The Murder of Coh
“We next see him in a terrible altercation with his brother Aac. The figures in that scene are nearly life-size, but so much disfigured and broken as to make it impossible to obtain good tracings. Coh is portrayed without weapons, his fists clenched, looking menacingly at his foe, who holds three spears, typical of the three wounds he inflicted in his brother’s back when he killed him treacherously. Coh is now laid out, being prepared for cremation. His body has been opened at the ribs to extract the viscera and heart, which, after being charred, are to be preserved in a stone urn with cinnabar, where the writer found them in 1875. His sister-wife, Queen Móo, in sad contemplation of the remains of the beloved, ... kneels at his feet.... The winged serpent, protective genius of the country, is pictured without a head. The ruler of the country has been slain. He is dead. The people are without a chief.”
The Widowhood of Móo
The widowhood of Móo is then said to be portrayed in subsequent pictures. Other suitors, among them Aac, make their proposals to her, but she refuses them all. “Aac’s pride being humiliated, his love turned to hatred. His only wish henceforth was to usurp the supreme power, to wage war against the friend of his childhood. He made religious disagreement the pretext. He proclaimed that the worship of the sun was to be superior to that of the winged serpent, the genius of the country; also to that of the worship of ancestors, typified by the feathered serpent, with horns and a flame or halo on the head.... Prompted by such evil passions, he put himself at the head of his own vassals, and attacked those who had remained faithful to Queen Móo and to Prince Coh’s memory. At first Móo’s adherents successfully opposed her foes. The contending parties, forgetting in the strife that they were children of the same soil, blinded by their prejudices, let their passions have the better of their reason. At last Queen Móo fell a prisoner in the hands of her enemy.”
The Manuscript Troano
Dr. Le Plongeon here assumes that the story is taken up by the Manuscript Troano. As no one is able to decipher this manuscript completely, he is pretty safe in his assertion. Here is what the pintura alluded to says regarding Queen Móo, according to our author:
“The people of Mayach having been whipped into submission and cowed, no longer opposing much resistance, the lord seized her by the hair, and, in common with others, caused her to suffer from blows. This happened on the ninth day of the tenth month of the year Kan. Being completely routed, she passed to the opposite sea-coast in the southern parts of the country, which had already suffered much injury.”
Here we shall leave the Queen, and those who have been sufficiently credulous to create and believe in her and her companions. We do not aver that the illustrations on the walls of the temple at Chichen do not allude to some such incident, or series of incidents, as Dr. Le Plongeon describes, but to bestow names upon the dramatis personæ in the face of almost complete inability to read the Maya script and a total dearth of accompanying historical manuscripts is merely futile, and we must regard Dr. Le Plongeon’s narrative as a quite fanciful rendering of probability. At the same time, the light which he throws—if some obviously unscientific remarks be deducted—on the customs of the Maya renders his account of considerable interest, and that must be our excuse for presenting it here at some length.