Chemistry at the Worcester Free Institute, who examined part of the cremated remains from the stone urn near the chest of the statue in the center of Coh’s mausoleum, twenty feet below the upper plane of the monument. The index places that certificate on pp. 84 and 85. The result, as the book gives it, is consistent with the theory that the mass was once part of a human body burned with some fuel. Loss on drying and on combustion, ferric oxide, alumina, silica, and traces of potash and soda are the particulars he prints. I do not requote the laboratory lines. The certificate is headed from Worcester.

The names in the several accounts are, he says, identical or of the same meaning. A-bel, A-bal, Bal, and Balam are the same word. A, contraction of Ah, is the Maya masculine article. Bal is the radical of Balam. Balam is still, for the superstitious aborigines, the Yumil Kaax, the Lord of the fields, the leopard, which they also call Coh. Coh’s totem is the leopard in the sculptures (p. 85). In Egypt the spotted skin of the leopard hung near Osiris. His priests wore it. As king of the Amenti, the West, his symbol was a crouching leopard with an open eye. The leopard skin of Nimrod and Bacchus was a sacred appendage of the mysteries, Eleusinian and Egyptian, and it appears in the Aitareya Brahmana and in the agnishtoma, the Soma initiation, where the neophyte is born again from a leopard skin as from his mother’s womb. Paul du Chaillu is cited for African warriors who wear a leopard skin as a charm against spears. Le Plongeon ties that charm to the way Coh died, stabbed with a spear, and says the ancestors imagined the totem would save them from the same weapon. Communication between Africa and the western continent is certain, he says, because black populations were on the isthmus of Panama and elsewhere when the Spaniards arrived, and their pictures are in the paintings at Chichen (pp. 86 and 87).

Osir, or Ozil, is a nickname for Coh because his sisters and the people desired him. Ozil is a Maya verb, to desire vehemently. Osiris in Egypt, Abel in Chaldea, and Bali in India are myths. Coh in Mayax is a reality: a warrior whose mausoleum he opened, whose weapons and jade ornaments he possesses, whose heart Professor Thompson analyzed, whose statue, with the name on the tablets that occupy the place of the ears, he unearthed. The statue is now in the National Museum in Mexico, robbed from him by force of arms by the Mexican authorities (p. 87).

Isis was the wife and sister of Osiris. Isis may be a dialect pronunciation of the Maya ioin, or idzin, the younger sister. Her headgear as a goddess was a vulture, her totem and the type of maternity. Isis was often called the great mother-goddess Mau, suggestive of Moo, as the vulture is of the macaw. One title of Isis was the royal wife and sister (p. 88). Authors who do not know the sculptures, the paintings, or the Troano do not believe Osiris and Isis were deified persons. The primitive rulers of the Mayas, whose history is an exact counterpart of the children of Seb and Nut, were deified and worshiped as gods of the elements. For the longer explanation he sends the reader to The Monuments of Mayax and their Historical Teachings (p. 89).

Cain, Set, Sougriva, and Aac all convey something of water. Cain, by apocope, gives Cay, the Maya word for fish. Set is a cognate of Maya Ze, to ill-treat with blows, a fit name for one who killed his brother with three spear thrusts and his sister by kicking her to death, as the Troano author shows Aac doing. Set, honored with the rest of the family of Seb, became the evil principle, Nubti, which he reads from Maya nup, adversary, and ti, for. Set was also the sun god, enemy of the serpent. Aac in the sculptures is always surrounded by the sun. The serpent, emblem of the country, shields Coh and his sister-wife. The escutcheon of Uxmal shows the title of that metropolis as the Land of the Sun. In the queen’s chamber at Chichen, Aac’s followers render homage to the sun, Moo’s friends to the serpent. In Egypt that enmity was a myth. In Mayax it was a dire reality (p. 90). The hippopotamus and the crocodile were emblems of Set. Plutarch: at Hermopolis a statue of Set was a hippopotamus with a hawk on its back fighting a serpent. Aac is the turtle, also amphibious. Sougriva he splits into zuc, lib, and ha: quiet, to ascend, and water, “he who tranquilly rises on the water,” as the turtle does (p. 91).

The cataclysm, the Akab-oib, and the mastodon

The universal deluge is another early tradition, credited by certain civilized nations. Egyptian priests, who kept archives, derided the philosophers when they spoke of Deucalion and the destruction of the human race. If the Egyptians had been preserved, the inundation was not universal. There had been several local catastrophes. The Hellenes were childish to make so much of that one. The greatest cataclysm in the books was the one in which Atlantis disappeared under the waves in one day and night, from violent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. From that time communication with the Lands of the West was interrupted. It had happened 9,000 years before Solon’s visit (p. 91).

The learned men of Mayax preserved an account identical with the Egyptian one. Nearly all the nations of the western continent kept the tradition of it.

Nearly all the nations living on the western continent have kept the tradition of it, but they do not pretend that all mankind was destroyed.

Augustus Le Plongeon. Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 Years Ago (1886), p. 92

In Mayax the priests had a relation carved in intaglio on the stone lintel over the interior doorway in the rooms on the south side of their college.

The building is known to this day by the name of Akab-oib, the dark, or terrible writing.

Augustus Le Plongeon. Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 Years Ago (1886), p. 92

The Troano author dedicates several pages at the beginning of the second part to the cataclysm and the phenomena.

This leaves no longer room for doubting that a large continent existed in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, and which was destroyed within the memory of man; and that the narrative by Plato of the submersion of Atlantis is, in the main, correct.

