by Talbot Mundy
It appears, from what already is uncovered, that the early Maya civilization — subsequent, that is, to the arrival of the Mayas from some continent that may have been Atlantis — had its beginnings in what is now called Guatemala, since it is there that are found carvings, photographs of which were long since published in The Theosophical Path, for November 1920, so ancient that few antiquarians have dared to assign a date to them.
From Guatemala the Maya race seems gradually to have extended its civilization northward into Yucatan, the theme and nature of its monuments not changing much but rather evolving slowly toward greater elegance and less solidity, until, as far north as Chichen-Itza, about a hundred miles from Merida, we find well preserved buildings probably not more than three thousand years old, with beams of the time-resisting zapote-wood still supporting the stone arches.
The Chichen-Itza ruins (the name is a Maya word meaning ‘by the well of the Itzas’) are on the site of the Maya or Itza capital. The well, or cenote, remains — a huge, natural pool in the limestone rock, fed by underground springs of extremely cold water that takes on a peculiar jade-green color. Ever since the arrival of the Spaniards that sacred well has been the center of romantic legends about maidens sacrificed to the rain-god, and prisoners of war permitted rather than obliged to sacrifice themselves by plunging in and drowning. (They say, though, that the principle of mercy was not wholly overlooked: whoever lived from dawn to sunset on the surface of the pool was rescued and allowed to live.) Unlike most legends, these have been checked up and in a large degree confirmed by M. E.H. Thompson, formerly U.S. Consul in Yucatan, who has spent the last thirty years in carefully exploring Chichen-Itza and its neighborhood.
Mr. Thompson procured a diving apparatus and spent, in all, more than a month under-water, stirring deep layers of mud with a rake, uncovering treasures of gold and a peculiar jade found nowhere else on earth, besides the bones of young women and warriors. A peculiarity about the jade is, not only that its source is unknown (for nothing like it has been found in Central America or elsewhere) but that every piece of it is broken, as if the priests, who performed the sacrifice, went through the form of releasing its spirit before, as it were, consigning its material shell to oblivion.
Whoever has studied Maya architecture and such fragments as are known of their ancient religion, is impressed by the marked resemblance to the ancient Egyptian culture. It is in the pages of The Secret Doctrine that one finds the key to this enigma, and, supposing it to be true that the originators of Maya and Egyptian culture came, before the period of any history we know, from one and the same continent, we might reasonably expect to find a parallel development.
We know, for instance, that the culture of ancient Egypt passed through cycles of adolescence, splendor, and decay. In course of time pure doctrine became corrupted as men ceased to aspire to the higher mysteries. What once had been a hierarchy was replaced by an ambitious priesthood; and the sacrifices that had once been imagery of the opulence of life became degraded into superstitious rites.
Why not the same in Yucatan? This key would fit the latter-day discoveries of bones and jewels thrown into the sacred pool — barbaric practices that otherwise it is impossible to correlate with the unquestionably esoteric nature of the ancient Maya art. It is incredible that men who rose to such artistic heights that they designed those carvings and the caste, high arches of those dim interiors should condescend to drowning human victims to appease a wrathful rain-god. But it might be that, as in Egypt, men forgot the ancient Key. The hierarchy may have died out from below, for lack of aspirants with moral strength to endure the higher ordeals of the Mystery. And so, while buildings by the thousand stood, that traced the dignity and grandeur of the past; while pictograph and symbol still remained in witness that the men who built those temples knew more than the mere surface-secrets of an ancient Wisdom, a degenerate, though still religious offspring of the builders, taking letter for the spirit of the law, grew morbid and disgraced themselves with human sacrifice. If so, that would not be the first, nor yet the last, great culture to decay in the gloom of superstitious cruelty. It is at such times of spiritual decadence that races become helpless to defend themselves against the conqueror. Then hundreds, in the vigor of material expansion overwhelm with ease the hundred-thousands, who have lost their spiritual vision yet affect still to despise materiality on which, in fact, they lean. No nation in the growth or the maturity of spiritual grandeur is in danger from the sword of the aggressor. Witness China, that kept peace a thousand years. But let the vision cease and, like a tree whose sap no longer answers to the challenge of the sun, that nation totters to its fall.
These latter days the Mayas, as a whole, display the symptoms of a conquered people. There is no revolt in them. They are a quiet-loving people, hospitable, kind, habitually clean, addicted to no outlandish vices — hardly even to the vices of their conquerors — and noticeably honest. But they submit. There is no vigor in their protests against exploitation. They take no part in the recurring revolutions that have boiled across the face of Mexico these fifty years. They are not soldiers; and with very rare exceptions they hold no public office. Courteous, secretive, patient, indifferent to hardship, they resemble in feature the images carved on the ruins that testify to the ancient glory of their race.
Uxmal and Chichen-Itza, where the principal uncovered ruins are, though ages of neglect, of wind and weather and the inroads of the jungle have combined to blot them from the memory of man, still mutely vouch for the enlightenment and taste of their forgotten builders. Civilization was there, and at a pinnacle, when Rome, it may be, was a scattering of hovels and the splendors of Nineveh and Babylon were not yet dreamed of.
