Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique (1868)

I read Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique for the names, places, dates, and Maya pages a later writer can set beside other Atlantic books. The copy is the 1868 Paris edition. The title page reads Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique, then the subtitle, an absolute exposition of the Mexican hieroglyphic system, the end of the Stone Age, a temporary glacial epoch, the beginning of the Bronze Age, and the origins of the civilization and the religions of antiquity, after the Teo-Amoxtli and other Mexican documents. The author is M. Brasseur de Bourbourg, former ecclesiastical administrator of the Indians of Rabinal, Guatemala. Paris, Maisonneuve et Cie, booksellers, 15 quai Voltaire. London, Trübner and Co., 60 Paternoster Row. The year on the title page is 1868, with all rights reserved. The next leaf is the printer, Saint-Cloud, Imprimerie de Mme Ve Belin. The same imprint closes the book. A series leaf calls this volume four of the Collection de documents dans les langues indigènes for the history and philology of ancient America, and it carries a handwritten homage from the author. The dedication leaf, unnumbered, gives the four letters to his friends, to the friends of America, and to the friends of independent science. The year 1868 is before 1929, so I treat the book as public domain and quote his sentences under the dates and places.

The running heads of the avant-propos go from VIII through XX. The four letters are numbered 1 to 399. A blank page follows. The pièces justificatives run from 401 to 448. The table of sommaires is 449 to 463. In this file, a printed page of the letters is the file page minus 24. I cite the printed numbers. This review is of the four letters. It is not his edition of the Manuscript Troano, and I do not read that later commentary, or any other writer’s map, back into these pages. For Plato’s own day and night, see Timaeus & Critias. I name Atlantis: The Antediluvian World and The History of Atlantis only so that those books stay separate. He never uses the names Mu or Lemuria. Lemnos, when it appears, is the Greek island.

The book at a glance

• Title: Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique. The subtitle on the same page is the exposition of the Mexican hieroglyphic system, the end of the Stone Age, a temporary glacial epoch, the beginning of the Bronze Age, and the origins of ancient civilization and religion, after the Teo-Amoxtli and other Mexican documents.
• Author: M. Brasseur de Bourbourg, former ecclesiastical administrator of the Indians of Rabinal (Guatemala).
• Edition I read: Paris, Maisonneuve et Cie, 15 quai Voltaire, and London, Trübner and Co., 60 Paternoster Row, 1868. Printed at Saint-Cloud by Mme Ve Belin. Volume four of his collection of documents in the indigenous languages.
• Length: An avant-propos dated Paris, 15 May 1868, pages VIII to XX. Four letters, pages 1 to 399, closed “Paris, 3 avril 1868.” Four pièces, pages 401 to 448. A table of sommaires, pages 449 to 463.
• What he claims: The whole of civilization, which people have always given the East for a cradle, comes from the West, that is from America. Mexican books have two senses on one text. The surface is a history of Toltecs and of kings. The hidden sense is geological. A land then covered the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean and ran east toward Europe and Africa. Volcanic fire broke it and sank the richest regions between one rising of the morning star and the next, in one day and one fatal night, which he sets beside Plato’s Atlantis. He puts that event some six or seven thousand years ago. The Lesser Antilles, and Guadeloupe in particular, are the first refuge and the first workshop of metals. The Maya signs, as he reads them, are the oldest writing, and the parent sketches of the Egyptian, the runic, and the cuneiform.

Findings worth setting beside other writers

• The date he is willing to print. Some six or seven thousand years ago, for the cataclysm that left the continents as they are (p. 24). On p. IX the same Mexican account has been kept for six thousand years among the peoples conquered by Cortés. He also says sixty centuries for the priestly veil, for the gold workings at Cibao, and for the three stones of the domestic hearth. He does not print a year before Christ tighter than those rounds. The letters themselves are dated 3 April 1868, the avant-propos 15 May 1868.
• The land, and its shape. The American continent was then double what it is. A portion covered the Gulf of Mexico and the sea of the Antilles and ran east and northeast toward Europe and Africa (pp. 46, 47). On p. 64 he measures the eastward handle, from the paintings of the Manuscript Troano, at eight hundred leagues at least beyond the Lesser Antilles. There the land bent north and south, leaving a gulf toward the coast of the United States and another where the mouths of the Amazon are now. The two gulfs are the two faces of the mirror Tezcatlipoca held up to Quetzalcoatl. The shape he names is a crescent, a tau, a half-moon, a leg. In Nahuatl the name is Metztli, which also means moon, month, and leg. The Maya sign is Manik, the fourth sign of Landa’s calendar, and he also finds it in the first letter of Landa’s alphabet (pp. 64 to 67).
• Atlantis, by that name. He refuses the charge that he is telling a novel, “as has been said of Plato, about Atlantis” (p. 45). Osiris, for the world, is the half of the American continent that the eruptions sent to the bottom of the abyss in one single day and one fatal night, as Plato says of Atlantis, and between one rising of the morning star and the next, according to the Codex Chimalpopoca (p. 54). Humboldt, he says, did not throw out Plato’s historical romance. Geologists, he says, agree that a vast land once lay between our continent and America (p. 108). After four days of agony, the dawn of the fifth day showed a new world, and Atlantis had disappeared with its inhabitants. Great and small islands were rising at the entrance of the two new inland seas (p. 246).
• Tollan is that land, not a kingdom he will keep. From Ixtlilxochitl he first tells a Toltec story: a revolt of thirteen years, a halt sixty leagues on, at Tlapallan-Conco, a migration of one hundred and four years, a law that no king reigns more than fifty-two, Hueman dead at nearly three centuries, a dynasty of eight kings and one queen, Topiltzin, a famine of four years, and a flight from the cave of Xicco to Tlapallan (pp. 82 to 87). He then takes it back. There was, he says, no Toltec monarchy properly so called, and no nation particularly distinguished by that name. What existed was a Toltec civilization that covered all America with its monuments. Quetzalcoatl is the personification of the land swallowed by the ocean. Tollan, his capital, was the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean (p. 87). Topiltzin’s retreat into the cave is the last volcano going back down into the abyss.
• The Manuscript Troano, as this book describes it. On his return from Mexico in 1866 a friend showed it to him at Madrid. Don Juan de Tro y Ortolano, who owns it, lent it and let him carry it away. It is painted on beaten bark paper with a light white varnish, and it has seventy-two pages, generally fairly well preserved. Beside the symbolic pictures is a phonetic explanation in the characters of which Landa kept the alphabet. The roughness of the profiles makes him think it very old, perhaps a thousand years before our era, and from some priestly burial (p. 33). A note says the Maya preserved their books by passing them each year, after ceremonies, through a water prepared with copper oxide and acetic acid. He first took it for a sort of almanac for owners of rural property. He has not read every figure in it, or in the Dresden Codex (p. 63). The facsimile, he says in the avant-propos and in a note, is being published in 1868 under the Minister of Public Instruction and the Commission scientifique du Mexique.
• Ice after the break. He will not yet say whether the ice came from the north or the south. He had thought of the north pole, at the moment the land of the Crescent first went under. Some indices show it coming from the south. What he calls certain is a debacle of ice whose first mountains covered the Caribbean as soon as that sea began to form, over the waters that had taken the place of Tamoanchan (p. 279). He has not fixed the length, and so far it does not seem to him to have been very long. The fifth chapter of the third part of the Popol Vuh is his text for tribes arriving, by a road that was neither land nor sea, at the Seven Caves, which he reads as the seven principal Lesser Antilles, shivering under hail from floating mountains of ice.
• Metals, and where he puts the Bronze Age. The guanin of Haiti and the other Antilles, still in use in Columbus’s time, was assayed by order of the king of Spain at eighteen parts gold, six of silver, and eight of copper, in thirty-two (p. 309, citing Herrera). He gives Guadeloupe the honor of the invention, and he allows that another tradition brings it back to Haiti, or that both islands saw it at once. Cibao later became the center. Columbus, he says, found the abandoned excavations in the mountains of Cibao where, sixty centuries before, the nations of both worlds went for gold (p. 308). In Europe he puts the first cradle of the Bronze Age not in India or Tibet but in the northern islands of Great Britain and in Scandinavia, and only afterwards in Asia, under the names Hyperborean or Medo-Scythian (p. 314). The primitive cradle of those peoples, and the source of the gold, the orichalc, the electrum, and the amber, he puts at Turu-Queira and Ma-Dan-Ino, Guadeloupe and Martinique in his reading.
• A Pacific aside, and what it is not. His documents, he says, refer almost only to the Atlantic side. Vague indices make him think the lands swallowed in the Pacific were even larger, the continent swollen between the tropics toward India and China. Peruvian traditions mention a cataclysm in which the earth rose and at the same time left to the sea the vast regions west of the Cordilleras (p. 64). He does not name that Pacific land, and he does not build a second system on it.
• Who left, and by which roads. North: from the Gulf of Mexico into the United States, which he calls the great Scythia and the great Hyperborea, and Plutarch’s Cronian continent, then by Newfoundland and Iceland to the coasts of Scandinavia or to Ireland (p. 313). South: from the mouths of the Orinoco to the coasts of Mauritania. The Hyksos, whether they entered Egypt from the east or from the west, still had the Antilles for a cradle (p. 395). He offers two paths, Brazil to the Canaries and Mauritania, or down through Celtica and Iberia, and he also leaves open a Scythian, Median, or Phrygian detachment. Diodorus, he notes, has the successors of the Scythians reach the Nile.

Avant-propos

The four letters were written at the request of a few friends. He warns the reader not to skim them, and to drop any idea already held for or against America. The matter, he says, is newer than anyone would think even after his introduction to Landa’s Relation des choses de Yucatan. He expects to be told that the book is a tissue of paradoxes. He accepts the dictionary’s definition, a proposition contrary to common opinion, and he adds the dictionary’s own example, that the motion of the earth around the sun was long regarded as a paradox. The fundamental proposition of the four letters is that the whole civilization which has always been given the East for a cradle comes from the West, that is from America.

He states his independence at length. He is Flemish and free, a Saxon of the old stock, of those Charlemagne transported. He belongs to no scientific, literary, or so-called theological coterie, and neither to the government nor to the university, though he can serve his country. Before printing the first pièce he consulted Charles Sainte-Claire Deville, because that pièce is geology.

Alors j'ai consulté l'un des maîtres de la science, M. Charles Sainte-Claire Deville, et je suis heureux, à cette occasion, de constater, pour mes lecteurs, que l'éminent professeur a trouvé dans le récit mexicain, conservé depuis six mille ans, chez les peuples conquis par Cortès, un récit entièrement d'accord avec les principes de la science moderne.

Brasseur de Bourbourg. Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique (1868), p. IX

The sense is that Deville found the Mexican account, kept for six thousand years among the peoples Cortés conquered, entirely in agreement with modern science. The pièce itself is the first pages of a Nahuatl manuscript, translated twice on the same text. The first version is what any Mexican scholiast would have given. The second, he says on this page, offers in its ensemble the history of the geological upheaval of the Lesser Antilles, in particular of Guadeloupe. That double sense is what led to most of the discoveries in the book. He thanks Deville as a colleague on the Commission du Mexique.

He then answers the rumor that the State paid for his American books. The four volumes of his history of Mexico were published by Madame veuve Arthus Bertrand under a treaty of 1857, and the ministry of state subscribed for twenty-five copies. The Popol Vuh, the grammar of the Quiche language, and the Relation of the things of Yucatan were printed entirely at his own cost, from small savings. The ministry of public instruction subscribed for fifty copies of each, which did not cover the printing, the maps, and the plates. The only book published at the State’s expense is the one he wrote two years before, at the minister’s request, to accompany M. de Waldeck’s album, Palenqué et autres ruines de l’ancienne civilisation du Mexique. For that, and for unpublished manuscripts copied at his order in Madrid, he received twelve copies, and he had to ask for them.

In March 1864, at his first interview, the Minister of Public Instruction called him the pivot of the Commission du Mexique. The Emperor Maximilian, in a council of state at the palace of Mexico, asked his Mexican ministers whether they knew any foreigner better informed of the things of their country, and more than once offered Brasseur the place of intendant general of the libraries and museums together with the ministry of public instruction. That was at a time when nothing yet announced the end of the war in the United States and the catastrophe that followed in Mexico. He refused, he says, in order to keep his independence, and the fear of the title of minister made him hasten his departure from Mexico at the end of April 1865 for Central America.

He dates the scientific commission. In December 1863, at Madrid, he received a letter from M. de Quatrefages announcing its probable creation and asking, on behalf of Marshal Vaillant, for his help. Two years before Vaillant took it up, approaches had been made to him indirectly in the Emperor’s own name, to put him at the head of a scientific mission accompanying the expeditionary corps. He did not like traveling with an army. The project was postponed before he decided. He still calls the commission Napoleon III’s first thought, and he says that if it had been properly supported it would have been one of the glories of the reign. France, he says, no longer commands on Mexican soil, but it holds the finest monuments of Mexico’s ancient history.

In January 1862 the government searched the libraries and depots of Paris, then England and Germany, for a map on a scale that could guide the corps from Veracruz to Mexico at the start. M. Maunoir came from the war depot. Brasseur had a map given him at Mexico by M. Bertault, with many additions in red ink. The next day Léonce Angrand explained that the service was for the State. Angrand copied the map, added corrections, and with it took several sheets of notes, from the Mexican itineraries, describing the two roads from Veracruz to Mexico, one by Orizaba and the other by Perote. Fifteen days later Angrand sent the notes and his fair copy directly to the head of state. Brasseur says he never used the service to ask a favor. His device, like that of an English nobleman whose name he has forgotten, will be Je Maintiendrai.

He has worked at these studies for twenty-five years and had the initiative in them. He hopes a school is forming. One disciple, he thinks, will be General Doutrelaine, his colleague on the commission, who has begun to turn the pages of Sahagun and Torquemada and who published the manuscript of the Boban collection in the Archives of the Commission. A letter from Don José María Andrade, in Paris, seems to announce a greater service: the publication of the Mexican manuscript kept in the library of the Corps législatif. Andrade’s note, which Brasseur prints, is dated Paris, 1 May 1868, and it quotes Don José Fernando Ramírez, writing from Bonn on 7 April, that the codex is worth much more than the one of Tro, brought from Spain, and that Doutrelaine told him in Mexico it was going to be published. Brasseur has never managed to see the Corps législatif manuscript, so he suspends judgment. He is himself directing the reproduction of the Manuscript Troano under the Minister of Public Instruction. In his own view the two have an equal value.

A letter full of details on Yucatan, written to him from Brussels by George Catlin and dated 6 May, complains of the Louvre’s indifference to Catlin’s collection. Brasseur calls it the finest ethnographic museum of the United States in the world. Catlin had nearly sold it to Washington, refused to share the glory, and brought it to Europe. On a report by Mérimée it seemed for a moment that the Louvre would buy it. The same fatality that cost France pieces of the Campana museum and the Blacas collection, and that leaves the Louvre showing only the coarsest Mexican antiquities while hiding those of Peru, then fell on Catlin. The avant-propos is signed Paris, 15 May 1868 (p. XX).

How little the public knows

The first letter opens on p. 1. The unnamed correspondent has asked for twenty years of notes on the antiquity, the history, and the languages of the American populations, and for the myths of Mexican religion with the veils lifted. Brasseur repeats the correspondent’s complaint. Except for himself and a few friends, who knows the history of those countries, if there is one? Men who can talk of Sanskrit, of the Vedas, of Brugsch and Mariette, and of what Oppert has done with cuneiform since Hincks and Rawlinson, cannot keep up a conversation on the antiquities of America.

His own books on Mexico and Central America already make seven enormous octavo volumes. Manuscripts on America are rare everywhere in Europe except Spain. He owns cards, written by his friend M. Muñoz, former librarian of the Royal Academy of History at Madrid, listing a great number of manuscripts in the Spanish archives. He hopes the Mexican scientific commission will publish that volume. Printed books are scarcely less rare. One must know Spanish, and it would help to have traveled and stayed in the New World. In France there are chairs for the learned languages of the old world, and none, he says, for America ancient or modern.

He defends the five or six young men of the scientific expedition. They crossed half the New World, explored ten times more country than the savants of the Egyptian expedition, and faced civil war, hunger, mountains, forests, and unhealthy marshes. It is not their fault that the military funds were large and the scientific funds small, or that they were five or six where a legion was needed. If the commission had had the head of state at its head, as the Egyptian commission had, the army would have been at their disposal. He names Guillemin, Dolfus, Montserrat, Pavie, Méhédin, Bocourt, and Bourgeot. Léon Méhédin, in eighteen months, surveyed two entire cities, Xochicalco and Teotihuacan, and molded, drew, and photographed on the spot every piece in the museum of Mexico. The teocalli of Xochicalco was reproduced at the Champ de Mars the year before, and quarrels forced Méhédin to build it in theater scenery instead of casting it in plaster. The monument of Xochicalco, if Méhédin’s portfolios were published, would bear, he says, not only on the origins of American civilization but on the cradle of the civilizations of classical antiquity. This section is his defense of the commission and of American studies. The cataclysm is not yet the subject.

Sanskrit, and a western cradle

On p. 7 he says Sanskrit has been put more or less in its true place. It is no longer “the common mother.” He quotes a short article by Oppert in the Revue de Linguistique: the Aryas implanted their linguistic character on European soil but did not erase the aborigines, so that one must admit Indo-European languages and must also declare that there are no Indo-European nations. Oppert counted, in Latin and in Greek, how much of the vocabulary is Aryan, how much cannot be tied to an Indo-European root, and how much is Semitic. The figures sit in a paragraph whose print I will not trust to a dirty line, so I do not repeat them. Brasseur says that on an evening of his own, with Noël’s Latin-French dictionary, Eichhoff on the Indo-European languages, and his American vocabularies, America carried off not only most of the Latin roots unknown to the Aryas but a great number of Sanskrit ones. He claims that at least half the words in Noël’s dictionary are in the Mexico-Guatemalan group, and that they can be taken apart down to a single vowel, which Bopp’s scalpel never did.

