which is formed of a cone with two arms extending, one each side, and an oval placed immediately above them, has been denominated by the Egyptologists cruz-ansata. It is not of Egyptian origin. It has its prototype in the conoidal pillar, surmounted by a sphere, used by the Babylonians as symbol of life and death; death being but the beginning or nursery of life. This emblem was only a reminiscence of the yaxche, the sacred tree of the Mayas, under the roots of which, the natives assert, is always to be found a source of pure cold water. The trunk of the yaxche, from the foot to the top, forms a perfect cone from which the main branches shoot in an horizontal direction. Its leafy top, seen from a distance, presents the appearance of a half sphere of verdure. The cone, the tau and the cruz-ansata were for those initiated to the mysteries the same symbol, emblematical of Deity, of the life to come, of the dual powers, of fertility. The Mayas and other peoples of Central America, in the sculptures or paintings, always represented their sacred trees with two branches shooting horizontally from the top of the trunk, thus presenting the appearance of a cross or tau.
From a Mexican MS. in British Museum. (Add. MS. b. m. 9789.)
In straying apparently so far from the main object of these pages, and tracing to their true origin the primitive traditions of mankind and many of the religious symbols common to all the civilized nations of antiquity, by dispelling the mists that have accumulated around them in the long vista of ages, my aim has been to show that they all emanated from one and the same source, and that this source was the country of Mayax, in the "Lands of the West." Ancient sacred mysteries, have been celebrated in the temples of Egypt, Chaldea, and India, from ages so remote that it is no longer known by whom or where they were first instituted. Herodotus tells us that the daughters of Danaus instituted the Thesmophoria in honor of the goddess Ceres, in imitation of the mysteries celebrated in Egypt in honor of Isis, and taught them to the Pelasgic women. That Eumolpus, king of Eleusis, instituted in his own country the Eleusinian mysteries on his return from Egypt, where he had been initiated by the priests as Orpheus who founded in Thracia those that bear his name; but who taught the rites of initiation, the use of the symbols and their meaning, to the Hierophants of Egypt, to the magi of Chaldea, to the Gymnosophists of India?
The mode of initiation, the use of the same symbols, with an identical signification ascribed to them, by peoples living so far apart whose customs and manners were so unlike, whose religion, so far at least as external practices were concerned, differed so widely, show that these mysteries originated with one people, and were carried to and promulgated among the others. As we do not find it mentioned anywhere that they originated either with the Egyptians, Chaldees, or Hindoos, and we have seen that their primitive traditions have been derived from the history of the early rulers of Mayax, is it not natural that we should look for the institution of the mysteries among the Mayas, since we find the same mysterious symbols, used by the initiates in all the other countries, carved on the walls of the temples of their gods, and the palaces of their kings? Their history may afford the clue to the original meaning of said symbols, as their language has given us the true signification of the words used by the celebrating priest to dismiss the initiates in the Eleusinian mysteries, or by the Brahmins at the end of their religious ceremonies, and as it has revealed the so long hidden mystery of the mystical Tau.
That sacred mysteries were celebrated from times immemorial in the temples of Mayax, Xibalba, Nachan (Palenque of to-day), Copan and other places of Central America there can be no doubt, since besides the symbols sculptured on the walls of the temples and palaces, in two distinct instances, we see the rites and the trials of initiation described in the Popol-Vuh; and as these rites and trials were identical with those to which the applicants to initiation in the mysteries of Egypt, Greece, Chaldea and India were subjected, we are justified in seeking in Mayax for the causes that may have induced the founders of the sacred mysteries to select the odd numbers 3, 5, and 7, instead of the even 2, 4, and 6 for mystic numbers.
The symbolization of number 3 may possibly be accounted for in two different ways. One is suggested by the sceptre of Poseidon, that Plato says was the first king of Atlantis, and is represented by the Greek mythologists as being a son of Kronos; his three-pronged trident being an allusion to the three great islands that formed his kingdom, North and South America and Atlan, that now lies buried under the waves of the Atlantic ocean. The emblem
placed in the hands of Vul the god of the atmosphere in the Chaldean mythology, found also in those of the Hindoo gods, may likewise represent the three worlds or great regions that the Egyptian and Maya hierogrammatists designed by the character