ANCIENT AMERICA: by an Archaeologist
LIKE an oasis in a desert, like a moment of silence and a sound of distant bells amid a din of discordant sounds, comes a brief note on prehistoric America in the midst of a monthly review devoted to a résumé of the Babel of modern thought. Bewildered with foolish spite of party politics, disgusted with lucubrations on "The Coming Christ," and a new Elixir of Life discovered in Africa, the reader achieves a moment of silence and inward joy inspired by this paragraph on an ancient City of the Sun, with its illustrations of the sublime architecture and sculpture of that epoch. These pictures inspire a reverence, similar in nature, if different in quality, to that which the ancient classical architecture and statues inspire; it is more akin to that inspired by ancient Egypt. It speaks of a spirit, so different from any that pervades our modern life, yet arousing in the soul a response as of something familiar—familiar but very deep and ancient.
We read that in the Bulletin of the Pan-American Union a writer describes Chichén Itzá. The Itzás were a tribe of the Mayas, whose civilization reached a height equaled by no other people of the Western hemisphere. They excelled in architecture, sculpture, printing, and astronomy. The pyramid on which the temple stands is 195 feet long on each side at the base and covers nearly an acre. It is made of nine terraces of faced masonry. Up the center of each of its four sides rises a stairway thirty-seven feet wide. A picture of a temple façade, in rectangular massive style like that of Egypt and covered with elaborate symbolic carving, while up from the roof rise tropical plants that have grown there, is labeled, "View of an Ancient Monastery" (so-called). The impression it gives is anything but that given by the idea of a monastery. Its spirit is alien to that of any spirit familiar to the times in which monasteries have prevailed.
It is awe-inspiring to think that this continent of America has behind it such a past, more ancient than Egypt, as great and perhaps greater. The Red Men must, many of them at least, be the remote descendants of this past.
There is something about their physiognomy that reminds us of the faces on the ancient pottery and carving; a broad-featured bronzed type—what one might call a solar type. Peoples like the Zuñis and Moquis have mysteries, into which but few white men have even partially penetrated; which shows they are the remnants of a once greater race, a part of whose knowledge they preserve in memory.
This subject of ancient America has not yet received from archaeologists the attention it deserves. Nevertheless there are explorers who study in this field, and the results of their researches are frequently written up for the Sunday editions. In this way the public gets acquainted with the subject independently of academical instruction. Such periodicals as the National Geographical Magazine and Records of the Past often give beautiful illustrated accounts of the ruins.
Thus we read that Dr. Max Uhle, director of the University of California's archaeological work in Peru, has discovered that a great civilization flourished at least 2000 years before the Incas, and that a highly cultured race was in existence in Peru before the Trojan war.
In Guerrero, Mexico, in a region south of the Balsas River, over an area of fifty square miles, there are remains of thousands of prehistoric dwellings and scores of pyramids. The sculptured tablets bear the usual mystic geometrical symbols of the ancient Science of Life.
A mining engineer, Mr. A. Lafave, is reported to have discovered in Arizona a prehistoric city older than Babylon or Nineveh, but nevertheless the center of a civilization very highly advanced. Great architectural skill is shown, and the symbol of what is called a sun-god was found.
The British Museum recently acquired the collection of pottery and other relics discovered by Mr. Hubert Myring in the Chimcana Valley of Peru and stated by him to be at the lowest estimate 7000 years old. Yet this pottery shows the highest possible degree of skill, while the subjects represented prove that the artists had the materials of a highly cultured and complex civilization to draw upon.
In Ecuador Dr. Marshall H. Saville of Columbia University discovered many tombs, and the objects collected show that the district was densely populated by a highly civilized people.
Writing from New Orleans, May 13, Charles F. Lummis of Los Angeles records his excavations at Quiriguá, Guatemala. A trackless jungle had to be cleared, and numerous monuments of heroic size were found; one was twenty-six feet above ground and sixteen feet below and weighed about 140,000 pounds. The greatest discovery was a palace which must have been magnificent. It was surrounded by columns and the frieze was covered with carved heads.
