Chapter XXII: Front Matter (22)

What seems quite clear is that the subterraneous vault constituted a sacred cosmical chamber and that the stelæ were memorial stones, which probably represented the image of a lord, and the record of his fixed term of office which formed a period or era of the native calendar (see p. 221). The stela which formed the stable, visible centre of the hidden substructure may also have been employed as a gnomon during some period of time, and in the monument the initiated must undoubtedly have recognized the underlying cosmical conceptions, and regarded it as a highly developed form or variant of the archaic cross, the primitive record of a year. It is remarkable how closely analogous are the Central American stelæ with their hidden cruciform vaults, to the conception of the Egyptian “star of Horus” explained by Hewitt as the meridian pole raised in the centre of a cross denoting the four quarters.

The most striking evidence of a close affinity between the ancient Central American ah-men, or master-masons, who built cruciform windows in the walls of temples and designed the cruciform vaults under the stelæ at Copan and Quirigua, and the amanteca or tolteca, the master-architects and builders of Mitla, Mexico, is furnished by Mr. M. H. Saville’s recent excavation of three remarkable subterraneous, cruciform chambers, the largest of which is situated on the summit of a high hill near Mitla. The interior of the latter is elaborately decorated with geometrical designs, like those on the exterior of the Mitla palace. The extreme length from east to west is 9m. 71cm., from north to south 8m. 18cm., and its roof was composed of large flat stones. The entrance to this and the other cruciform vaults is situated at the extremity of the western arm, which in the case described was longer than the other arms.

The most remarkable example of such a cruciform crypt is, however, that situated beneath the palace of Mitla, which has been figured by Dupaix in Lord Kingsborough’s Mexican Antiquities, vol. IX. This vault is also built of the shape of a so-called “Greek” cross, but in its centre stands a large circular stone column reaching from floor to ceiling. It is impossible not to recognize the symbolism of this pillar situated in the centre of a structure, the form of which symbolizes the Four Quarters and the fundamental identity of the column occupying the centre of the Mitla chamber and the Copan stelæ standing above the centre of the hidden cruciform vault. Details associated with the pillar which stood in the Great Temple of Mexico (p. 53), and the “pedestal” erected on the hill of justice at Guatemala (p. 79) definitely show that, in ancient America, the column was also associated with star-cult, with the administration of justice and central celestial and terrestrial government. Investigation has shown that precisely the same ideas were associated with the circular, square or octagonal columns of Egypt, Greece, Rome and Japan, where they either constituted the images of the central supreme divinity, formed the support for the statues of earthly “divine” rulers, or marked the centres of the cosmos or state, bearing inscriptions of the sacred laws as in Athens, or of the distances to all points of the empire, viz. the Roman Milliarum Aureum.

It is remarkable to find that, whereas in ancient Byzantium the centre of the city had been marked by a column surmounted by a colossal statue of Apollo, a pillar or pole god, Constantine erected a “spacious edifice, from the centre of which all roads of the empire were measured.” Considering that, at the time when this edifice was built, the ancient quadruplicate plan had been revised and the empire of New Rome had been divided into four parts by Constantine, it seems reasonable to infer that the form of the great edifice which marked the territorial centre of the new empire bore the impress of the cruciform plan, and that the shape of the cross should have been adopted throughout the empire, in edifices marking central consecrated places. How much of the true spirit of the Christian ideal of universal brotherhood entered into the constitution of Constantine’s New Rome it is impossible to conjecture. Niebuhr denies that Constantine was a Christian, records that he was only baptized shortly before his death, and states that the religion of Constantine “must have been a strange compound indeed, something like the amulet recently discovered at Rome, which is an example of that curious mixture of Judaism, Christianity and Paganism which we so frequently meet with from about the beginning of the third century.”(151)

In an extremely interesting monograph “On the origin of the cruciform plan of the mediæval Cathedral,” by the distinguished architect, Mr. E. M. Wheelwright, published in the “Transactions of the Boston Society of Architects, 1891,” I find the significant fact that what is now the little church of S. Tiburce, Rome, in the form of a Greek cross, was built at the time of Constantine.

The same monograph teaches that “de Rossi discovered in the catacombs of Rome two scholia of a plan called specifically triclinium, of a date previous to Diocletian and probably of the third century. In such were celebrated, by the presbyters, the memorial feasts of martyrs, the congregation assembling outside. Tombs of a positive cruciform plan are also found in the catacombs. In the fifth or sixth century cruciform buildings became in the East, and _wherever Byzantine influence was potent, the recognized form for tombs, mortuary chapels and buildings commemorative of holy places_. These types seem to have been given, by Byzantine architects, special recognition of the purpose of their construction and to have appeared to them _as monuments requiring a symbolical expression of plan_, while they evidently _did not consider such symbolical expressions requisite in buildings planned for general congregations_, which, although of types without distinct association with the Christian faith, were held, for several centuries, to be sufficiently well adapted to purposes of Christian worship without material change from their ancient form [that of the Roman Basilica].”

Referring the reader to Mr. Wheelwright’s monograph for interesting data concerning the Byzantine influence discernible in the early types of Christian churches of cruciform plan erected in northern Italy and Europe, I merely note here that in St. Sophia, founded by Constantine, and completed by Justinian, “the load of the dome is thrown on four great piers disposed at either corner of a square. These great piers, with the corresponding buttresses of the outer wall, suggest a possible symbolical intent in the arrangement ... otherwise the cruciform plan here suggested is expressed neither externally nor internally.” I venture to suggest that in St. Sophia, “Holy Eternal Wisdom,” as in the case of the Pantheon, the dominant idea may have been the all-embracing unity, but that, as the number four was identified with “wisdom and justice” by the widespread Pythagorean philosophy, that number must have seemed, to the initiated, to pervade the entire structure. In the case of the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem, where it was Justinian’s intention to mark a sacred locality, we find the cruciform plan clearly carried out. “The church of St. Simeon Stylite at Kelat Seman Syria, built about A.D. 500, is a most interesting example of a cruciform church, marking a sacred spot [and associated with a sacred column].”

