From Atlantis to the Sphinx (19 page)

Back in France, Charnay published a book called
Anciennes Villes du Nouveau Monde
, but it failed to improve his reputation among academics, and he retired to Algiers to write novels, dying in 1915 at the age of 87.

Charnay’s contemporary Augustus Le Plongeon was even less concerned about his academic reputation, with the result that his name is seldom found in books on Central America (although one modern authority pauses long enough to describe him as an ‘argumentative crackpot’). By the time he was in his mid-forties, Le Plongeon had been a gold prospector in California, a lawyer in San Francisco and the director of a hospital in Peru, where he became interested in ancient ruins. He was 48 when he sailed, with his young English wife Alice, from New York for Yucatan in 1873.

By this time, Mexico was firmly in the grip of Porfirio Diaz, who had encouraged the corruption that so dismayed his predecessor Maximilian; in fact, Mexico had reverted to the days of the Mayas, with an all-powerful ruling class and a browbeaten class of peasants, whose land was confiscated and given to the rich. The result was that the Indians in remoter parts—like Yucatan—frequently rebelled, and when the Le Plongeons first went to Chichen Itzá, they had to be protected by soldiers. But Le Plongeon learned the Mayan language, and soon began exploring the forest alone. He found the Indians to be friendly and polite, and he was soon known as the Great Black Beard.

From oyster shells in the region of Lake Titicaca, on the border of Bolivia and Peru, Le Plongeon had concluded that at some point in the remote past, the lake must once have been at sea level, and that therefore some great upheaval must have raised it two and a half miles to its present location. Now, among the Indians of Yucatan, he again heard tales of this great catastrophe.

He learned from these forest Indians that they still preserved an occult tradition. Peter Tompkins states (in
Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids
):

Like Carlos Castaneda in our day, Le Plongeon learned that the native Indians in his day still practised magic and divination, that their wise men were able to surround themselves with clouds and even appear to make themselves invisible, materialising strange and amazing objects. Sometimes, says Le Plongeon, the place where they were operating would seem to shake as if an earthquake were occurring, or whirl around and around as if being carried off by a tornado... Beneath the prosaic life of the Indians... Le Plongeon concluded that there flowed a rich living current of occult wisdom and practice, with its sources in an extremely ancient past, far beyond the purview of ordinary historical research.

Le Plongeon felt that occasionally the mask was lowered sufficiently for him to glimpse ‘a world of spiritual reality, sometimes of indescribable beauty, again of inexpressible horror’.

Le Plongeon learned to decipher Mayan hieroglyphs from a 150-year-old Indian. Scholars were to cast doubt on Le Plongeon’s readings of these glyphs, yet his ability is attested by his discovery of a statue buried 24 feet under the earth of Chichen Itzá, whose location he found described in a Mayan inscription on a wall. The inscription referred to the buried object as a
chacmool
(meaning ‘jaguar paw’); it proved to be the huge figure of a man reclining on his elbows, his head turned at 90 degrees. With the aid of his team of diggers, Le Plongeon raised it to the surface. But his hopes of sending it for exhibition in Philadelphia were frustrated by the Mexican authorities, who seized it before it had got beyond the local capital. Chacmools are now recognised as ritual figures—probably representing fallen warriors who act as messengers to the gods—and the receptacle often found on the chest is intended for the heart of a sacrificial victim.

The result of Le Plongeon’s studies of ancient Mayan texts were convictions that in many ways echoed those of Brasseur and Charnay, but went even further. Charnay had been inclined to believe that civilisation had reached South America from Asia or Europe, Brasseur that it originated in Atlantis. Le Plongeon thought that it had begun in South America and moved east. He cited the
Ramayana
, the Hindu epic written by the poet Valmiki in the third century BC, declaring that India had been peopled by seagoing conquerors in remote antiquity. Valmiki called these conquerors the Nagas, and Le Plongeon pointed out the similarity to the word Naacal, Mayan priests or ‘adepts’ who, according to Mayan mythology, travelled the world as teachers of wisdom. Like Brasseur, Le Plongeon cited the Mesopotamian myth that civilisation was brought to the world by creatures from the sea called ‘oannes’, and pointed out that the Mayan word
oaana
means ‘he who lives in water’. In fact, Le Plongeon spent a great deal of space on the similarities between Mayan and the ancient languages of the Middle East. (In both Akkadian and Mayan,
kul
is the word for the behind, and
kun
for the female genitalia, suggesting a common origin for words we still use.)