The ruined temples of Palenque, Uxmal, Chichén Itzá, etc., have often been described. The mysterious hieroglyphics of the Mayas have yet to be deciphered; and when they are we shall have another epoch-making revelation like that following the deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphics by Champollion.
Dr. Heath, a writer on Peruvian Antiquities, gives an account of the incredible size and quantity of the ruins, from which the following is selected. (See Kansas City Review of Science and Industry, Nov. 1878)
The coast of Peru extends from Tumbez to the river Loa, a distance of 1233 miles. Scattered over this whole extent there are thousands of ruins ... while nearly every hill and spire of the mountains have upon them or about them some relic of the past; and in every ravine, from the coast to the central plateau, there are ruins of walls, cities, fortresses, burial vaults, and miles and miles of terraces and water-courses.... Of granite, porphyritic lime and silicated sandstone, these massive colossal cyclopean structures have resisted the disintegration of time, geological transformations, earthquakes, and the sacrilegious destructive hand of the warrior and treasure-seeker. The masonry composing these walls, temples, houses, towers, fortresses, or sepulchres, is uncemented, held in place by the incline of the walls from the perpendicular, and by the adaptation of each stone to the place designed for it, the stones having from six to many sides, each dressed and smoothed to fit another or others with such exactness that the blade of a small penknife cannot be inserted in any of the seams thus formed.... These stones ... vary from one-half cubic foot to 1500 cubic feet of solid contents, and if in the many many millions of stones you could find one that would fit in the place of another, it would be purely accidental.
Speaking of the terraces, he says:
Estimating five hundred ravines in the 1200 miles of Peru, and ten miles of terraces of fifty tiers to each ravine, which would only be five miles of twenty-five tiers to each side, we have 250,000 miles of stone wall, averaging three to four feet high—enough to encircle this globe ten times.
The mention of hieroglyphs yet undeciphered, which may any day prove the key to a new revelation of history, receives apposite illustration in an article in the Los Angeles Times (Sunday magazine edition) for May 14. This describes the discovery of several cylinders, resembling the clay cylinders of Babylonian civilization, which have been deciphered; and it is thought that these may prove the Rosetta stone of American Egypt. They are about three inches long by an inch and a half in diameter, hollow, the walls a quarter of an inch thick. The clay has turned to stone, thus being preserved, and the inscriptions repeat hieroglyphs known to correspond to familiar phrases.
The account in which this occurs is that of a discovery made by Prof. William Niven, a field archaeologist of Mexico City; and his statements as to the age and value of his finds are confirmed by Dr. Edward E. Seler, head of the National School of Archaeology of the Republic of Mexico. The latter authority declares the ruins and relics to be the evidences of a civilization new to archaeology, though bearing some resemblance to the ruins of the Tigris and Euphrates. This center of civilization lies about forty minutes' ride from Mexico City, under the suburb of Azcapotzalco.
It is eighteen feet beneath the surface, and from it have been produced pottery of a type different from any hitherto found in Mexico, an entire goldsmith's outfit with patterns and molds for the making of ornaments of gold and silver, pendants and rings and beads of jade, copper knives which cut like steel, skulls containing teeth whose cavities are filled with cement and turquoise, the cylinders just mentioned, and many other objects.
These things were found in an immense basin containing the ruins of a city some ten miles long by three or four wide. Its houses were of laid stone, cemented with a white cement, unlike the black cement of Mitla or the gray composition of Palenque. The rooms were of uniform height—nine feet; the floors of tile—or, rather, of small squares of cement, colored and traced in beautiful patterns; the walls ornamented with frescoes and friezes showing a remarkable development of the color art. Paints used on these buildings, though evidently of vegetable composition and more than 3000 years old, are fresh and do not fade when exposed to light.