“The church of the seventh century built at Sichem, over the well of the Samaritan, shows a distribution of plan similar to that of S. Simeon Stylite, the holy object being at the crossing.... There are existing at St. Wandrille and at Querqueville in Normandy, two (cruciform) triapsidal churches of a date prior to the Norman conquest ... a well preserved four-apsed tomb chapel exists at Montmajour near Arles, built in 1019; the detail and plan of which point to a Syrian prototype and resembles two buildings of an early date now existing in Dalmatia.” The use of the cruciform type of church, anterior to the great revival of purely Christian religious architecture in the thirteenth century, was confined to Picardy and the Rhenish provinces, fine churches of this type being at Cologne, Bonn, Marburg, etc.

It is interesting to recall that the building of sacred structures is attributed to “secret organizations of free or enfranchised operative masons which existed during the middle ages, and possessed grades of officers and secret signs by which, on coming to a strange place, they could be recognized as real craftsmen and not impostors.” To this day, in some parts of Germany and Bohemia, the swastika is the sign or mark of the stone-mason’s guild which has survived from the mediæval times. In the organized bands of masons whose mark was the swastika and who introduced Eastern cosmical symbolism into Europe and gradually developed, upon this basis, a purely Christian form of architecture, we may perhaps see the descendants of those ancient builders who, filled with the conception of the sacred Central power, the Four Quarters, the Above and Below, planned the square, seven-stoned zikkurats of Babylonia-Assyria, the pyramids, obelisks and sphinxes of Egypt, the columns and cruciform tombs and sanctuaries of Greece, Asia Minor and Rome, the cruciform temples and the topes of India and the domes of the Pantheon and St. Sophia.(152)

It would appear that these ancient builders were also the designers and founders of cities and states. It is, for instance, known that Hippodamus, the son of Euryphon, a Milesian, and by profession an architect, gained celebrity in his own art by constructing the Piræus at Athens and by improving the method of distributing streets and planning cities ... and also wrote a treatise concerning the best form of government.

A kinship of thought undoubtedly exists between the trained builders of cosmical structures in the Old World and the ah-men, the amantecas and toltecas of Central America and Mexico, who also reared pyramids, cruciform vaults, circular temples, with openings to the four quarters (see fig. 30, p. 97), altars and pillars, and in their temples wrought, in stone, endless variations of the great human theme: the sacred central, stable power, the four quarters and elements, and the heaven and earth with the dualities of Nature, and likewise instituted an artificial scheme of social organization, a calendar and religious rites based on these same fundamental principles, which can be traced back to primitive pole-star worship. It has been of utmost interest to me, as I was approaching the end of the present investigation, to become acquainted with Hewitt’s work and his view that it was the seafaring Turanians, originally a northern race, the worshippers of Tur=the pole, who claimed descent from the seven stars of Nāgash, the serpent=Ursa Major, and, from India, extended their trade and carried their form of social organization and religious cult first to the Euphratean kingdoms and afterwards to Egypt and Syria, where they were known by the Greeks as the Phœnicians.

The subjoined detached passages, which open out new fields of inquiry, not only appear to me to establish conclusively this view, but certainly afford most interesting information concerning the ancient race of pole-star worshippers, seafarers, builders and handicraftsmen who, according to Hewitt (p. 25), extended their emigrations not only to Europe but also to America.(153) Hewitt bases the latter assertion upon the identity be perceived “between Akkadian and American mythological traditions.”

As the limit of the present inquiry excludes mythology, I cannot discuss here the evidences of similarity produced by Hewitt. I must express regret, however, that he designates a tribe of Pueblo Indians (the Sias, related to the Zuñis), as “Mexican” (see vol. II, p. 243, etc.), a term which, in this case, is decidedly misleading. His identification of the truly Mexican, “teo-cipactli” as a “fish-god” is unfortunate, as numberless conventionalized drawings in the Codices prove that cipactli signifies alligator. If the somewhat limited and vague evidence, produced by Mr. Hewitt, appeared to justify his conclusion, how much more must an identity of social organization and cult such as I have traced, not only authorize but also render it imperative, that the possibility of pre-Columbian contact should be thoroughly looked into. Disclaiming any desire to formulate hasty conclusions, and merely for the sake of gaining information by looking squarely at facts, I shall now rapidly enumerate some of these which undoubtedly appear to corroborate Hewitt’s further assertion that “the Mayas and Nahuas of Yucatan and Mexico were emigrants of the Magha and Nahusha tribes, who pertained to the race of navigators known by the Greeks as the Phœnicians ... and who continued in their new land, America, the worship of the rain god, to whom, as their fathers in central Asia, they dedicated the sign of the cross” (Hewitt, p. 492).

“The Maghas were the Finnic long-haired race of star- and fire-worshippers who, starting from Phrygia, as the Takkas conquered northern India ... who called themselves the sons of the Northern pine tree, called in Phrygia, as by the Northern Finns, Ma=the mother; also the sons of the mother-goddess Magha, the socket block whence fire was generated by the fire-drill; who is also worshipped as the mother Maga under the form of the alligator. Consequently the alligator was their totem.” In Essay VIII Hewitt states that these “sons of the great witch-mother Maga” lived in Magnesia, whence they emigrated to Thessaly and that theirs was the “city of the Magnetes” referred to by Plato as “the mother of laws.” The word mag, however, meant great in Akkadian, hence according to Hewitt the name Makkhu, the high priests or Magi (vol. II, p. 54).