But Le Plongeon’s most controversial contribution was his translations from the
Troano Codex
,
first studied by Brasseur. Like Brasseur, he agreed that this contained references to the catastrophe that destroyed Atlantis—although, as far as Le Plongeon could determine, the Mayas had apparently referred to Atlantis as Mu. The text spoke of terrible earthquakes that continued for thirteen
chuen
('days’?), causing the land to rise and sink several times before it was torn asunder. The date given by the codex—'the year six Kan, and the eleventh Mulac’—means (according to both Brasseur and Le Plongeon) 9500 BC. Le Plongeon later claimed that he had discovered in the ruins of Kabah, south of Uxmal, a mural that confirmed this date, and at Xochicalco yet another inscription about the cataclysm.

Le Plongeon’s reputation for romantic flights of fancy seemed to be confirmed by his book
Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx
(1896) in which he argued that the Mayas’ legendary Queen Moo and Prince Aac are the origin of the Egyptian Isis and Osiris, and that the evidence of the
Troana Codex
indicates that Queen Moo originated in Egypt and later returned there. He also speculates that the fact that Atlantis sank in the thirteenth
chuen
may be the origin of the modern superstition about the number thirteen; he suggests, more plausibly, that this may explain why the Mayan calendar is based on the number thirteen.

Such speculations obscured some of Le Plongeon’s more important observations, such as that the relation of the height to the base of Mayan pyramids represented the earth—as in the case of the Great Pyramid of Giza. He also argued that the Mayan unit of measurement was one forty-millionth of the earth’s circumference—a suggestion that might be regarded as absurd if it were not for the fact that the Egyptians also seemed to be aware of the length of the equator.

The Le Plongeons spent twelve years in Central America, returning to New York in 1885. He was hoping for a triumphant homecoming; in fact, the remaining 23 years of his life were to be a continuous disappointment. To the academic establishment he was a crank who believed in magic and in a chronology that struck them as absurd (for everyone knew that the very first towns were built around 4000 BC—it would be another seventy years before that estimate was pushed back to 8000 BC, and even that was fifteen hundred years later than Le Plongeon’s dating of Atlantis). Museums were not interested in Mayan artefacts, or even Mayan manuscripts; the Metropolitan Museum accepted Le Plongeon’s casts of Mayan friezes but relegated them to the storage basement. So Le Plongeon lived on to 1908, and died at the age of 82, still regarded as an argumentative crackpot.

One of the few friends he made in these last years was a young Englishman named James Churchward, who had been (according to his own account) a Bengal Lancer in India. (Peter Tompkins states that he was a civil servant with connections with British Intelligence.) According to Churchward, writing more than forty years later, he had already stumbled on the trail of ancient Mayan (‘Naacal’) inscriptions in India, when a Brahmin priest had showed him—and allowed him to copy—tablets covered with Mayan inscriptions. These, according to the priest, were accounts of the lost continent called Mu, which was not situated in the Atlantic, as Le Plongeon had assumed, but in the Pacific, just as the zoologist P. L. Sclater had suggested in the 1850s when he noticed the similarity between flora and fauna of so many lands between India and Australia. But Churchward’s
Lost Continent of Mu
would not be published until 1926, and then it would be dismissed by historians as a kind of hoax. After all, Sclater had christened his lost continent Lemuria, and it was after this that Le Plongeon had discovered ‘Mu’ in the
Troano Codex.

Churchward seems to have been inspired to write his Mu books (five in all) by contact with a friend named William Niven, to whom he dedicated the first of them. Niven was, like Le Plongeon, a maverick archaeologist—a Scots mining engineer who worked in Mexico as early as 1889. At Guerrero, near Acapulco, he explored a region that contained hundreds of pits, from which the building material of Mexico City had been mined. Digging in these pits, Niven claimed to have come across ancient ruins, some of which were full of volcanic ash, suggesting that, like Pompeii, they had been suddenly overwhelmed. From their depth—some were 30 feet below the surface—Niven estimated that some of them dated from 50,000 years ago. One goldsmith’s shop contained around 200 clay figures that had been baked into stone. He also found murals that rivalled those of Greece or the Middle East.

