In
recent weeks, I have been reading up on the Maya civilization and,
particularly, the discovery of it by Western antiquarians, later
archaeologists. The fascination has been fuelled in part by the enforced
restrictions imposed by COVID-19 but also because this field of discovery has a
great bearing upon the Mythos, its origins and development. Let it not be said
that this is some great revelation to me: on the contrary, I’ve been well aware
of the Lovecraft Circle’s obsession with South and Central America and its
relics. It’s simply that I thought I should gain a wider perspective on all of
it and its implementation. My jumping-off point on this venture was the
following:
CARLSEN,
William, Jungle of Stone – The Extraordinary Journey of John L. Stephens and
Frederick Catherwood and the Discovery of the Lost Civilization of the Maya,
William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers, New York NY, 2016.
Octavo; paperback; 529pp., with maps, many monochrome
illustrations and 16pp. of colour plates. Mild wear; rolled; covers lightly
edgeworn; mild creasing to the spine and front cover; text block and page edges
lightly toned. Very good.
By
1839, John L. Stephens had seen most of the known world and had written about
his experiences, becoming the foremost travel writer of his day and, therefore,
conveniently being allowed to sidestep the legal career that his father had
insisted upon. Travelling between London and New York, he encountered an
equally intrepid architect and illustrator named Frederick Catherwood and they
devised a crazy notion to journey into the Yucatan Peninsula to see what was
going on down there. As a prophylactic measure against rough treatment by
thugs, Stephens accepted a diplomatic role to visit the US Embassy in Guatemala
City, to reassure the locals about America’s willingness to continue trading
with the country and then pack up the archive and withdraw the country’s
delegation entirely, in the face of revolutionary aggression. It was a two-step
of great delicacy to undertake, but Stephens felt that the mantle of
international representation was equal to a Conquistador’s breastplate and was
well worth the trouble. He was probably right.
The
main point of Stephens’ and Catherwood’s trip down south was to find and map
the forgotten cities within the Guatemalan heartland that they had heard
whispers about. Very little was known about these places at the time: the early
narratives of the Spanish invaders glossed over them and spoke about them only
insofar as they discussed tearing them down and using the pillaged stone to
build lonely cathedrals, soon to be devoured by the encroaching jungle. What
they found when, finally, they reached the insect-infested region was
spectacular and it blew their minds. They became the first white men to map and
otherwise record such places as Copan, Palenque, Uxmal, Chichen Itzá, Tulum and
about forty other equally as impressive forgotten cities. They compiled two
books about their travels – filled with breathless adventure as much as they
brimmed with copious archaeological detail – and secured their places in the
history of the region’s exploration.
PRESCOTT,
William Hickling (Keith Henderson, illus; Introduction by T.A. Joyce), The Conquest
of Mexico, Chatto & Windus, London, 1922
Two volumes: quarto; hardcover, with gilt upper board
decorations and spine titles and endpaper maps; 965pp. [480pp. + 485pp.],
untrimmed with wide margins, top edges gilt, with many monochrome illustrations.
Mild wear; boards rubbed; spines sunned with some marks; mild insect damage to
the upper board fore-edges; light bumping to corners and mild shelfwear to
spine extremities; previous owner's ink inscriptions and retailer's bookplates
to front pastedowns; scattered spotting to preliminaries; embrowned page edges;
top edges dusted. Good to very good.