The Maya and Mexican fire altars and sockets and their association
with the earth-mother and alligator in the native Codices has been
discussed. The Mexican day-sign cipactli figures an alligator and
is associated with a female deity. The alligator altar at Copan,
is described on p. 228. Were it not for limit of space additional
testimony could be cited here, proving that in Mexico the
alligator was associated with the mother of the race, the
fire-socket, and was a tribal totem.

“As the mother Maga she is the maker or kneader, the mother of the building and constructing races ... they were the first builders of towns.... They adored the god of the twirling or churning fire-drill.... They employed the name Ku, Ukko, Pukka and Pukan to designate the rain and thunder god and star-god who guides the stars in their courses and rules the beginning of the year” (Hewitt, p 438). The Finnic and Esthonian “Ukko is also called Taivahan Napanen, meaning the navel of the heaven and this is called the place of the pole star, the star at the top of the heavenly mountain” (vol. II, p. 155).

Compare Ku in Maya list, appendix III, also Tezcatli-poca or
puca=Mexican fire-drill god, Ursa Major.

“They worshipped Nag or Nagash,=the serpent and fire-drill constellation of Ursa Major, and consequently called themselves also the sons of Naga=the Nahushas. They worshipped the Pleiades=the mother stars....”

The Nahuas traced ancestry to seven stars of Ursa Major and began
their religious year at the culmination of the Pleiades at
midnight.

“The Nagas united with the navigating Shus or Phœnicians ... the red men, who worshipped the ruler of heaven.... These Shus ... called in the North, Hus ... were the Sumerian trading races of the Euphratean delta and Western India, who traced their descent to Khu, the mother bird of the Akkadians, Egyptians and Kushites.... They reverenced the sacred ‘shu’ stone, the begetter of fire and of life fostered by heat,... designated as the precious stone, the strong stone, the snake stone, the mountain stone.... The pregnant mountain of the Shu stone was to the Akkadians the central point of the earth. The people who are said in the Rig-Veda to have first found fire by the help of Matarishoan, the fire-socket, and to have brought it to men, and are said to have placed it in the navel of the world ... as the sacred Shu stone.”

It should be added here that the Hittite sign for Ishtar was a triangle enclosing a stone: “the mountain enclosing the stone of life.”

About 270 A.D. the Tutul-xius=(_cf._ Kukul) under a great chief or
lord Kukulcan reigned at Chichen-Itza ... (p. 206). In Mexico the
name for turquoise is xiuitl and the god of fire is named
Xiuh-tecuhtli. Jadeite is designated as chal-chiuitl and is
associated with Chalchiuitlycue, the mother-goddess. The
spark-producing, flint knife=tecpatl is also employed as a symbol
of generation.

“Their kings, like those of Egypt, wore the uræus serpent as a sign of royal authority and made this the emblem of kingly rank in countries so widely distant from one another as India and Egypt....”

We learn from Prof. A. H. Sayce (Ancient Empires of the East, p. 200), that customs that had originated in a primitive period of Semitic belief survived in Phœnician religion and that clear traces of totemism are found amongst the Semites. “Tribes were named each after its peculiar totem, an animal, plant or heavenly body.... David, for instance, belonged to the serpent-family, as is shown by the name of his ancestor Nahshon, and Professor Smith suggests that the brazen serpent found by Hezekiah in the Solomonic Temple was the symbol of it. We find David and the family of Nahash, ‘or the serpent,’ the king of Ammon, on friendly terms even after the deadly war between Israel and Ammon, that had resulted in the conquest and decimation of the latter.”

The name of the culture hero Kukulcan or Quetzalcoatl incorporates
the word serpent in Maya and Nahuatl. The conventionalized open
serpent’s jaw forms the usual head-dress of the lords sculptured
on the Central American stelæ and bas-reliefs. The existence of
totemism in America is too well known to require comment, and the
arbitrary method by which it was established by the Incas of Peru,
when they founded the new colony, has been described.

“... I have already shown that the snake-father of the snake races in Greece and Asia Minor and of the matriarchal races in India was the snake Echis, or Achis, the holding snake, the Vritra, or enclosing snake of the Rig-Veda, the cultivated land which girdled the Temenos. This was the Sanscrit and Egyptian snake Ahi.... But the Naga snake was not the encircling snake, but the offspring of the house-pole and in this form it was called by the Jews the offspring or Baal of the land. But as the heavenly snake it was the old village snake transferred to heaven, called the Nag-ksetra, or field of the Nags, and there it was the girdling air-god who encircled the cloud mothers, the Apsaras, the daughters of the Abyss, the Assyrian Apsa, and marked their boundaries as the village snake did those of the holy grove on earth. But on earth the water-snake was the magical rain-pole, called the god Darka, set up by the Dravidian Males in front of every house ...” (p. 194). “They are the Canaanites, or dwellers in the low country, and the Hivites or the villagers of the Bible and the race of Achæans of Greece. These are the sons of the Achis=the serpent, the having or holding snake, the girdling snake of cultivated land which surrounded the Temenos or inner shrine, the holy grove of the gods” (Hewitt, p. 175).

Attention is drawn here to the twin serpents which enclose the
Mexican Cosmical Tablet (fig. 56), whose bodies may be seen to
consist of a repetition of the conventional sign for tlalli=land,
consisting of a fringed square. Each square in this case encloses
a sign resembling that of fire=tletl and the numeral ten. These
girdling serpents, whose heads unite, being directly associated
with land, appear as the counterpart of the Old World Achis, a
curious fact when it is considered that they are represented as
springing from the sign Acatl (see p. 257).