Augustus Le Plongeon. Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 Years Ago (1886), p. 92

The Maya author represents the lost land by the figure of a black man with red lips, which would imply that it was mostly inhabited by a race of black men.

Augustus Le Plongeon. Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 Years Ago (1886), p. 92

That would account for black-skinned populations on the western continent before the Spaniards. The Mayas, like the Egyptians, represented the world as an old man. Plutarch says the Egyptians called the east the face, the north the right side, the south the left. We reckon the east as the right hand, the west as the left, the north as the face (pp. 92 and 93).

When the Troano author speaks of the Master of the land par excellence, king Can deified, he sometimes pictures him with a human body painted blue and the head of a mastodon. On the facade of the building at Chichen-Itza which the natives call Kuna, the house of God, and which Stephens calls the Iglesia, is a tableau of the worship of that pachyderm. The mastodon’s head and trunk are the principal ornament of temples and palaces built by the Can family (p. 93). Over the trunk, between the eyes, there was a human head, now destroyed, wearing a royal crown that is still in place. On the front of the crown is a small portrait in the round of some very ancient personage. Square niches on each side hold, each, two now headless statues, a male and a female, seated not in a squat but with the legs crossed and doubled under them, each with a totem on the back. Under them are two triangles, emblems of offerings in Mayax as in Egypt, and the image of a honeycomb. Honey, with the bark of the balche tree, was the principal ingredient of balche, the drink pleasing to their palate, the same that Hebe served on Olympus as nectar, and the amrita which the gods, the manes, and the saints still enjoy on the day of the full moon, though it caused the war of the gods and the Titans and still causes quarrels among the tribes of equatorial Africa (p. 94).

The upper cornice above the mastodon is a wavy adornment of the Cans, two letters N juxtaposed, the monogram of Can. The lower cornice reads Ah oam, he of the throne, the monarch (p. 95).

In Japan the seven members of the Can family, deified and figured by the same symbols, are worshiped in the shrine of the palace at Tokio dedicated to the goddess symbolized by a bird, who recalls the goddess Moo, or Isis. Above the winged, beaked attendants an elephant couches, the god of fire on his back, and in the flames the head of a bird. At Chichen the followers of queen Moo, who became the goddess of fire, carry a bird in their headgear (p. 95). The Japanese claim descent from the gods and produce two genealogical tables. Seven gods reigned an incalculable number of years, though they are said to have been spiritual and incorporeal. Five terrestrial spirits or deified heroes followed. Then the Japanese themselves. He sets this beside the twelve gods who, the Egyptians told Herodotus, governed Egypt an incalculable number of years before Menes, their first terrestrial king. The Greeks made them the twelve deities of Olympus (p. 96).

The twelve serpent heads he brought to light in December 1883, from the center of the mausoleum of the high pontiff Cay at Chichen-Itza, are emblematic of the twelve rulers who had reigned in Mayax in times anterior to the great cataclysm when Atlantis was submerged. Their portraits, with the sign cimi, dead, adorn the east facade of the palace, with the tableau of creation, showing that they existed in very early times (p. 96). A dim tradition of them remains in China in the Tchi, also called che-cull-tse, the twelve children of Tien-hoang, emperor of heaven, who had the body of a serpent. Each Tchi lived eighteen thousand years and reigned before Ti-hoang, sovereign of the country in the middle of the land.

The mastodon worship returns as Ganesha in India, red body, elephant head, god of prudence, wisdom, and letters, saluted before any letter or book, set in foundations, at crossroads, at the gate called Ganesha-pol, and on a conspicuous door of the palace. Pol, in Maya, is the head, so Ganesha-pol would be the head of Ganesha. Ganesha may be a dialect pronunciation of Can-ex, “the serpents.” The legends of the elephant head are so many that the origin is unknown. He suggests colonists from Mayax, where the mastodon was widely worshiped, and where children are carried astride on the hip and a hand dipped in red liquid is printed on temple walls. Ganesha’s body is red, the color characteristic of the American race and the symbol of nobility among the Egyptians. The Egyptians did not worship the elephant and seem not to have known it well. The red hand has not been observed in Egyptian temples, and Egyptian women did not carry children astride on the hip, though many other customs were shared. Colonists from the Lands of the West who settled in the Nile valley replaced the mastodon, which was not there, with the bull, the largest and most useful domestic animal, and that was the origin of the veneration for Apis. Initiates of Osiris were told that Apis ought to be regarded as a fair and beautiful image of their soul (pp. 97 and 98).

Serpent, tree, and country

From the remotest antiquity the serpent was venerated as the embodiment of divine wisdom. Eusebius says the Egyptians figured Kneph as a serpent. Maya priests represented the ancestor of all beings protected within the coils of a serpent. Stanyland Wake, as the book spells him, and James Fergusson, in Serpent and Tree Worship, show the worships were common and fail, he says, to name the country of origin. All authors admit the origin is still a mystery, and that the two worships are so connected they must have the same source (p. 99).

His own claim is that serpent and tree worship originated on this western continent, from the same cause, the love of the country, the amor patriae still so strong that it is hard to induce the aborigines to leave the place where they were born. On the eastern continents the worship is tied to mythology, metaphysics, or astronomy above the reach of the multitude. Those were fictions the priests invented, either to hide the facts or to hide their ignorance, while keeping power. Early, the serpent, emblem of Kneph, was the agathodaemon, the good genius, and the Chinese still take it as one of their most beautiful symbols. Later, when it became the emblem of Set or Typhon, slayer of Osiris, it was the evil principle. Jews, Christians, and Muslims, whose tenets rest on the Bible, have held it so ever since (pp. 100 and 101).