An
interesting sideline to the work of Stephens and Catherwood was the writing of
the histories of Mexico and Peru – specifically their conquests by the Spanish
– by an American author named William Hickling Prescott. Almost blind, the
Boston-based author wrote the definitive records of these events using the work
of agents and readers to acquire the necessary information. These works still
hold their own even in the current whirlwind of Central and South American
studies today. John L. Stephens had read Prescott’s work on Mexico and, after
publishing his first book on Yucatan, became a close confidante of the
historian. They swapped many insights about the early civilizations of South
and Central America and were in accord about the origins of the jungle-devoured
cities; Prescott eagerly encouraged Stephens to undertake a second journey into
the wilderness…
Quite
apart from itemising the cities of the Maya homeland, Stephens and Catherwood
were crucial in discerning and initiating the notion of Mayan hieroglyphic
writing, recognizing that the culture had a concrete means of recording and
transmitting knowledge and that it was integral to the society while
simultaneously being quite different from similar systems used in Mexico, by
the Aztecs, or by the Inca communities in Peru. They hypothesized that the
symbols were hieroglyphic as well as being a means of coding for phonetic speech,
an idea that was rejected early out of hand by following researchers – bent
upon insisting that the Mayan writers were in accord with Egyptian scribes –
only to be vindicated in such thinking by epigraphers working in the late
Twentieth Century. The other idea that they developed was that the indigenous
natives of their own day were the heirs of a greater civilization than that in
which they currently resided, a notion which other Western academics rejected
absolutely – and incorrectly – as a matter of tacit policy.
*****
GALEANO, Eduardo (Foreword by Isabel Allende), Open Veins of Latin America - Five centuries of the pillage of a continent (25th Anniversary Edition), Monthly Review Press, New York NY, 1997.
Octavo; paperback; 317pp. Minor wear; slightly cocked; covers a little edgeworn; previous owners's bookplate to the first page.
By
the 1800s, Most Europeans felt that the indigenous populations of the Americas
were a degenerate and God-forsaken people: violent when pressed, but otherwise
unmotivated, complacent and intellectually dull. No effort was made to read this
as the result of centuries of enforced repression by cruel and despotic rulers;
it was simply declared to be the status quo, the defining traits of a
low-grade native community. This was colonial thinking of a high order – the
Spanish, English and other European dominators of the hemisphere required that
the submission of the native population be maintained and so, the possibility
of an ancient “golden age” of the peoples’ culture was swiftly repressed
throughout academia, wherever it chose to examine the subject. That being said,
ever since the days of Cortes, writings of various explorers have discussed the
intellectual capacity and the cultural enlightenment of the indigenous people,
even with instances of Europeans choosing to slough off the trappings of their
own culture and to join the “superior” lifestyle of the natives; however it was
chosen to see these as aberrant instances, occasions outside the norm.
Most
academics (mostly from within the Catholic Church, initially) chose to believe
that the people who built the amazing stone cities of the Americas were
travellers from across the Atlantic. They felt that the only people who could
possibly have established themselves with such power in the region were the
“lost” peoples of the Phoenician culture, which spanned the Mediterranean and
the Ancient Near East in ancient times. Why the Phoenicians? Like the Etruscans
in Italy, predating the Roman culture, the Phoenicians were a far-ranging Mediterranean
civilization which inexplicably vanished: nowadays, all we know of them stems
from the fact that – as a seafaring nation - they founded many coastal cities
around the Mediterranean Sea - including Carthage and Alexandria – and that
they gave us the book and the early rudiments of our alphabet. They also gave
us the colour red, stemming from the fact that they jealously guarded the
technology to make purple dye: ‘Phoenicia’ comes from the Greek ‘Phoinikes’
meaning ‘red ones’. The Romans put paid to the Phoenicians, wiping out their
cities utterly whenever they defeated them, ensuring that very little knowledge
about them survived to the present.
However,
they are referenced in the Bible, and early archaeologists – more
properly ‘antiquarians’ – felt duty bound to account for them. Consequently,
upon reading Homer, they made tentative connexions between them and the “lost
civilization” of Atlantis. If the Phoenicians were driven out, the ‘reasoning’
went, they must have moved somewhere else and – since no-one had found Atlantis
as discussed by Homer – that’s where they must have gone. From there, they
extrapolated, the Atlanteans must have removed to the Americas, there to thrive
before being usurped by the ‘inferior’ Indians prior to the Spanish conquest. This
process of ‘supposing X; then…’ is a hallmark of much of the early thinking
to do with South and Central America, indeed of much of the “lunatic fringe”
thinking which inspired HPL and his circle in their literary efforts.