On the other hand, the heavenly “feathered serpent” of Mexico and
Yucatan is distinctly associated with the air and the circle; its
conception curiously coinciding with that of the “girdling
air-god” mentioned by Hewitt. It is well known that the walls
enclosing the court of the Great Temple of Mexico, were covered
with sculptured serpents, and at Xochicalco, Mexico, and in
Central American ruins (Uxmal, for instance), great sculptured
serpents surround the buildings. It is remarkable that the sign
Acatl not only figures conspicuously on the Great American Tablet,
but also on the allegorical figure of the “Divine Serpent,” which
may well represent the totemic divinity and ancestor of a snake
tribe, associated with the word Acatl, possibly conveying their
name. The undeniable association, in Mexico, of the serpent with
Acatl, curiously agrees with the name of the “sons of Achis, the
serpent”=the Achaians: and deserves consideration.

In the Genesis genealogy of the kings of Edom, the land of the red man, the priest king of the Hus or Shus is mentioned “... his people had replaced the Tur, the stone pillar, the Egyptian obelisk by the temple, the home and symbol of the creating god, who had been the pillar of the house.... But in their eyes the father-god was not the central pillar but the two door-posts and thence they called the temple gates Babel or the gates of god.... This gate was guarded by the holy twins.... The doorposts, and night and morning are invoked in the Rig-Veda.... The Magas were the discoverers of magic, mining, metallurgy, handicrafts—the pioneers of scientific research and the first organizers of a ritual of religious festivals.”

Twin pillars, sculptured in the form of great serpents, whose
names signify twinship, support the entrances to the ancient
temples of Yucatan, Central America, and have been found on the
site of the Great Temple of Mexico. The Mexican and Maya accounts
of the culture hero Quetzalcoatl-Kukulcan state that he and his
followers were “great necromancers” and magicians and that they
taught handicrafts, metallurgy, and instituted calendar, social
organization and ritual. A personal, close examination of a large
number of old Peruvian and Mexican as well as Coptic textile
fabrics, has convinced me moreover of their identity of technique.

“The Magas sacrificed dogs,.... They wore long hair,.... They made human sacrifices in order to obtain rain” (Hewitt).

“The Phœnician priests scourged themselves or gashed their arms and breasts to win divine favor.... Human sacrifices were made, to Moloch or Milkom ... the parent was required to offer his eldest or only son as a sacrifice and the victim’s cries were drowned by the noise of drums and flutes” (Sayce).

The human sacrifices of Mexico are familiar to all. The native dog
and various kinds of birds were sacrificed. The Mexican priests,
named papas, wore long hair, practised asceticism, gashed their
breasts, arms and legs and pierced their ears and tongues. On the
Palenque bas-reliefs, priests with long hair are sculptured. The
human sacrifices of Mexico and those of Egypt, Phœnicia and
Assyria, described by Sayce and Hewitt (pp. 275 and 348), are
closely alike. See also Hewitt’s account of the blood brotherhood
made between the sacrificer and the land on which the blood is
poured (p. 196), and the Chichimec blood sacrifice described in
the present work, p. 66.

The foregoing are a few noteworthy analogies which have impressed themselves upon me during the present course of investigation, in addition to the many undeniable and unsuspected evidences I have found, of an identity of star-cult, ritual and social organization in Old and New World civilizations.

It will be seen that the outcome of my researches corroborates the opinions differently expressed by a long line of eminent investigators, who have been constantly discovering and pointing out undeniable similarities and identities between the civilizations of both hemispheres.

It seems to me that an accumulation of evidence now forces us to face and thoroughly investigate the possibility that, from remote antiquity, our continent and its inhabitants were known to the seafarers of the Old World, to whose agency the spread of similar forms of cult and civilization in the New World is to be assigned.

While those who uphold the autochthony of the native civilization may regard such identities as accidental, those who are willing to admit the possibility that the Phœnicians, the red men of antiquity, whose land was Syria, navigating by the pole-star, may have reached America, will doubtlessly dwell upon the unquestionable fact that the most ancient traces of organized and settled communities actually exist along the coast swept by the equatorial currents. A glance at an ordinary chart exhibiting the ocean currents and trade winds shows that vessels sailing southward from the Canary Islands and caught in the north African current, might, at a certain point, enter the north equatorial current flowing towards the coast of America. Further southward still, off the coast of Guinea, the current bearing this name meets the main equatorial current which sweeps along the coast of Honduras and Yucatan into the Gulf of Mexico.

What is more, ancient well-known tradition asserts that the culture-hero Kukulcan-Quetzalcoatl, with his followers, came to Mexico from the East (_via_ Yucatan) and told the natives of their distant home, named Tlapallan and Huehue tlapallan which, translated, mean “the red land” and “the great ancient red land.” Native American tradition unquestionably and unanimously ascribes to single individuals of aged and venerable aspect, or leaders of small bands of men and women of an alien race, the peaceable introduction of a definite plan of civilization, identical in its elements with that known to have existed in India, Egypt and Babylonia-Assyria from time immemorial, and said to have been spread to these countries by the Phœnicians.

Native tradition, therefore, is seen unanimously to controvert the independent development of the cosmical schemes of government and most advanced forms of civilization which prevailed in America at the Columbian period. This, of course, in no wise excludes the existence of purely native people, with a certain degree of civilization, more rudimentary in form, founded on impressive natural phenomena, which the natives had always been in a position to observe for themselves.