The worship was no less spread in the Lands of the West. Vestiges run from the banks of Brush Creek, Adams County, Ohio, where a great serpent effigy 700 feet (213 meters) long still lies on the crest of a mound, entirely similar to the one John S. Phene found in Glen Feechan, Argyllshire, to the ancient city of Tiahuanuco. Those ruins are 13,500 feet (4114 meters) above the Pacific, on the shores of Lake Titicaca, near the frontier of Bolivia, on the high plateau of the Andes. A doorway is a single monolith 13 feet (3.96 meters) 5 inches long, 7 feet (2.13 meters) high above the ground, and 18 inches thick. D’Orbigny and other travelers, Le Plongeon among them, were astonished by the sculptures on the southeastern facade. Mayas, no doubt, were the unknown builders, since the sculptures carry the totems of prince Coh, of his wife and sister Moo, and of their father king Can (pp. 101 and 102).

The gate at Tiahuanuco

He digresses to describe the gate. The city was already in ruins when Manco Capac laid the foundation of the Inca empire. Natives told the Spaniards it had been built by giants before the sun shone in heaven. The members of Can’s family, worshiped in Japan and once in Egypt, are here carved at the foot of the glaciers of Sorata and Illimani, as they are in the lore of India and Greece (p. 102).

The front was once as polished as trachyte allows. Above the doorway, four bands about eight inches high. The lower band has seventeen small heads in low relief. Seven of them, directly under the central figure, wear a plume of three feathers. Grecques with macaw heads separate the small heads. The grecque, in the ancient Maya and Egyptian alphabets, equals Latin H. Ah is the masculine article and conveys might. With the macaw, totem of Moo, queen of Chichen, it signifies the mighty, the powerful Moo (p. 103). The central figure is 32 by 21 inches. Its head is three superposed escutcheons, the uppermost a human face. Three escutcheons, three feathers, a triple throne, three dots on each cheek, three oblong squares on the breastplate, and three macaw heads on the triple sceptre symbolize the three great western regions, which the Egyptians called the Lands of the West and represented by a character that is an image of the crown worn by some high chiefs in Mayax. The sign that stands in lieu of the mouth is the letter M, pronounced Ma, radical of Mayax. Ma, in Egypt as in Mayax, signifies land, country, and by extension universe (p. 104).

Rays around the head are in groups of four, each ray ending in a circle with a dot, the sign often met on Maya monuments and particularly on the trunks of mastodon heads. It is the first letter of the ancient Maya and Egyptian alphabets, our A, initial of Ahau, king. Kneeling personages worship the central figure. On the neck of the macaw-headed figures, followers of queen Moo, is the sign of offering. The name of the great king he reads in four leopard heads and in the four rays of each group. Four, in Maya, is can, and can also means serpent and power. Pythagoras connected four with Mercury, the Egyptian Thoth. The tetraktys was the mystic name of the Creative Power, later intellect and wisdom. The oath of the Pythagoreans was the four that contain the ten (p. 106).

The four leopard heads are his totem, Kancoh, Coh being leopard.

Augustus Le Plongeon. Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 Years Ago (1886), p. 106

The sceptre in the left hand is bifurcated, each end a macaw, totem of queen Moo of Chichen-Itza, sister and wife of Coh. Its undulations, like a serpent in motion, are the three great regions of the empire, also shown in three rows of kneeling winged personages. The upper portion is the western continent, divided into two great parts united by the Isthmus of Panama.

The lower was meant to represent that extensive island that sunk beneath the waves of the Atlantic ocean, about 11,500 years ago.

Augustus Le Plongeon. Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 Years Ago (1886), p. 106

The sceptre in the right hand is whole, so the entire country was governed by one potentate. The rulers of seventeen nations paid him homage. The seventeen divisions are the seventeen small heads, and seventeen signs of land on the arms, the breastplate, and the ribbon. The middle row of kneeling figures have macaw heads, adherents of queen Moo. The others have human heads but wear her totem on their crowns. All are ornamented with twelve serpents in groups of three. The sash ends in a knot with four circles, which he has said stand for Ahau, king, so their lord is of the Can dynasty. The tableau recalls the beaked attendants at the shrine of the bird deity at Kioto (p. 107).

Mr. Angrand finds a coincidence with Central American sculptures and sees the same origin for the builders of Tiahuanuco and those of Palenque, Ocosingo, and Xochicalco. Le Plongeon would add the cities of Mayax, founded many centuries earlier (p. 108).

Creation, the sea as Canah, and the empire as a serpent

Chichen may be called the City of Serpents. The serpent guards the entrance of public edifices, lies at the foot of grand stairways, and forms the columns, head as base and body as shaft. Nobles wore serpent adornments (p. 108). The esoteric cause of the worship, taught only to a few initiates of the greater mysteries, is homage of the creature to the Creator. The exoteric cause, for the uninitiated, is love of the country and respect for rulers, living images of Deity (p. 109).