Strange, and hitherto incomprehensible designs, wrought with consummate artistry, cover the whole face of building after building, alternating with elephants, leopards, leaves, flowers, and conventionalized human faces. Where did the ancient Mayas find their elephants? Who taught them how to carve with such unerring skill? If there was never an Atlantis, as some historians still insist, and if the arts, philosophy, and science, as the same historians maintain, derive from what they call the Old World — Rome, Greece, Egypt — whence came the Maya arts and sciences?
The predominant character of all the larger ancient Maya structures is that they are built on artificial elevations: a pyramid or truncate cone, approached by magnificent stone stairs, supports a building that thus crowns the view, suggesting elemental dignity and a conception of life’s grandeur. The walls are usually of tremendous thickness, so that the silence which today reigns over that unpeopled wilderness was more than probably essential to existence when the thinkers lived who wrought that artistry.
Interiors are quiet, oftener than not devoid of any other contribution to their beauty than the sheer simplicity of strong design, but sometimes carved, like the exteriors, with hieroglyphic cornices or adorned with paintings that permit no other comparison than with those of ancient Egypt.
The finest workmanship is displayed in the broad and elevated cornices; and whether the artists excelled more in the skill with which they assembled prodigious numbers of small pieces with which to construct their effect, or in the accuracy to nature of the scenes they represented, is a matter solely of opinion. Certainly their craftsmanship has never been surpassed on the American continent.
The Mexican authorities have wisely ruled that no more plunder shall be taken from the ruins, and no foreign collections shall be enriched by specimens from Yucatan. Facilities are given to qualified archaeologists and to expeditions from foreign universities, who are allowed to fence off areas and dig, uncover, reconstruct; but what antiquities they find must remain in their proper surroundings, so that some day it will be possible to study the whole scheme of ancient Maya life and culture where it had its being.
But the study of it is unlikely to lead men far until they search The Secret Doctrine’s pages and so reconstruct the past and read it with the Key that H.P. Blavatsky
provided. The world, men say, is full of mysteries; but far the greatest of them all, most baffling and least suggestive of intelligence in homo sapiens is this: that after fifty years, with The Secret Doctrine and Isis Unveiled almost anywhere obtainable, men still search blindly for a key with which to solve the riddles of the past. Men still deny the ‘fable’ of Atlantis — still search for the source of light among the shadows — and, when H.P. Blavatsky’s authoritative statements month after month become confirmed, still prefer to ignore her teaching instead of making use of what she taught for the uncovering of more.
AN ANSWER TO CORRESPONDENTS
I ADMIT it was a greatly daring editor who first published OM as a serial in Adventure, a magazine which, though it stands for manliness, omits religious subjects as a rule. It was a daring firm of publishers who brought the story out in book-form last November. OM treats of a mystery that to one half of the world, the whole of the eastern hemisphere, is concrete fact, however many explanations of it may be current; whereas to the western half it sounds not mystery so much as a mere fairy-tale. And it is the western half of the world that buys books in English.
However, both the magazine and the book publishers now admit that their daring must have been a sort of inspiration; while I, the author of the story, have been swamped under a mass of correspondence, to the greater part of which I have not yet had time to reply (and to none of it adequately).
The amazing part of it is this: that among all of the hundreds of letters I have received about the book, not one finds fault with it. I had expected to be deluged with abuse and ridicule!
I wrote the book from knowledge; but I did not know there were so many people in the western hemisphere not only willing but apparently quite eager to accept an explanation of life’s handicap based solely on what Asia calls the Ancient Wisdom. I am almost tempted to believe — perhaps to hope — that prejudice and dogma are not after all so firmly seated on the throne of Christianity as the professional religionists would have us think.
Has the world gone mad, that it accepts my book? Or is it waking up? Or am I dreaming? All I know is, that the book is being widely read. The answer must be left to wiser heads than mine.
The East has known, for no man knows how many centuries, that there exist (and always have existed) individuals — known variously as the Keepers of the Ancient Wisdom, Teachers, Masters, Gurus — who, from philosophic heights attained by heroism of self-mastery in former lives, keep watch over the world, inspiring it, whenever opportunity presents itself, with pure, uplifting thought. These men (and they are men, not spirits) have attained to greater heights of evolution than the rest of us have glimpsed. They live apart from the world, and so have always lived since long before such history as we find recorded in the western text-books; and this, less from dread of defilement by the world’s dense thinking than because of the uselessness of mingling with a crowd that crucifies, idolizes or prevents all teachers whom it fails to understand. On one point all who know of these men are agreed: that they are practical, and faithful to the vast responsibility entailed by knowing more than others know.
I am reliably informed that at this present time the home of the Masters is in Tibet, that country being difficult of access and affording them the opportunity they need to think and move and have their being in an undisturbed calm, beneath whose unruffled surface they persist in pauseless effort to induce into the world high thinking and its consequences, purity of living; since through purity alone comes true enlightenment.