*****
VELIKOVSKY,
Immanuel, Ramses II and His Time - A Volume in the "Ages in Chaos"
Series, Doubleday & Company Inc., New York NY, 1978.
First edition: octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titles and
endpaper maps; 270pp., untrimmed, lower edges speckled red, with 28pp. of
monochrome plates. Moderate wear; rolled; spine extremities softened; corners
mildly bumped; text block top edge lightly dusted; spotting and mild toning to
the other edges. Dustwrapper rubbed and edgeworn with chipping to the spine
panel extremities; light insect damage to the lower flap-turn; sine panel
sunned; now backed by archival-quality white paper and professionally protected
by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Good to very good.
In
the 1960s, a Russian fruitcake named Immanuel Velikovsky made himself known by
penning books which depended strongly upon building these flimsy rafts of
spurious supposition, in order to create (literally) an entire cosmos of
theoretical fantasy. Velikovsky started by positing that Earth and Mars were
part of the same planet, split apart dramatically by Venus crashing into it,
and causing it to shift places in the solar system, incidentally creating the
Moon while doing so. Cannily, after visiting the US and (somehow!) getting his
rubbish published, Velikovsky arranged to have his photo taken alongside (an
unwilling) Albert Einstein in order to glean a little scientific cred and thus became
the counter-cultural cosmic guru of the Love Generation. Thereafter he coasted
on his laurels, writing other books examining human history from various other ‘what
if…?’ premises, and declaring his own versions to be reality. In every
case, whenever a cold examination of the facts is played across his fantasies,
the original cranky premises of his many houses of cards can be discerned and
the whole construction quickly comes apart. Anyone can say ‘suppose X to be
true; then it logically follows that…’; however, if the original premise is
quantifiably untrue, it doesn’t matter how skillfully you argue the rest, it’s
still just rubbish.
von
Däniken, Erich (Michael Heron, trans.), Chariots of the Gods?, Souvenir
Press Ltd., London, 1969.
Octavo; hardcover, with silver-gilt spine titles; 190pp., with
20pp. od monochrome plates. Mild wear; mild corner-bumping to the boards; text
block edges lightly toned. Dustwrapper a little rubbed and edgeworn with a few
slight tears to the edges. Very good.
Another
presenter of such flawed thinking is the well-known Erich von Däniken . In Chariots of the Gods? he posits a
similar chain of dubious thinking which stems from the premise that ‘if
ancient terrestrial civilizations didn’t have the means to build the great
edifices upon the Earth, which are demonstrably real, then they must have had
assistance from extraterrestrial powers’. Time has shown however,
that those civilizations did have the means and – more importantly - the
will to build such things as the Pyramids of Giza, the Nazca Lines, Stonehenge
and, indeed, the great cities of Central America. He and his ilk enjoy
minimizing the capabilities of the human creature, imposing limits which are unjustified
and which, furthermore, fly in the face of the evidence. Those ancient
antiquarians of the 1800s were basing their findings upon a baseless colonial assumption
of superiority over American indigenes, more or less in line with the one that von
Däniken was imposing upon the whole of humanity. Thankfully, the worm has
turned in the interim, and now von Däniken has been relegated to the idiot
fringe where he belongs.