He lines up the cosmogonies. The Manava-dharma-sastra: the visible universe was darkness, then the self-existing Power appeared, produced the waters, and Narayana moved on them. Berosus: in the beginning all was darkness and water, and monstrous animals were generated. A woman rules them all, Thalath in Chaldee, Thalassa in Greek, Thallac in Maya, a thing without steadiness. Genesis: the earth without form and void, darkness on the face of the deep, the spirit of God on the face of the water, then light. The Poemander, which he takes as the most ancient authentic book of the first philosophical books of Egypt, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus: Thoth tells the Supreme Intelligence that all things resolved themselves into light, then a horrid shadow of humid nature agitated itself, and the verb came forth from the voice of light and was carried on the humid principle. Fire rose and was lost in the air. Earth and water were so mixed that the surface of the earth appeared nowhere. Later Hermetic books: God, intellect, nature, matter, energy, fate, conclusion, and renovation; boundless darkness in the abyss, water, and a subtle intellectual spirit; then the holy light, and the elements from the sand of a watery essence (pp. 110 and 111).

In the Popol Vuh: everything was without life, calm and silent. Void was the immensity of the heavens. The face of the earth did not yet manifest itself. Only the tranquil sea was, and the space of the heavens. In the darkness, only the Creator, the Maker, the Dominator, the serpent covered with feathers, they who engender and create, were on the waters as an ever increasing light. They are surrounded by green and blue. Their name is Gucumatz (p. 112).

The same words in India, Egypt, and Mayax are not an accident and not a separate discovery. He compares the man who would say the railway and the electric telegraph sprang up simultaneously in every nation. Who brought the notions to the Lands of the West, and when? Who can say they did not arise on the western continent and go the other way? In The Monuments of Mayax he has shown, he says, that legends of several Egyptian deities, read by means of Maya, point to Mayax as the birthplace of Egyptian civilization, and that his Maya hieratic alphabet is as near the Egyptian hieratic as two alphabets can be. Either they learned writing from the same masters, or the Egyptians learned it from the Mayas. He believes the cosmogony began with the Mayas (p. 113).

The tableau at Chichen is also his proof that the designers knew something of the globe. The philosophers of Mayax must have known that the waters cover the greatest part of the earth, about three fifths, and that water, a combination of oxygen and hydrogen, the most subtle of fluids, was the first form of matter. On each side and on the top of the tableau they placed the symbol of water, leaving without it, at the upper part, a portion equal to two fifths of the length. In the midst is an egg, a germ, because no being exists on earth but that is born from an egg. The egg emits rays, the light into which Thoth said all things resolved themselves, and which the Quiche author of the Popol Vuh said appeared on the water as an increasing brightness that bathed the Creator, the feathered serpent, in green and azure. The water symbols end in serpent heads, because the waves were compared to the undulations of a serpent. For this reason the Mayas named the sea Canah, the great, the powerful serpent, and in the Troano the sea is always a serpent’s head. Quiches, Mayas, Egyptians, and Hindus represented the world, and by extension its maker, as a serpent. A serpent within the egg, behind the creator, is the totem of the ancestor of all beings. That is one origin of serpent worship: adoration of the Creator (pp. 114 and 115).

In Egypt the goddess Uati, genius of the lower country, is sometimes a serpent with inflated breast, body erect over a basket or sieve, the lower part against a figure like the numeral 8, and sometimes a winged serpent with inflated breast and the crown of lower Egypt. The Troano author sometimes pictures Mayax as a serpent with an inflated breast, plate XVII, part II, and sometimes as a serpent with part of the body bent in the shape of the Yucatan peninsula. A footnote on p. 116 gives his reading of the legend, beginning Ahau Eb Kan, which he renders freely as the master of the basin of water turning it so that abundant fluid submerges the land. He says a glance at the illustration shows the reading is correct, and he sends the fuller explanation to The Monuments of Mayax. I do not treat that footnote as a second flood story. It is his reading of one plate.

The painters of Coh’s funerary chamber typified the country as a winged serpent, back green, belly yellow, a blue crown, the tail ending in a dart like the southern continent of America (p. 117). The twist against which the Egyptian serpent rests is the same twist the Troano uses for the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. The peninsula stands erect between those seas as the serpent stands in the Egyptian sign. The sieve is called by the natives Mayab, which in past ages was one of the names of the peninsula. The crown of lower Egypt is the crown worn by certain chieftains in the bas-reliefs at Chichen-Itza. There the peak was in front. In Egypt it is at the back, perhaps, he says, as a mark of respect, the child standing behind its parent, as children do among the aborigines of Yucatan (p. 118).

Winged serpents in Egyptian paintings are also emblematic of the rites of the dead and of the mode of being in Amenti, the Lands of the West, where souls returned after leaving the body. In early days Uati, or Mati, the country of Mayax, was one of the divinities worshiped on the Nile. The asp, not any other snake, was the badge of royalty on the headdress of kings and gods. When angry it dilates its breast, and in that condition it recalled the geographical contours of the land of their forefathers in the West, and the way that land was drawn in the books they had studied as children (p. 119).

A map of the western continent shows Central America, the old Maya empire, as a serpent with an inflated breast, in a position like the emblem of lower Egypt. The head is the peninsula of Yucatan, anciently the seat of government. The southern continent is the dart of the tail. Green back: the tropical forests. Yellow belly: the internal volcanic fires that make the surface wriggle. Blue crown: the sky. Wings: the smoke of volcanoes. Fins: the high peaks of the cordillera, the backbone of the continent (p. 120). There is a map of the Maya empire at that page. Love of country, amounting to fanaticism, is another origin of serpent worship, the emblem of the motherland (p. 121).