In order to obtain an insight into conditions which might have determined and affected maritime intercourse with distant America, let us now make a rapid survey of the history of the ancient civilizations of the Old World. This reveals, in the first case, the undeniable fact (one of deepest significance in the light of the present investigation) that the period of a general stirring of men’s minds, in countries where pole-star worship had prevailed from time immemorial, exactly coincides with the period to which I alluded on p. 43, during which there ceased to be a brilliantly conspicuous and perfectly immovable pole-star in the northern heavens.

From Mr. Hinckley Allen’s work (p. 454), I have since learned that astronomers have closely determined this period, and that Miss Clerke writes of this: “The entire millennium before the Christian era may count for an interregnum as regards pole-stars. Alpha Draconis had ceased to exercise that office; and Alruccabah had not yet assumed it.” Prof. A. H. Sayce tells us that the Phœnician pilots steered by the pole-star in remotest antiquity, and it is a matter of history that “Pytheas of Massilia, the bold navigator (died about 285 B.C.), showed the Greeks that the pole-star was not at the pole itself.” Previous to that date, however, the astronomer-priests must have noted the change in the heavens. On descendants of ancient pole-star worshippers, whose entire religion and civilization were based on the idea of fixity and rotation, the unaccountable change in the order of the universe must indeed have produced a deep impression. Under such conditions it seems but natural that a great awakening of doubt and speculation should take place, that worship should be transferred from stars known to be subject to change, to the unseen, incomprehensible but ever-present eternal power which ruled the universe.

Let us examine some of the records of the great intellectual movement that swept at one time, like a wave, over the ancient centres of civilization. The eighth, seventh and sixth centuries before our era are marked by the growth of the Ionian philosophy which, as Huxley tells us, “was but one of many results of the stirring of the moral and intellectual life of the Aryan-Semitic population of Western Asia. The conditions of the general awakening were doubtless manifold, but there is one which modern research has brought into great prominence. This is the existence of extremely ancient and highly advanced societies in the valleys of the Euphrates and the Nile.... The Ionian intellectual movement is only one of the several sporadic indications of some powerful mental ferment over the whole of the area comprised between the Ægean and Northern Hindustan....”(154)

Professor Schroeder’s statement that, “in the seventh century B.C., the idea of four, _i. e._ five elements, spread in India,” is particularly interesting in connection with the date assigned to the birth of the Ionian intellectual movement. Of Pythagoras it is related that, like Solon, “he had visited Egypt, also Phœnicia and Babylon, then Chaldean and independent, and founded a brotherhood originally brought together by a religious influence, with observances approaching to monastic peculiarity, and working in a direction at once religious, political and scientific.” According to the learned translator of Cicero’s first Tusculan disputation(155) “it is generally accepted that Pherecydes of Syros (one of the Cyclades islands in the Ægean sea) was the teacher of Pythagoras. Pherecydes, who flourished about B.C. 544 is said to have derived his knowledge from the secret books of the Phœnicians and from travels of inquiry in Egypt.” Through Philolaus (see Grote IV, p. 395, note 2), Pythagorean science was made known to Plato, whose views are quoted on p. 449. Grote states that, about 300 B.C., the Pythagorean philosophy nearly died out. It is a curious fact that this date coincides, approximately, with the destruction of Tyre (Tsar, in Phœnician,=the rock), the last stronghold of the Phœnicians, “which had defied Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian but at last fell,” according to Prof. A. H. Sayce, “in July, B.C. 332, before the Greek conqueror Alexander. Thirty thousand of its citizens were sold in slavery, thousands of others massacred and crucified and the wealth of the richest and most luxurious city of the world became the prey of an exasperated army. Its trade was inherited by its neighbor Sidon” (_op. cit._ p. 194). It is obvious that, at this period, bands of fugitives may well have taken refuge in traders’ ships and sought safety in flight to distant regions, where they might establish themselves and found colonies on the pattern of Tyre or of Carthage which, in ancient times had also been founded by fugitives and been named “the new city,” Karthakhadasha (Sayce). While the great historical events which marked the fourth century B.C. seem to have arrested the spread of Pythagorean philosophy, we find that, according to Grote, “in the time of Cicero, two centuries later, the orientalizing tendency, beginning to spread over the Grecian and Roman world, caused it to be again revived, with little or none of its scientific tendencies, but with more than its primitive religious and imaginative fanaticism.... It was taken up anew by the pagan world, along with the disfigured doctrines of Plato. Neo-Pythagorism, passing gradually into Neo-Platonism, outlasted other more positive and masculine systems of pagan philosophy, as the contemporary and revival of Christianity” (_op. cit._ IV, 398). Neo-Platonism reached its height under its chief Plotinus (A.D. 205-270) who sought to reconcile the Platonic and Aristotelian systems with Oriental theosophy. His pantheistic and eclectic school was the last product of the Greek philosophy.(156)