His footnote on that page defines the group. He means the principal languages spoken between the isthmus of Tehuantepec and the isthmus of Nicaragua. The best known are Nahuatl or Mexican, Maya, Tzendal, Tzotzil, Quiche and its dialects, Mame, and Pokomam. By the group he means above all Mexican, Quiche, and Maya, including the old language of the islanders of Haiti, from which all the others seem to him to have issued. At the Imperial Library one should consult Molina’s Mexican vocabulary and the Quiche and Cakchiquel vocabularies of the American collection.

He is not an Orientalist. Twenty-five years ago the East was the goal of his studies, before his American voyages. He has kept it up only in a secondary way, with Bopp, Burnouf, and Westergaard, Wilson’s English Vedas, and Rosen’s Latin text. Unlike Columbus, who found this continent while thinking he was sailing to Asia, he found the East again while trying to push farther west. Sanskrit, he says with Bopp and Chavée, is not a mother tongue. He adds that it does not even seem to him the daughter or the granddaughter, and that most of the so-called Aryan roots, when he dissects them, have their primitive elements in the Mexico-Guatemalan languages. Whatever the objections to the idea that American nations preceded those of our continent in civilization, what he has to say is tied to geology. He is even less a geologist than an Orientalist. What he found, at the same time as the origins of civilization, and what he reads in a great number of documents, is the history of the geological formation of the Gulf of Mexico and the surrounding countries, a formation that followed a cataclysm caused by volcanic movements. He reads it in the texts in Nahuatl, Quiche, Cakchiquel, or Maya, in the Spanish manuscripts, and in the original paintings kept in the libraries and reproduced in Lord Kingsborough’s collection. The note gives Antiquities of Mexico, nine large folio volumes, the drawings on stone by A. Aglio, London, 1831 to 1848.

The Codex Chimalpopoca and the Teo-Amoxtli

For twenty years he has studied the American languages, histories, and traditions, but it is not six months since he succeeded in understanding the secrets under the veil. A happy concurrence brought him there unexpectedly last summer. Nahuatl, which he has studied with more ardor than ever since his last voyage to Mexico, Maya, which he had the chance to go into deeply in Yucatan, and Quiche and its dialects, extended his reach. The discovery of the Maya alphabet, which he published in 1864 with Landa’s book, and the notions in that book on Maya religion and the calendar, had already made him suspect, even then, what the American histories could teach, including in geology. He had scarcely a confused idea of it when he published the Quiche text and translation of the Popol Vuh. The notes give Landa, Spanish text and French translation, Paris, Durand, 1864, and the Popol Vuh, Paris, Durand, 1861. An Egyptologist friend had supplied notions on the Book of the Dead. Those appreciations led him to give the introduction of the Yucatan relation its title, which seemed strange: the sources of the primitive history of Mexico in the Egyptian monuments, and of the primitive history of Egypt in the American monuments. A learned friend told him the theory had not been received in the academic world. He is not surprised. The university is classical, Hellenist, and Latin. The Academy of Inscriptions, however, in 1862, gave a very honorable mention to his two volumes on the Quiche language, on the occasion of the Volney prize.

The book he has in hand is not his. It is only the translation of an old Mexican manuscript he copied at Mexico in 1850. It is number 13 of the Nahuatl documents, section VIII, of Boturini’s collection, titled Historia de los Reyes de Colhuacan y Mexico. He has often pointed it out in his history of the civilized nations of Mexico and Central America under the name Codex Chimalpopoca, from Don Faustino Chimalpopoca Galicia, his Nahuatl teacher and Aubin’s. Two other copies exist in France, in that scholar’s possession, one by the astronomer Gama y León and one by Padre Pichardo of the Oratory of Mexico. He transcribed his own from the original, then at the college of San Gregorio, and he thinks it more exact. The note cites Boturini, Idea de una nueva historia general de la America septentrional, Madrid, 1746.

For nearly twenty years, like every writer on ancient Mexico since the conquest, he saw only the appearance. Under a tiresome chronology and the story of the Toltecs hide the deepest mysteries of the geological origins of the present world and of the cradle of the religions of antiquity. From Ternaux-Compans he recalls the Toltec revolt against the monarch of Huehue-Tlapallan, a civil war of several years, and the emigration. At their head were seven chiefs, two of them holding the supreme authority jointly with a priest, Hueman or Huematzin, their inferior in rank and their equal or superior by wisdom, always with them, the third when he stood with the first two, the eighth when the seven were together.

From Ixtlilxochitl, in Kingsborough, volume IX, he copies the notice of Huematzin the astrologer. A few years before the death of Ixtlilcuechahuac, father of Huetzin, Huematzin died aged nearly three hundred years. Before that he gathered all the histories the Toltecs possessed, from the creation of the world to that time, and had them set down in a great book: the persecutions, the labors, the prosperity, the dynasties, the laws, the old sentences, the temples and the gods, the sacrifices, the rites, astrology, philosophy, agriculture, and the other arts, good and bad. He gave the book the title Teo-Amoxtli, which, well interpreted, means divine things and divine book. Ixtlilxochitl calls it the primordial book. The natives now call Teo-Amoxtli the second writing, because it is almost in the same manner, chiefly as to the persecutions and the labors of men. That, it seems, was the name they gave the sacred paintings kept in the royal archives of the city of Texcoco and burned by order of the first bishop of Mexico.

Several paintings escaped. He names Kingsborough’s collection, and the proofs of the Manuscript Troano now being reproduced under his direction in the name of the Minister of Public Instruction and the commission. A note says the Troano will be finished in the present year 1868, and that the original belongs to Señor Don Juan de Tro y Ortolano, professor at the École des Chartes in Madrid, who lent it generously and authorized the reproduction. Various of these documents are only the hieroglyphic transcription of the famous Teo-Amoxtli. The most remarkable, to his knowledge, are the fine manuscript called of Velletri or of the Museo Borgia, kept at the library of the Propaganda in Rome and often cited by Alexander von Humboldt, the first document in volume III of Kingsborough, and the one in the royal library of Dresden, which follows it in the same volume. The Mexican manuscript of the library of the Corps législatif he has not been able to see.

Ugly pictures, and a double sense

He answers the man who sees only a dead letter, and ugly images that say less than the signs of the Luxor obelisk or the tomb of Sati. He doubts that any Egyptologist of the correspondent’s acquaintance has begun to interpret that sarcophagus. A scholar of his acquaintance is at work on it, and on the Book of the Dead. The moment is not far, he thinks, when the secrets of that book will be unveiled without the mystic rigmarole the Hellenistic Egyptians of the last epochs imagined, after they had lost the true sense of the hieroglyphs. The Mexican sketches are ugly because they are hieroglyphs, a sacred writing whose form, once agreed, could not change, and because they are rebuses that would become inexplicable if a line were altered. The uglier they are, the closer they are to the primordial object. In the primitive documents they are not human beings. They are more or less anthropomorphized sketches of purely geological facts. Greek art, by perfecting the statues, forgot the origin of the gods. The Mexican priests held to the shapeless sketches because they were closer than the priests of any other nation to the places where the terrible mysteries that gave birth to the idolatrous cults were accomplished.

He returns to the Codex Chimalpopoca. Translating it for the third or fourth time, he lifted the veils. Imagine a whole book written in puns, in which every phrase and most of the words have a double sense, each perfectly clear and distinct from the other. He reached that by looking for the explanation of a curious passage on the history of Quetzalcoatl.

Oui, Monsieur, si ce livre est en apparence l'histoire des Toltèques et ensuite des rois de Colhuacan et de Mexico, il présente, en réalité, le récit du cataclysme qui bouleversa le monde, il y a quelques six ou sept mille ans, et constitua les continents dans leur état actuel.

Brasseur de Bourbourg. Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique (1868), p. 24

The sense is that the book looks like a history of the Toltecs and then of the kings of Colhuacan and of Mexico, but is really the account of the cataclysm that overturned the world some six or seven thousand years ago and set the continents in their present state. What the Borgia Codex of the Propaganda, the Dresden manuscript, and the Manuscript Troano spread out in images and hieroglyphs, the Chimalpopoca gives in letters. It contains, in Nahuatl, the history of the world composed by the sage Hueman, that is by the powerful hand of God in the great book of nature. In a word, it is the divine book itself, the Teo-Amoxtli. His first translation, written nineteen years ago at Mexico under his Nahuatl teacher, was more than imperfect. After eighteen years of work he understands its real nature only now. He had long hoped Aubin would publish it.

The same myths, and where he looks for the cradle

A year ago he saw in the book only a chronological history mixed with legends. The legends, drawn from old ballads which the nobility and the priests had kept in memory, held him, especially those of Quetzalcoatl, which struck him by their relations with Bacchus and Hercules, and with Osiris. Creuzer’s symbolic, in Guigniaut’s translation, helped him. He did not adopt Creuzer’s transcendentalism. He wanted the facts and the traditions, and then the sources when he could reach them. The chain of the myths in Mexican theology is continuous, while in the mythologies of our continent he often saw only fragments. If Mexico could not yet claim the priority of their invention, it could claim a clearer and more complete notion. The distinctive attributes of the divinities of Egypt, Greece, and Asia Minor he found, one after another, among the Mexican divinities, and often with a plausible explanation.

He will not stop for adversaries of American archaeology. He had been determined, on taking up the Chimalpopoca again, not to insert analogical notes of the kind he placed in the Landa introduction, and to leave the reader the pleasure of the surprise. The identities became so striking that he changed his mind. Bopp, whose recent death the learned world deplores, worked by comparisons toward the primitive unity of the Indo-European languages, starting from a unity already made evident by Grimm, William Jones, and Friedrich Schlegel. If those men had shut themselves inside “natural limits,” they could not have compared the European languages with those of India and Persia. He asks whether it is farther from India to Germany than from America to Europe or to Africa. Jones in 1786 said that no philologist, after examining Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, could help recognizing that they are derived from some common source which perhaps no longer exists. Brasseur does not say crudely that the source is in Mexico. When he has shown that the most important expressions of the sacred language of India exist identically in Mexico and Central America, with their radical meaning, and has put a finger on the place where they were born, the reader will have the discovery. The religious conceptions of India that serve as the base of those expressions are only the more or less material images of original ideas contained in a primitive hieroglyph. The passages Wilson thought the most difficult in the Indian poet’s strophes are full of details of which the Teo-Amoxtli alone, by the pictures of the cataclysm, gives the key.

The Troano, the mirror, and the Delphic sentence

The whole mythology, he now says, is founded on a geological myth, based on the cataclysm and on the topographic form of the land whose ruin it caused. During his stay in Central America, twelve years before this letter, he had been struck more than once by the names of the heroes of the Popol Vuh attached to localities. He found the Four Hundred Young Men on the shores of the Pacific, the name Cabrakan given to a mountain in the country of the Mames, and Hun-Ahpu as the name of the Volcano of Fire near Guatemala. He was still too full of anthropomorphism to explain it. A foreign Egyptologist, M. Rillieux, whom he met seventeen years before, returning by diligence from Mexico to Veracruz, and whom he later found again in Paris, asked more than once whether the American documents held something other than ordinary histories or a current mythology. Having read the Popol Vuh translation, Rillieux said it had been of great use, and that he thought he saw in it allusions to geological and geographical myths existing, as he said, in the Book of the Dead. Brasseur was long incredulous. Landa, the calendar signs, the Maya alphabet, and the geographical myths in Humboldt, together with the traditions reported by Friar Ramón Pané and Peter Martyr of Anghiera about the Antilles, changed the first impressions. His note says he translated Pané’s little work from the Italian edition of Venice, printed at the end of his Landa, from p. 431, and he points to the Decades of Peter Martyr.

On his return from Mexico, in 1866, a friend at Madrid communicated a precious monument.

Ce document, peint sur papier d'écorce d'arbre, battue et recouverte d'un léger vernis blanc, comme la plupart de ceux du même genre dont il est question dans Landa et ailleurs, comporte soixante-douze pages, généralement assez bien conservées.

Brasseur de Bourbourg. Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique (1868), p. 33

The sense is that the Troano is painted on beaten tree-bark paper covered with a light white varnish, like most books of that kind in Landa and elsewhere, and that it contains seventy-two pages, generally fairly well kept. It is traced in characters and figures, in the ordinary phrase of the Spanish writers of the conquest, which means that beside the images that express the facts symbolically there is the explanation in phonetic characters, those of which Landa preserved the alphabet.

La rudesse des profils me ferait croire qu'il est d'une date très-ancienne, peut-être de mille ans antérieur à notre ère, et qu'il provient de quelque sépulture sacerdotale.

Brasseur de Bourbourg. Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique (1868), p. 33

The sense is that the roughness of the profiles would make him believe the manuscript very ancient, perhaps a thousand years before our era, and that it comes from some priestly burial. He did not know that when it was entrusted to him. The analysis of certain groups, and a few feasts of the Maya calendar which he thought he saw, first made him think it could only be a sort of almanac for the use of owners of rural property. Comparison with the American manuscripts in Kingsborough changed his mind. After conversations with Léonce Angrand he began to strip the Mexican authors he owns, toward a symbolic which Angrand called the first marker to set down for a serious study of American archaeology. Against the plates of the Vatican copy, so often cited by the Jesuit Fábrega in his examination of the Borgia Codex, he raised the whole text of Father Ríos. A sign of the Vatican copy, also in a plate of the Letellier manuscript at the Imperial Library, struck him by its resemblance to the Egyptian hieroglyph for cities of the first order. He found nearly the same sign in the proofs of the Troano, often on the same page, and he satisfied himself that it had the same meaning in the Mexican and Maya symbols as in those of Egypt. The phonetics helped: “city, town, or fortress,” cah in Maya, identical with Egyptian kah, meaning the earth, the place, the locality. He will say later that cah is not a root. For the moment, cah in Maya and in Quiche means four, and alludes to the four winds of the world and to the four quarters of every American city, marked by the four arms that form the cross in the sign. The calendar signs, ordinarily given as symbols of so many divinities, were in reality representations of localities or of regions made divine and carried to heaven with a divine character. The names of tribal ancestors, and of the Toltec kings as they stand in Ixtlilxochitl, analyzed into nothing but qualifications that apply only to localities.

In June of the previous year, in his translation of the Chimalpopoca, he was at the history of Quetzalcoatl, king and pontiff of Tollan, at the moment Tezcatlipoca conspires with another demon to tempt the monarch. Tezcatlipoca invents a mirror with two faces, one of which has the power to alter monstrously the features reflected in it, so as to make the king odious to himself and force him to abandon his kingdom. After repeated refusals he is admitted. He presents the mirror, saying: Know thyself, look, my lord, you are about to appear in the mirror. Brasseur recognizes the famous sentence engraved in the temple of Delphi, pronounced by the Mexican god long before Greece had knowledge of the myth. The pontiff, obeying, is terrified at what he sees. Like Zagreus, in Guigniaut’s Creuzer, he saw in that deceiving mirror only an unfaithful image of himself. He wants to withdraw from Tollan. Another tempter offers to make a mask that will hide the deformities from his subjects. The Mexican text describes the mask in every detail. Brasseur says you can see it in the face called of the sun, which occupies the center of the famous zodiac of Mexico, and in the trophy of the temple called of the sun in the ruins of Palenque, plates 29 and 30 of Waldeck’s album, the frontispiece plate of Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, volume II. It is the same mask as that of Silenus on a crowd of Bacchic monuments, in relation with Dionysus, god of tragedy and of scenic representations, as Quetzalcoatl is in Mexico, and the same which in Egypt often represented the father of the gods, according to Athenaeus and Diodorus. The description turns above all on two teeth coming out of the mouth, twins or in the form of serpents. He has seen those teeth on images of Buddha in the Siamese exhibition, and sometimes in the mouth of Greek divinities, and they are in every symbol of Quetzalcoatl. A few days before, examining a local hieroglyph of the Dresden manuscript, he had thought he had found its mysterious sense. The Chimalpopoca description was a sudden revelation. The band fell. Except perhaps the history of a dozen kings, predecessors of Montezuma, it is not the history of men that one must henceforth look for in the known documents, but that of American nature. The Toltecs, whom he long took for an ancient and policed nation, pursued in the eleventh century by implacable enemies, are in reality telluric powers, agents of subterranean fire. They are the Cabiri, who later become the Cyclopes by hollowing an eye in the forehead, that is by rising with the masses of earth above its surface and filling the craters with fire. They are the true smiths of the Orcus, of the Limné of which Tollan is the symbol, the masters of civilization and of the arts, the smelters of the metals, which men learned to know only in the midst of the convulsions of a world overturned by subterranean agitations.

Toltecs, Chichimecs, and Aztecs as powers of the earth

The founders of the primitive societies took their name from those all-powerful Toltecs. The Chichimecs and the Aztecs are likewise symbolic names, borrowed from the forces of nature or from the condition of those who first put them on, and with which the tribes of the valley of Mexico later decorated themselves. They may have distinguished the castes of one society, like the caste names of India, or they may have recalled the regions designated by one or another of the phenomena. The first hypothesis seems to him more conformable to Mexican history. The seven Nahuatlaca tribes would have been, at the beginning, different castes, erected according to the number of the seven Toltec chiefs and of the seven primitive volcanoes. Less immobile than those of India, these castes would have disputed the power at different epochs. The destruction of the Toltecs, if it is true historically, could apply only to a great social revolution in which the priestly body, less strong than the Brahmins, succumbed and dispersed to the four winds.