In the serpent mantra of the Aitareya Brahmana the earth is Sarpa Rajni, queen of the serpents and mother of all that moves, still worshiped by the Nayas in the valley of Kashmir. In Mayax the primitive rulers took the title Can, serpent, from the contours of the empire, as the priests of the sun took theirs from Kin, the name of that luminary. Their emblem was not the winged serpent with a dart, but a rattlesnake covered with feathers, image of the feathered mantle of the king, the high pontiff, and other high dignitaries. It adorns the royal mansions, and it is seen at Uxmal on the east facade of the west wing of king Can’s palace. After death these rulers were deified. In Assyria the winged serpent was replaced by the winged circle, emblem of Asshur, seldom found except in immediate connection with the monarch, and closely related to the sacred tree (pp. 121 and 122).

One name for rattlesnake in Maya is Ahau-Can, the royal serpent. In the sculptures the king is often this emblem with seven rattles, seven having been the number of Can’s family. Egypt honored kings and queens as gods after death. Greece deified heroes (p. 122).

The yaxche, the cross, and the month of May

Tree and serpent have been so closely identified that their origin must be the same. Fergusson is inclined to “the mud of the lower Euphrates, among a people of Turanian origin,” and then, Le Plongeon says, fails to account for the same worship in the West. The oak was dedicated to Baal. Druids performed their most sacred rites under it in honor of the Supreme Being. Scandinavians venerated the ash. Delos, the palm of Latona. Sacred groves at Samos, Athens, Dodona, Arcadia, and in Canaan. In India and Ceylon, a bo tree, Ficus indica, in the courtyard of every monastery. Fergusson sends the reader to Egypt, before the Theban pantheon. The tamarisk overshadowed the supposed sepulchre of Osiris, king of Amenti. The persea was sacred to Athor, regent of the West, often identified with Isis. The sycamore was consecrated to Nut, mother of Isis and Osiris, often shown in its branches pouring a liquid, the water of eternal life, which the soul, a bird with a human head, catches in its hands. The trees were particularly sacred to the deities of Amenti, that is, to the deified kings and queens from the Lands of the West (pp. 123 and 124).

In Assyria the sacred tree is frequently with the winged circle, and the circle is with the monarchs, so the tree worship bears on deified heroes and kings. The annals of Mayax explain the relation. The Mayas held certain trees sacred. Landa, Cogolludo, and other early writers say that even at the Spanish conquest the aborigines believed in the immortality of the soul, rewarded or punished beyond the grave. The reward was a delectable place, no pain, delicious food, eternal repose in the cool shade of the yaxche, the ceiba, still planted in front of the main entrance of churches throughout Yucatan and Central America. Sometimes the churches stand in groves of ceiba, and in some localities the gigantic palm, palma real, replaces it (pp. 124 and 125).

The Maya empire was of old, according to the Troano author, figured as a tree planted in the continent known today as South America, its principal branch the Yucatan peninsula. See the map on p. 120. That is his key to tree worship and to its relation with the winged serpent and the king. It is again the worship of the country. The tree of life, of civilization, of knowledge, stood in the middle of the land, of the garden, of the primitive country, Mayax, the empire placed between the two great continents, forming the Lands of the West (pp. 125 and 126).

A long footnote on p. 126 is his free reading of a Troano legend. Can, the master of the basin of water, who was dead, forcing his way by an earthquake, has risen. Can’s foot sank. The air filled the crater of the volcano. Six fertile lands appeared in Umukan, which he identifies with Cuba, and four volcanoes in Timanik, which he identifies with one of the small Antilles. Maya writers sometimes figured the earth as an old woman, mam, the grandmother. She holds the sign of smoke and a javelin, emblem of volcanic energy, and the symbol of the Land of the Scorpion, Zinaan, the West India islands of his day. The deer head represents the Maya empire. I report this as his reading of that plate, not as a second Atlantic narrative. The Atlantic island remains the one he has already tied to Plato.

Chinese commentators on the Chou King confirm, for him, the relation of tree, serpent, and the country in the middle of the world. Yong-chi says Tien-hoang had the body of a serpent, was the origin of letters, and gave names to the ten Kan and the twelve Tchi in order to determine the place of the year. Yuen-leao-fan says Kan means the trunk of a tree and Tchi are the branches, hence che-cull-tse, the twelve children. The children of king Can were called Can-chi, still a family name among the aborigines. Ti-huang, king of the earth, is also Hoang-kiun, he who reigns in the middle of the earth, and Tse-yuen, the son principle, the engendered, the Brahma of the Hindus, the Kneph of the Egyptians, the Mehen of the Mayas (pp. 127 and 128).

The cross was reverenced ages before Christianity, from a scratch on the rock to the caves of Elephanta. All varieties go back to a form like the Latin cross. The earliest eastern type he names is the crux ansata, the Key of the Nile, the symbol of symbols among Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Chaldees, emblem of the life to come, placed on the breast of the deceased, sometimes a simple T on the fulcrum of a cone, sometimes supported on a heart. The same adorns breasts of statues at Palenque, Copan, and other cities of Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Central America. Everywhere it was associated with water. In Babylon, water deities. In Egypt, Assyria, and Britain, creative power and eternity. In India, China, and Scandinavia, heaven and immortality. In Mayax, rejuvenescence and freedom from physical suffering. It was placed on the breast of the initiate after his new birth in the Bacchic and Eleusinian mysteries (pp. 128 and 129).