*****
The
other great theory which abided concerning the Americas was purely and simply a
Biblical contrivance. The Ten Tribes of Israel – each led by a son of Jacob - were
sent into the wilderness after being driven from Samaria by invading Assyrians
(2Kings 17:6) and – simply because the Old Testament is a little sketchy
concerning which tribe went where – it was posited that at least one of these
wandering groups ended up in the Americas (in fact many ethnic and cultural
groups across the planet, from Maori enclaves in New Zealand to Chinese
regional cliques, claim descent). The Lost Tribe chestnut is an old and hoary
one that gets trotted out whenever a rationale of Velikovskian solidity is
required. Famously in recent times it has been used to justify the ‘Holy Blood
and the Holy Grail’ theories of Christ’s adventures after his resurrection, but
most notorious is the fact that this ‘theory’ underpins the entire structure of
Mormonism and the Book of Mormon. According to Mormon theology, the Ark
of the Covenant was shipped to the US by the Lost Tribe and secreted there
until such time as it should be used once more. (You’d think, in a world
containing Trump, someone would have seen fit to trot that baby out by now and
do some good, already!) In this quirky take, native Americans, the members of
the Lost Tribe and Angels interbred to create a new and complex society in the
Americas which rose to prominence and then faded from view shortly before the
Spaniards dropped anchor offshore.
The
problem with this thinking (“just one problem?”, I hear you cry) is that
it is made up out of whole cloth by completists who can’t stand gaps in their
knowledge bank. Just as there was a Sixth and Seventh Book of Moses in
grimoire lore simply because five were documented and some wag had coined the
idea of a Eighth Book in the interim, so there is a Lost Tribe, simply
because an ancient scribe somewhere failed to cross the Ts and dot the Is while
compiling the Old Testament. This kind of absolutist thinking – filling
in the blanks in a documentary historical crazy-quilt – leads only to madness.
And Mormonism.
But
it’s not simply a neurotic urge to colour in a space looming alarmingly in the
jig-saw puzzle of the world; it has another rationale driving it which is all
about cultural elitism and colonial greediness. Simply put, if the Lost Tribe
had wandered into those parts of the world where Western culture currently
doesn’t hold sway, then invoking them is a means of claiming prior ownership.
Those monumental cities abandoned in the jungle, it implies, belong to our
ancestors, not yours, and therefore our desire to reclaim them is
entirely justified. You see how evil this is? It’s a good thing then, isn’t it,
that such thinking is a thing of the past. But is it?
*****
FAWCETT,
Brian (Ed. & illus.), Exploration Fawcett: Journey to the Lost City of
Z, arranged from the manuscripts, letters, log-books and records of Col. Percy
Fawcett, The Overlook Press/Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc., New York, NY,
USA, 2010
Octavo;
trade paperback; 312pp., with 16pp. of monochrome photographic plates, one
photographic illustration, a map, and many line drawings. As new.
In
the 1920s, Colonel Percy Fawcett set out to South America to map territorial
boundaries for the local citizens. Rubber plantations were booming and the
various countries in the rubber ‘hot zone’ were having trouble working out who
was harvesting where and therefore upon whom to impose taxes. Since no-one
living locally was willing to trust another local to determine their borders
for them, they handed the whole project over to the Brits; they in turn looked
down upon the matter as lowly scut work and looked around for someone lowly
enough to give it to. They found Percy Fawcett.
Fawcett
was from a well-born family of England’s gentry; however, his father had
behaved atrociously, bad enough that the whole family was dragged down by his
infamy and every member partook of the poisoned chalice which eventuated. While
excellent as a soldier, Percy was systematically overlooked for promotion simply
as a means of punishing his dad – who was a long time dead by then. Such is the
‘value’ of an Old-Boys’ Network: no-one is rewarded on merit and everyone has a
long memory. So, Percy took on the unwanted mapping job and sank his teeth into
it, doing a brilliant job on the way and discovering a passion for South
America.
While
engaged on this thankless task, Fawcett kept his ears open and heard tales of
lost cities in the jungles of Brazil, at the headwaters of the rivers which
rose in the impenetrable Matto Grosso region. As well, H. Rider Haggard
(no less!) had given him a carved piece of rock, said to have come from the
area, which Percy took to a psychokinetic medium for examination (as you do).