The double interpretation of the Chimalpopoca opened the treasures. The names of tribes were all drawn from the attributions of the volcanic power that overturned the world six or seven thousand years ago, or from the symbols attached to that catastrophe. All his documents tell the story of those overturnings, the history of the cataclysm of which all peoples have kept the memory. He was far from expecting that outcome, though he had more than once foreseen it, especially when he published, with Landa, his dissertation on the Egyptian and Mexican monuments.

He then reprints, as lines he wrote barely four years ago, a long passage from that dissertation. America, he said then, has been the object of no serious archaeological investigation. It is perhaps America that will contribute most to the solution of the great historical problems. The solution will be found in the katuns or cartouches encrusted on its monuments, in the books shut in the sepulchres and hidden since the conquest, perhaps even in those our libraries already possess. One will end by reading the Dresden Codex, and one will interpret the Tonalamatl or Mexican Ritual of the library of the Corps législatif, of which Aubin also owns an original copy. Beside judicial astrology and the feasts of the ecclesiastical ritual, those books hold the most ancient historical documents and the origins of the mystic ceremonies of a cult that kept, in the most perfect chronological order, the account of antediluvian memories and of the natural catastrophes that on various occasions had overturned the world since God placed humanity there. The same traditions, under different names, were recalled in the cult not only among the other civilized nations of Mexico and Central America but among most of the populations of South America. New doctrines tried to supplant the old ones and succeeded only by letting the earlier symbols subsist or by identifying themselves with them. Until the books are interpreted, one must use the cosmogonic fragments kept in the books and histories of the time of the conquest. The most formal are those he calls the History of the Suns, cited by Humboldt after Gómara, and found, with variants, in the Codex Chimalpopoca. These suns are epochs to which the various catastrophes are referred. Their number, and the order in which they followed, vary. He will not examine here what led to inverting the events. The disorder seems to him to belong to a time after the Spanish conquest, explained by the desire of the natives who had to explain them, and to please their new masters, to accommodate the American deluge to the deluge of the Mosaic traditions. According to the annotations of the Codex Letellier, there were in particular three memorable epochs in which the human race, after existing for centuries, was suddenly torn from its ordinary occupations and in great part annihilated by the convulsions of nature. The earth, shaken by frightful earthquakes, flooded at once by the waves of the sea and the fires of the volcanoes, stirred in its entrails by interior gases seeking an issue, and agitated by formidable hurricanes: that is the picture the American traditions give of this continent at three distinct epochs, chronologically determined in books that ignorance made disappear at the time of the conquest.

He could not then have imagined that so soon afterward he would hold the instrument destined to break the seals. In the extraordinary pages of the Chimalpopoca he has read how, following the eruption of volcanoes opened over the whole extent of the American continent, then double what it is today, the sudden eruption of an immense submarine hearth burst the world and swallowed, between one rising of the morning star and another, the richest regions of the globe.

Ce n'est pas un roman que je raconte ici, comme on l'a dit de Platon, à propos de l'Atlantide.

Brasseur de Bourbourg. Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique (1868), p. 45

The sense is that he is not telling a novel, as has been said of Plato on the subject of Atlantis. He is only rapidly abridging the facts narrated, with innumerable details, in the Teo-Amoxtli and in all the relations of Ixtlilxochitl and others, whose paintings one can see among the documents of Kingsborough. There, repeated with variants, is the image of a tree covered with flowers, the trunk broken in the middle, from which, the authors say, floods of blood escape. He had long consulted his authors in vain. According to the Vatican copy and the Letellier manuscript, that tree, under the name Tamoanchan, was the symbol of a sort of terrestrial paradise, from which the gods had been precipitated to the bottom of hell for having dared to lay a sacrilegious hand on it and strip it of its fruits and flowers. Hence also the name Xochitl-Icacan, the Flower upright or raised. Xochitl, the flower, regarded as the Mexican Venus, the goddess of lust, was, according to the commentators Ríos, Fábrega, and a crowd of others, a confused memory of the biblical Eve, having been the first to carry her rash hand onto those fruits. Others gave the tree the name Quahuitl-Icacan, the tree raised, in its place. Elsewhere it takes the name Ezquahuitl, the tree of blood, because of the blood that seemed to spring from it. Aubin told him one day that he thought he saw an allusion to the Christian idea of the tree of the cross, and to the preaching of a primitive Christianity in America. Brasseur was little disposed to admit these versions. The history of the suns, joined to the plates of the Borgia Codex, first led him to look in the bleeding tree for the effects of the fires of the rising sun, the combats of the dawn with the clouds. Open Kingsborough, volume III, folios 18 and 20 of the Borgia Codex, and the marvelous tree is broken in the middle of the trunk, with torrents of fire leaping out. He first took the break for a gorge between two folds of the earth, from which the morning star sprang. When the band fell, it was neither the rising sun nor the dawn. It was a volcano, its mouth gaping, vomiting the fires of its entrails. The tree was indeed the earth, but that earth was the American continent, torn by the subterranean power. The piece that separated from it was that vast portion of the continent which lately covered the Gulf of Mexico and the sea of the Antilles, running far toward Europe and Africa, to the east and the northeast (pp. 46, 47). The blood one thought one saw is the boiling blood of the earth opening, the lava flowing on every side. The flowers are the volcanoes bursting like a bud on a bouquet. The tree is the one found in all the ancient mythologies, Egyptian, Persian, and Hindu. It is the ahuehuetl of the Mexican legends, the mystic cypress, on which M. Lajard lately wrote a remarkable dissertation. There is a remarkable connection between this tree and the sacred Hom of Persia, the Oum of Egypt, the Om of Mexico, and the Hom of Central America. He will give the sense of that word in its place. The history set down in the Chimalpopoca is that of the most frightful catastrophe of which men have kept the memory, whose every episode, down to the least details, has been preserved not only in the American religions but in all those of our continent. The first letter ends “Je suis, etc.” It was, he says, only a sort of introduction.

Homer’s Ocean and the western Ethiopians

The second letter begins on p. 49. The correspondent has read the first, is interested, and is not satisfied. It is too concise, too many things at once, too free, and a series of enigmas. Brasseur reminds him that the first letter was only the preliminaries, and that he could not put the detail into twenty-five pages. The Parisian mind has so little faith in ancient America that, if it believes, it would have to be an America built on purpose in a Gallic style, in the manner of certain novels called historical.

He takes up Homer, who makes Okeanos and Tethys the origin of a system of gods and, a friend adds, of a system of worlds. The friend is the Baron d’Eckstein, whose words he quotes from Sur les sources de la cosmogonie de Sanchoniathon. The theory is not Homeric. It comes from the theological schools of an old Asia, originally Cephenian or Cushite, an Asia that depends on the Ethiopians of the East, as Homer calls them, a source from which the Aryas drew, in the very places of their cradle, before the great separation of the peoples who have been given the unfortunate name Indo-European. D’Eckstein is one of the small number who have penetrated most deeply the primitive idea of the ancient cults. If he had followed Homer faithfully, he would have looked not to a Chamitic old Asia but to the West. He could have concluded nothing, for lack of authentic documents. Like so many others, he had only the most elementary notions of America.

Homer and Hesiod, then, on the Ethiopians of the East and of the West, debris of a primitive world-map. Helios of Homer comes out of a Limné empurpled by the fires of the setting sun, to climb again to the East. Voss, Welcker, and Völcker brought the passage near a fragment of the Prometheus Unbound of Aeschylus, where the chorus of Titans comes to Prometheus chained on Mount Caucasus, arriving from the Limné of a burning red, or from a gulf of the sunset on the shores of Okeanos, the river that envelops the globe. There Helios descends with his tired horses into the country of the Ethiopians of the sunset, restores himself, and by his bath restores the whole world. The Odyssey divides these Ethiopians in two, the men of the two ends of the world. The great gods meet among them at certain seasons, once among the Ethiopians of the East and once among those of the West. It is among the latter that Zeus spends the twelve famous nights of the end of the year, which belong to the constitution of an old calendar. D’Eckstein looks for the western Ethiopians in Abyssinia, in the country of Meroë, or near Arabia, and puts those of the East at the sources of the great rivers that water India. Brasseur refuses that. If Homer is exact, the Ethiopians of the East can only be the brown and copper races of the Asiatic continent and its neighborhood, and those of the West the brown and copper races of America, since Homer’s west is the same sunset from which his Helios comes out, that is the Ocean. Despite the lies of the Greeks, those who followed their indications without a party spirit would, like Columbus, have discovered an America. The ocean, when it is not clearly the ocean that goes round the world, is always the Atlantic. Its root is oc or og, to groan, to enter, to embark, to dominate, according to the various senses the Quiche language gives, all of them related to the great geological events from which the Ocean came. There was buried, amid the groanings, that god whose death all the idolatrous nations lately mourned on 13 November. There the god took his way to enter the eternal dwelling. There the gods of Egypt embarked on the Nile, weeping Osiris, gone down to the Underworld, of which he made himself master. Hence the name Ogen, which in Quiche means precisely the groaning, the entry, the embarkation, the hidden domination. In Maya, ok-en means the leg descended, and that leg is the hieroglyphic character of Osiris in America, Osiris carried off in the deluge of Ogyges, whose name is in its turn, in Quiche, the explanation of the same event.

Osiris is the land under the Atlantic

Eh bien ! Osiris c'est la terre ensevelie sous les flots de l'Atlantique.

Brasseur de Bourbourg. Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique (1868), p. 54

The sense is that Osiris is the land buried under the waves of the Atlantic. He calls this the most sacred password of the ancient mysteries, for entering the sanctuary whose veil has thickened since the centuries of the Pharaohs.

Osiris, pour le monde, c'est la moitié du continent américain que les éruptions volcaniques firent descendre au fond de l'abîme, en un seul jour et en une fatale nuit, ainsi que l'énonce de son côté Platon, en parlant de l'Atlantide, entre un lever et un autre de l'étoile du matin, suivant le Codex Chimalpopoca.

Brasseur de Bourbourg. Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique (1868), p. 54

The sense is that Osiris, for the world, is the half of the American continent which the volcanic eruptions sent down to the bottom of the abyss in one single day and one fatal night, as Plato for his part says when speaking of Atlantis, and between one rising of the morning star and the next, according to the Codex Chimalpopoca. That is why Osiris is the king of the Orcus, the supreme judge of the infernal regions, as Mictlan-Teuctli is the lord of the Mexican Hell. The burning Limné on the shores of Okeanos is plate 76 of the Borgia Codex, in volume III of Kingsborough. It is the immense furnace that appeared after Osiris, raising his phallus, that is the immense mountain of the volcano long submarine in the sea of the Antilles, let it sink into that frightful brazier. The blue color around it is the marsh. It is the famous Tollan of the Mexicans, the rush-bed, a low and fertile region which lately covered the two greatest gulfs of America, that of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea.

Soma, in the religion of the Vedas, is literally the piercing, the opening of the arm, ço-ma in the Mexican language. The swallowed land was compared in turn to an arm, a leg, and even a phallus. The cup of Soma, identical with that of Dionysus, in whose name he again finds the root co, to pierce, to open, to tear, is that vast volcanic tear, that titanic cup. Surya embarks in it, like Helios, with his chariot and his horses. Stesichorus sings that golden cup. Helios embarks to cross the Ocean, to go to the sacred abysses of the dark night, where he rejoins the mother of his children and his children themselves, amid cool groves. Those abysses are the abysses of the Ocean, dug to receive the great mummy of which all the idolatrous religions made their god. Hence the Orcus. In that submarine volcano you find Ahir Budhnyah, the fire-dragon at the hearth of the volcano, of the Rig-Veda, the god who reigns in the three worlds, the son of Tvashtri who engenders himself, master of the celestial hearth, the atmospheric hearth, and the hearth of the abyss. The cult of the subterranean altar, of the altar of the grotto, which d’Eckstein claims for the Chamitic races, belongs to him. Those races are the Ethiopians of the two ends of the world, those of Asia and of eastern Africa and those of America. A Chamitic breath, d’Eckstein says, breathes in the dust of the Babylonian, Tyrian, and Sidonian cosmogonies, and the cipher of the same thought is engraved on the monuments of old Egypt. He speaks of an air of family, not of identities. Brasseur says that between the American cosmogonies and a great part of those of the old world it is no longer only an air of family. It is a real kinship and very often an entire conformity. D’Eckstein questions the stelai or kiones, the columns at the entrance of the temples of Phoenicia, with which Hiram decorated the entrance of the sanctuary Solomon built on Mount Moriah. Brasseur will later explain those columns. Egypt seemed destined to give, with the key of its hieroglyphs, the mysterious sense of the ancient symbols. It only prepared the way, without knowing it. Daughter of America, like India, it yields the step to old America. The Aryas owe the Chamites their whole civilization and all their traditions, and those traditions remained entire at the place of their cradle, America.

The key is not in the Vedas

D’Eckstein thinks the Veda answers every question about the Gandharvas, the Maruts, the ancestors of the Aryas as barbarians wandering in the woods, ignorant of the sacra, and about how Tvashtri’s reign ended and Varuna’s was substituted. Brasseur admires the views and says the answer is still an enigma. Each verse is still a myth, each word a hieroglyph whose key the masters of the sacred language of India kept, if they did not lose it. That key, which he has found, also opens the sanctuaries of India, the sacred books of Persia and of Egypt, and the mysteries of Eleusis and of Samothrace. D’Eckstein is, of all the scholars he knows, the one who came closest, and his terminology now serves. The pivot of the Vedic cult, in that reading, is the adoration of the associated gods of the altar, the two columns, the two stelai. The same is true of Hephaestus and Dionysus among the Pelasgians, and of Vulcan and Jupiter Liber among the Latins of the old stock. The hearth is the principle of the altar. It passes from the family to the gens or the phratry, then to the neighbors and the amphictyony, and it ends in a polis. Brasseur finds that hearth, that association, that city, in the Egyptian, Mexican, or Maya hieroglyph of which he spoke in the first letter: the four quarters of every Mexican city, the four parts of the world, the four quarters of the city of Cuzco, Tahuantinsuyu, under the Incas, the four great regions of the city of Babylon, and the temple or sanctuary figured at the center. D’Eckstein had found the formal conception in the Vedas and called it the fact of the Chamites, a ritual that comes from an anterior world, from an observation of the heavens, a study of times, a scientific orientation. Brasseur stops him. These forms, kept entire in the Mexican documents, came not from an observation of the heavens but from an observation of the earth. Nothing is simpler or more grossly material. They are the phenomena that preceded the cataclysm or combined with its phases. Each phenomenon became a hieroglyph, each phase a myth, comprised under the signs of the Maya alphabet and calendar, a geological calendar if ever there was one, which tells, down to its least details, the history of the immense catastrophe from which the present earth came. He is still far from having been able to read all the figures in the pages of the Troano or of the Dresden Codex, though the translation of the Teo-Amoxtli and the analysis of the Nahuatl words have helped him greatly. He has deciphered enough to sketch, with more or less exactness, the lines of a geographical map of the American world of six or seven thousand years ago, if not more.

Until now his documents refer almost uniquely to the Atlantic side of the American continent, though certain indices, still vague, give him reason to think that the lands swallowed in the Pacific were more considerable still in extent than those that went down in the Atlantic. Those Atlantic lands are sometimes compared, as to form, to an immense animal that seems to lie in the ordinary way, in a position of rest. The rest of the continent, if he understands the ensemble, would have been considerably swollen between the tropics, so as to cover a great part of the Pacific in the direction of India and of China.

Les traditions antiques du Pérou mentionnent, de leur côté, le cataclysme durant lequel la terre se souleva d'une manière extraordinaire, abandonnant en même temps à la mer les vastes régions qui s'étendaient à l'ouest des Cordillères.

Brasseur de Bourbourg. Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique (1868), p. 64

The sense is that the ancient traditions of Peru mention, on their side, the cataclysm during which the earth rose in an extraordinary manner and at the same time abandoned to the sea the vast regions that extended west of the Cordilleras. In the opposite direction the lands of the continent covered both the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. Those two gulfs are designated as the two faces of the mirror Tezcatlipoca presented to Quetzalcoatl, and the handle of the mirror figured the prolongation of the same lands toward the east, in a measure he evaluates approximately, from the paintings of the Manuscript Troano, at eight hundred leagues at least beyond the Lesser Antilles. At about that distance the region bent back to the north and to the south, so as to leave, on each side, a considerable gulf or a sort of Mediterranean, one to the north, between that land and the coast of the United States, whatever that coast then was, and the other in the place where the mouths of the Amazon are today. Such is the figure given in abridgment by a remarkable sign reproduced by Landa, found frequently in the Dresden Codex and the Troano, which he orients in its normal position. Reversed, the sign is identical with the Greek tau and the handled cross of the Egyptians, with this difference, that the handle, or rather the ring that surmounts it, the sign of the vase or of the sea in which the tau went down, is placed above, while in the Maya hieroglyph it is enclosed. That is why the mirror plays so great a role in the mysteries. Its two faces are the two faces of Hermes, the cosmic lantern, the magic mirror of the world. The two gulfs are the two hemispheres of which Osiris, the great X, is the all-powerful king. The islands scattered on their surface were for a long time the refuge and the dwelling of the institutors of civilization who escaped the great shipwreck. Brahmanic mythology made of them the two equal parts of the divine egg from which Brahma hatches. The globules that ordinarily surround the mystic mirror recall the seven primitive gods, or the seven first volcanoes that burst on the region gone down under the waves, seven in Egypt, seven in Mexico, seven that become eight, like the Toltec chiefs, whose eighth, the Eshmun of the Phoenicians, Schmun in Quiche, the little servant, at once the youngest and the most powerful, the minister of his brothers, is Tlamacazqui in Mexican, known in turn under the names Topiltzin, Ce Acatl, and Quetzalcoatl.