Remesal and Torquemada say that when the Spaniards under Hernan Cortez landed at Cozumel in 1519 they found crosses which the natives worshiped as gods. Le Plongeon calls this a mistake. Bernal Diaz del Castillo, who was there, does not mention such symbols. Cortez ordered the idols destroyed, had an image of the Virgin placed in their stead, and had two carpenters erect a wooden cross, recommending the natives to care for them. Dr. Pedro Sanchez de Aguilar says the stone crosses found afterward on the island imitated that of Cortez. Bishop Landa, zealous to convert the aborigines, does not mention crosses at Cozumel before the Spaniards, a fact he would not have failed to use (pp. 129 and 130).

In Mayax, in very remote ages, the cross was an emblem of the mysteries. No external vestiges like those at Palenque are found on Maya temples and palaces. Only one image of a perfect cross has he met in the ancient edifices of Yucatan, besides the ground plan of the sanctuary at Uxmal. It is part of the inscription on the lintel of the doorway of the east facade of the palace at Chichen. Tradition says the cross was symbolical of the God of Rain. They made no image of it and held no festival for it at the time of the conquest. It was simply a notion of their forefathers (p. 130).

The ancient Maya astronomers had observed that at the beginning of our month of May, which owes its name to the goddess Maya, the good dame, mother of the gods, the Southern Cross appears perfectly perpendicular above the southern horizon. That is why, he says, the Catholic Church celebrates the exaltation of the holy cross on the third day of that month, consecrated to the Mother of God, the Good Lady, the virgin Ma-R-ia, or the goddess Isis anthropomorphized by Bishop Cyril of Alexandria (p. 131). I keep his division of the name Maria. It is his etymology, not a claim I add.

Between the 12th and 23rd degree of north latitude, about the beginning of January the dry season sets in. In May and April, in a country like Yucatan with no water on the surface, everything is parched. Birds lose their shyness. Then four bright stars stand up in the south. The cross announces rain, new life, and, with renewed life, immortality. It is the God of Rain. Civilized nations in the Lands of the West and on the eastern continent dwelt in latitudes where the Southern Cross is visible during May, and the first showers follow its apparition. From them the symbol passed farther north, accepted without the original meaning. Unsophisticated natives in the forests still rejoice at the Southern Cross and prepare to sow (pp. 131 and 132).

The mystical T, tau, is nothing more, he says, than a representation of the God of Rain, the Southern Cross. Tau is a Maya word of three primitives: ti, here; a for ha, water; and u, month. Freely, “this is the month for water,” hence the resurrection of nature and the new life. The complex form, a cone with two arms and an oval above, the crux ansata, is not of Egyptian origin. Its prototype is the conoidal pillar surmounted by a sphere, used by the Babylonians as the symbol of life and death, death being the nursery of life. That emblem was a reminiscence of the yaxche, under whose roots the natives say a source of pure cold water is always found. The trunk is a perfect cone. The main branches shoot horizontally. The leafy top, from a distance, is a half sphere of verdure. Cone, tau, and crux ansata were, for the initiated, the same symbol: Deity, the life to come, the dual powers, fertility. Mayas and other peoples of Central America always drew their sacred trees with two branches shooting horizontally from the top of the trunk, so that the tree looks like a cross or a tau. He points to a Mexican manuscript in the British Museum, Additional MS. 9789 (pp. 132 to 134).

Why three, five, and seven

He has strayed, he says, in order to show that the primitive traditions and the religious symbols common to the civilized nations of antiquity emanated from one source, the country of Mayax, in the Lands of the West (p. 135). Herodotus says the daughters of Danaus instituted the Thesmophoria in honor of Ceres, in imitation of the Egyptian mysteries of Isis, and that Eumolpus instituted the Eleusinian mysteries on his return from Egypt, as Orpheus founded the rites that bear his name in Thrace. Who taught the hierophants of Egypt, the magi of Chaldea, and the gymnosophists of India? The same symbols, with the same signification, among peoples so far apart, show one origin. It is not said anywhere that they began with the Egyptians, the Chaldees, or the Hindus. Their primitive traditions have been derived from the history of the early rulers of Mayax. The same symbols are carved on the temples and palaces there. Their language has given the meaning of the dismissal words and of the mystical tau (pp. 135 and 136).

Sacred mysteries were celebrated from times immemorial in the temples of Mayax, Xibalba, Nachan (Palenque of today), Copan, and other places of Central America. Besides the sculptures, the rites and trials are described in two distinct instances in the Popol Vuh, and they match the trials of Egypt, Greece, Chaldea, and India. So he looks in Mayax for the reason the founders chose the odd numbers 3, 5, and 7 (pp. 136 and 137).

The symbolization of 3 may be accounted for in two ways. One is the sceptre of Poseidon. Plato, he says, makes Poseidon the first king of Atlantis, and the Greek mythologists make him a son of Kronos. The three-pronged trident alludes to the three great islands of his kingdom: North America, South America, and Atlan, now buried under the Atlantic (p. 137). The same emblem in the hands of Vul, god of the atmosphere in Chaldean mythology, and in the hands of Hindu gods, may represent the three worlds or great regions which Egyptian and Maya hierogrammatists designed by the character in the hieroglyph for the Lands of the West, which the Mayas also figured as the sacred tree with three branches. A footnote reads a legend, freely, as PPeu has struck again the tree with his ax. PPeu was one of the twelve ancient rulers who governed the country in times anterior to the great cataclysm during which the Atlantic island was submerged. Deified, he became one of the protecting genii of the land. His effigy still adorns the east facade of the palace at Chichen-Itza, between the eyes, over the trunk of the mastodon’s head, surrounded with an aureole (pp. 137 and 138).

