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But it must be noticed that these last-mentioned customs seemed to have been introduced in the country by the Nahualts and Aztecs; since, as yet, we have found nothing in the mural paintings to cause us to believe that the Mayas indulged in such barbaric repasts, beyond the eating of their enemies’ hearts. The Mayas were, and their descendants are still, confirmed believers in witchcraft.
At Izamal, in Yucatan, says Mr Stansbury Hagar, is a group of ruins perched, after the Mexican and Central-American plan, on the summits of pyramidal mounds which mark the site of an ancient theogonic center of the Mayas. Here the temples all evidently refer to a cult based upon the constellations as symbols.
Divination by the inspection of the entrails of victims, and the study of omens were considered by the Egyptians as important branches of learning. The soothsayers formed a respected order of the priesthood. From the mural paintings at Chichen, and from the works of the chroniclers, we learn that the Mayas also had several manners of consulting fate.
Benito Juarez, who laid the foundations on which Diaz has so magnificently built, was a pure-blood Zapotec. From the Aztecs, the Tlaxcalans, Mixtecs, Zapotecs and Mayas, we may hope much in the future. They were races of achievement in the past, and the monuments of their achievement still remain. But that the Otomi, the Triqui, or the Mixe, should be made over by the schools is doubtful.
The Egyptians, in their computations, calculated by a system of fives and tens; the Mayas by a system of fives and twenties, to four hundred. Their sacred number appears to have been 13 from the remotest antiquity, but SEVEN seems to have been a mystic number among them as among the Hindoos, Aryans, Chaldeans, Egyptians, and other nations.
The relation of scrub, jungle, and rain forest is well illustrated in Yucatan, where the ancient Mayas reared their stately temples. On the northern coast the annual rainfall is only ten or fifteen inches and is concentrated largely in our summer months. There the country is covered with scrubby bushes six to ten feet high.
While he was stopping at this island, these Mayas came there “in a vessel of considerable size” from a port in Yucatan, thirty leagues distant. It was a trading vessel, freighted with a variety of merchandise, and it used sails. Its cargo consisted of a variety of textile fabrics of divers colors, wearing apparel, arms, household furniture, and cacao, and the crew numbered twenty men.
If identical customs and manners, and the worship of the same divinities under the same name, besides the traditions of a people pointing towards a certain point of the globe as being the birth-place of their ancestors, prove anything, then I must say that in Egypt also we meet with the tracks of the Mayas, of whose name we again have a reminiscence in that of the goddess Maia, the daughter of Atlantis, worshiped in Greece.
Almost as frequent as the changing of the bells were the changes from state to state. I realized what is meant by the Indian philosophy of Maya. Truly my days were full of Mayas, and my work-a-day city life was no more real to me than one of those bright, brief glimpses of things long past. I talk of the past, and yet these moments taught me how false our ideas of time are.
Considering the numerous coincidences already pointed out, and many more I could bring forth, between the attainments and customs of the Mayas and the Egyptians; in view also of the fact that the priests and learned men of Egypt constantly pointed toward the WEST as the birthplace of their ancestors, it would seem as if a colony, starting from Mayab, had emigrated Eastward, and settled on the banks of the Nile; just as the Chinese to-day, quitting their native land and traveling toward the rising sun, establish themselves in America.
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