Queen Moo's Talisman: The Fall of the Maya Empire

								

varied according to the rank of the individual; yellow being that of
the royal family, red that of the nobility, and green that of the
learned men. The word CAN has in the Maya language a great variety of
meanings, as Dr. Le Plongeon explains in his works; it is the generic
name for serpent.
The personages whom Dr. Le Plongeon succeeded in tracing were—the CAN,
his Queen, Zoɔ; their three sons—Cay, Aac, and Coh; and two
daughters—Móo and Nicté. There was also an aged man named Cay, the
High Priest, elder brother of the King. This venerable person is
introduced in the early part of the poem. When he died, his nephew and
namesake, Cay, succeeded to his position and title. Let it be noted
that the High Priest was, as among the Egyptians and the Hindoos of
old, superior in authority to the King himself.
At the death of King Can, his daughter Móo became Queen of Chicħen. As
among the Egyptians, and the Incas in Peru, so among the Mayas, royal
brothers and sisters were obliged to marry each other; in Siam and some
other places the same custom exists to-day. One of Móo’s brothers had
therefore to be Prince consort. Aac aspired to her hand, but Coh, a
valiant leader in battle, and favorite with the people, was her own
choice. This gave rise to lamentable events which caused the ruin of
the dynasty, Aac refusing to be reconciled.
In a carving on stone, as well as in the Troano MS. and the Codex
Cortesianus, Dr. Le Plongeon has found records of the destruction by
earthquake, followed by submergence, of a great island in the Atlantic
ocean. The author of the Troano MS. affirms that this land disappeared
under the waves 8,060 years before the inditing of that volume. It is
not known when the book in question was written, but judging from
Egyptian records, the cataclysm must have occurred between ten and
eleven thousand years ago. In the Maya books the lost land is called MU.
Lately Dr. Le Plongeon has discovered, in translating the inscriptions,
written in Maya language with Egyptian and Maya characters, which adorn
the faces of the Pyramid of Xochicalco, situated sixty miles to the
southwest of the city of Mexico, in the State of Morelos, eighteen
miles from the city of Cuernavaca, that said pyramid was a
commemorative monument raised to perpetuate the memory of the
destruction of the land of Mu among coming generations, and that it was
made an exact model of the sacred hill in Atlantis which Plato in his
Timœus describes as having been crowned by a temple dedicated to Cleito
and Poseidon.
Looking at scenes depicted in mural paintings, one is driven to the
conclusion that the Mayas were much addicted to the study of occult
forces; they certainly used magic mirrors and appealed to haruspicy in
their desire to foretell events. As may be seen in Dr. Le Plongeon’s
“Queen Móo”, one tableau represents a wiseman examining the cracks