A crescent, a leg, and a moon

The first image under which the Atlantic region presents itself, in the order of the Maya characters preserved by Landa, is that of a crescent, more or less regular, in which you immediately recognize the sign Manik, fourth of the calendar, the lines on one side and the head of a cat or a tiger on the other stating the symbols of the water and the sea, with the sign of the locality, the hieroglyph of a country. With some difference it is found again in the first sign of Landa’s alphabet, A. The nuances of form seem to him to correspond to the changes undergone by the Atlantic region swallowed after the cataclysm, and very probably the first comes closer to the topographic configuration of the lost country. Metztli is the name under which it is known in the Nahuatl documents. Following Molina it is translated by moon, month, and leg, the three words being expressed by the same term in Mexican. If Metztli, whose meaning answers to a curved thing, a crescent, is one of the names of the region that went down, it is also the name of the companion of Nanahuatl, the Syphilitic, who became the sun by rising from the pyre into which he had thrown himself, and from which Metztli himself afterward came out transformed into the moon. Both are the symbols of the Atlantic region at the moment of its ruin, and the account in the Chimalpopoca is one of the greatest episodes of the cataclysm. He then runs the etymologies of Metztli, its identity with Maya Men and with the Men of the Greeks, Men as the measure of time and of space, the Acatl of the Mexicans, the Ahau of the Quiches, and the Yoni-Lingam of the Hindus, and the Latin mensis, all of them, as he reads them, brought back to the topographic form of the swallowed land. This section adds those names. It does not add a second place or a second date.

What the nobles knew

Herodotus’s notions of America were vague, and the knowledge of the Mexican hieroglyphs elucidates them. He asks how far the Mexican nobility, at the time of the conquest, was instructed in them, and in the double sense of the ideas they contain. The Mexican history as one ordinarily reads it presents material impossibilities. Certain kings have extraordinary longevities, and he explains them. The relations of the indigenous prince Ixtlilxochitl are the text. The Mexican nobles, by his own admission, laugh at him. Their tales are symbolic, and therefore, at bottom, very true. He says what they mean, and how children were taught to keep the memory of past things. Sahagun suspects the mysteries contained in the ancient songs without penetrating the sense, and Brasseur says what the Spaniards would have thought of them. The section is that argument about a double reading already in use before the conquest. It does not move the drowned land.

Ixtlilxochitl’s Tollan

Ixtlilxochitl, he says, always ignored the true history of his country. The origin of the Toltecs, according to his relations, is confusion and obscurity, with contradictions that are only apparent. After a certain number of years the Toltecs, become an integral portion of the Chichimec empire of Huehue-Tlapallan, ambitious of power, revolt against the supreme chief, whom the author decorates with the title of emperor. A terrible struggle follows. At the end of thirteen years, unable to resist, they are obliged to abandon the common fatherland. At their head are the two chiefs already named, guiding the emigrated nation through deserts and distant regions. Sixty leagues from the frontiers of the Chichimec empire they stop on the shores of the sea, at the station they name Tlapallan-Conco, “on the vase of the Vermilion Land,” in memory of Huehue-Tlapallan, “the Vermilion Land of the Ancestors.” After some years they continue. Between the beginning and the end of the migration there elapse exactly two of their ordinary cycles, making a great cycle of one hundred and four years, at the end of which they seem to have found themselves very nearly at the point of their departure, in the regions near the Huasteca, where they would have built the city of Tollantzinco. Brasseur will not lead the reader through every station. The contradictions of Ixtlilxochitl never let him give the itinerary a complete agreement, though more than once he thought he was about to.

Besides the two supreme chiefs there were five others, inferior in rank, making with the first the council of the nation. To these seven an eighth was joined, the astrologer Hueman, priest, prophet, and legislator. On his advice, after several years at Tollantzinco, they determine to build a city that will be the seat of their government. That city is Tollan. They then elect a king. To conciliate the Chichimecs, their old masters, they agree to ask for their sovereign one of the sons of the Great Chichimec, who comes to reign at Tollan. In putting him on the throne they establish the bizarre law that no king shall reign more than one cycle, or fifty-two years. The historian says no more of the old chiefs. To have done everything the historian attributes to them, each would have had to live at least two hundred years. In the matter of age, only Hueman is in question. He dies after an existence of nearly three centuries, leaving the Toltecs, as his testament, the famous Teo-Amoxtli, and frightening prophecies.

The dynasty of Tollan is composed in all of eight kings and one queen, according to Ixtlilxochitl. The last, Topiltzin, fruit of an adulterous concubinage, is a prince gifted with the happiest qualities. He mounts the throne in the lifetime of his father, who abdicates, according to the law, after fifty-two years. His advent is followed by an era of prosperity without example. He soon lets himself go to the seductions of power and to every disorder of the senses. The whole empire follows. The priesthood itself becomes an accomplice, forgets the lessons of Hueman, neglects the gods and their altars, and ends by the most enormous sacrileges. Frightening prodigies, comets, extraordinary phenomena in the sky and on the earth, open his eyes. In the midst of reforms he learns that princes, enemies of his family, have come out of the countries neighboring the sea and are advancing on Tollan with a considerable army. Unable to resist, he tries to appease them by abandoning part of his riches. Among other presents is a tlachtli, or wonderful ball game, composed of four precious stones, whose ball is a carbuncle, which he sends them on the coast, conjuring them to turn back. They persist, come as far as Tollan, strip the capital of everything that made its splendor, and consent to retire, threatening to return at the end of ten years. He uses the respite to prepare the defense. Prodigies no less sinister follow. A frightful drought, unaccustomed colds after excessive heats, sterility, and a famine that lasts four years. The rain at last returns. They have scarcely recovered when the truce expires and the kingdom is invaded again. His best generals are routed one after another. In a last combat his father Tecpancaltzin puts himself at the head of the royal troops. A battalion of Amazons, commanded by the queen mother Xochiltzin, had gathered the noblest ladies of Tollan. They succumb to the last, and Tecpancaltzin falls as a hero. Topiltzin, beaten on another side, flees and hides in the cave of Xicco. After some days, profiting by a dark night, he leaves the cavern with a small number of devoted friends, confides his two children, the hope of his race, to a servant, and emigrates to the distant lands of Tlapallan, while the remains of the Toltecs disperse on every side.

Tollan is not a kingdom

Such, in abridgment, is the history according to Ixtlilxochitl. It differs sensibly from that of the Codex Chimalpopoca, to the point that he long thought there had been two Toltec monarchies, entirely distinct, the first anterior to the second by a great number of centuries. He now confesses that there does not appear ever to have been a Toltec monarchy, properly so called, nor a nation particularly distinguished under that name. What existed is a Toltec civilization that covered the whole of America with its monuments. The Toltec empire is the symbol of the golden age and of a fabulous prosperity, attributed to the regions of which Quetzalcoatl was said to have been the prince and the pontiff.

Mais Quetzal-Coatl n'était lui-même que la personnification de la terre engloutie dans l'océan, tandis que Tollan, sa capitale, c'était le golfe du Mexique, c'était la mer des Caraïbes, c'était l'ensemble des mers ou plutôt de l'orbe topographique où se dessinait naguère une des régions les plus fertiles de la terre du Croissant.

Brasseur de Bourbourg. Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique (1868), p. 87

The sense is that Quetzalcoatl himself was only the personification of the land swallowed in the ocean, while Tollan, his capital, was the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, the ensemble of the seas, or rather the topographic orb on which there lately lay one of the most fertile regions of the land of the Crescent. In the metaphysical ideas of a later epoch, Tollan seems also to have symbolized the hearth lighted in the entrails of the earth, the volcanic hearth. The kings of Tollan became the symbols of the volcanoes whose extinction announced their death. Topiltzin, the last of them, is identified with a crowd of different personalities. Vanquished, when he retires into the cave of Xicco, that is simply an image for the retreat of the volcano that bore that name and which, on the eve of the cataclysm, went suddenly back down into the abyss. Topiltzin coming out of the grotto is the volcanic power manifesting itself with a new crater on the Atlantic region which the waters had momentarily invaded.

He then sets the duplicity of the Mexican texts beside the enigmatic duplicity of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, as the ancient writers describe it, and he cites the passage of Clement of Alexandria. The modern Egyptologists, successors of the philosophers of the school of Alexandria, are judged by Macrobius. The hieroglyphs of the two worlds are identical as to the duplicity of their signification. Ballets, moving dramas, gestures, and the accentuation of the songs kept the American exposition clearer. The indigenous peoples have kept their respect for the depositaries of the ancient traditions, and the signification is identical over the whole continent. This section is the turn from Ixtlilxochitl’s kings to the drowned crescent. The names of the kings stay on the page as his summary of Ixtlilxochitl. He does not keep them as men.

The same name in India

The name Tollan, Tulan, Tula, and the rest is found in various countries. He sets the Brahmanic legends beside the Toltec histories, and Tollan beside the Manthanam, the churning. The seven-headed dragon is the symbol of the submarine hearth of the Caribbean and of the seven volcanoes of the Crescent. It is also the Hydra of Lerna, whose flaming heads grow again as they are cut. When the dragon, whose tail plunges to the bottom of the ocean, carries its head to the heavens, the image is the depth of the hearth that still agitates the Antilles and that, on the day of the ruin, momentarily raised a mountain whose summit seemed to threaten the masters of the firmament. He quotes d’Eckstein on the myth of Rahu and Ketu, the head and the tail, dispersed over the globe, among a crowd of savage peoples of Africa, America, and the southern world, and among the Chinese, Tibetans, Mongols, Turks, Finns, Aryas, Pelasgians, Hellenes, Scandinavians, and Celts. There is, d’Eckstein says, no tradition more universal. What is striking is not the fact but the rites, and a conformity of usages put back in vigor at the appearance of a new comet. D’Eckstein looks for the origin in central Asia. Brasseur says the most ancient passages of the Vedas, those whose sense has remained unintelligible to the commentators, support the Ocean, not a center in central Asia, as the theater of the convulsions that caused the migration of the Aryas. The West is also signaled as the point from which the primitive races came out. When the Egyptians speak of their ancestors, and when the sacred traditions of India, like Homer and Hesiod, speak of the Ocean, it is always an ocean that is to the west. The commentators agree in placing Mount Meru west of India, since in abandoning it the Ouranids and the Titans direct themselves toward the east. He quotes Guigniaut’s Creuzer: the gods, having held council to invent a drink that would give immortality, or a violent struggle having arisen between the good and the bad genii over that divine drink, it was lost, Mount Meru was precipitated into the sea, and as it sank the whole earth was overturned. Vishnu, in the form of an immense tortoise, plunged, raised the mountain, and held it on his back with the entire world. Meru was enlaced in the folds of the immense serpent Shesha or Vasuki, the demons seizing its head and the gods its tail, and the holy mountain, the axis of the world, turned under their contrary efforts in the midst of the sea of milk. He cannot believe this description ever suited a locality of central Asia. It is an oceanic locality, turned in the waves by the double serpent so often seen in the Mexican paintings, the serpent of fire and the serpent of water, as in the caduceus of Mercury. The tortoise has its origin in the one which, according to the tradition of Haiti, comes out of the shoulder of Dimivan Cara-Caracol, after the sea and the islands have come out of a broken gourd, the tortoise on which men establish their first dwellings after the cataclysm. In the shoulder of Dimivan recognize that of Pelops, image of the earth issued from the Crescent. Men or Metztli, whose curved form is compared not only to the moon and to a phallus but also to an arm, a leg, and a knee whose abscess, in bursting, overturns the world, is also the thigh of Jupiter from which Bacchus comes. In the Greek word for thigh Guigniaut observes the root of Meru, identical with that of Men. If that sacred mountain is ever to be found, it will not be useless to remember that Mount Meru, the central point of the earth, rises like an immense phallus from the center of an immense yoni, among the islands with which the sea is sown, like the peak of Caru-Queira among the Lesser Antilles, or that of the Cibao group on the island of Haiti. The note sends the Haiti tradition to his Landa, p. 442, and the double serpent to Kingsborough and the Troano.

Humboldt, Plato, and a land between the continents

Whatever one thinks of that mountain, Creuzer and the most learned mythologists agree that one cannot apply the geographical myths of India topographically to India itself. D’Eckstein, in accord with the traditions, transports the myths of the cataclysm of the Manthanam in turn from the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean, and stops. Who would have thought for an instant of placing the cradle of mythology elsewhere than in Asia? Humboldt, with all the force of his genius, had himself affirmed, after a thorough examination, that the myth of Atlantis, in its simplest expression, designates the epoch of a war of peoples who lived beyond the Pillars of Hercules against those who are to the east, that is an irruption from the west. He cites Humboldt’s Examen critique, volume I, p. 174. The Atlantes of historical times are east of the Pillars. Herodotus places them at twenty days from the Garamantes. Nothing more natural: Atlantis no longer existing, what remained of its eastern inhabitants must have taken refuge in Africa, as the western ones in America. Hence the striking resemblance of certain African populations, above all those of Fernando Po, with the American aborigines. The note cites Thiercelin, Journal d’un baleinier, in the Bulletin of the Geographical Society, June 1867. The mythical Atlantes, Humboldt continues, may have been carried west, beyond the Pillars, as the fable of Atlas the mountain was pushed progressively in the same direction. The war of the Atlantes with the inhabitants of Cerne and the Amazons, treated confusedly by Diodorus, took place in the whole northwest of Africa, beyond the river Triton, the limit between the nomad peoples and the agricultural peoples, and the most anciently civilized, if one may assign a determined locality to a struggle in which fabulous beings, the Gorgons, intervene. Brasseur’s notes add that the agricultural populations in question are very probably those who inhabited the swallowed continent, and that the Gorgons are a symbol of the volcanoes, the blood flowing like serpents from their cut heads being the fire flowing from craters whose summit was cut by the subterranean fires, an image frequent in the Mexican hieroglyphic documents. The lake Triton, according to Diodorus, is not on the coasts of the Mediterranean but on those of the Ocean. The same region, and this fact is the more worthy of attention because Diodorus nowhere mentions the destruction of the Atlantis of Solon, offered great volcanic eruptions. Lake Triton itself disappeared by the effect of an earthquake and the tearing of the soil that separated it from the Ocean, whose littoral was occupied by the Atlantes. A migration of peoples from west to east, whose memory, preserved in Egypt, was carried to Athens and celebrated by religious feasts, may belong to times well anterior to the invasion of the Persians in Mauritania, of which Sallust recognized the traces.

Vous le voyez, malgré les sarcasmes lancés, de nos jours, contre les théories du siècle dernier, concernant l'Atlantide, malgré ces sarcasmes, dis-je, Humboldt n'a pas cru devoir rejeter au nombre des fables le roman historique de Platon.

Brasseur de Bourbourg. Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique (1868), p. 108

The sense is that, despite the sarcasms launched in his own day against the last century’s theories about Atlantis, Humboldt did not think he should reject Plato’s historical romance among the fables. The philosopher’s account has every character of truth, another philosopher said lately. Brasseur is persuaded that one will find more and more of it, as one studies it in a spirit of sincere criticism. The geologists are today universally agreed, he says, in admitting the ancient existence of a vast land between our continent and America. He is not a little surprised at the contradiction of Baron Bunsen, who, while recognizing the veracity of the tradition reported by Plato, does not fear to confuse the invasion of the Atlantes, come out of the west, with that of the Aryas come from Asia. The note cites Egypt’s Place in Universal History, volume IV, pp. 467 to 468.

He comes back to the Chichimecs. Their capital bears alternately the names Amaqueme or Huehue-Tlapallan, and it is there, if one believes Ixtlilxochitl, that all the sages and astrologers of the American world once gathered to work at the reform of the calendar. Where was Huehue-Tlapallan? The most serious writers, in accord with the ensemble of the traditions, place it unanimously in the regions that extend north of Mexico, at a considerable distance, which Torquemada hazards to evaluate at about six hundred miles. But Torquemada gives Huehue-Tlapallan as the fatherland of the Toltecs, and to the Chichimecs he assigns Amaqueme, which Clavigero wrongly confuses with Amequemecan. In reality the first and the second are one. They are different designations of one locality or one region which, like Tollan, has every character that suits the continent swallowed under the waters, though after the cataclysm the names Amaqueme and Huehue-Tlapallan may have been given to the neighboring countries of the north. He etymologizes a-mac-e-me as literally the three curves in the hand of the water, an allusion to the three seas formed by the ruin of the Crescent, the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic, unless me from metl expresses the volcanic idea and the whole name means the three volcanoes on the hand of the water. Huehue, the reduplication of huei, great, has in Nahuatl the sense of ancient, but here, as in most texts of the Chimalpopoca, it must allude to those who have made themselves great, the giants of the mountains, the most considerable upheavals of the earth, and those upheavals having taken place above all to the southeast of Mexico, inside or around the Caribbean, it is on that side that one would have to look for the capital of the Chichimecs. Tlapallan, the land of colors, alludes at once to the dawn, the colors of the sky, the rising sun, and a colored place or a place where there are flames. Later, Tlapallan without Huehue seemed to mean in turn the East, the countries near Honduras, and even, according to Ixtlilxochitl, the Gulf of California. Everything unites, nevertheless, to demonstrate that these names can in reality apply only to the region swallowed under the waves. The Chichimecs are represented sometimes as living in the last barbarism and sometimes as having made the most astonishing progress. The contrast comes from confusing the Chichimecs as a nation with the Chichimecs as telluric powers. Those powers class themselves, so far as he can account for them, in the number of three principal ones: the Chichimeca, the Tolteca, and the Azteca. Chi, which one pronounces tchi, is a syllable Molina does not account for. According to Vetancurt it is a preposition expressing what is at the very bottom, as aco means what is at the very top. In Quiche chi is the mouth, an opening, the preposition in or at. Chichi is a little dog, of those called of Chihuahua, which dig subterranean lairs where they live in society.