He was told that it had come from an ancient city lost in the wilderness and, soon
after, he set out to find this place. Not that this was all that he was going
on, of course; he had compiled a long list of clues about where this city might
be and also of what it might be composed. He had sussed out the local
tribespeople and other local residents, calculated the risks and had set off.
He never came back, and his body was never located.
Fawcett
called his mystery city “Zed”, which is a telling point. He had decided that he
would find this place, if it was the last thing he did and, figuring that it
probably would be the last thing he ever did, he named it after the last
letter of the alphabet. He resisted all efforts to pre-conceive notions of what
it would be like – something which calling it “El Dorado”, for example, would
have worked against – and he conducted his search strictly as the evidence
dictated. At all times he was respectful and friendly with the tribes of people
whom he encountered and this allowed him to gain greater access to the
wilderness than anyone else before him, certainly any foreigner; it’s easy to
believe that he felt the City of Zed was a product of the people who lived near
it and who’d fought hard to keep it secret, not something that sprang from
outer space… although he would have been open to that if it proved to be the
case, I’m sure. Sadly, his disappearance left the whole question dangling.
FLEMING,
Peter, Brazilian Adventure, Jonathan Cape, Ltd., London, 1938
Octavo; hardcover; 376pp., top edges dyed red, with a
monochrome frontispiece, 2 maps and four plates likewise. Ex-library: covers
rubbed and badly edgeworn; crude tape repair to the spine; covers rubbed and
spine extremities pulled; corners bumped; text block edges lightly toned; top
joint split and spine detached; retailer’s bookplate to the front pastedown; the
usual cancelled library ink stamps and accoutrements throughout; flyleaf
clipped; several pages in the early signatures loose (all still present); lower
joint cracked with crude tape repair. Lacks dustjacket. Poor.
In
the early 1930s, Bond author Ian Fleming’s older brother, Peter, set out
at the behest of the newspaper he worked for, to locate Fawcett and Zed and
resolve the issue. He wasn’t the first to attempt this, and he certainly wasn’t
the most determined; however, he penned a narrative of his travels afterwards
and discovered a knack for writing travel memoirs, which kept him in the public
eye thereafter. Brazilian Adventure is a rollicking yarn detailing the
slapdash (and slapstick) efforts of Fleming and his buddies in getting into and
out of Brazil and, although they fail utterly in their stated aims, it is white-knuckle,
often hilarious, reading. It also inspired many other explorers.
HOMET,
Marcel F. (Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood, trans.), On the Trail of the Sun Gods,
Neville Spearman Ltd., London, 1965.
Octavo; hardcover; 272pp., with many monochrome diagrams and
16pp. of plates likewise. Mild wear; covers lightly rubbed; corners lightly
bumped; spine extremities mildly softened; text block edges spotted and top
edge dusted; retailer’s bookplate and ink stamp to the front pastedown and
flyleaf respectively. Lacks dustwrapper. Good.
One
of these was a Frenchman named Marcel F. Homet, who glommed like a gecko onto
the more outré elements of Fawcett’s story and sought to bring
resolution to the question. Unfortunately, Homet’s working principles were not
so much informed by the Scientific Method as they were by notions of a
Phoenician diaspora and the re-settling of the Lost Tribes (as dictated to him
by a cranky Irish drunk slumming through Brittany). Across two books – Sons
of the Sun and On the Trail of the Sun Gods - detailing his South
American shenanigans, he shamelessly retails his tendency to treat South
American indigenes with casual disregard and to relentlessly pillage their
history and sacred sites in his efforts to wrest ownership of the Western hemisphere’s
ancient history from those to whom it rightfully belongs. Here once more we
have Velikovskian constructions of ephemera out of the slightest of thought
experiments (mostly deriving from cross-language puns) and a resurgence of
imperial aggression in the name of archaeology.
