From Atlantis to the Sphinx

by Colin Wilson

  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 representativ
e 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?

  He decided on an extremely dangerous expedient: to go down in a diving suit. Realising that everyone would try to talk him out of it, he started by going to Boston and taking lessons in deep-sea diving. Then he was ready to approach the American Antiquarian Society, and his patron Stephen Salisbury. As he expected, Salisbury reacted with horror, and told Thompson he would be committing suicide. But Thompson persisted, and finally raised the funds he needed.

  Next he dangled a plumb line into the well until it seemed to touch bottom; from this he determined that the water was about 35 feet deep. But how to know where to look for human skeletons in about 3000 square feet of water? He solved this by throwing logs weighing as much as a human body from the top, and noting the spot where they fell.

  Next, he positioned a dredge, with a long steel cable, at the edge of the cliff, and watched the gaping steel jaws plunge under the dark surface. The men at the winch lowered the dredge into the dark water and turned the handle until the cable became slack. Then they closed the steel jaws, and heaved the dredge back up. As it came out above the surface, the water boiled, and great bubbles of gas surged up. On a wooden platform, the jaws deposited a load of black leafmould and dead branches. Then it plunged back again into the water.

  For days this continued, and the pile of black sludge grew larger—one day it even brought up a complete tree, ‘as sound as if toppled into the pit by a storm of yesterday’. But Thompson began to worry. Supposing this was all he was going to find? Suppose Landa had been allowing his imagination to run wild? He would be subjected to merciless ridicule. Even fragments of pottery did nothing to raise his spirits. After all, boys might have used flat bits of broken pots to skim across the surface of the well.

  Then, one early morning, he staggered down to the cenote, his eyes heavy with lack of sleep, and looked down into the ‘bucket’ formed by the closed jaws as it rose out of the water. In it he noticed two large blobs of some yellow substance, not unlike butter. They reminded him of the balls of ‘bog butter’ found by archaeologists in ancient settlements in Switzerland and Austria. But the ancient Maya had no cows or goats—or any other domestic animals—so this could not be butter. He sniffed it, then tasted it. It was resin. And suddenly, Thompson’s heart became light. He threw some of the resin on to a fire, and the air was permeated by a fragrant smell. It was some kind of sacred incense, and it meant that the well had been used for religious purposes.

  From then on, the well began to yield up its treasures—pottery, sacred vessels, axe and arrow heads, copper chisels and discs of beaten copper, Maya deities, bells, beads, pendants and pieces of jade.

  Thompson had moored a large, flat boat below the overhang of the cliff, alongside a narrow ‘beach’ with lizards and giant toads. One day he was sitting in the boat, working at his notes, when he paused to stare meditatively down into the water. What he saw startled him. He seemed to be looking down a vertical wall with ‘many deeps and hollows’, as described by the women who had been hauled up. It was, he quickly realised, the reflection of the cliff above him. And the workmen looking over the cliff were also reflected in the water, giving the impression that people were walking about below.

  He had also read that the water in the cenote sometimes turned green, and sometimes became clotted blood. Observation over a period revealed that these comments were also based on fact. Algae sometimes turned the water bright green, and red seed capsules made it look like blood.

  Finally, it was obvious that the dredge had reached the bottom of the mud and slime—about 40 feet below the original ‘bottom’—and that no more artefacts would be found. Now it was time to begin diving.

  Thompson and two Greek divers descended to the flat-bottomed scow in the dredge bucket, and changed into diving gear, with huge copper helmets. Finally, Thompson climbed over the edge of the boat—the boys who would work the air pump solemnly shaking hands with him, in case he failed to reappear—and clambered down the wire ladder. At the bottom he let himself go, and his iron-soled shoes and lead necklace carried him downward. Yellow water changed to green, then purple, then black, and pains shot through his ears. When he opened the air valves, letting out the pressure, these disappeared. Finally, he stood on the rock bottom. Here he was surrounded by vertical mud walls left by the dredge, eighteen feet high, with rocks sticking out of them.

  Another diver joined him and they shook hands. Thompson discovered that, by placing his helmet against that of his companion, they could hold intelligible conversations, although their voices sounded like ghosts echoing in the darkness. They soon decided to abandon their flashlights and submarine telephone—these were useless in water as thick as pea soup. It was not hard to move around, since they were almost weightless, like astronauts; Thompson soon discovered that if he wanted to move to a spot a few feet away, he had to jump cautiously, or he would shoot straight past it.

  Another danger came from the huge rocks jutting out of the mud walls that the dredge had excavated. Sometimes these would break loose and fall down. But they sent a wave of water-pres
sure ahead of them, which gave the divers time to move. So long as they kept their air-lines and speaking tubes away from the walls, they were relatively safe. ‘Had we incautiously been standing with our backs to the walls, we would have been sheared in two as cleanly as if by a pair of gigantic shears.’

  The natives were convinced that giant snakes and lizards swam in the pool. There were snakes and lizards—but they had fallen into the pool and were desperate to get out.

  Thompson did have one bad experience. Digging in a narrow crevice in the floor, a Greek diver beside him, he suddenly felt the movement of something gliding down on him. A moment later, he was being pushed flat against the bottom. For a moment he remembered the legends of strange monsters. Then the Greek diver began to push at the object, and as Thompson helped him, he realised that it was a tree that had been dislodged from above.

  On another occasion, gloating over a bell that he had found in a crevice, he forgot to open his air valves to let the air out. Suddenly, as he rose to change his position, he began to float upwards like a balloon. This was highly dangerous, for a diver’s blood is charged with air bubbles, like champagne, and unless these are released with a slow ascent, they cause a disorder known as decompression sickness or the ‘bends’, in which a man can die in agony. Thompson had the presence of mind to open the valves quickly; but the accident permanently damaged his eardrums.

  The bottom of the cenote yielded the treasure he had hoped for: human bones and skulls, proof that Landa had been telling the truth, and hundreds of ritual objects of gold, copper and jade. They even found the skull of an old man—probably a priest dragged down by a struggling girl as she was hurled into the pool.