Chichimecs, Telchines, and the curve

He classifies Chichimec-Toltecs and Chichimec-Nonohualcas. The Mixcoas, chiefs of the Chichimecs, he identifies with the Maruts of the Veda. The Chichimecs and the Telchines of the Greeks are the same. Nine Chichimec chiefs and nine Telchines. The etymology of Telchin is radically Mexican. According to the symbolic of Creuzer their character, alternately good or bad, represents telluric powers, like the Chichimecs. They identify with the Cabiri, as the Chichimecs with the Toltecs. The Telchines, murderers of Apis, and why they leave Rhodes, are the close of the section. It adds those Greek names to the same telluric reading. It does not move the site.

Tollan, in the next section, is a myth born of the hieroglyph. He asks where the name Tolteca came from, and what images the documents of Mexican origin give. The Toltecs, in this reading, are digging the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. The Chichimecs identify with the Cyclopes. Seven chiefs of the Toltecs and seven Cabiri. The etymology of Cabirim is by the Quiche language. Tlatoani, chief or king in Nahuatl, and the verb tlatoa, to speak, carry a deep sense, as does the word mic, death. The cipher seven-eight is the cipher of the principal gods created at Teotihuacan, and he etymologizes that name and says what it applies to. The section is those equations. The place remains the two gulfs.

Seven, eight, and the first hearth

The mystic ciphers, 7 and 8, 4, 9, 12, 13, and the rest, are in direct relation with the various phenomena of the cataclysm. The seven volcanoes, seven-eight, and the seven-eight great gods. The four. The two, making one, origin of the divine duality. All the gods are originally material. Atabeira, the dry on the water, the land of refuge, is the first idea of the supreme being at Haiti. The seven grottoes, the seven Lesser Antilles, are the seven first gods. The myth of Xolotl and of Nopaltzin follows, and the question where the Chichimeca and Tenayocan are, and where the Tolteca are as localities. Colhuacan is explained. The religions and the gods are born of the abyss. Xolotl is a volcano with two craters. He says in what manner these phenomena were spiritualized. The comitl and the comal, the pot and the griddle, are symbols of the cataclysm. The hearth, image of the first teocalli, is the origin of the first ritual calendar. From it follows an astronomical and geometrical science. The Toltecs are the first civilizers of the peoples. This is the section in which the numbers become the count of volcanoes, islands, and gods. The seven Lesser Antilles are the place he names.

The rabbit in the vase

The image of a rabbit in a vase is the symbol of the swallowed continent. Other symbols relate to it. Living or dead, what does it signify? It is identified with the opossum, the jackal, the mole, and other types of the land sunk under the waves. A mysterious animal in the Mexican Codex of Dresden and in the Manuscript Troano is identical with the bull of Mithra and the bull Nandi. The absolute signification of these animals is the same as the myth of Zagreus and of Apis killed by the Cabiri. He runs the etymologies of Tochtli, the rabbit, and asks whether they could relate to the origin of language. The Mexico-Guatemalan group is rich in monosyllabic words. The human faces in the hieroglyphic writing are silhouettes of mountains. The etymology of och, from which the Ocean, as from og, closes the section. The drowned land is the same land. The new piece is the rabbit, the bull, and the faces as mountain outlines, including in the Troano.

Isis, Oxomoco, and the devouring sea

The faculty of signs among the creators of language is still found among the Americans. He praises the original power of the American languages and a remarkable sensibility among the aborigines of the western continent. Isis is identical with Oxomoco in Mexico, the Glutton, of whom the opossum is the image. He etymologizes Tlaquatzin, Tozan, Balam, and the rest. The myth of the union of Poseidon with Demeter is explained by the Mexican names. The fable of Erysichthon and others become comprehensible by the Mexican documents. Apiz-Teotl, god of gluttony in Mexico, is identical with the Egyptian Apis, and with the voracious Indra of the Veda. It is always the swallowing Ocean and the swallowed earth. The second letter ends on that identification. It adds Poseidon and Demeter, Apis, and Indra to the same pair of waters and land. It does not name a new island.

Recent catastrophes, and two religions

The third letter begins on p. 152. The variety of the hieroglyphs he has explained, on the myths that relate to the moon, has fixed the correspondent’s attention, especially in connection with the recent catastrophes that have so suddenly struck the Antilles. Would that vast furnace, opened one day and one night in the places where the Ocean now rolls its great waves, be ready to open again and swallow part of the world once more? God forbid. The abyss opened once under the vast regions that lately stood there, and he does not expect the cataclysm to renew itself for a long time. The character of the inhabitants of Spanish America is, for him, analogous to the soil. Respect for authority, in particular for royal authority, among the indigenous peoples has an origin that is entirely terrestrial. The volcano was the first god and the type of the first king. Nanahuatl is the type of the first holocaust. Quetzalcoatl is the type of the first priest in the religions of profane antiquity. Their relation is with the swallowed land. Two rival religions stand at the cradle of the nations. He asks whether the dead gods are those of the first religion, and whether the living gods were adored in the islands that served as a refuge for the shipwrecked of the cataclysm. The cults of Atys, of Osiris, of Quetzalcoatl, and of Tezcatlipoca begin in those rivalries. The section states the two religions and the islands as the refuge. The islands are the ones already placed at the entrance of the two gulfs.

Nanahuatl and the pyre

Nanahuatl, Quetzalcoatl, and Tezcatlipoca are intimately related. The earth is compared to a sick body. The submarine volcano is symbolized in the chancre of Nanahuatl the syphilitic. He gives the topographic situation of the submarine hearth and various etymologies of the name. The legend of Nanahuatl and of Metztli, according to Sahagun, is their sacrifice. The gods, ranged around the pyre, wait until the sun comes out and sets itself in motion. Xolotl, the god with the double foot, tries to escape. His metamorphoses follow. The explanation of the myth of Nanahuatl is the close. After the triumph of Quetzalcoatl, the men who bore his name would have taken the direction of religion and of society, which would have made considerable progress in their hands. The unheard-of prosperity of the great Tollan, of which all the traditions speak, though it certainly reflects an ideal one believed to have existed before the cataclysm, is perhaps in its turn a true echo of the renown those Toltecs, those priests, institutors of civilization and of the arts, acquired by their labors. The section is the sacrifice on the pyre. It does not add a date.

Quetzalcoatl, the cup, and the serpent

The table of sommaires warns that on p. 163 the text is wrongly numbered § 5, and that it must be § 3. The section arrives at the name. Quetzalcoatl is “the serpent raised,” according to the ordinary symbol, the serpent-quetzal, or “clothed in the feathers” of that bird. He looks for the analytical sense. The god is a universal cosmic power, the type of humility and of continence, with titles as earth, as fire, as volcano, and as air. He is identified with Topiltzin, with Nanahuatl and the Ninyah of the Vedic legend, with the Indian Eros, and with Ce Acatl, son of Mixcoatl. His transformations follow. The legend of Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca has the latter present the cup of pulque. The orgy of Quetzalcoatl is the fiction whose signification he gives. He also says what the procession of the phallus of Bacchus in Egypt, told by Herodotus, means. On p. 171 he quotes Herodotus, in Larcher’s translation, Book II: they invented figures about a cubit high, moved by means of a cord, which the women carry through the towns and villages, the virile member scarcely less large than the rest of the body, a flute-player at the head, and a sacred reason given for why only that part moves. The section is that myth and that Egyptian parallel. The place is still Tollan as the swallowed land.

Zagreus, the flaying, and the scalp

The myth of Zagreus is identical with that of Quetzalcoatl, one the son of Proserpine and the other of Chimalman. He says what Proserpine and Zagreus are the symbols of. The myth of Tezcatlipoca follows, with the various names of that divinity, the attributes, and the etymologies. The water and the wave of the Ocean are vaporized on the crater of Nanahuatl. One finds the symbol again in the death of Hun-Ahpu and of Xbalanque. He explains how Tezcatlipoca becomes Tonatiuh and the sun, and how he is identified with the darkness and the abyss, and why he is called the Vermilion. The identification with Totec, the god of flaying, is the signification of that barbarous myth. Xipe-Totec and the custom of scalping captives have their origin here, with the symbolic ideas attached to them, and the flaying of Marsyas is the Greek parallel. On p. 180 he is still in the rite. If the great sacrifice consisted in opening the victim’s breast with a flint knife, to tear out the heart, the sign of the fire coming out of the volcano, and then in flaying him, in honor of Tezcatlipoca, a preparatory ceremony the day before scalped the victim in advance, and the hair, as one still sees among the barbarians of the North, was kept as the trophy of the victory of Quetzalcoatl. Sahagun transmitted the details. This is a custom he reads off the myth. It does not add a new geography.

Two trees, and the phoenix

Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca are compared to two trees, with Tonaca-Tecutli placed between them. Phtha and Phra are the Egyptian parallel, and Agni, Ahi, and Indra the Vedic one. The birds of the pyre of Quetzalcoatl are the origin of the Egyptian phoenix, of the Hiranya-Paksha and the bird Simorgh, and of the Chinese fenghuang. All of them relate to the American volcano. He gives Herodotus’s portrait of the phoenix. The ara of Tiahuanaco and the hummingbird of Huitzilopochtli at Mexico are identical with the rest. The section gathers those birds onto one volcano. It does not name a new island.

The Hom and the cypress of the deluge

He repeats that he has no pretension to set himself up as a doctor against the men who have grown white over Oriental studies. His researches, in an apparently different path, have led him to the entrance of the sanctuary from which all the mysteries of pagan antiquity came out. The Hom of the ancient mythologies, Oum, Om, An, and the rest, are identical with the Quiche and Mexican Hom. It is the word of Brahma, three powers in one, identical with the Mexican Homeyocan. He compares the Hindu legend and the Mexican, analyzes Hom, and takes the Hom of the Persians, the Ezquahuitl, and the Xochitl-Icacan. Osiris, Ormuzd, and Mictlan-Tecutli, Chantico, are set beside one another. He compares Hom with certain modern words. The ahuehuetl, or pyramidal cypress of Texcoco and of Chapultepec, has its role in the deluge. The section is that tree and that word. The deluge is the same cataclysm.

The tree makes its entry

Type of the male and female moon, the great ahuehuetl carried the androgynous character attributed to the cypress in the Oriental cults. From its debris was to come the hermaphrodite who gave birth to Eros, symbol of the fires that devoured it, as one sees in some monuments where winged Love is represented being born from a tree. In America, as in Africa, the cypress was the symbol of Xochitl, the Mexican Venus, whence the name Xochitl-Icacan, the place where the Flower stands, given by tradition to that portion of the Atlantic region. Most of the mystic names of antiquity, he says, are intelligible only by the traditions and the languages of Mexico. He compares cypress, cupressus, and kopher with the American copei and hobi, and says the etymologies are complete only in the Mexico-Guatemalan group. The myrobalans, trees of the sun and of the moon, adored by Alexander, are the myrobalans of Haiti. The myths of Atys and of Cybele follow. The tree makes its Entry, and he says what those words meant. It is identical with the Xocotl Huetzi at Mexico. He says what the Ochpaniztli means, with its symbols, in the Boban manuscript. The feasts of the month Quecholli, the bamboo and the hummingbird of Huitzilopochtli, the Quauhxicalli, and the feasts of the month Panquetzaliztli are identical with those of the month of Atys among the Egyptians. The section is the ritual calendar of that tree. The place is the Atlantic region already defined, and Haiti for the myrobalans.

The crescent, the bamboo, and two races

When the party of Quetzalcoatl had the preponderance over the god of fire, one celebrated with the greatest solemnity the anniversary of his Descent, prepared with no less solemnity than that of Huitzilopochtli at Mexico. The feast began on the last day of the month Xul, “he is descended,” and on the first of the month Yaxkin, “new sun,” 13 November, one celebrated the arrival of the divinity of the waters, Ixmol, a name Landa translates as the arriver, she who makes the water arrive, probably. One then dyed blue, that is the color of water, every object of ordinary use in the temples and the houses, and even the hands and the faces of the little children. The Veda, in this section, alludes to the form of the Crescent. Samba, son of Krishna, is identical with Nanahuatl the syphilitic. Nanahuatl is the type of the expiatory holocaust. There are indices of two races, or of two different religions, in presence after the cataclysm. Blacks and whites are in the Popol Vuh. He examines the symbol of the Yoni-Lingam, its identity with the Mexican Acatl, the type of the first teocalli, and the symbol of the Ahau, the union of the male and the female in the title of the kings. He says why Agni is compared to a bamboo, and he gives the variants of the Ahau, the Yoni-Lingam of the Maya. Ahau and Yoni-Lingam are identical with Topiltzin. On p. 209 the phallus of Shiva, the Ahau flung and flaming, which violently pierces the earth or the steep mountain, is expressed in the paintings and in a striking manner in the katuns of Palenque, according to the plates of Stephens and of Waldeck. It is also the sign of Topiltzin, “our noble son,” a royal title of one of the personifications of Quetzalcoatl, to-pil-tzin, the suspended jet of the heat, taking the sense of Ce Acatl, a cane, in manifesting itself as a mountain outside its mother’s belly. The new customs are the blue dye on 13 November and the title Ahau. The two races are the blacks and the whites of the Popol Vuh. He does not give them a homeland beyond the islands already named.

Bacchus from the thigh

Who would not recognize in all these images the type of Bacchus, coming out of the thigh of Jupiter? The Flaming One and the Liberator, his horns and the torches of the Maenad, the etymologies of Luna, the idea of the Sun-Wolf among the Greeks, the relations of Bacchus and Apollo, the ass of Silenus and the ass of the Veda, are explained together. He asks what Bacchus is under his various aspects, gives Müller’s image of the Yoni-Lingam, and returns to the Hom. The etymologies of the name Bacchus are in Quiche. The signification of the god’s toys follows. The Mexican tecpatl, the Quiche tihax, and the Maya Edznab are the same sign. The cross of Nahui Ollin Tonatiuh, the sign of the ecliptic in the Artemis of Ephesus and at Mexico, is found again in the Boban manuscript, and it is a sign of plus. The section is that Greek and Mexican set. It adds no separate flood.

Hercules, Mycenae, and the tripod

Does he need, for Bacchus or Dionysus, to recall the sword Aeschylus puts in his hands, a sword of fire, identical with the Mexican tecpatl and with the sword of Chrysaor, the man with the golden sword, coming out with Pegasus from the blood of Medusa, beheaded by Perseus, that is by the fire? Medusa, in his etymology, is American, and so are the sheath of the sword of Perseus and the origin of Mycenae, with Greek and Quiche etymologies of that name. The myth of Hercules is entire in that of Tezcatlipoca. Am, Amen, and Ammon, the Phoenician Eshmun, and Huitzilopochtli in the hands of Tlacahuepan follow. The cult of Hercules was carried from America into Europe. He gives various etymologies of the name Melkarth in the languages of the Mexican group, and he says what the tripod of Apollo was. On p. 222 the tripod is the wave breaking the earth and taking, for its profit, the three great Antilles, which it forms by surrounding them. Those are the three feet of the mystic vat. Those are the three islands where the humanity that escaped the cataclysm recomposed society and opened the new era of civilization. Those are, as the Teo-Amoxtli elegantly says, the three stones of the domestic hearth, whose use, for six thousand years, has not ceased to be transmitted from generation to generation among the populations of America. Traveling with the indigenous people in Guatemala, he has often observed the same hearth. The place added here is the three great Antilles as the three stones. The six thousand years are the same round he has already printed.

The brothers changed into monkeys

He would never finish if he undertook every parallel. The signification of the myth of the Cercopes is that the monkeys are symbols of the mountains raised and then lowered again in the Caribbean. The legend of the two brothers changed into monkeys follows. Their grandparents, Xpiyacoc and Xmucane, are the symbols of North America and of South America, identical with Cipactonal and Oxomoco, and with Ilancueitl and Ilamatecuhtli. He gives the signification of those names. Tona and her symbol have two masks. He says what the modius of Cybele means, gives a Mexican etymology of Artemis, and reads the volcano as one and as seven. The deep sense of the Quiche legend is what Xbakiyalo, or the Attached Bones, was. Hun-Batz and Hun-Chouen are the two brothers changed into monkeys. The etymology of Hun-Batz is where he finds that of the double Baal of the Syrians. The section is that pair of continents and those monkeys. North and South America, as the two grandparents, are the new geographical equation.

A transitory rise in the Caribbean

On p. 229, Hun-Chouen is literally “a hidden mouse” or “a lake on watch,” for both are in the expression. If the one alludes in a particular way to the waters of the Ocean that were substituted, in the basin of the Caribbean, for the marshy land symbolized by the name Xbakiyalo, both of them also express, by the ensemble of their names, the account of a transitory upheaval in that sea. The two brothers are true Toltecs. He explains the myth of Xquic receiving the saliva of Hunhun-Ahpu, the two brothers climbing the tree that swells and rises, and the anvil of the Ocean. The swelling of the tree, and the monkeys dancing before their grandmother, have their signification. The work of the bee in the hive symbolizes the work of the subterranean fires. Various signs in the Maya calendar relate to it, and he explains and etymologizes them. The section is that temporary rise and fall in the Caribbean. It does not change the six or seven thousand years.

Aditi, the name Arya, and the curve of islands

Xmucane, the grandmother par excellence, is identical with Atit, the Aditi of the Vedas. He gives the signification and the etymologies, the invocation to Aditi as earth in the Veda, and how she is the mother of the Adityas. Indra and Vritra are identical with Tezcatlipoca and Nanahuatl. Other senses sit in Atit. The signification of the rite, and of the word rite, so common in the Vedas, has its absolute origin here, and he says why it is attributed to Ila, daughter of Manu. The roots i and ri of the Haitian language, Amritayu the Voracious, and the Badava, whose names are all American in their intimate signification, follow. The rite and the two holocausts of clarified butter have their deep sense. The Cercopes of Hercules and the Red Island, the Pithecusae and the Arimi, are all names borrowed from the languages of the Mexican group, as are the myths they express. The name Arya does not belong to Asia. It is identical with that of the Eyeri of Boriquen. Mut, the Egyptian goddess, is the American earth, and he says where the name comes from. Ixchel and Juno follow. The curve of the islands issued from the waters is the close of the third letter. The new names are Boriquen for the Arya equation, and the curve of islands as the form that came out of the water. The cataclysm is the same one.

