The story of this mysterious city was told to Stephens by a Spanish Padre, in 1838-9. The priest swore to him that he had seen it with his own eyes, and gave Stephens the following details, which the traveller firmly believed to be true. “The Padre of the little village near the ruins of Santa Cruz del Quichè, had heard of the unknown city at the village of Chajul.... He was then young, and climbed with much labor to the naked summit of the topmost ridge of the sierra of the Cordillera. When arrived at a height of ten or twelve thousand feet, he looked over an immense plain extending to Yucatan and the Gulf of Mexico, and saw, at a great distance, a large city spread over a great space, and with turrets white and glittering in the sun. Tradition says that no white man has ever reached this city; that the inhabitants speak the Maya language, know that strangers have conquered their whole land, and murder any white man who attempts to enter their territory.... They have no coin; no horses, cattle, mules, or other domestic animals except fowls, and the cocks they keep underground to prevent their crowing being heard.”
Nearly the same was given us personally about twenty years ago, by an old native priest, whom we met in Peru, and with whom we happened to have business relations. He had passed all his life vainly trying to conceal his hatred toward the conquerors—“brigands,” he termed them; and, as he confessed, kept friends with them and the Catholic religion for the sake of his people, but he was as truly a sun-worshipper in his heart as ever he was. He had travelled in his capacity of a converted native missionary, and had been at Santa Cruz and, as he solemnly affirmed, had been also to see some of his people by a “subterranean passage” leading into the mysterious city. We believe his account; for a man who is about to die, will rarely stop to invent idle stories; and this one we have found corroborated in Stephen’s Travels. Besides, we know of two other cities utterly unknown to European travellers; not that the inhabitants particularly desire to hide themselves; for people from Buddhistic countries come occasionally to visit them. But their towns are not set down on the European or Asiatic maps; and, on account of the too zealous and enterprising Christian missionaries, and perhaps for more mysterious reasons of their own, the few natives of other countries who are aware of the existence of these two cities never mention them. Nature has provided strange nooks and hiding-places for her favorites; and unfortunately it is but far away from so-called civilized countries that man is free to worship the Deity in the way that his fathers did.
Even the erudite and sober Max Müller is somehow unable to get rid of coincidences. To him they come in the shape of the most unexpected discoveries. These Mexicans, for instance, whose obscure origin, according to the laws of probability, has no connection with the Aryans of India, nevertheless, like the Hindus, represent an eclipse of the moon as “the moon being devoured by a dragon.”[816] And though Professor Müller admits that an historical intercourse between the two people was suspected by Alexander von Humboldt, and he himself considers it possible, still the occurrence of such a fact he adds, “need not be the result of any historical intercourse. As we have stated above, the origin of the aborigines of America is a very vexed question for those interested in tracing out the affiliation and migrations of peoples.” Notwithstanding the labor of Brasseur de Bourbourg, and his elaborate translation of the famous Popol-Vuh, alleged to be written by Ixtlilxochitl, after weighing its contents, the antiquarian remains as much in the dark as ever. We have read the Popol-Vuh in its original translation, and the review of the same by Max Müller, and out of the former find shining a light of such brightness, that it is no wonder that the matter-of-fact, skeptical scientists should be blinded by it. But so far as an author can be judged by his writings, Professor Max Müller is no unfair skeptic; and, moreover, very little of importance escapes his attention. How is it then that a man of such immense and rare erudition, accustomed as he is to embrace at one eagle glance the traditions, religious customs, and superstitions of a people, detecting the slightest similarity, and taking in the smallest details, failed to give any importance or perhaps even suspect what the humble author of the present volume, who has neither scientific training nor erudition, to any extent, apprehended at first view? Fallacious and unwarranted as to many may seem this remark, it appears to us that science loses more than she gains by neglecting the ancient and even mediæval esoteric literature, or rather what remains of it. To one who devotes himself to such study many a coincidence is transformed into a natural result of demonstrable antecedent causes. We think we can see how it is that Professor Müller confesses that “now and then ... one imagines one sees certain periods and landmarks, but in the next page all is chaos again.”[817] May it not be barely possible that this chaos is intensified by the fact that most of the scientists, directing the whole of their attention to history, skip that which they treat as “vague, contradictory, miraculous, absurd.” Notwithstanding the feeling that there was “a groundwork of noble conceptions which has been covered and distorted by an aftergrowth of fantastic nonsense,” Professor Müller cannot help comparing this nonsense to the tales of the Arabian Nights.