The deification of a world of three parts may have been the origin of the Trimurti and of the mystification of number 3. In Mayax he sees it in the three platforms of the most ancient edifices, the three rooms of the temple of the mysteries, the three steps to the first platform, the 21 metres, 3 times 7, of all the principal pyramids in Yucatan, and the three concentric circles of the zodiac. In India: the vyahritis or three sacred words, the three ornaments or saranas, the three principal classes, the three ways of salvation, the three fetters of the soul or gunas, the three eyes in Siva’s forehead, the three strands of the sacred cord, the three letters of Aum. In Egypt: the three-thonged flagellum of Osiris, the triple phallus carried at the festival he calls the Paamylia, in honor of the birth of Osiris, and the triads, as likewise in Chaldea (pp. 138 and 139).

The other way of accounting for 3 is the indication of Orpheus, Plato, Proclus, and the other Greek philosophers who had been admitted to the mysteries. The three intellects of the Demiurgos were three kings. The Troano author relates the history of the three sons of king Can and the troubles after their father’s death. A faint and distorted tradition still existed at the Spanish conquest. Bishop Landa states that it was said that once upon a time three lords, brothers, governed the country together. Those three brothers are realities. We have their portraits, their weapons, their ornaments, and their mortal remains. They recall the three sons of Adam, the three sons of Seb, and the three sons of Kronos (pp. 139 and 140). The members of Can’s family were deified and worshiped in temples whose ruins still lie in the forests. It is not improbable that Cay, the elder brother and high pontiff, having instituted the mysteries with his father, took as symbols of the degrees the number of the members of the family, so as to perpetuate their name. Eusebius says the Egyptians represented the supreme Deity as a serpent, Can-hel, superior to the triads as a father is to his children. “Numero Deus impare gaudet.” The three Hoang-ti of Chinese mythological times also had the shape of serpents (pp. 140 and 141).

A footnote on p. 139 gives the symbol of the three sons as three deer heads, Uluumil ceh, “the land of the deer,” one of the names of the country of the Mayas.

Number 5 was mystic in the east. In the Y-king, the canonical book of changes, which Confucius was seldom seen without, the celestial or perfect numbers are 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9. He lists the Chinese fives: elements (water, fire, wood, metal, earth), grains, colors (black, red, green or blue, yellow, white), tastes, tones, relations of life, virtues, organs of the body, Chang-ti, parts of the heavens, seasons, genii, and tutelary mountains. India has five organs of intelligence, five organs of action, five elements, five great oblations, five great sacrifices, five great fires (pp. 141 and 142). In Mayax the five semispheres are carved at each end of the southern apartment in the edifice of the mysteries. Five is the number of steps from the courtyards to the principal apartments in the House of the Governor, the palace of king Can, and other edifices at Uxmal. It is the number of the second of the three platforms under temples and palaces. In modern Free Masonry it is still the sacred number of the second degree. In the Troano the legends of all the compartments are five characters, to indicate that they are headings, ho-ol, the beginning, the head (p. 142).

The number may have become sacred in remembrance of the children of king Can. Besides his three sons Cay, Aac, and Coh, he had by his wife Zoo two daughters, Moo and Nicté, whose names bear a striking resemblance to T-Mau, one of the names of Isis, and to Nike, her sister. So Can and Zoo had five children, just as Seb and Nut had Aroeris, Set, Osiris, Isis, and Nike (p. 143).

Seven was the sacred number par excellence. Pythagoras, borrowing from the Egyptians, calls it the vehicle of life, containing body and soul, a quaternary of wisdom and intellect plus a trinity of action and matter. The emperor Julian, in the pieces he calls Matrem and Oratio, says that if he touched the initiation into the secret mysteries which the Chaldees bacchized, respecting the seven-rayed god lighting up the soul, he would say things unknown to the rabble but well known to the blessed theurgists (p. 143). The esoteric explanation can only be surmised. It is not improbable that it lay in an event in the early history of the race whose traditions are scattered over the earth. The family of king Can was seven members, rulers of the seven cities that bear their names, whose ruins still exist in the forests of Yucatan. Deified, they have been worshiped in various countries under different names. Remembrance of these seven rulers of Mayax may be the origin of the seven divine rulers of Egypt, the seven Manous of the Brahmins, the seven Richis, the seven princes of the Persian court and the seven councillors, the seven Ameshas-pants or first angels, the seven great gods of the Assyrians, the seven primitive gods of the Japanese, the seven Cabiri at Lemnos and Samothrace, and the seven great gods of the Nahualts (pp. 144 and 145).