The skulls and arrowheads found in the soil above are similar to those found in other parts, and relate to peoples having no connexion with the occupants of this ancient city. Does not this prove that so-called "primitive man" was merely odd tribes of lowly nomads or settlers, belonging to fallen remnants of earlier civilizations; whereas many anthropologists seem to try to make out that they represent an earlier stage in evolution? This ancient city flourished long before the owners of the skulls and arrow-heads. All through the period of Aztec civilization it lay buried and unsuspected by the Aztecs.
Lomaland Photo. and Engraving Dept.
PYRAMID, AND BUILDING COMMONLY CALLED "THE CASTLE"—CHICHÉN ITZÁ, YUCATAN
(Photograph by A. P. Maudslay)
ANOTHER VIEW OF CHICHÉN ITZÁ
THE SO-CALLED "TEMPLE OF THE TIGERS," AND "THE CASTLE"
PORTION OF THE EASTERN FAÇADE
OF THE SO-CALLED "GOVERNOR'S HOUSE," UXMAL, YUCATAN
Lomaland Photo. and Engraving Dept.
PANORAMIC VIEW OF SAN JUAN TEOTIHUACÁN, TAKEN FROM THE NORTH
(Sketched by W. H. Holmes)
A. Pyramid of the Moon. B. Pyramid of the Sun. C. The Path of the Dead.
FF. San Juan River. G. Town of San Juan.
The great age of this civilization is amply proved by the fact that the city was buried under the wash of a great river that came down from the mountains. Geological considerations enable us to fix the date of that river back beyond other changes that have taken place in the ground since. Hence the city must be older still. And even before this flood the city was probably already abandoned—through pestilence, war, or some such cause. It was quite by accident that it was found; the exploring party chanced to step into a cave-in. It lies beneath the thick and long-cultivated residual soil, and consequently there may be an indefinite number of such cities almost anywhere.
Among objects found was a dental cast of a human mouth.
The more we discover, the more do we confirm the teaching that civilization is not of recent growth. The older the civilization, the more advanced—this seems to be the rule everywhere. Clearly the arts of modern civilization have been known before and we are but rediscoverers of them.
We might go on quoting indefinitely, but must pass on to comment. It is very clear that these mighty builders, whose achievements have never since been equaled or even approached by any race in any part of the world were no barbarians or "primitive men." And we have to remember that it is not only from America that such archaeological accounts come, but from Asia, Africa, Europe, New Zealand—practically everywhere. And always one tale is the same—that of ancient civilizations and their prowess. Only recently the discoveries in Crete have altered all our views of Greek history by showing the existence of a great and widespread civilization in the Aegean, far preceding that of Greece.
And side by side with all this we find the extraordinary fact that many anthropologists are still deeply engaged in their attempts to establish a gradual ascent of man from ape ancestors. Ignoring these evidences, they are diligently seeking and collecting the bones of unburied wanderers. But even these bones do not bear out the theory, for the older bones are no more ape-like than the later ones. Men exist on earth today, even among civilized peoples, as backward in type as these bones. What is quite certain is that man degenerates as well as evolves. Culture moves in waves, having ebbs and flows. The so-called aboriginal peoples are the remote and degenerated descendants of civilizations.
But what is the real import of these discoveries? Are they mere subjects of curiosity and wonder? No; the interest lies in what they imply. For if there is to be any coherence in our views, we must make the rest of our ideas agree with our enlarged view of past history. And the conventional views of man and his life do not thus agree; they are too insignificant, and out of tune with increasing knowledge.
THE PARABLE OF THE CRUCIFIXION:
by Cranstone Woodhead
FOR nearly two thousand years the story of the Crucifixion which we find in the four Gospels of the New Testament has appealed in various ways to the deepest and most sacred feelings of the human heart. Yet it may possibly be questioned whether its history and deeper meaning have been entirely comprehended by more than a very small fraction of those who have fashioned the framework of their lives and aspirations upon the tragic story.
Before attempting the explanation which modern enlightenment and research have thrown upon this deeper meaning, it may be useful to consider what we really know of the origin of the gospels themselves; for the investigations of the last half century or so, have thrown much light upon this question.