The
thing that makes Homet’s books, and the ideas that infest them, so shocking, is
that they were written in the mid-60s, a time when the whole concept of
archaeology in South and Central America was undergoing a seismic shift. With
the help of ethnographically sensitive archaeologists like J. Eric S. Thompson
and a pair of Russian linguists – Yuri Knorosov and Tatiana Proskouriakoff -
sites were being mapped and hieroglyphic carvings were being decoded as never
before. It wasn’t until 1985 that Maya writing could be effectively said to
have been cracked, and insights into the language and its written form continue
to take place today. Having an intellectual midget like Homet in the mix, with
his bragging about stealing from gravesites and the ruination of monuments so
that others couldn’t claim them, is repugnant in the extreme. Especially when
the reader is forced to sift through his pious declarations about his quest to
find Fawcett’s body.
HEYERDAHL,
Thor, The Art of Easter Island, Allen & Unwin, London, 1976.
Quarto; hardcover; 349pp., with many monochrome and colour
illustrations. Mild wear; endpapers and text block edges lightly toned and
spotted. Dustwrapper tarnished with spotting to the spine panel; mild scuffing
and edgewear; slight tears to the top of the lower hinge and to the bottom edge
of the lower panel; mild chipping to the flap-turns; now protected by superior
non-adhesive film with archival-quality white paper backing. Good.
After
Homet, von Däniken stepped up and entered the fray. Well into the 70s and early
80s, he peddled his ‘space-architects’ trash, which trod a fine line between the
most low-brow of popular science and UFOlogy. He even built a theme park in
Switzerland on the back of it! Disappointingly, the rubbish offered by Homet
and von Däniken threatened to destroy the valuable work being done by the likes
of Thor Heyerdahl, whose Kon-Tiki experiment opened up new thinking in
regard to the populating of the Pacific. Practical archaeology is a valuable
tool these days, used for delivering insights into past communities, as any
devotee of “Time Team” will assert; these scribblers on the idiot fringe
tried to use the concept to ‘prove’ the existence of Phoenicians and Atlanteans
in Brazil and Yucatan, and it set Heyerdahl’s work and credibility on the back
foot for decades.
*****
The
horror of Maya archaeology (and archaeology in the New World in general) is
that wrong-headedness, greed, religious nuttery and personal gain, has meant
that it is only in the last four decades or so that traction has been gained
and forward impetus achieved. The story of the indigenous peoples of the
Americas is finally being told despite much of it being now irrevocably lost. Lost,
despite the fact that the West has known of the place since at least the 1500s;
in fact, most of the necessary information crucial for completing that history
was lost since that time. What’s left is being painfully sifted from the
jungle terrain and excruciatingly recorded with a gut-wrenching sense that it
might all be far too late.
One
of the more difficult aspects of studying the ancient Maya culture was that it
was so alien to everything the antiquarians were used to seeing.
Frederick Catherwood, for example, cut his teeth studying Ancient Roman and
Greek, and then Egyptian, constructions as part of his architectural training. Though
he became the best field artist ever when it came to sketching Maya monuments,
even he had to take some time to re-calibrate his artist’s eye and get into the
mode. Photographic processes were coming into their own during the time of
Stephens’ and Catherwood’s travels and many people initially thought that – as
good as Catherwood’s efforts were – a photographic record would be better. The
two explorers actually took a camera with them on their second run and included
some photographic images in their sequel volumes; however, there’s little
difference between Catherwood’s drawings and the photographic ones and even
today his efforts are held up as superlative transcriptions from the real.
The
problem of perception is always an issue in regard to the early days of
exploration. Artists have certain pre-conceived notions about how things look,
and their education informs how they reproduce certain elements of their work.
Many early expedition artists were Classically trained in terms of human and
animal anatomy and proportion, and so were unable to faithfully render exactly
what it was that they were seeing. Even such things as an unfamiliarity with
how fabrics and clothing work could lead to the artist making all sorts of
assumptions regarding how an indigenous peoples’ costumes functioned – anyone
who’s looked closely at the native peoples depicted in Cook’s travel journals
will recognise this.