Far be from us the ridiculous pretension of criticising a scientist so worthy of admiration for his learning as Max Müller. But we cannot help saying that even among the fantastic nonsense of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments anything would be worthy of attention, if it should help toward the evolving of some historical truth. Homer’s Odyssey surpasses in fantastic nonsense all the tales of the Arabian Nights combined; and notwithstanding that, many of his myths are now proved to be something else besides the creation of the old poet’s fancy. The Læstrygonians, who devoured the companions of Ulysses, are traced to the huge cannibal[818] race, said in primitive days to inhabit the caves of Norway. Geology verified through her discoveries some of the assertions of Homer, supposed for so many ages to have been but poetical hallucinations. The perpetual daylight enjoyed by this race of Læstrygonians indicates that they were inhabitants of the North Cape, where, during the whole summer, there is perpetual daylight. The Norwegian fiords are perfectly described by Homer in his Odyssey, x. 110; and the gigantic stature of the Læstrygonians is demonstrated by human bones of unusual size found in caves situated near this region, and which the geologists suppose to have belonged to a race extinct long before the Aryan immigration. Charybdis, as we have seen, has been recognized in the maëlstrom; and the Wandering Rocks[819] in the enormous icebergs of the Arctic seas.
If the consecutive attempts at the creation of man described in the Quichè Cosmogony suggests no comparison with some Apocrypha, with the Jewish sacred books, and the kabalistic theories of creation, it is indeed strange. Even the Book of Jasher, condemned as a gross forgery of the twelfth century, may furnish more than one clew to trace a relation between the population of Ur of the Kasdeans, where Magism flourished before the days of Abraham, and those of Central and North America. The divine beings, “brought down to the level of human nature,” perform no feats or tricks more strange or incredible than the miraculous performances of Moses and of Pharaoh’s magicians, while many of these are exactly similar in their nature. And when, moreover, in addition to this latter fact, we find so great a resemblance between certain kabalistic terms common to both hemispheres, there must be something else than mere accident to account for the circumstance. Many of such feats have clearly a common parentage. The story of the two brothers of Central America, who, before starting on their journey to Xibalba, “plant each a cane in the middle of their grandmother’s house, that she may know by its flourishing or withering whether they are alive or dead,”[820] finds its analogy in the beliefs of many other countries. In the Popular Tales and Traditions, by Sacharoff (Russia), one can find a similar narrative, and trace this belief in various other legends. And yet these fairy tales were current in Russia many centuries before America was discovered.
In recognizing in the gods of Stonehenge the divinities of Delphos and Babylon, one need feel little surprised. Bel and the Dragon, Apollo and Python, Osiris and Typhon, are all one under many names, and have travelled far and wide. The Both-al of Ireland points directly to its first parent, the Batylos of the Greeks and the Beth-el of Chanaan. “History,” says H. de la Villemarque, “which took no notes at those distant ages, can plead ignorance, but the science of languages affirms. Philology, with a daily-increasing probability, has again linked together the chain hardly broken between the Orient and the Occident.”[821]
No more remarkable is the discovery of a like resemblance between the Oriental myths and ancient Russian tales and traditions, for it is entirely natural to look for a similarity between the beliefs of the Semitic and Aryan families. But when we discover an almost perfect identity between the character of Zarevna Militrissa, with a moon in her forehead, who is in constant danger of being devoured by Zmeÿ Gorenetch (the Serpent or Dragon), who plays such a prominent part in all popular Russian tales, and similar characters in the Mexican legends—extending to the minutest details—we may well pause and ask ourselves whether there be not here more than a simple coincidence.