It is now the opinion of most well-informed biblical critics, that the gospels, as we now know them, did not exist until about two centuries after the beginning of the Christian era. They are merely different editions of the manuscripts containing the sayings and teachings of the Nazarene initiate, which were handed round and copied by his disciples after his death, with additions and interpolations added by later writers.
It would not be profitable, nor have we time within the compass of this paper, to sketch even in outlines, the almost endless arguments which have been educed in the elucidation of the questions involved. Only a vast library could contain all the books which have been written upon the history of the gospels. Nearly all of them were written in days when the psychological influence of the ecclesiasticism of the middle ages still enthralled the judgment of even the most learned. But as time passes on, and the vast literary and archaeological treasures of the Eastern home of the gospels become more widely known, several points stand out more and more clearly from the haze of controversy and dogmatic prejudice.
For instance, it is now well known that the gospel of Matthew is but a later and much-changed edition in Greek, of the original gospel of the Hebrews (a work constantly referred to by early Christian writers), which is now almost entirely lost, only a few fragments remaining. But none of the numerous references to it lead us to suppose that it contained anything more than a collection of the logia or especial "sayings" of the Master whom they revered and followed.
The gospel of Luke, on the other hand, was originally the gospel used by Marcion the Gnostic, derived from similar sources; and this gospel also suffered the same kind of mutilation and addition at the hands of the patristic fathers.
The early Christian writers of the first two centuries, such as Papias and his contemporaries, do not appear to have been aware of the existence of the gospels which have come down to us in the present canon of the New Testament. Their quotations from what they call the "scriptures," are almost entirely from the books of the Old Testament. And when they quote the sayings of their Nazarene Master, they do it in such a way as to show that they reverenced them as ethical precepts to be followed, each man for himself, as counsels of perfection. Then the words used in these quotations vary considerably from those of our present gospels, and some of the quotations most often used, are not to be found in any of the four. They are evidently not drawn from that source. Nor is there any word or sign in these early Christian writers that they regarded their Teacher other than as a great philosopher. We find no reference whatever to the Man-God whom later dogmatism represented as a sacrifice for the sins of Humanity.
It is therefore evident that before these earlier books were incorporated into our present gospels, a mystical story was superadded containing an account of his supposed death upon the cross. This story was perfectly well understood by its writers to have an entirely different meaning to that which has been given to it in later centuries. It was a superb piece of poetic imagery derived partly from the traditions of the ancient Mysteries, then just fading away into oblivion, and partly from the teaching of the apostle Thomas, who, on his return from India, had brought home the mystical parable of the deified Krishna.[4]
[4] Isis Unveiled, Vol. II, p. 539.
The contemporary history of the Christian era has been so beclouded by the benumbing effect of misconceptions that it is exceedingly difficult to bring into play a dispassionate judgment of such data as are left to us. But there is no doubt that the gospels cannot be trusted as regards historical detail. The more reliable accounts show, however, that Jesus was condemned to death by the Jewish Sanhedrim after he had wandered about in Judaea for many years as a teacher. One definite tradition says that when about sixty years of age, he was stoned to death, and his body was hung upon a tree.
Had it not been for the mad fanaticism which in the early centuries, time and again, destroyed so much of the priceless literature of the past, all this would doubtless be widely known. All we can do now, therefore, is to rise above the shadows which have obscured our vision for so many centuries, and in reading for ourselves the true story of the crucifixion, find therein a message which is of the deepest importance for man's real salvation. For the crucifixion is a parable and simile of the supreme mystery of evolution, the goal towards which every human soul is progressing in the course of its spiritual development.
The student who has realized the teachings of Theosophy that man is a divine soul inhabiting a material body, on a dual line of evolution for the perfection of both, knows well the opposing nature of the forces continually at work within his inner consciousness. He knows that in his real Self, he is not the body in which he finds himself; and that the task before him is the conquest and mastery of the lower animal nature by the aid of the God within him, which is, indeed, that real Self, when he can so realize the fact so as to assume his own potential godhood.
