At some remote period of antiquity man developed the idea of social organization and, in India, ancient Egypt and Babylonia-Assyria, actual proofs exist that the earliest cities and states were divided into four quarters, a division involving the distribution of the population into four tribes under a central chief. Wherever this division was carried out, it represented an attempt to harmonize human society and the establishment of the ideal of a religious democracy, founded on principles of law, order, justice, peace and good will. The pyramid, a primitive form of which consisted of four stories, and cruciform sacred structures, may be regarded as [pg 545] monuments commemorating a cosmical and territorial organization into four parts. The more extended conception of seven directions in space, consisting of the Above and Below, or Heaven and Earth, the Four Quarters and the sacred Middle, the synopsis of all, was also evolved. In the confederations of India and Iran, and Arabia, in the seven-storied towers of Babylonia, and in the division of the Egyptians into seven classes, we find the earliest traces of a practical application of this numerical division.
The ancient historical records of Egypt and Greece reveal that, in the earliest polities, the population was divided into groups consisting of a fixed number of individuals, officially represented by chieftains, or officers of the state, and that, in consequence, a state formed a unit, constituted according to a mathematical scheme, which was also applied to the regulation of time. Each officer of the state held office for a fixed term, in a prescribed order of rotation. The year was divided into a fixed number of seasons, marked by the positions of a circumpolar constellation, and this therefore appeared to regulate not only the cycle of time but the governmental rotation of office and the entire activity of the community. Starting from a common basis of quadruplicate division in different countries, a great variety of constitutions of state was independently invented by statesmen and philosophers, who devised cycles produced by different combinations of numbers and signs, the object being to regulate time and communal life in imitation of the law, order and harmony existing in the motion of the stars and under the guidance of a supreme ruler, the earthly representative of Polaris.
The origin of these ideas and governmental scheme, in the Old World, is assigned by competent authorities to a northern race which had discovered the art of fire-making and evolved a religious cult and ritual suggested by it, in association with pole-star worship. Their civilization is supposed to have been developed by contact with a southern race, in Phrygia, and to have been carried at a remote period by their seafaring descendants to India, Asia Minor, Egypt and beyond the pillars of Hercules, to European countries, situated on the Atlantic.
The present investigation brings into prominence the fact that, just as the older Andean art closely resembles that of the early Mediterranean, an observation first made by Prof. F. W. Putnam,[159] [pg 546] so the fundamental principles, numerical scheme and plan of the state founded by the foreign Incas in Peru, resembled those formulated by Plato in his description of an ideal state.
It is a remarkable fact, on which the writer lays utmost stress, that, whereas there is a marked difference between the Chinese and the Mexican and Peruvian divisions of the elements and numerical cycles, the American systems exactly agree with those propounded by Greek philosophers and said to have reached them from more ancient centres of culture, presumably through the Phœnicians. On the other hand, there undoubtedly exist remarkable analogies between the Chinese and Hindu and Mexican sociological, chronological, cyclical systems, their principles being precisely the same. These close analogies as well as the marked divergences which have been noted can only be satisfactorily accounted for by the assumption that each of these countries derived their civilization from the same source. Over and over again different writers have pointed out undeniable analogies and resemblances between the highest forms of American civilization and that of China, India, Asia Minor, the Mediterranean and Western European countries. At the same time modern research has shown that the seafarers, whom we shall conveniently designate as the Phœnicians, acted as the intermediaries of ancient Old World civilization and formulated a culture which incorporated and formed a curious compound of elements drawn from different countries and people.
While investigation, moreover, reveals that the conquest of Phœnicia and intermittent periods of warfare and persecution directed against the religion and democratic principles of its people, must have furnished the most powerful incentive for them to extend their voyages of discovery and seek distant lands where colonies might be established. It is obvious that, if safe places of refuge were found, their existence would remain a secret and that, in course of time, a complete isolation of distant colonies would result.
Considering that it would be premature to formulate a final conclusion on a subject which demands so much more investigation, I merely observe here that, as far as I can see, the conditions which existed and survive amongst the aborigines of America would be fully accounted for by the assumption that they received certain elements of culture and civilization from Mediterranean seafarers who, at widely separated, critical periods of Old World [pg 547] history, may have transported refugees and would-be colonists or founders of ideal republics and “divine polities” to different parts of the hidden or divine land of “the West,” the existence of which was known by tradition to the Egyptian priesthood.
Under such circumstances it is apparent how the American Continent could have become an isolated area of preservation where archaic and primitive forms of civilization, religious cult, symbolism and industries, drawn at different epochs, from various, more or less important centres or from the outposts of Old World culture, would be handed down, transformed through the active and increasing influence of the native elements. The latter must always have been markedly predominant since it must be assumed, if at all, that the number of individuals who reached America, and the subsequent duration of their lives, must have been extremely limited. What is more, as Montezuma related that the colonists, from whom he descended, married native women, it is obvious that, from the outset, foreign and native influences were combined.
There was one main element, however, underlying both foreign and native civilizations, which formed the basis of both, united and made them as one, namely, the recognition of fixed immutable laws governing the universe, attained, by both races, by long-continued observation of Polaris and the “Northern” constellations.
To me the most precious result of the preceding investigation is the gradual recognition that the entire intellectual, moral and religious evolution of mankind has been the result of the fixed laws which govern the universe. From the time when our world began to revolve in space, at intervals, a luminous point of fixity in space has existed and an unknown force, irresistible as that which controls the magnetic needle and gyrostat,[160] appears to have raised [pg 548] the mind of man from ignorance and darkness and guided his footsteps towards a higher scale of existence and a more elevated conception of a supreme central power.