The fifth dawn

The fourth letter begins on p. 245. A year ago he could not have imagined that so soon afterward he would explain the myths of antiquity with such ease and shut the most salient traits of the origins of the world into a few pages. The correspondent is now convinced. The facts accumulate under his pen. He has lifted the veil of Isis. India and Greece still present, in their poems, the vivid images. He prints the Greek for “I have found it.”

The cataclysm was finished. After four days of inexpressible agitation and mortal anguish, the earth breathed. The sky and the Ocean began to grow calm. The dawn of the fifth day lit a new world.

L'Atlantide avait disparu avec ses habitants, avec tous les êtres qui la peuplaient.

Brasseur de Bourbourg. Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique (1868), p. 246

The sense is that Atlantis had disappeared with its inhabitants and with all the beings that peopled it. In the place it had occupied, the sea had spread its immensity, and at the entrance of the two new inland seas which it had opened, the islands, great and small, were rising, destined to become the first hearths of a future civilization. The text of the Popol Vuh alludes to the appearance of those countries surrounded by water, in speaking of the two brothers Hun-Ahpu and Xbalanque who, after the consummation of their sacrifice, showed themselves in the form of handsome young men above the waters where their ashes had been thrown, and who, on the fifth day, manifested themselves as fish-men.

Beside that tradition he puts the one of the ancient populations of Haiti, kept by the first writers of the time of Columbus. “From the beginning of the sea,” writes Peter Martyr of Anghiera, they say there was a powerful man called Iaia. Having killed an only son, and not knowing where to put him, he shut him in a great gourd, which he then placed at the foot of a very high mountain, a little distance from the place he lived, and he went often to see it. One day, having opened it, whales and other very large fish came out. Iaia, full of fright, went home and told his neighbors that the gourd was filled with water and with fish without end. The news spread. Four brothers, born at one birth, desirous of fish, went where the gourd was. As they had taken it in their hands to open it, Iaia came upon them. In the fear they had of him they threw the gourd on the ground. It broke because of the great weight it held. The sea came out by its ruptures, and the whole plain one saw extending far, without end or term on any side, being covered with water, was submerged. The mountains alone remained, because of their elevation, sheltered from that immense inundation, and thus they believe that these mountains are the islands and the other parts of the earth that are seen in the world. The note cites De rebus Oceanicis, Decade I, book IX, pp. 103 to 106.

The words bear witness no less than the names. Iaia or Gaia, that is Xaia for Shaia, the master of the great domains, as he is called elsewhere, seems, following Pané, to mean the fertile earth, in the language of Haiti as in Greek gaia. He identifies with Xmucane and with Atit, the American earth. The son he buried in a gourd is called Igiël in Pané’s account, at the end of the Yucatan relation, p. 439, that is the one who comes out of the fertile earth, a name that alludes to the fire, destroyer of the ancient land. That fire is found again in the four brothers who seize the gourd, symbols of the volcanic craters. Their name Caracol, or scabby, brings them near Nanahuatl and makes known the place of their origin. Ca-ra-col means literally the shoulder of men, or the curve of the birth or of the fatherland. In Pané’s account the boldest of the four, the one who seizes the gourd and detaches it, is called Dimivan, “the day or the burst of the life of man,” a personification of the volcanic power in the appearance of the Lesser Antilles after the cataclysm. Like a lighthouse that announces the land from afar to the sailor lost on the Ocean, the volcano newly issued from the waters showed itself as the center of the asylum offered to shipwrecked humanity. The root di, which one calls a Sanskrit root, is a Haitian root covered with a bark. Strip the consonant and you have i, activity and life. The mounts of Demavend, where according to the Persian tradition Zohak was shut up after his defeat, are this series of islands serpentining at the entrance of the Caribbean, the new curve, Caracola, of which Dimivan was the principal. The tortoise that comes out of his shoulder, though designating first the island of Turu-Queira, from which the first volcano sprang and where the first dwelling of the men escaped from the great catastrophe was, might later have been the symbol of the island of Boriquen, today called Porto Rico. Country of the Eyeri, that is of the men noble par excellence, that island, gone down in part under the waves, would afterward have become one of the principal cradles of civilization. The place where Dimivan receives the blow that makes his shoulder swell is called Ba-Samanaco, in which you can recognize Samana, the name of the most eastern province of Haiti, neighbor of Porto Rico. In the name Bayama-Nicoël, which comes in the same tradition, one discovers Bayamo, one of the provinces of the island of Cuba, designated in the traditions of the Yaqui of the north of Mexico, and in that of the kings of Michoacan, as the cradle of their race. The Haitian tradition reports to the island of Cuba the honor of having been the most ancient fatherland. It is called Coaibai, the country of the ancestors and the place where the dead go, and Soraya, the land of the setting sun, or more etymologically “the land of the last dwelling.” That is the land of the setting sun to which the name Surya, given to the setting sun in the Vedas, alludes, the material sun of the sunset, identified with the region of the sunset, which the Vedic poet celebrated not as the star triumphant in the air but as the region of the setting sun escaped from the furies of the cataclysm after losing its two arms, the portions of the Crescent gone down into the abyss. The note cites Wilson’s Rig-Veda-Sanhita, volume I, p. 81.

The dances of the two brothers

Under the emblem of the brothers Hun-Ahpu and Xbalanque, the heroes of the epic of the Popol Vuh, reappearing before the princes of Xibalba as two wretches dressed in rags, after their condemnation and their execution, the Quiche mythology veils the account of the appearance of the islands between the two American inland seas, and records the conservation of those debris of the swallowed land. The two brothers execute, with a marvelous agility, extraordinary dances whose names designate precisely the Greater and the Lesser Antilles. The text of the Popol Vuh, like that of the Codex Chimalpopoca, presents two entirely distinct interpretations. “Early in the morning,” it is said, there appeared two extents of water, the water furrowing their softened surface, the water furrowing the sheet of their basins, but their surfaces no longer grew, since they had been hollowed by the power of the hearth rolling underneath. As these extents had just been produced, the Owl was still moving, the Weasel too, while the Armadillo, the Centipede, and the Stilts were bristling with sharp points. Those are, among a crowd of others, the names the Antilles receive here. The note cites the Popol Vuh, part II, chapter 13, and the two versions. He then reads the manducation of the pieces of the divine body, and religious anthropophagy, as the debris of the body of Quetzalcoatl. The temples of Quetzalcoatl and of Busiris, the death of Hercules in that place, the myth of Cacus, and the quails whose odor resuscitates Hercules, hide geological ideas. Quetzalcoatl in the underworld, the quails of the Chimalpopoca, and the etymology of the Greek word for quail close the section. The dances are the Antilles. The fifth day is the same dawn as on p. 246.

The gourd, the two oceans, and Osiris

The appearance of the Lesser Antilles is signified in the gods saved from the shipwreck. The pierced bark of the earth and the cow’s skin of the Veda are the image of the terrestrial ocean and of the celestial ocean. The separation of the sky and the earth, formerly united, and the division of the gods into two choirs, follow. The firmament is held up by Agni and Indra. He says what the gourd means in the Quiche symbols, and what the tecpatl of the Mexicans is. It is the type of the philosophical idea of Kneph and of Phtha. Agni, the hidden germ of the waters, is signified by the germ of the gourd. The gourd split and then opened is the egg of Brahma. Oxomoco, the woman who gins the cotton, is found again in Citlalinicue, image of the Milky Way. He gives the origin of that name. It is the ocean covered with its islands. Citli, the hare or the grandmother, is another name of Oxomoco. He proposes etymologies for the name Osiris. The section is that opening of the gourd into sea and sky. The islands are the ones already risen on the fifth day.

Two faces, and the curve

Xmucane is the mother of the dead gods and of the living gods. The four great gods of the ancient mythologies, Oxomoco and Cipactonal, and the four signs of the indictions follow. Sirius and Anubis would be found again on the island of Boriquen. The mystic mirror with two faces presents two women’s faces. The Diota, the sign of the vase with two handles, represents what he says it represents. The images of Isis and Nephthys, of Xmucane and Xpiyacoc, of Citlalinicue and Citlallatonac, are the two Americas. The curve of the vocable il is fertile. The horseshoe form has its mysterious signification, with the heads and symbols attached to it, the image of the sling, the vase as the origin of the lyre of Apollo, the syrinx of Pan, and the Egyptian sistrum according to Plutarch. The vina of the Maruts, Phtha, and the Pataikoi close the section. The two Americas are the two women. Boriquen is named again for Sirius and Anubis. No new date.

The scorpion and the first day

Various enigmas proposed in the Vedas, the harness of the sacrificial horse, the chariot with one wheel and three axles, are this myth. That chariot is identical with the constellation of the Wain in India and in Mexico. The Colotl, or Scorpion, is identical with the great curve of the Lesser Antilles. He says what the Great Bear was. The myth of Typhon, vanquished by Horus and delivered by Isis, identifies Typhon with the Mexican Cipactli. He etymologizes the name of Set. The sign Cipactli agreed with Ce Acatl, one reed. Ce Cipactli is the first day of the calendar. The variants of the name are fortunate, as Typhon formerly was. On the page before this section he notes that Typhon was not always, among the Egyptians, as abhorred a divinity as he became after the religious troubles that formerly agitated Egypt, as Bunsen observes and as Mariette remarks from his recent discoveries. The curve of the Lesser Antilles is the scorpion. The first day of the calendar is that sign. The section adds no separate catastrophe.

The ice

Although Ce Acatl is not the first sign of the calendar, one of the great fractions of the ancient cult preferred it to express the measure of time and of years. Like Ce Tecpatl elsewhere, a flint, symbol of the era of Tezcatlipoca and character of the year of the catastrophe, it was the sign of the new fire, that is of life, and for that it was considered the first sign of the new age. Its appearance as a volcano having coincided with that of the morning star, the star received the same name. Hence the identification of Ce Acatl and of Quetzalcoatl with the star of Venus. The qualification the Mexican documents ordinarily give Venus is Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli, the Lord who Shines on the Houses, in the common translation, which he interprets analytically as the vitality of the surface covering the heat coming out of the fire. The Codex Chimalpopoca always adds that this god is identical with the ice, and he prints the Nahuatl sentence. Cetl, the ice, literally “the life in one, the compressed movement,” is what came and fixed itself momentarily on the boiling waters with the lava and the vapors of every sort. The Teo-Amoxtli says formally that it is the ice, whose vast and brilliant mantle arrived in time to finish extinguishing the fire of the volcanoes.

Where did this ice come from? For a long time he had the idea that it had started from the north pole, where the breakup would have operated at the moment the land of the Crescent went under the water for the first time. While waiting to discover the proof in a more complete interpretation, certain indices show it to him coming from the south. He affirms nothing yet on that point.

La seule chose qui me paraisse certaine, c'est le fait matériel de cette débâcle de glace, dont les premières montagnes couvrirent la mer des Caraïbes, aussitôt qu'elle eut commencé à se former, et c'est au-dessus des eaux qui venaient de prendre la place du paradis de Xochitl ou de Tamoanchan, dont les terres s'étaient engouffrées les premières, que ces glaces stationnèrent particulièrement.

Brasseur de Bourbourg. Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique (1868), p. 279

The sense is that the only thing which seems to him certain is the material fact of this debacle of ice, whose first mountains covered the Caribbean as soon as it had begun to form, and that these ices stopped in particular above the waters which had just taken the place of the paradise of Xochitl or of Tamoanchan, whose lands had been engulfed first. It is for the geologists to find the rest. Most of the Mexican documents, interpreted in their real or symbolic sense, confirm it. The Popol Vuh devotes the whole fifth chapter of the third part to the turns of this episode. One sees the tribes arriving, the Quiche text adds that one does not know how, by a road that was neither land nor sea and that resembled rocks rolled on the sand, at the Seven Caves that were their refuge, that is at the seven principal ones among the Lesser Antilles, the first raised after the cataclysm. There they were without fire. They shivered under the hail and the frost occasioned by the neighborhood of the floating mountains of ice, accumulated on the immense tear that had just been produced, whose deepest line seems to have been precisely that great curve of the Lesser Antilles, the Colhuacan or curved country of the ancient Mexican traditions, before the fire had entirely raised them. All these traditions have kept the memory of that sea of ice, with which the two tropical inland seas were covered during a space of time he has not yet been able to determine, but which does not seem to him, so far, to have been of very long duration. The memory was commemorated in solemn feasts under the name Itzpapalotl, a divinity ordinarily represented as a butterfly with wings spotted with black points, on which blades of obsidian stand out. The authors interpreted it as a butterfly with obsidian knives. The two spotted wings probably symbolized the islands scarcely visible under the ice, where they were beginning to rise, though the myth seems to identify especially with one of those islands, Turu-Queira, to which most of the fictions of the Mexican religion attach. The obsidian knives are the images of the volcanoes which, rising in their turn with their fires, were to finish consolidating them by breaking and melting the ices around them. Itzpapalotl means literally “the life of the surface covered with ice.”

How many times, during the solemnities of the Catholic Church, in which the indigenous people of Central America have sought, as in Mexico, to preserve the ancient symbols of their religion, and in which he was himself the first actor, he had asked what those two great wings of white spotted feathers meant, in whose shadow he followed the patron of Rabinal carried in the processions. They seemed to cover him and the saint like a vast and magnificent mantle. Itzpapalotl, whose episode is told with such interesting details in the Chimalpopoca, was thus the image of universal life brooding under the icy waters, and in the black spots and the obsidian blades the man initiated into the mysteries of Mexico still recognized Quetzalcoatl, reborn after his death. Quetzalcoatl-Chalchihuitl, the precious emerald, had received that name from his mother’s own breast. Itzpapalotl was identified first with Chalchiuhtlicue, “she of the emerald skirt,” image of the green plain of the Ocean but in reality the life come out of the limestone massif, that is the fire of the volcano whose cone was soon to pierce its mantle of ice. The ice beginning to melt is personified in the god Itztlacoliuhqui, “he who turns the fire in the ice,” whom Sahagun expressly names the god of the frost. In the paintings he is ordinarily a male divinity, the body white, striped with pink lines, the face turned and invisible. At the feast of Toci, Sahagun says, the god Centeotl showed himself with a hood covered by a roll, on which stood something like a cock’s comb, the symbol of the god of the frost. That headdress is what the ancients called the modius. Centeotl, god or goddess of maize, or the God One, of the ear in which all the grains are in one, identifies with Itztlacoliuhqui. Itzpapalotl is the most complete prototype of Juno, floating between the sea and the heavens. He says why Juno is called Fluonia, and he runs her surnames. Juno-Hera is identical with Itzpapalotl-Itztlacoliuhqui. The Ixcuiname, the identification of Tlazolteotl with the morning star and with ancient Venus, the etymology of her name, and her identity with Xochitl and Xochiquetzal close the section. The ice is the new physical claim. He does not choose north or south, and he does not fix the duration.

The virgin, Guadeloupe, and the Soufrière

Ichpochtli, the Mexican virgin, is identical with Xochitl. Her descent to the bottom of the waves and her coming out, and why she is Tepeyolotl, are the symbols of this section. Aphrodite, engendered from the blood of Ouranos and the foam of the Ocean, is the personification of the island of Guadeloupe, the first of the Lesser Antilles. Her name Turu-Queira is the cradle of the celestial world. He notes the crudity of the Mexican symbols. Xocotzin is the crater of the base. He gives the ideas of Fábrega and of Sahagun on these images. The male and bearded Aphrodite adored at Cyprus, the cone of Astarte at Paphos, and the conical caps of the gods have their signification. The poetic symbols of Hesiod all arrived from America. He says what it means that Venus persecutes her three sisters, daughters of Gingras. The three sisters of the Mexican Venus have their names and their signification, allusions first to natural phenomena and then to the customs of the Lesser Antilles. Huitzilopochtli symbolizes the volcanic power in the massif of the Soufrière. The sisters of Venus designate special localities in Guadeloupe. One of them, in the pages I read around this argument, is Tlacocoa. The place he names is Guadeloupe, and the Soufrière inside it. The three sisters are localities on that island, not a second catastrophe.

Haiti, the caves, and the Scythians

In the Haitian traditions kept by the companions of Columbus, the telluric powers were symbolized under particular images. The caves of Cacibaxagua and of Amaiauna, the men metamorphosed, and Gua-Ho-Xona leading the women away to Madanino, are the woman of the Ocean and the guanin. The legend of Hercules surprised in the country of the Scythians, according to Herodotus, has its signification, and he etymologizes the name of the Scythians. He identifies the various localities. The Hyperborean Ulen, the analogy between Herodotus and the Haitian tradition, and the way most of the names of the Haitian legend identify with Guadeloupe, are the middle of the section. The beautiful Cobo, the Nara, the retreat of the Haitian cacique, is found on the same island, under the name Rib-Eroz-I, or the life of love in living beings. All the traditions and all the ancient songs in the United States tell the history of the cataclysm. The section ties those songs and the Scythian story to Guadeloupe and Haiti. It does not add a year.