Such has been the teaching of the Wisdom-Religion of Humanity for countless ages, and such has been the doctrine of all the divine Teachers whose wisdom has come down to us in the sacred books of the world. Of these Teachers and Sages, Jesus was one of the illustrious.
Those who have studied the religions of ancient times, the myths and allegories of all nations, especially in the poetic East from whence all historical religions have sprung, have found that there are countless records of men who have so far advanced on the line of interior enlightenment and evolution, that they have solved the supreme mystery of their own inner godhood, and have thenceforward devoted themselves to the help and enlightenment of souls less advanced in the scale of spiritual progress. There have been such men in all ages of the world, men who have accomplished the union with their own Higher Selves, and such men there are today, although little known to the world at large.
The contest which thus takes place within the human heart, has been symbolized in the imagery of every ancient civilization. The conquest of the dragon by St. Michael, of the python by Apollo, and the labors of Hercules to cleanse the Augean stable, are examples of these ancient allegories. Life after life, again and again, we slowly evolve towards the great goal. And though the end may be far away, for the great mass of humanity, yet there are ages in advance of us, as there have been ages in the past, and the Law must be fulfilled.
Thus the provision of the divine law of evolution is, that all have the potentiality of godhood. Yet some are in advance of the rest. There are gradations. Still, the unity of the one divinity in its countless aspects is preserved by the law of love and helpfulness to one another. Each man becomes his brother's keeper, and the more he realizes this, the nearer he is to his own divinity.
It is now well known that the symbolism of the crucifixion is many thousands of years older than the days of Jesus. It was created by some of the divine sages of prehistoric times to represent a great ideal, and to serve as a permanent metaphor for a great event which must come sooner or later in the history of every seeker for divine truth. This has been expressed by a modern writer as follows.
To put on armor and go forth to war, taking the chances of death in the hurry of the fight is an easy thing; to stand still amid the jangle of the world, to preserve stillness amid the turmoil of the body, to hold silence amid the thousand cries of the senses and desires, and then, stripped of all armor and without hurry or excitement, take the deadly serpent of self and kill it, is no easy thing. Yet that is what has to be done.
It will be evident that in these days, comparatively few attain the great enlightenment which follows this supreme victory. Yet, on our way thither, and in the experiences which follow the repeated conquests which must precede it, we may realize, that the voice of conscience, when obeyed, will gradually grow into intuition, and that intuition in its final victory becomes enlightenment. Thus self-denial, which is only another name for self-conquest, is transmuted from a dismal task into a joyful duty performed as a sacrifice to the God within.
Thus we see that the symbolism of the crucifixion is that of the conquest of the lower passional material self. Fixed upon the cross of matter the body is pierced by the spear of the spiritual will, and the soul is freed from the tyranny of the lower human self. Thenceforth, whether in or out of a body, it lives not for self but for humanity.
Such was the well-understood symbolism of the crucifixion in ancient times. It was the supreme ceremonial enacted in the divine Mysteries of Ancient Egypt, India, and Greece. And the reason why we do not now hear more about it, is that in recent centuries, these ancient teachings have been forgotten in the rush and strain of nations armed to the teeth, and in the allurements of material prosperity.
In the ignorance and darkness which followed the death of the ancient Mysteries, the beautiful ancient symbolism of the Crucifixion was soon forgotten. It was very early degraded into a materialistic dogma which has come down to our own times. The earliest Christians knew nothing of the crucifixion as now taught in the churches. It is entirely absent from their writings. All they had were manuscripts containing the words of their Master, and it was not till long afterwards that this poetic symbol was added to the early versions.
Of the esoteric teachings of Jesus, one version alone has come down to later times, the Pistis-Sophia, of the Gnostics; and it is to be noted that therein, the teachings of Jesus are distinctly stated to have been given for years after his crucifixion, implying thereby his initiation into the mysteries of his own divinity.