It is, at all events, remarkable, that the date tradition assigns to the presence of Kukulcan in Yucatan and the foundation of the quadruplicate state of Mayapan coincides with the dying out, in Europe, of pagan philosophy, one of the features of which had been the elaboration of ideal forms of government based on a numerical and cosmical scheme, the elements of which had apparently been spread by the Phœnicians. In Copan and Quirigua we find remnants of long-established, peaceable communities revealing no trace of war-like weapons, and the memorial stelæ of whose rulers stand above hidden cruciform vaults, while carved personages are represented as seated in the centre of ornate crosses. In Yucatan, through which land the foreign civilization seems to have reached the plateau of Mexico, there are significant traces of an ancient city, named Zilan, situated on the Atlantic coast; proofs that buildings of cosmical forms were erected; that the state of Mayapan was laid out on the familiar cosmical plan; that repeated migrations took place, and that, from time immemorial, a calendar, on the same numerical basis as that of Mexico, had been in use. The great state of Mayapan, where a remarkable stone cross was found at Cozumel by the Spaniards, is shown to have been figured as a circle within a circle, the whole divided into four parts by cross-lines. Here, as in Chiapas and Mexico, all divisions of government, population and time are organized on a numerical scheme representing the combination of 4×5=20 _i. e_. an entire finger and toe count, “a whole man,” with the 13 directions in space. The multiplication of 13 and 20 results in a unit of 260 which, as a cycle of time, represents the complete set of all harmonious combinations of man the miniature image of the living state, with the thirteen directions of space in the all-embracing Cosmos, composed of four primary elements. In consonance with this we find the existence of 20 (or 4×5) lords, whose names correspond to those of the 4 chief and 16 minor day-signs of the calendar, and of a lord by election, whose name signifies the thirteen divisions or parts, and who constituted a microcosmos, a Four in One. In regular rotation the 20 lords, consisting of 4 chief and 4×4=16=minor rulers fulfilled duties towards the supreme representative who resided in the capital, while they respectively lived in four provinces, the population of which was subdivided into four tribes each of the 20 divisions of the state being again divided into 13 parts.

In a cosmical state like this in which each individual not only felt himself to be a unit and a microcosmos, but also an indispensable part of a living organism, under the form of which the state was symbolized, its inhabitants, leading lives regulated by a calendar based on the phenomenon of circumpolar rotation, under a chief ruler entitled the “Four in One,” assisted by four sub-rulers, must indeed have felt that they “lived, moved and had their being” in the Teotl or Theos, imagined as the embodiment of the four elements. In this connection it is interesting to learn that “the animal” itself, of Plato, is considered by eminent authorities to have been the tetrad.

In Zuñi, where, at the present day, each individual feels himself identified with some part of the body of a quadruped, his clan totem, the conception of the state as “a living animal,” is an actual reality. Their pueblo moreover represents a 6+1=7, or a “seven in one,” the miniature counterpart of the far distant Ooraon village of Chota Nagpore and of the ancient archaic kingdoms of India, Persia, Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, etc. Anciently the Zuñis called themselves the Ashiwi, a name remarkably like that of the Ashvins, derived from the Akkadian ash=six.

I revert again here to the following landmarks, which may perhaps furnish a useful “working hypothesis” for future investigation. In Mexico the pyramids of Cholula and of Teotihuacan seem to render testimony of the, possibly consecutive, establishment of ideal states amongst tribes “capable of subjection” by Toltecas, or “Master-Builders,” who, according to their method, used the building of a great structure, requiring time and united labor, as a means of organizing a new community or colony. It may be that the period of their completion coincided with the establishment of the Calendar system, beginning with the number one.

In my Preliminary Note on the Ancient Mexican Calendar System (Stockholm 1894), I demonstrated how, by reconstructing the Calendar cycles, it was possible to determine exactly when the native system was adopted. According to my demonstration, which has now stood unchallenged for six years, a fresh year cycle began in 1507 A.D., with the year sign II Acatl and the day 2 cipactli. For a cycle to be associated with the number two it is obvious that it must have been preceded by a cycle ruled by number one, therefore it may be safely inferred that the cycle II Acatl that commenced in 1507 followed a cyclical period of 4×13=52×20=1840 years (p. 32). Accordingly the date when the Mexican system was instituted in the form which existed at the time of the Conquest, may be fixed as corresponding to the year 467 of our era.

Considering that the Calendar system was, however, but one part of the machinery of government, was inseparable from the organization of tribes, classes and individuals, and that its institution signified the foundation of a state, it is remarkable to ascertain that, but 137 years previously, Constantine, in A.D. 330, had instituted the empire of New Rome, on precisely the same numerical basis as that of the Mexican Calendar, and divided it into 4 parts or prefectures, each subdivided into 13, yielding a total of 52 prefectures. Moreover, as far back as the institution of the Kleisthenean democracy, the Greeks had been familiar with an extremely intricate and close union of calendar and government system, such as existed in Babylonia-Assyria and, as I have shown, in ancient Mexico.

It is certainly suggestive that the period of 137 years, which elapsed between the establishment of New Rome on a partly revived and partly amended or remodelled plan, and the foundation of the great democracy of ancient Mexico at the date inferred, is unparalleled in the history of mankind for religious persecutions, carried on in Egypt, Greece and Rome, following upon three centuries marked by the growth and spread of Christianity and the persecution of its followers, the destruction of Jerusalem and the persecution of the Jews. It was in A.D. 379 that Theodosius, the Greek, proclaimed Christianity the religion of his empire and instituted a relentless persecution of the Arians and followers of the ancient Egyptian religion.

Under Arcadius, Emperor of the East (A.D. 395), the Anthromorphites, who affirmed that God was of human form, destroyed the greater number of their opponents. Under Marcianus (A.D. 451), Silco invaded Egypt with his Nubian followers and the Council of Chalcedon condemned the Monophysite doctrine of Eutyches. Later, under Justinian (A.D. 527), the Monophysites separated from the Melchites and chose their own patriarch, being afterwards called Copts.