This tradition of the Dragon and the Sun—occasionally replaced by the Moon—has awakened echoes in the remotest parts of the world. It may be accounted for with perfect readiness by the once universal heliolatrous religion. There was a time when Asia, Europe, Africa, and America were covered with the temples sacred to the sun and the dragons. The priests assumed the names of their deities, and thus the tradition of these spread like a net-work all over the globe: “Bel and the Dragon being uniformly coupled together, and the priest of the Ophite religion as uniformly assuming the name of his god.”[822] But still, “if the original conception is natural and intelligible ... and its occurrence need not be the result of any historical intercourse,” as Professor Müller tells us, the details are so strikingly similar that we cannot feel satisfied that the riddle is entirely solved. The origin of this universal symbolical worship being concealed in the night of time, we would have far more chance to arrive at the truth by tracing these traditions to their very source. And where is this source? Kircher places the origin of the Ophite and heliolatrous worship, the shape of conical monuments and the obelisks, with the Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus.[823] Where, then, except in Hermetic books, are we to seek for the desired information? Is it likely that modern authors can know more, or as much, of ancient myths and cults as the men who taught them to their contemporaries? Clearly two things are necessary: first, to find the missing books of Hermes; and second, the key by which to understand them, for reading is not sufficient. Failing in this, our savants are abandoned to unfruitful speculations, as for a like reason geographers waste their energies in a vain quest of the sources of the Nile. Truly the land of Egypt is another abode of mystery!
Without stopping to discuss whether Hermes was the “Prince of postdiluvian magic,” as des Mousseaux calls him, or the antediluvian, which is much more likely, one thing is certain: The authenticity, reliability, and usefulness of the Books of Hermes—or rather of what remains of the thirty-six works attributed to the Egyptian magician—are fully recognized by Champollion, junior, and corroborated by Champollion-Figeac, who mentions it. Now, if by carefully looking over the kabalistical works, which are all derived from that universal storehouse of esoteric knowledge, we find the fac-similes of many so-called miracles wrought by magical art, equally reproduced by the Quichès; and if even in the fragments left of the original Popol-Vuh, there is sufficient evidence that the religious customs of the Mexicans, Peruvians, and other American races are nearly identical with those of the ancient Phœnicians, Babylonians, and Egyptians; and if, moreover, we discover that many of their religious terms have etymologically the same origin; how are we to avoid believing that they are the descendants of those whose forefathers “fled before the brigand, Joshua, the son of Nun?” “Nuñez de la Vega says that Nin, or Imos, of the Tzendales, was the Ninus of the Babylonians.”[824]
It is possible that, so far, it may be a coincidence; as the identification of one with the other rests but upon a poor argument. “But it is known,” adds de Bourbourg, “that this prince, and according to others, his father, Bel, or Baal, received, like the Nin of the Tzendales, the homages of his subjects under the shape of a serpent.” The latter assertion, besides being fantastic, is nowhere corroborated in the Babylonian records. It is very true that the Phœnicians represented the sun under the image of a dragon; but so did all the other people who symbolized their sun-gods. Belus, the first king of the Assyrian dynasty was, according to Castor, and Eusebius who quotes him, deified, i. e., he was ranked among the gods “after his death” only. Thus, neither himself nor his son, Ninus, or Nin, could have received their subjects under the shape of a serpent, whatever the Tzendales did. Bel, according to Christians, is Baal; and Baal is the Devil, since the Bible prophets began so designating every deity of their neighbors; therefore Belus, Ninus, and the Mexican Nin are serpents and devils; and, as the Devil, or father of evil, is one under many forms, therefore, under whatever name the serpent appears, it is the Devil. Strange logic! Why not say that Ninus the Assyrian, represented as husband and victim of the ambitious Semiramis, was high priest as well as king of his country? That as such he wore on his tiara the sacred emblems of the dragon and the sun? Moreover, as the priest generally assumed the name of his god, Ninus was said to receive his subject as the representative of this serpent-god. The idea is preëminently Roman Catholic, and amounts to very little, as all their inventions do. If Nuñez de la Vega was so anxious to establish an affiliation between the Mexicans and the biblical sun-and serpent-worshippers, why did he not show another and a better similarity between them without tracing in the Ninevites and the Tzendales the hoof and horn of the Christian Devil?