In
Central America, explorers saw stelae – carved, upright stones depicting
former kings – and assumed that they were columns, remembering such
configurations from their Egyptian travels or reading. They went to the jungle expecting
to find a Greek acropolis and were confused and disorientated by what they were
actually seeing. It took the likes of Catherwood and Desiré Charnay –
diligently hauling his photographic equipment through impenetrable forests – to
start to correct these assumptions.
*****
Beginning
in the 20s, a series of actual archaeologists (some of them not quite
sure about this new term for their activities) set out in Stephens’ and
Catherwood’s footsteps, just as they had set forth in the wake of those who had
gone before them. Explorers such as Alfred Maudslay and Desiré Charnay began
the thankless job of recording the finds of their precursors and sifting
through these for some trace of history that could be codified. How frustrating
for them to know that the writing that peppered these ruins was a complete
record of what they were after, but with no Rosetta Stone to allow them to
decipher it! By the 50s, numbers and the calendrical system had been discerned
and English digger and ethnographer J. Eric S. Thompson managed to collect
almost all of the hieroglyphic symbols extant on the stone monuments discovered
to that point. The Maya kingdoms were, it seemed to these explorers, obsessed
with time and the recording of it. The “Long Count” – the Maya system of reckoning
time was pinned down and that seemed to be as far as scientists were going to
get with it all.
EMMERICH,
Roland (Dir.), 2012, Columbia Pictures/Centropolis
Entertainment/Farewell Productions, 2009.
Of
course, nonsense has intervened here as well. Given that the Long Count has a
beginning and an end – occurring in our year of 2012 – a cabal of idiots out
there decided – on the basis of very little - that the world would end when the
Long Count did. *Sigh!* It seems that there is just no end to the
foolishness that people are ready to buy into. Of course, nowadays, we know
that the Long Count is a cyclical reckoning based upon astronomical
observations – once it ends, it just starts again – and the Maya have left us plenty
of texts that tell us exactly this. That didn’t stop a bunch of people killing a
whole heap of trees in order to tell us that Christmas 2012 would be our last.
They even made a movie out of it!
THOMPSON,
J. Eric S., Maya Archeologist, Robert Hale Ltd., London, 1963.
Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titles; 208pp., with maps,
many monochrome illustrations and 16pp. of plates likewise. Mild wear; slightly
rolled; spine extremities softened; corners bumped; text block edges spotted
and top edge dusted; mild offset to the endpapers; retailer’s bookplate to the
front pastedown; previous owners’ ink inscriptions to the flyleaf; mild foxing
to the preliminaries. Price-clipped dustwrapper is rubbed, scuffed and edgeworn
with some mild scraping to the spine panel; some small tears to the lower
flap-turn with associated creasing; now professionally protected by archival-quality
non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good.
J.
Eric S. Thompson became the torch-bearer of American archaeological studies for
a time and tried to blend emerging studies in ethnography and anthropology with
the digging that he was doing in the Yucatecan (yes – it is a real word)
jungles. Crucially, during the time of Maudslay and up until Thompson’s
generation, it was noticed that words in the indigenous peoples’ language were
similar, if not identical, to the words in Maya: a phonetic ‘alphabet’ compiled
by an early Spanish priest named Diego de Landa (ironically, the same guy who
burnt more Maya texts than anyone else) was able to verify this state of
affairs. The native tongue K’iché (Quiché in Spanish) has many
points of reference to spoken Maya, and these were used to begin to identify
how Maya glyphs might have been vocalised and to creep forward with the
decipherment. Thompson took things even further: he took his observations of
the contemporary native lifestyle and used these to backwards engineer a
reconstruction of how the Maya might have lived centuries ago. In this he was
quite some way off track, but he enabled a more sympathetic and spiritual light
to shine on what had previously been written-off as a single-mindedly
bloodthirsty culture. His books are also a joy to read, combining the
derring-do of Peter Fleming with the archaeological rigor of Prescott and Stephens.