It is impossible to close one’s eyes to the fact that, during this period of persecution and massacre, imminent peril of death must have forced many a band of the priests and followers of the ancient Egyptian and other religions to seek safety in flight. The events which took place in Egypt between A.D. 379 and 451, culminating in Silco’s invasion, must unquestionably have been deeply felt by the descendants of the ancient Phœnician, Carthaginian and Grecian exiles, fugitives and mercenaries who, during countless centuries, had founded colonies along the Libyan coast, and pushed migration further westward along the coast line. Migrations from these regions would doubtless have resulted in the remarkable combination of archaic star, fire-drill and socket worship found in Yucatan and Mexico, existing alongside of a highly developed and perfected philosophical scheme of social organization identical, in principle, with that which, in the Old World, constituted an ideal which was the result of centuries of experience and active intellectual life.

The present investigation, in which I have collected more material than it has been possible to present in this publication, brings out facts tending to show that, originally, both hemispheres were peopled from the North, and that, in antiquity, at intervals, an extremely limited intercourse was kept up between the Old and New Worlds. The obvious fact that navigation must have been seriously impeded by the interregnum of Polaris, lasting for many centuries, would explain a prolonged isolation of America anterior to the Christian era. Whereas the equatorial currents facilitated the voyage to America, the same favorable conditions did not accompany navigation in the same latitudes in a reverse direction, and this suggests the probability that few who set out for “the hidden land,” ever returned to the port whence they sailed. Investigation seems to reveal that influences, emanating from the most ancient centres of Old World civilization, reached sundered regions of America at different times, and that they could have been carried there by a seafaring and building race such as the Minyans, the Magas, the Phœnicians or their descendants.

If such were the case it would be reasonable to expect that, in America, traces of words associated with the archaic set of ideas would be found, and the same method of writing. Let us now refer with prudent reservations as to the possibility of their being accidental, to the striking resemblances which undoubtedly exist between certain names for God, Heaven, North, Middle, etc., in the languages of the most ancient civilizations of the Old World and the Maya and Nahuatl. For convenient reference and without detailed comment, these words are presented as Appendix III.

Too much importance must not, of course, be given to these linguistic analogies; at the same time we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that these broken fragments of language, traceable to India, Babylonia-Assyria, Egypt and Greece, are found, in America, clinging tenaciously to a set of cosmical ideas and a scheme of organization identical in both hemispheres.

It has been surprising to me, for instance, to learn, by carefully collecting facts, that whereas Professor Sayce tells us that the supreme god of the Phœnicians was named Yeud or Ekhad, the supreme god of the Mexican Chichimecs (literally, Red race) was named Youalli-Ehecatl, which signifies, literally, night-air or wind. I likewise ascertained that, whereas the word yau or yu signifies the source or origin in Chinese, is linked to a character forming a cross and is homogeneous with Yaou Sing, a star in Ursa Major, described as “revolving,” the Mexican name for the pole-star god was Yaual or Yohual Tecuhtli, the lord of the circle or of the night.

Again there is a remarkable similarity between the Mexican yaualli=circle and the verb yoli or yuli=to resuscitate or vivify; the Chinese ui=to turn around, and the Scandinavian yul, yeul or yol = wheel, also the festival of the winter solstice, when nature seemed to resuscitate. Whereas the significance of the above Mexican, Chinese and Scandinavian names, is clear, no meaning has, to my knowledge, been attached to the Semitic name for the supreme god, which, as Professor Sayce informs us, was pronounced Yahu or Yaho or Yahve (see Appendix, list I).

Other striking resemblances are found between the names for handicraftsman and master-builder in widely distant countries. Thus, in Phrygia, we have the Daktuloi, the builders who erected monuments decorated with cross-symbols arranged so as to form a geometrical design, such as represented in fig. 72, 2. In Oaxaca the Toltecatl=builders and handicraftsmen, erected the walled temple and cruciform structures at Mitla, and decorated them with geometrical designs.

Reliable authorities teach us that “the Hittites were the northern minyan or menyan=measurers, a building race” (Hewitt); that Aha-Mena, the first historical ruler of Egypt, was a builder; that the name of Amun, the god of the Ammonites, signified “the builder.” Dictionaries reveal that, in America, Maya-speaking people designated a master builder or handicraftsman as ah-men, or menyah which, in Nahuatl, became amanteca. In Yucatan the name for North was Aman or Xaman; the building race of civilizers seems to have been associated with that region, which the Arabians named Shamaliyy. In the Babylonian-Assyrian Shamash, the Sanscrit Brahman and the Egyptian Amen-ra, we seem to have but different forms of the same word, which recurs in the Akkadian-Sumerian Sama, or an=the revolving heaven (see Appendix, list).

It is to philologists that I refer the question whether the resemblances, in sound and meaning, of certain words I have found associated, in widely sundered countries, with the universal cosmical set of ideas, are merely accidental or whether they furnish indication of a remote common origin or of contact at a later period. It will interest me particularly to learn their opinion as to the oldest forms of the words; and whether there is really no clue to the meaning of the Hebrew Yahu and the Phœnician Yeud-Ekhad. One is tempted to inquire whether the Chichimecan Youalli-Ehecatl was not the same and whether this and other analogies do not constitute evidence tending to establish that Mexico was a Phœnician colony in which during centuries of isolation the archaic forms and meanings of Phœnician words were preserved.

It is my hope that these lists will be carefully examined and explained by competent authorities, to whose judgment they are respectfully submitted. Whether they will be accounted for in one way or another, these lists will be found to establish the existence of striking resemblances which, by themselves, might not carry weight, but which unquestionably gain in significance when found in conjunction with cosmical conceptions, social organization, forms of architecture and cross-symbolism, which appear universal.