But this may give a false impression of them. They are manly men, not meditative fakirs. Except that they are human they resemble not at all the popularity pursuing ‘swamis,’ self-styled ‘mahatmas’ or ‘yogis’ who posture on rocks for the plaudits of ignorant people — or who cross the Atlantic to pocket the dollars of fools. They do not advertise. They shun the fawning adulation of the mob as sedulously as they keep aloof from its vindictiveness and passion. To them, I have been told, all forms of selfishness appear ridiculous, since selfishness contains its own destroying agent, and to them there is no profit under the sun except in benefiting others.
Their religion, as I understand it, recognizing thought as the precursor of all deed, and regulating thought as the precursor, consequently in the last analysis is wholly one of deeds and of abstaining from such deeds as might, by their inherent selfishness, destroy the harmony of others. No life like that could possibly be lived without more wisdom than is given to the ordinary run of men. None, surely, will deny that wisdom is a stark necessity if one is to discriminate between what benefits humanity at large and what does not. Reforms, ‘revivals,’ social crusades and all familiar attempts to legislate or wheedle nations into righteousness are self-destroyed inevitably by the lack of wisdom in their frequently too energetic advocates. It was Solomon, I think, who is supposed to have advised us to seek wisdom first.
I have been told — and I believe it — that these Masters have, by high unselfishness and self-control in former lives, attained to higher wisdom than the rest of us can understand. If so, then we show less wisdom than we might, if we should challenge or resent their privilege of keeping to themselves. If they are so wise that in spite of all our modern methods of inquisitive research they can retain aloofness and can pass among us, when they so please, utterly unrecognized, it serves no useful purpose to deny their right to do so, or, in the alternative, to argue they do not exist.
I can imagine (who cannot?) that multitudes of higher forms of life exist of which nine-tenths of us at present have no cognizance. But ignorance proves nothing. I am sure, for instance, that in every realm of art and science there are men innumerable who know more than I do, but my ignorance of what they know does not disprove their knowledge. Rather they serve as an avenue through which I may attain their knowledge, if I will.
When we behold art, do we stultify our own intelligence by arguing that the artist knew no more than we? Or, because we have never seen the artist, do we deny that art exists? Or, because we see fraudulent copies of art, do we deny that there are many artists whose integrity is above dispute?
Admitting as, for one, I do admit that there is high philosophy abroad among us, that is freshening our thought and working like precipitating acid on our outworn, half-abandoned creeds; maintaining that philosophy necessitates philosophers to bring it into being, as it were; and so admitting as, for one, I do admit, that the existence of the Masters is no myth but an established certainty; conceding at the same time, as we must, that if they do exist they must be wiser than the rest of us in order to escape the searchlight of our pitiless publicity (the name preferred by persecution-mongers); what avails then to pit our ignorance against their wisdom and insist, with the world at large, that they are non-existent or that they are selfish not to satisfy our curiosity by coming out of their seclusion and, with magic, entertaining us. Doubtless they know better than to do it — or do it they would. Theirs is the prerogative of wisdom.
What is magic? It is certainly not humbug, though we know too well how many humbugs pose among us as magicians, in the same way that too many cacophonists claim the title of musician and too many doctors mutilate our bodies in the name of healing. The exposure of a thousand tricksters never has disproved one truth, though many a magician has been branded as a fraud because, for lack of enough wisdom, and perhaps because of vanity, he has displayed more knowledge of the esoteric laws of nature than the prejudices of the human mind permit to any man. Knowledge and wisdom are not the same thing.
A century ago would radio not have been magic? What of Newton and his laws? And what of Galileo? Would our fathers have believed it possible to transmit by a mechanism, through the ether without wires, the pictures of events within a half-hour of their happening? Can there be any object other than to glorify our ignorance, in stubbornly denying that there might be men who know how to project their thought without the intervening agency of a machine?
The handicap of all humanity is fear. We are afraid
to lift ourselves above the ruts in which we run, and glance into the storehouse of the Infinite. A century ago (and less) it was religion under which we covered up our eyes and hugged our totally illogical conservatism. Now with flattery we fool ourselves that science has uncovered all laws and the portals of all knowledge. What the licensed and accredited observers of the shadows of the real say is true, we must believe or else be damned. And being damned by fellow-men is much more comfortless (because more real) than the hell our ancestors believed in!
We are still, like the fabled ostrich with its head stuck in the sand, absurd conservatives, for we conserve not much else than our own opinion of ourselves — no pleasant one, at that, maintaining as it generally does that we were born in sin.
But of the Masters I am told on good authority that they conserve the Ancient Wisdom, which is something not so worthless as our theories of God- appointed and prenatally implanted vice.
Presuming, as I think the preachers mostly do, that there was wisdom in the ordering of all this universe, and that the stars that keep their courses, and the flowers that obey the summons of the spring, have not entirely lost their contact (yet, in spite of jazz and boot-leg liquor!) with the First Cause, that obeyed the Wisdom, that impelled them forth; presuming that; admitting, as we must, that we ourselves are not wise, or our affairs were better ordered; yet admitting, too, that most of us would like to be wise and would cherish wisdom if it might be had without too much self-sacrifice — to me it does not seem too far-fetched to presuppose that Wisdom does exist.