In 1921, in a village called Santiago Ahuizoctla, he found hundreds of stone tablets engraved with curious symbols and figures, not unlike those of the Maya, although Maya scholars failed to recognise them. Niven showed some of these tablets to Churchward, who said they confirmed what he had learned from the Hindu priest. These tablets, said Churchward, had been inscribed by Naacal priests who had been sent out from Mu to Central America, to disseminate their secret knowledge. Churchward was to claim that these tablets revealed that the civilisation of Mu was 200,000 years old.

Understandably, then, Churchward’s Mu books have been dismissed as a fraud. It must be confessed that this was largely his own fault; he is so vague about the temple where he claims to have seen the Naacal tablets, and offers so little proof of his various assertions, that it is hard to take him seriously. On the other hand, if Brasseur, Le Plongeon and Niven can be taken seriously when they speak of Mayan inscriptions referring to 9500 BC, then it is possible that we may eventually discover that Churchward was more truthful than we suspect.

Le Plongeon was a severe disappointment to the American Antiquarian Society, which for a time published his reports from Mexico in its journal. But his speculations about Atlantis, and his habit of sniping at the Church for its unsavoury record of torture and bloodshed, became finally too much for the New Englanders, and they dropped him.

Amusingly enough, the young man they chose to be their representative in Mexico had started his career by publishing an article in
Popular Science Monthly
called ‘Atlantis Not a Myth’, which argued that although there is no scientific evidence for Atlantis, a tradition so widespread must surely have some basis in fact, and that this lost civilisation seems to have made its mark on the land of the Mayas. He then went on to cite the legend of light-skinned, blue-eyed people, with serpent emblems on their heads, who had come from the east in remote antiquity. His article came out in 1879, three years before Donnelly’s book on Atlantis. He pointed out that the leaders of the Olmecs were known as Chanes, Serpent Wise Men, and among the Mayas as Canob, People of the Rattlesnake.

Edward Herbert Thompson’s article attracted some scholarly attention, as a result of which he found himself, in his mid-twenties, in Mexico as American consul. It was 1885, the year Le Plongeon left.

As a student, Thompson had read a book by Diego de Landa, the Spanish bishop who began his career by destroying thousands of Mayan books and artefacts, and ended by carefully collecting and preserving the remains of Mayan culture. Landa had described a sacred well at Chichen Itzá, where sacrificial victims were hurled during times of drought or pestilence. The story fascinated him, just as, four decades earlier, a picture book showing the vast walls of Troy had fascinated a seven-year-old named Heinrich Schliemann, who thereupon decided that he would one day discover Troy. Forty-four years later, in 1873, he did precisely that.

Diego de Landa’s descriptions of the sacrificial ceremonies would have been regarded by most scholars in the 1880s as fiction; like Schliemann, Thompson was determined to establish how much truth lay behind it.

Another account, by Don Diego de Figueroa, described how women were hurled into the well at dawn, with instructions to ask the gods who dwelt in its depths questions about when their master was to undertake important projects. The masters themselves fasted for 60 days before the ceremony. At midday, the women who had not drowned were heaved out by means of ropes, and were dried out in front of fires in which incense was burned. They would then describe how they had seen many people at the bottom of the well—people of their own race—and how they were not allowed to look at them direct in the face—they were given blows on the head if they tried. But the well-people answered their questions and told them when their masters’ projects should be undertaken...

Thompson lost no time in visiting Chichen Itzá to look at the sinister well; he found it as morbidly fascinating as he had expected. The sacrificial well, or cenote, was an oval water hole, 165 by 200 feet, surrounded by vertical limestone cliffs that soared 70 feet above the surface. It certainly looked grim enough. The water was green and slimy, almost black, and no one was sure of its depth, for there was undoubtedly a thick layer of mud at its bottom.

Finally, more than a decade after his first visit, Thompson succeeded in purchasing Chichen Itzá as Stephens had purchased Copan. Now, in effect, he owned the well. But how could he explore it?