A few words here concerning the undoubted general resemblances that exist between the Chinese and Japanese, and Central American methods of organization—resemblances which even extend to certain words directly traceable to Western Asiatic influence in the case of the Eastern Asiatic civilizations. The existence of marked differences between the Chinese and Maya-Mexican numerical systems and determination of elements, appears to exclude the possibility that dominating Asiatic influences could have reached America _via_ China and Japan after the still existing, crystallized forms of government and calendar had been established in the latter countries. As far as I can judge, the great antiquity attributed, by Chinese historians, to the establishment of the governmental and cyclical schemes, still in use, appears extremely doubtful. Referring the question to Sinologists, I venture to ask whether it does not seem probable that the present Chinese scheme dates from the lifetime of Lao-tze, in the sixth century B.C., a period marked, as I have pointed out, by the growth of Ionian philosophy, one feature of which was the invention of numerical schemes applied to “divine polities” and ideal forms of government. Future investigation may, perhaps, prove that “the powerful mental ferment” alluded to by Huxley, as spreading between the eighth and ninth centuries B.C., over the whole of the area comprised between the Ægean and North Hindustan, was caused by the growth and diffusion of plans of ideal states, which would naturally suggest and lead to the formation of bands of enthusiasts, who would set out in search of districts where they could carry out their principles and ideals.

Personally, I am strongly inclined to assign the origin of the Chinese and the Mexican schemes, which are identical in principle, to the same source, and to believe that they were carried in opposite directions, at different periods, by seafarers and colonists, animated by the same purpose. Favorably established in distant regions, both grew and flourished during centuries, constituting analogous examples of an immense, submissive, native population living under a highly perfected, artificial, numerical, scheme of religious government, preserved intact and enforced by a ruling caste, who possessed superior knowledge and claimed divine descent.

It is, of course, to Chinese and Japanese scholars and to archaeologists, some of whom constitute the able staff of the Jesup Expedition, who are investigating the question of Asiatic contact, that I look for further information and enlightenment as to prehistoric contact between China and America.(157)

The foregoing investigation seems to have shown that in all countries alike, at one period or other, the cross-symbol or swastika expressed absolutely the same meaning. Primarily the record of a year, which suggested the division of the heaven into four parts, it had come to signify the establishment of communal life on a basis of fixed law, order and harmony. Like the number four itself which, in Pythagorean philosophy, is identified with wisdom and justice “because it is the first square number, the product of equals,” the cruciform symbols have been the emblems of justice, equality and brotherhood.

From the dawn of human history, the cross, therefore, appears to have expressed a plan as simple as it was noble and great, which consisted in peaceably uniting men, on principles of good-will, peace, equity, equality and mutual help, of instituting and organizing communal life, and of regulating its activity in accord with the immutable laws which govern the movements of celestial bodies, causing the circumpolar constellations to assume opposite positions, forming the sign of the cross, and marking seasons, days and years, all testifying to the existence of a single, all-ruling, all-pervading, stable and eternal central power, who thus controlled not only the heavens but, by a human representative, the earthly kingdom, laid out on the celestial plan.

Considering that no less an authority than St. Augustine has asserted “that which is now called the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and in fact was with the human race from the beginning,” it is permissible to ask whether the above scheme does not strikingly substantiate his dictum, afford a deep view under the surface of accumulated dogma and a perception of the mighty principle that has been at work from the beginning of all things and was understood by many at that time when “the people that sat in darkness saw great light, and to them which sat in the region and shadow of death light sprang up.”... “From that time Jesus began to preach and say, ‘Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand’ ” (Matthew IV, 16, 17). Adopting the cross as the emblem of his earthly mission he said: “If any man will come after me, let him take up his cross and follow me.” By the words: “I bear in my body the mark of the Lord Jesus,” St. Paul designates the recognized “mark” to have been the quadruplicate cross of the Saviour, who charged his apostles to preach, saying: “the kingdom of heaven is at hand” and promised them that “ye which have followed me in the regeneration, when the Son of Man shall sit in the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Matthew XIX, 28). The mother of Zebedee’s children came unto him asking that her sons might sit “the one on thy right hand and the other on thy left, in thy kingdom” (Matthew XX, 20). Repeatedly, the Teacher, referring to children, said “of such is the kingdom of heaven,” or “Except ye be converted and become as little children ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” St. Paul and his followers were designated as “those that have turned the world upside down ... doing contrary to the decrees of Cæsar, saying that there is another king, one Jesus” (Acts XVII, 6 and 7).

It is well known that the early Christian church was persecuted because, from the first, it preached a total regeneration of human society and its reëstablishment of a basis of peace and good-will, social equality, absolute justice, mutual aid, respect and sympathy, unselfish, disinterested subservience of the individual to the interest of the community.

It was for the sublime principle of a religious democracy and the regeneration of human society that, in an age of tyranny, oppression and bloodshed, the early Christian martyrs laid down their lives. The foundations of religious orders were as many attempts to realize the Christian ideal, and to this day the Roman Catholic Church, whose clergy and religious orders unquestionably afford a splendid living example of devotion to a common cause, self-abnegation, obedience and humility, clings to the ideal of a state in which temporal power is wielded by a hierarchy raised to rulership from all ranks, merely by virtue of personal, moral and intellectual qualities. Throughout the Christian church the ideal of religious democracy prevails. Each day it is prayed for in the words “Thy kingdom come,” by those taught to look forward to the promise of the time when “former things are passed away and a holy Jerusalem shall descend out of heaven from God, lying four-square, with twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels and names written thereon which are the names of the twelve tribes of the children of Israel ... and the wall of the city had twelve foundations and in them the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb,.... And I saw no temple therein, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple in it ... but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it.... And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the midst of the street of it and on either side of the river was there a tree of life, which bore twelve manner of fruits and yielded her fruit every month ...” (Revelation, chaps. XXI and XXII).