The Nara, the griffins, and Atlas

In the Mexican paintings one finds the hieroglyphs and images of a crowd of different traditions. The Hindu tirthas and the Nara in the Antilles, the etymologies of the names of the sisters of Tlazolteotl, and the ancient idea of the subterranean hearth of the Orcus, born in the Antilles, follow. Subterranean Hecate and Ixcuina, the Amazons of Ma-Dan-Ino, and the memories of them in Herodotus, are next. The tradition of the rabbits fed at the bottom of a cave by the women is the type of the dogs of subterranean Hecate. Ana-Gacuxa and Shambarah, Nerites, Nereus, Nar, Ner, Aner, and the rest are etymologized from American words. The Nara of Guadeloupe, the massif of the volcano of the Soufrière and its various images, are where he puts Ushi-Nara, the Atlas of the Mount. The celestial constellations, daughters of the Ocean, exist at the Antilles only. The section repeats Guadeloupe and the Soufrière and adds Atlas as that mountain. It is still the same island.

The Atlantic catastrophe as the base of history

He has just sketched, he says, the summary of a great number of details worthy of larger investigation. Men more learned than he in the Oriental world can use the torch he has lighted. The legends of the islands of India and of Greece, and the traditions still alive in the heart of the people in Finland, Scandinavia, Scotland, Ireland, and old Armorica, deserve to be studied together and then compared with those of America. That study will throw a bright light on the history of the ante-diluvian and post-diluvian world, in the ages neighboring the cataclysm, whose markers he is setting here. The geological fossils will be joined, for reconstituting those ante-historic times, by the fossils buried in the memory of the people. If one wants to remake the antique parchments of humanity, one must study above all the old tales of the navigators of all nations and the legends of the seashore. The Malabar coast, the peninsula of Kutch, the ports at the mouths of the rivers of India and even of China, the cities of the Persian Gulf and of the Red Sea, the shores of all Africa, the ports and islands of the Mediterranean, and those of the Baltic and the North Sea will furnish documents. The epic of the Kalevala, lately published in French by M. Léouzon-Leduc, is full of texts and names identical with those of the Gulf of Mexico. The work Columbus began, in discovering the Antilles, whose memory had grown old into a myth, they will continue. They will weave together the history of our fathers at the coming out of the catastrophes that inaugurated the age of bronze, the age of metallurgical industry.

C'est Colomb qui retrouva, dans les entrailles des monts de Cibao, en Haïti, les grandes excavations abandonnées, où soixante siècles auparavant, les nations des deux mondes allaient se fournir d'or.

Brasseur de Bourbourg. Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique (1868), p. 308

The sense is that it was Columbus who found again, in the entrails of the mountains of Cibao, in Haiti, the great abandoned excavations where, sixty centuries before, the nations of both worlds went to supply themselves with gold. Despite the numerous inversions of the Haitian traditions, gathered pell-mell by Friar Ramón Pané, as he himself naively admits, it is still to that source that one must now recur to reconstruct the first mining annals. The telluric powers, symbolized in the cacique Gua-Ho-Xona, after having gone through all the Lesser Antilles and burst out in a crowd of places, seem to return to the caves of Haiti, though there is nothing very positive on that point. What seems certain is that Cibao became, with time, the principal nucleus of ancient metallurgy and the center of the wealth and the civilization of the Antilles. Cibao is the name of the most considerable group of the mountains of Haiti, generally interpreted as “mountain of stone,” from ciba, stone. He prefers “what resembles the nucleus, the heart, or the center,” and, decomposed entire, “like the father of the eye,” whether the name alludes to the swallowed land, father and mother of the eye of the Ocean, or to the great volcano that caused it, or was given to the Haitian mountains in memory of the peak of the Soufrière of Guadeloupe, the first eye of the sun-volcano after the rescue.

Obscure fictions cover the first attempts to discover the origin of gold and precious stones. A faint trace is in the legend of the woman Gua-Bonito making presents of guanin and of coleciba to Gua-Ho-Xona, in the caves of the sea. The guanin, of which the islanders of Haiti and of the other Antilles still made use in the time of Columbus, was a brilliant alloy containing, in thirty-two parts, eighteen of gold, six of silver, and eight of copper, according to the assay made by order of the king of Spain. The note cites Herrera, Decade I, book III, chapter 9, at the end. One may therefore conclude that it was Guadeloupe which had the honor of the invention of the metallurgical industry in those remote times, though another tradition, also reported by Friar Pané, brings them back to Haiti. Haiti having later become the center of works of that kind, it was natural that the legend should transport the invention there. It would be possible, however, that it took place simultaneously on the two islands, the same volcanic phenomena having been observable in both countries at the same time.

After the departure of all the women, the men left in the caves were much tormented at being alone. One night, having gone out to bathe, they saw beings without sex letting themselves slide along the trees called myrobalans. They resolved to seize them and make them their women. The beings escaped from their hands like eels. They then sent for men called Caracola who, having scabby and rough hands, would hold them more easily. The expedient succeeded. They seized the beings without sex and, in order to use them as women, tied them to trees, charging the bird Inriri, the woodpecker, to pierce the sex they lacked. Thus they succeeded in having women again and in peopling the whole island. He identifies the legend with the discovery of gold only by comparing scattered reports. In the Haitian tradition, as in those of Mexico, the men are the mountains and the women are the image of the bottoms and the valleys carrying water, like a vase filled with liquid. The women without sex are the valleys deprived of water by the raising of the island during the cataclysm. The idea of the ants running along the myrobalans seems to answer to the gold spread by volcanic action around the mountains that had just risen, whose craters, signified by the Caracols with scabby hands, hold the rainwater in their reservoirs. The woodpecker that pierces the women, Inriri Cahuvayel, “the son of the mahogany, piercer of women,” is again the life in the power of the water seeking an issue. A second and more complete aspect of the fiction is in the Codex Chimalpopoca. At the moment the chiefs of the new society, symbolized in Quetzalcoatl, are searching for the foods that will feed man, the mountain or the volcano, that god meets the ants. The section is the gold, the guanin assay, Guadeloupe and Cibao, and the sixty centuries. Aztlan, which he takes up next in the same stretch of argument, is identical with the Aztam of the Veda. The griffins are the guardians of the gold. The one-eyed Arimaspi, the river Hylaea identical with the Ulua and the Gulu of the Mexicans, the migration of the Scythians and the monuments they left, the first Scythia and the first Hyperborea, and Scandinavia as the first cradle of the Bronze Age and of metallurgy on the European continent before Asia, are the claims the table of sommaires prints for the close of this section. The body, which I read on pp. 313 and 314, puts the Scythians and their traditions on the move with the populations who, from the Gulf of Mexico, went up to the United States, the great Scythia and the great Hyperborea of prehistoric times, Plutarch’s Cronian continent, and from there, by Newfoundland and Iceland, reached either the coasts of Scandinavia or the land of Ireland, where, on Strabo’s testimony, one offered Ceres and Proserpine a cult like the one rendered them in Samothrace. Sixty centuries have elapsed since the fables began to spread. Mixed with the remains of the Stone Age one discovers the more recent souvenirs of the Bronze Age. A thorough study of Greek and Scandinavian mythology, stripped of the old classical carcass, will alone reconstitute the history. There one will know how and why the myth of Odin and the Aesir passed from the north of America to the north of Europe, how in Europe the first Scythia and the first Hyperborea were the islands of the north of Great Britain and Scandinavia, and how the Bronze Age, whose origin you would seek in vain in India or in Tibet, had its first cradle in those countries. Only then will you know why the fictions were carried from Europe into Asia, always under the names Hyperborean or Medo-Scythian. You will know the primitive cradle of those populations only by a voyage of exploration to the sacred isles, to Turu-Queira and to Ma-Dan-Ino, that cradle of gynecocracy, that source of the gold, the orichalc, the electrum, and the amber.

The griffin, Palenque, and Albe-Bora

Open the Mexican documents in Kingsborough and you will see, under a more or less varied form, the griffin, the fabulous bird, sometimes perched on the sacred tree, like the one seen at the summit of the cross of Palenque, sometimes presiding over the floods of lava flowing from the trunk of the broken tree. The griffin is identical with the phoenix. Hence its intimacy with the one-eyed Arimaspi, those Cyclopes whose eye in the forehead is the most striking symbol of a crater just opened at the summit of a mountain. The Arimaspi, to see only the first part of their name, are identical with the Arimi, the monkeys that pursued Hercules as far as the Red Island. As those monkeys symbolized the mountains momentarily raised in the Caribbean, so the Arimaspi, whose name can be translated in Quiche as nipples bursting or breaking with the gases, evidently represent the Lesser Antilles, their summits covered with fire. The griffins were the image of those fires. In the Scandinavian legend they are eagles, teaching the hero Sigurd of the Edda to strike the dragon and take its gold. The traditions of antiquity generally place the cradle of all these fictions toward the West or in Hyperborean countries. The very name of the Hyperboreans recalls one of the names the Haitian tradition gave the four persons to whom it attributed the first invention of metallurgy. “The origin of the guanin,” it says, “began with Gua-Bonito, Albe-Bora-El, and Gua-Ho-Xona, and the father of Albe-Bora-El,” that is Albe-Bora. The name seems to mean “what is like the great cradle of life,” and it identifies in its turn with Guadeloupe, or at least with Basse-Terre dominated by the hill of the Soufrière. Gua-Bonito seems another name of the same island, perhaps in particular of the part called Grande-Terre, but certainly of a place where the men found gold. Gua-Ho-Xona and his sons can designate only Haiti and the other great islands that seem to depend on it, where the great hearth of metallurgical civilization especially existed. Bor or bora, which sits so completely in the name of the Hyperboreans, means the lord, the father, or the ancestor of the place of birth, and also the forced labor of the slave or of the man attached to the soil, bo-ri, the man of the lord, in the Haitian language, whence naboria or laboria, exchanged with lubuyi among the Caribs. He asks whether one knows, for Dutch boor, the peasant, the vassal, and for Latin labor, a more rational etymology. The hardest labors to which the men escaped from the great shipwreck then constrained their fellows were, precisely as in the time of the Spaniards in the Antilles, the works of the mines. In Quiche bor, exchanged with vor, means to bore, to pierce, to tap, as German Born is the well, Latin forare, vortex, foramen, boreas the jasper drawn from the quarries. Guadeloupe, to which the name Albe-Bora is given, is that first cradle of civilization and of the arts. There, in the manner of the volcanic powers, the first metallurgical workers, “skilled in the forge” and “powerful by fire,” as Nonnus calls the Cabiri of Samothrace, learned to bore the mountains and extract the metals. Nature had taught them the use and revealed the marvels in alloys whose beauty and brilliance all antiquity agrees in praising. The orichalc, of which there is so often question among the ancients, is one of them. The section is Palenque’s cross, the griffin, and Albe-Bora as Guadeloupe. The metals are the same guanin.

Dactyls, Lemnos, and the great Antilles

He has shown the Telchines and the Cabiri. The Dactyls follow, with a Quiche etymology of their name and its analogy with the Dan of the traditions of the Popol Vuh and with Man-Dan-Ino. The nymph Anchiale and the Dactyls are identical with the Haitian Caracols. He gives the names of the principal Dactyls and their American etymology. The crime of the women of Lemnos is explained. Sydyk has his etymology. The Corybantes and the Curetes, and what their dance means, follow. The fiction of Oedipus and the Sphinx is identical with that of Xolotl. A study of the languages of the Mexico-Guatemalan group will be easy for linguistics and for the history of origins in general. The great Antilles, Cuba and the others, close the section. Lemnos here is the Greek island of the women’s crime, explained by his American etymology. It is not a Pacific continent, and he does not give it a drowned land of its own.

The Seven Caves, the cold, and the first city

The most remarkable fact, and at the same time the most certain, is the one he takes up here. The Lesser Antilles are identical with Chicomoztoc, the Seven Caves of the Mexican traditions. He describes the condition of the new sea toward the Antilles in the first days after the cataclysm: floating islands and chinampas, the populations in the cold and in need, grouping at Mount Pixab according to the Quiches, Tohil giving them fire, and the reappearance of the sun. The Quiche chiefs follow. The Airyana Vaego and the traditions that relate to it are compared. The name of the Aryas, not the people, came from the Antilles. The traditions of the Lenape are analogous to those of the Vendidad, and he says how they could be explained. The notions in the ancient songs are brief. The accounts of the Book of the Dead agree with those of the Codex Chimalpopoca. Hacavitz is the name of the first teocalli and of the first city in the Popol Vuh. Ma-Dan-Ino is Martinique. The tribes of Dan, the Danaids, and the Danavas follow. Xelhua and Peleg, Cholollan, Aztlan, and Assur, are set in one line. The first migration of the Yaqui or Mexicans from Ma-Dan-Ino to the island of Haiti, and the ancient traces of their establishments on that island, close the section. The places named are the Lesser Antilles as the Seven Caves, Mount Pixab, Martinique, and Haiti. The cold is the ice already described.

The Yaqui, the mines, and the merchants

There is every reason to think that the Yaqui were the first civilizers of Haiti. They are the prototypes of the four Oannes, of the Matsyahs, and the rest. They are the first Taut or Thoth, and he asks where that name could come from. The first rivalries and the first wars have a religious origin. The first civilizers impose the work of the mines. He gives his ideas of the first religious rivalries, Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca, human sacrifices, gynecocracy, and obscene loves. A religion of merchants and of prostitutes in the Antilles is the origin of the Carians, whose name he etymologizes. They spread through the whole world. The section is that Haitian beginning and that dispersion. It adds the Yaqui as the first civilizers on Haiti, and the Carians as the people who then left.

The Caracols and the Macares

The traditions kept by the companions of the first navigators are the frame. The Caracols, the first Carians, came out of Colhuacan, the places of the Curve. Various names issue from that one, among them Dimivan Caracol. Other etymologies of the name Cara follow. The gods Macares, and the places where they are met in the old world, are identical with the Makara and with Cipactli. That is the ridge of the Lesser Antilles. Memories of the Macares in America, the sanctuary of Fur-Atena and what it was, the ancient riches of the coast of Santa Marta in South America, and the name of the Macares again at the mouth of all the great American rivers, are the close. The ridge of the Lesser Antilles is the place. Santa Marta is a coast he names for its ancient wealth, not a second cradle.

How the Carians moved, and the first temple

Such are these Carians, these ancestors. Their migrations and their establishments in the Mediterranean, the migrations by the southern way from the mouths of the Orinoco to the coasts of Mauritania, and the Hyperborean migrations, are the roads. Civilization spreads through the whole world. He reflects, with d’Eckstein, on the foreign character it wears everywhere it goes, and on its true cradle. The first hearth, the first altar, and the first temple, the designs of the ceramics inspired by the twisting of the lavas, the mountain as the model of the first palace, and the volcano as the type of the first teocalli, are the architectural claims. The signification of the pyramid, the subterranean hearth of New Mexico, nature as the first mistress of architecture, the dolmens and the menhirs, the monuments left by the peoples on their passage, the various pyramids in memory of the volcanoes and of the raising of the mountains, and the ornamentation of the palaces sought in crystallization, fill the section. The new places are the Orinoco-to-Mauritania road and a subterranean hearth in New Mexico. The pyramid is a memory of the volcano, not a separate mystery.

Vowels, and Kush as the navel

At the pyramid whose meaning he has just shown, he takes up Kush, the primitive Mexico, or navel of the earth, and the ideas that relate to it. The gods as stelai, Heracles and Atlas, and various etymologies follow. Vowels, the bases of language according to Birch, represent what he says they represent in the Quiche-Guatemalan group. The combinations of the letters A, I, and U with various consonants, their richness in the composition of Mexican and Quiche words, and an extraordinary faculty of analysis in the languages of this group, are the linguistic claim. The defect is the lack of vocabularies. Kush as “primitive Mexico” is a name he puts on the navel of the earth. He does not give it a coordinate different from the crescent.

From east back to west, and the Phoenician names

He cannot repeat too often that one must return from the East to the West to find the cradle, first in Europe and in Africa, then in America. The sacred terminology of the languages of Asia has moved far from its original source. The signification of the names Mot and Mokh in the Phoenician histories, Omoroka and Oxomoco, the etymology and signification of those names, the Zophasemin and what they were, Oulom and Kadmon and their etymology in Quiche, Kazeh, Lebanon, Syrian and Tabor and what they identify with, the two columns of the Phoenician Hercules, the etymology and signification of Hamunim, Khusor the Artist and the Quiche etymology of his name, the idea of work attached to it, Tubal and the words derived from it, the Phoenician Iao identical with the Mexican Yao and Yaotl, the Samaritan Iabe and the Quiche Yabe, and the etymology and identification of the Kerubim, are the list. The section is that list of Old World names read backward into Quiche and Nahuatl. It adds no new Atlantic measurement.

The serpent alphabet

He arrives at the two columns, the two pillars. The serpent is the emblem of the characters of the Phoenician alphabet, and he says how and why. The signs of the language of life or of vapor are identical in Mexican. The bee, like the ant, is the sign of the subterranean gases and of the work of the mines. Taaut and his doctrines, according to Philo, and the letters of the alphabet formed by means of serpents, the initials of the names of the gods, follow. The twenty signs of the Maya and Mexican days are the set he works through. Aleph is identical with Adoni, according to Bunsen, and he says what it is in the alphabet and according to the Maya etymology. El, in Quiche, the sign of the Mexican month Tititl, the etymology and signification of Bethel, how the Daleth is interpreted in Quiche, the role of the fish goddess in the alphabet, Halel explained in the Mexican group, Lilith as the night and the sling, the Nun and the Nahamah, the uraeus and the sign of Colhuacan, Nab, Neb, and Nib, the character P and Phtha from Patah, and the flower of Aram, are the identifications. On p. 386, just as this argument passes into the next section, he notes a province bearing the Hebrew name Aram-Ana, “the flower of Aram,” situated in the southwest of Haiti, citing Peter Martyr. The section is the alphabet read as serpents and as the twenty day-signs. The only new place is that province in the southwest of Haiti.