The Ah-ac-chapat, the seven-headed serpent, totem of the seven primitive rulers, has its simile in the seven-headed heavenly serpent on which Vishnu rests, corresponding to Egyptian Kneph or Maya Mehen, or Canhel; in the seven serpents that form the crown of Siva; and in the seven-rayed god of which Julian was reluctant to speak. Festivals of seven days commemorate them: the Eleusinian mysteries, the festival of Apis, the feast of tabernacles. The septenary system in Mayax is the seven cities, one for each member of the family; the seven pyramids of Uxmal; the seven turrets on the south facade of the north wing of Can’s palace, each inscribed with a name, those of the females at the east end of the wing; the seven gradients of the third and uppermost platform; the seven superposed gradients of the pyramids, calling to mind the seven terraces of the temple of the seven lights at Borsippa and the pyramid degrees at Sakkara, though that Egyptian pyramid has more gradients; the seven rooms on the west side of the conical mound that supports the temple of the mysteries at Uxmal, each with a bust over the doorway; the seven courses of stones in the walls and in the triangular arches. The same system is in the grand gallery of the great pyramid at Ghizzeh. In that monument, as in the antique edifices of Mayax, the proportional scale follows 3, 5, 7, and their multiples (pp. 145 and 146).

Seven days of the rainfall that produced the deluge, according to the Chaldeans, are reproduced in Vishnu’s prophecy to Satyravata in the Bhagavata Purana, and in the Lord’s prophecy to Noah in Genesis. Because of seven days of rainfall the Babylonian priests used seven vases. He lists the seven Maruts, the seven rounds of the ladder in the cave of Mithra, the seven horses of the sun, the seven Apris, the seven rays of Agni, the seven steps of Buddha at his birth, the seven classes of the Egyptians, the seven-day week, a creation completed in seven days, the seven lamps, the seven branches of the candlestick, the seven days of the dedication, seven years of plenty and seven of famine, and the sevens of the Apocalypse and of Greek myth, the hydra and the seven islands sacred to Proserpine (pp. 147 and 148).

On the western continent the number is no less common. It occurs often in the Popol Vuh. Sahagun and Clavigero say seven families accompanied the mystical personage Votan, reputed founder of the great city of Nachan, identified by some with Palenque. The ancestors of the Nahualts emerged from seven caves. The seven cities of Cibola were described by Coronado and by the writer he prints as Mza, and Frank Cushing has fixed the site in the immediate neighborhood of the village of Zuni. He adds the seven Antilles, and the seven heroes who escaped the deluge (p. 148). This last is the flood remnant he allows. It is not a claim that Mayax itself was drowned, and it is not the Atlantic island. The island is Atlan, already sunk. The seven heroes are one more instance of the number.

Can it be accidental, he asks, that nations so unlike, and so far apart, accepted seven from the remotest ages? The initiated are told an esoteric meaning in the third degree of Free Masonry, but that meaning is an invention of our days and does not give the origin. In Mayax, 3 was the number of the sons of king Can, 5 the number of his sons and daughters, and 7 the number of the whole family. It is not improbable that, to commemorate that fact, 7 was made the sacred number of the third degree, and that this was the origin of its mystification (p. 149).

The close

He has presented, without commentaries, a few of the facts that twelve years of research among the ruins, a knowledge of the language still spoken by the descendants and, in the vicinity of Peten, in all its pristine purity, the deciphering of certain mural inscriptions, the study of the sacred book of the Quiches, and the interpretation of passages in the Troano have disclosed to him concerning the history, civilization, cosmogony, and religious practices of the ancient inhabitants of Yucatan (p. 149). On p. 22 he had said fourteen years. I leave both numbers as he prints them.

The reader is to judge whether a knowledge of the primitive dwellers in the Lands of the West will raise the veil on the first traditions of mankind. He quotes the first annual report of the executive committee of the Archaeological Institute of America, which said the study of American archaeology relates to a race that never attained a high degree of civilization, left no trustworthy records, and offers nothing with any direct bearing on the progress of civilization. He differs because he has seen and photographed the constructions, studied the monuments in situ, learned the language of the stone inscriptions, and read some of them. They have not. Not far from New Orleans, relics of past generations are as interesting as those of Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, and Italy. A few years more and the intelligible traces will have disappeared, destroyed by ignorance and cupidity (pp. 150 and 151).

Maya, he says, is not a dead language. It is one of the oldest forms of speech, coeval with Sanskrit if not anterior. The names Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and the rest of the Greek alphabet form a curious epic poem in that language. Interesting inscriptions in New York only await decipherment. Why not found, in Yucatan, in the ruins of the temples and colleges of the learned priesthood of Mayax, a school where students can learn, with the language, what the Maya sages knew of man’s origin, of his intellectual development, of the past of their people, and of the colonists they sent out with the arts, sciences, and religion of the mother country, the civilization from which our own is descended (p. 152)?

After twelve years of incessant labor, unaided by any government or scientific society, opposed and robbed of their finds by the Mexican government, which has refused to indemnify them, Mrs. Le Plongeon and he have saved many documents and relics and have found a key that will unlock the door of that chamber of mysteries. They have lifted, in part, the veil that has hung over the history of mankind in America in remote ages. Shall it be allowed to fall again (p. 153)?

The index, pp. 155 to 163, is a finder, not a new argument. It enters Atlantis as submerged, p. 41, with the record of the submersion in Egypt and Mayax at p. 91, the lost land figured as a black man at p. 92, and the destruction 11,500 years ago at p. 106. It enters Moo as a person, “who she was,” p. 78. It does not enter a continent named Mu, and it does not enter Lemuria.

What I can set beside other writers from this book is therefore a western motherland he calls Mayax and the Land of Kui, an Atlantic island he calls Atlantis and Atlan, a royal house of serpent, fish, turtle, leopard, macaw, and flower, and a Quiche initiation at Xibalba in seven houses. The flood he refuses to make universal. The cataclysm he insists on is the loss of that Atlantic island, within the memory of the men who wrote the Troano and who told Solon the story Plato preserved.