The Maya signs as the oldest alphabet

Although they have a common origin and a common cradle, the alphabet, like the language issued from the cataclysm, seems to have followed the march of religion and to have split, from its cradle, into two equally opposed branches. The characters preserved by Landa, and the numerous signs contained in the Manuscript Troano, in Mexican Manuscript number 2 of the Imperial Library, and in the Mexican Codex of Dresden, certainly offer the most ancient elements on which the other alphabets were founded, in the sense that only there are found the geographical sketches that served them as a base. The signs of the figurative writing of Mexico proper, and the Egyptian hieroglyphs, are those that come closest. In the second rank come the runic characters, to which the characters called cuneiform are closely related, and whose traces are found in the Maya alphabet more completely than one could imagine at first. All the notions he possesses lead him to conclude that these two writings, the runic and the cuneiform, are sisters, and that they must, like the languages of which they are the figured expression, have followed the same route on leaving the primitive cradle. The great family of the Scythians, of which the Medes seem to have been a considerable branch, held as one of their principal symbols an arrow or a spit, the spit the sign of the volcanic cone, found again in the name of Huitzilopochtli, the arrow the sign of the fire that burst from it. Such is the spit of the Roman Mars on the Quirinal, and the lance of the Germans. Bor, work or servitude, the man of the domain in the Haitian language, identifies the notion of the work of the mines and of precious stones, bor, to hole, to pierce, to bore, in Quiche, with several northern regions of the European world, whose name is still recognized in those of Prussia (Borussia) and of Bursa in Asia Minor. Ibor, identical with Abaris, the famous Hyperborean prophet, means in the same language “the master or the lord of the men of the domain.” One can attach the Avars, and by opposition the Boreans. Creuzer had the Carians in turn the rivals, the masters, and the slaves of the Boreans, American predecessors of the Boreans of Europe, of whom Abar or Abaris was the personification par excellence. These would have been the primitive representatives of the great Scythian family, adorers of the light united to the victorious wave, of which Tonatiuh, a nuance of Tezcatlipoca, was the expression in America, as Apollo in Greece was the nuance of Hercules. The Hyperboreans, at first slaves of the brown or red race, then its masters, but in continual struggle with it, would be found again, perhaps, in Europe and afterward in Asia, in the Diti which d’Eckstein presents as the symbol of the Aryan race, by opposition to Aditi, South America, though Diti seems identical with Xpiyacoc, image of the Gulf of Mexico and of all the countries of North America.

From the ensemble of these traditions, the first Carians would only be mestizos, issued from the mixture of the races escaped from the cataclysm on the Antilles. Their adventurous life, their distant expeditions on the sea, their habits of piracy, and their disordered morals would be explained, up to a point, by the fact of their birth. Hence, perhaps, the complete disappearance of the Carians of antiquity after having been, for several centuries, the masters of the Mediterranean. As for the Boreans, it is by North America that they must have reached the northern countries of Europe, from which the Hyperboreans extended over the vast regions since designated under the name of Scythia, eastward to the confines of Asia, and southward to the mouths of the Don, the Tanais of the ancients, from which they would have occupied all the contours of the Black Sea. Creuzer had already thought he recognized that Abaris could be a Druid of the North and the country of the Hyperboreans the Hebrides. The name, like all the names attached to the cradles of the different peoples, had followed the march of the ancient migrations, and from the extremity of Florida it had ended by extending to all the northern countries of Europe. From those countries descended the Olen, carrying the cult of Apollo and of Ilithyia, the Ilancueitl and the Ilamatecuhtli of the Mexicans. The name is found again in the Ilma and the Ilmatar of the Finnish traditions, with the complete history of the volcanoes of the cataclysm, symbolized by the six golden eggs deposited in the knee of the mother of the wave. The note cites the Kalevala, translated by Léouzon-Leduc, volume I, Paris, 1867, pp. 6 to 7. Creuzer adds that the seven gods of the week, in the primitive Scandinavian religion, are also the seven elements of runic writing, and that in the seven letters decorated with the name of Abaris and of Pythagoras one meets the axiom that the eye has an analogy with fire. Brasseur recognizes the Mexican idea of the human eye meaning the crater of the volcano, figured in the sign Imix, the eye of the nipple, or of the breast, in the Maya language, that is the opening of the nipple of the mountain. In that sign one still discovers the four arrows, symbols of the four great Antilles, of the four first volcanoes lighted after the cataclysm, or of the jets of fire of the principal crater. Abaris travels over Greece carried on an arrow, as in the legends of our countryside the witch on her broomstick. He travels in the regions of the air. He is an inspired man who renders oracles and composes songs of conjuration, of expiation, and of initiation, like Votan among the Tzendals, like Quetzalcoatl in Mexico. The runes, Creuzer continues, are in great part arrows, characters in the form of arrows, as are the cuneiform characters. That is why the first sign of the Toltec year, in the system of the partisans of Tezcatlipoca, one of the two great rival fractions of the ancient religion, instead of Ce Acatl, a cane, is Ce Tecpatl, a flint, an iron of a lance, an arrow, a spit, the symbol of fire and of the volcanic eruption, which you find first in the sign Edznab, then in the sign of the letter, the sling opened and armed with three arrows, the three strokes that also allude to the famous pot held up by the three stones of the domestic hearth, and finally in the character represented by three arrowheads superimposed, whose first idea relates to the whistling of the gas or of the fire coming out of the earth. The section is the Maya writing as the oldest, the runic and the cuneiform as its sisters, Abaris, and the four great Antilles as four arrows. Florida is the American end of the name’s march. The Mediterranean mastery of the Carians lasts several centuries, which he does not date more tightly.

Mounds, Hyksos, and the square city

The most considerable migrations seem to him nevertheless to have been the first. The name of the Hyperboreans, which he has just shown in that of Bursa and of the Prussians, is found again, with the idea of work and in particular of the metallurgical industry, in a crowd of names. Imbramus, which the Carians gave to Mercury according to Stephanus of Byzantium, and Imbros, the mystic assessor of the Cabiri, correspond to Quiche words for the grains or the nuggets of the water boring the nipples or the mines, and for the breath piercing the nipples. In Hesiod he finds the name given to the Cyclopes, and he finds it again in the Bryges or Phrygians, whose country, the cradle of the Cabiri according to a great number of ancient authors, contained a city of Astyra famous for its gold mines, like the country of Aztlan from which they had originally set out. He decomposes it in all the words that served as a glossary to bronze and to brass, in Ducange’s brunus, brown like the men who first worked it, in the Greek word for the red-haired, in German brennen, to burn, identical with a word in the Chol Maya dialect, and in Flemish bronnen for the spring, the water that pierces, all of them in direct relation with the Quiche and Haitian bor and with the island of Boriquen, Porto Rico, from which the Boreans probably went away on the day of the great dispersion.

Search all the notions that concern the Hyperboreans and the Scythians, and a powerful light will fall on the cradle of the nations of Europe and of Asia. The old traditions of the East are full of the same memories. They speak of a dark sea, a tenebrous region where the Fortunate Isles are and where the fountain of life is found. They speak of the Dry Island and of the great continent that is beyond the mountains of Qaf. “The land where we are is surrounded by the Ocean,” said in the sixth century the monk Cosmas, who had traveled long in Asia, “but beyond that Ocean is another land which touches the walls of the sky. It is in that land that man was created, and where the terrestrial paradise was. At the time of the deluge, Noah was carried by the ark into the land his posterity inhabits today.” The notes cite d’Eckstein, d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale, and Cosmas Indicopleustes. That Dry Island and that continent are the islands that appeared after the cataclysm, Ma-Dan-Ino, and the American continent from which the Boreans passed into this one, carrying their gods and the ancient notions of their origin. A note recalls that Columbus, writing to Queen Isabella, also imagined he had found the terrestrial paradise on discovering the lands of Paria. There is every reason to believe that swarms detached from these great northern migrations left in Africa the strange monuments of which M. Bourguignat proposes to write the history. Come from the valleys of the Mississippi and of the Ohio, one follows them to the confines of the Sahara, where the archaeologists can go and study those immense moles of earth and of stone packed in the form of crescents, of serpents, and of other animals, whose configuration, identical in Algeria, in England, and in the United States, would have remained an insoluble enigma forever without the light the Mexican documents throw on the history of the whole world. These gigantic signs are commemorative monuments of the cataclysm. They are souvenirs of the ancient land of the Crescent, buried under the waters, as well as of the Dry Land and of the islands extended as a serpent or as a scorpion on the surface of the waves, at the entrance of the sea of the Antilles and of the Gulf of Mexico. It is to the same souvenirs that one must go back to understand the construction of the pyramids, in Egypt as well as in America, and of so many other monuments scattered on the surface of the globe.

Whether the Hyksos, to whom some Egyptologists attribute them, entered Egypt by the east or by the west, it does not matter. They had none the less the Antilles for a cradle. One will not be long in discovering whether they belonged to the swarms that came directly from America to Africa, passing, by the south, from the coasts of Brazil to the Canaries and to Mauritania, or whether they were part of those who came down by Celtica and Iberia to the shores of the Mediterranean. Perhaps they were only groups detached from the nomad populations which, under the name of Scythians, of Medes, or of Bryges, conquered in turn most of the kingdoms of Asia. He recalls what Diodorus says, a passage to which the Egyptologists have not paid sufficient attention, that the successors of the Scythians, renowned for their courage and their strategic skill, extended their conquests beyond the Tanais as far as Thrace and, carrying their arms to another point, penetrated into Egypt as far as the Nile. Compare the traits of those Scythians with those of whom Brugsch said that the king, the members of his family, the great functionaries, the warriors, in short the whole population of the new residence at Thebes, have almost the aspect of a foreign race, and ask whether the latter issued from a Libyan race or from some Turanian family, touran, toulan, tulan, tollan. The notes cite Diodorus, Book II, and Brugsch, Histoire d’Égypte, p. 118.

In Egypt, as in Greece or in Asia, the antique rivalries of these different peoples, born on other shores, often lit again when the nations issued from their colonies found themselves again in contact in those countries or in the islands of the Mediterranean. Those migrations, that contact, the wars that followed, and the fusion that operated on various occasions between these nations and their religious symbols, are alone capable of throwing light on the era of the Hyksos in Egypt and on the primitive establishments of the Phoenicians. The same facts will explain the origins of Greece and of Italy. When learned studies have planted their first marker in the places where history was born, one will compare the religious symbols of the different peoples with the phenomena that presided at their cradle. One will study the cipher four, identical with the cross and with the sign of the earthquake and of the cataclysm from which the new order of things came out. One will understand the primordial foundation by four, as at Babylon, and that of the Roma quadrata, similar in everything to the square of the plan of Izamal and of Tihoo, where from the four principal edifices, symbolic monuments of the four great islands, four great streets set out, cutting the city in a cross. Hence, according to a different religious system, the cipher seven, the seven tribes, the seven mounts, identical with that of the Lesser Antilles, with that of the seven Toltec chiefs, or nine of the nine kings of Tollan, or of the nine Chichimec chiefs. In that detail one will find the origin of the incarnations of the Hindu gods, as of the number four and five of the Mexican suns. One will understand why the two great pyramids of Teotihuacan are the Moon first and the Sun afterward, why so many teocallis are scattered in its vast enclosure, and why the two twins at Rome are figured, suckled by a she-wolf, brothers and rivals, one killed by the other, the last disappearing with a thunderbolt. One will find again the original couple of Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca, nourished in the body of the great she-wolf of the Crescent, symbolized in its turn in the mundus, that world par excellence, the sacred symbol of the Moon, born of the abyss, the swallowed thing of the swallowing Ocean, like the mundus in the cave of the equipment of the Palatine, under the primitive seat of the urban establishment. The note cites Mommsen. There the first inhabitants of Rome, like the Mexicans, in memory of the fiction relative to the burial of Xochitl, carried at a certain epoch of the year a provision of every object of domestic use, to which they added a clod of the national and cherished earth.

He ends the long letter by quoting the illustrious Dane, whose words he has interrogated so often. Let one follow the path of true historical criticism, which takes account of the ensemble of the facts and of its intimate correspondence with the geographical establishment and the tradition of the peoples, and let one know how to join the most individual perception of the fables to the appreciation of the institutions of the religious and domestic life of each branch of a people, without browsing forever on the same leaf of incredulous negation or of superstitious affirmation. He does not doubt the light that can result for the approximate history of one of the most primitive expansions of the old human species. The letter closes:

Paris, 3 April 1868.

FIN.

The square cities, Izamal and Tihoo, the four great islands as the four edifices, Teotihuacan, and the Palatine mundus are the last geographical equations. The Hyksos claim is the one a later writer will set beside Egypt. He does not date their entry.

The pièces

The first pièce, on p. 401, is the history of the Mexican nation, a manuscript in the Nahuatl language of the year 1576, with a prologue. It comes from Boturini’s collection, number 14, section VIII, where it follows immediately the one he has entitled the Codex Chimalpopoca. It now belongs to the collection of M. Aubin, who had it autographed without publishing it in France. Most of the copies are in the possession of E. G. Squier at New York and of Don Fernando Ramírez of Mexico. Brasseur holds his from Aubin. The manuscript has never been translated, so far as he knows. He chose the first pages as a pièce justificative because they contain, as in a summary, almost the whole history of the cataclysm, and because they are like the abridgment of the great document he is announcing to the public. The duplicity of the sense is complete. The first translation, printed beside the text, is the one he calls pseudo-historical, since it is not in reality, as one has been able to believe until now, the Mexican history, but only what it has been supposed to be. The difficulty, not to say the impossibility, of rendering that translation in a wholly grammatical manner is visible. The contradictions are the manifest proof that this was not the true history, destined for instructed men initiated into the mysteries of ancient times. The true history is the geological history, that of the second translation, for only there does the ensemble link up properly. The first and most flagrant contradiction is the number of the tribes, at first four and then, three lines lower, eight. He also signals the word diablo, devil or demon, inserted by the redactor of the piece, which he leaves, wishing to change absolutely nothing. It is evident to him that diablo replaces a scientific word, an allusion to the volcanic power, perhaps to electricity, which the Mexican sages knew but did not know how to define for Spanish ignorance. It cannot stand for teotl, god, since that word is found elsewhere. A note added since he wrote these lines says that Charles Sainte-Claire Deville, having examined the geological translation, recognized in the word diablo the eruptive power. The Nahuatl and the two French versions then run in columns. The opening of the surface version is the beginning of the histories of the arrival of the Mexicans from the place called Aztlan, by the middle of the water, being four tribes, rowing in boats, and placing their huts on piles at the place called the Grotto of Quinehuayan, where the eight tribes came out. His notes argue the grammar of each verb. I do not retranslate his Nahuatl. The avant-propos has already said what the second version is: the upheaval of the Lesser Antilles, and of Guadeloupe in particular.

The second pièce, which the table places at p. 423, is the notes of Sainte-Claire Deville on that double translation. They are, as Deville writes, of an entirely interpretive character and not at all positive. Brasseur nevertheless calls them a brilliant testimony in favor of the geological sense. The Codex Chimalpopoca, whose double interpretation he is finishing, will give the most complete proofs, with details so circumstantial that it will be impossible not to recognize that the Mexicans, or their predecessors, had written, more than six thousand years ago, the most complete geological history of the cataclysm that swallowed half the American continent. The notes that follow are Deville’s, on vapors, cones, and the passage from submarine volcanoes to aerial ones, the most active being the central peak that dominates the vase or the crater of the upheaval. I do not turn his technical remarks into a second narrative. They are the geologist’s marginal agreement, which the avant-propos already summarized.

The third pièce, which the table places at p. 431, is headed Friday, 8 May last. As he was finishing the correction of the proofs of the Mexican pages, he received from Brussels a letter from George Catlin, who had only just learned of his return from Mexico and wrote to congratulate him on arriving in good health at Paris. The letter was above all about the failure to sell the collection, offered to the Louvre under the auspices of Mérimée. Catlin then speaks of his own voyages and of the remarks he has made on the monuments of Yucatan. Those remarks are very important, Brasseur says, under the double relation of history and of geology, and nothing could have arrived more apropos. Catlin did not know of the return, and he knows only since the answer, dated Saturday, 9 May, what Brasseur is occupied with. He transcribes the paragraph entire. Catlin was but five days in Merida, the capital of Yucatan, and thirteen at Uxmal, years since, and of course learned and saw only a little. The pièce is that letter. It is not an Atlantic geography of Brasseur’s own.

The fourth pièce, which the table places at p. 435, is “Ancient songs of the Indians of the United States,” an extract from The American Nations, or outlines of their general history, ancient and modern, by C. S. Rafinesque, Philadelphia, 1836, first volume, from p. 122. Rafinesque had obtained, through the late Dr. Ward of Indiana, some of the original Wallam-Olum, the painted records, of the Lenape tribe of White River, and he gives the translation of the songs annexed to each, a kind of connected annals, with the original glyphs and a literal translation. He notes that the writers who had friendly intercourse with the tribes knew they possessed historical records by hieroglyphs on wood, bark, skins, and in stringed wampum, but that none had been published in the original form. Lederer saw, two hundred years ago in Carolina, wheels of sixty rays recording events of six hundred years. Humboldt mentioned the glyphic symbols of the Hurons on wood, seen by the Jesuits. Heckewelder saw the Olumapi or painted sticks of the Lenape and did not describe them. The songs then run in English, a king-list Brasseur prints rather than retells. The letter, not this appendix, is where he says that all the ancient songs in the United States tell the cataclysm. I do not make Rafinesque’s kings into Brasseur’s Atlantic dynasties.

The table of sommaires

Pages 449 to 463 are his own index of the four letters, section by section, and of the four pièces. It adds no narrative. The erratum printed in it, that on p. 163 one must read § 3 instead of § 5, is the only correction I have used. The last leaf repeats the Saint-Cloud imprint.