DREW,
David, The Lost Chronicles of the Maya Kings, Weidenfeld &
Nicolson/The Orion Publishing Group Ltd., London, 1999.
Octavo; hardcover, full cloth with silver-gilt spine titles;
450pp., with maps, monochrome illustrations and 24pp. of full-colour and
monochrome plates. Minor wear; some light spotting to the text block fore-edge.
Near fine in a like dustwrapper.
Nowadays,
as stated above, American archaeology has established itself and has made many
stunning inroads in the understanding of the region’s past civilisations – as
outlined in many publications such as that listed above. Ownership of the field
has rightfully devolved upon academics native to the Americas, working within
their own countries where the monuments and relics are found, and have sloughed
off the hindrance that was colonial entitlement, as well as the flaky hootings
of the idiot fringe. Financed by American academic institutions and other progressive
entities, such as the National Geographic, the archaeology of the
Americas nowadays represents the cutting edge of the discipline.
*****
Of
course, in the world of the Mythos, the troublesome elements that have dogged
and detained the progress of American archaeology are the ones that writers and
gamers naturally look to in order to spin out narratives of cosmic terror and
earthly horror. HPL and his circle were living during times of great upheaval
in regard to what an “archaeologist” was (in fact, so many different scientific
disciplines were coming into their own when these guys were scribbling away –
anthropology; ethnography; psychology…). Much of the Lovecraft Circle’s
precursors – Machen; Blackwood; Bierce – wrote tales of antiquarian dabblers
biting off more than they could choke down, so it made sense for their
inheritors to take that new-fangled word “archaeology” and use it to underscore
the modern-ness of their own tales. Too, the Old World was just that – old –
and newer narratives needed someplace that was fresh and exciting; the New World
fitted the bill nicely.
Even
a cursory glance through some of the books mentioned here reveals that, in
terms of cobbling together a gripping story, there was much to recommend the
Americas. Revolutions, native uprisings, general lawlessness, impenetrable
jungles, disease, voracious wild animals, venomous reptiles and loathsome
insects – it was all ripe for exploitation, which the cinema, books and
tabloids of the day certainly did with gusto. Add to this the alien qualities
of the Maya aesthetic – along with those of the Aztec and Inca nations – and
suddenly, it’s almost too much to handle.
The
sensibilities of the Lovecraft Circle however, were finely honed towards making
the impossible seem plausible, of couching the fantastic in the everyday. Take,
for example, the scientific rigor which HPL brings to “At the Mountains of
Madness”: the whole reason that story works so well is that it is riddled
with map references, equipment and logistical details, and real locations. When
searching around for wormy old tomes to imperil his characters, he often looked
for real-world analogues – this is how The Book of Dzyan, a Theosophical
text – came to be included in the Mythos canon. Another example is the
following work:
CHURCHWARD,
James, The Lost Continent of Mu: Motherland of Man, William Edwin Rudge,
New York NY, 1926.
Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titles and an upper board
decoration; 316pp., with a monochrome portrait frontispiece, various maps and
diagrams likewise and 4pp. of plates. Minor wear; some tarnishing of the gilt
on the spine. Lacks dustwrapper. Very good to near fine.
While
HPL and E. Hoffman Price were putting together “Through the Gates of the
Silver Key”, they stumbled across mention of this book. Churchward’s thesis
is that the fabled continent of Mu is the source of all humanity and goes on to
explain at length how that came to be and where Mu went to in the end. Churchward
claimed to have been instructed in the language of “Naacal” by an ancient
Indian guru and HPL and Hoffman Price decided to appropriate that word as the
name of the language of their own Muvian homeland. Additionally, they added a
page to Churchward’s book – an extra plate with a handy table showing how
Naacal could be translated – and nicknamed the work “The Naacal Key”.
Consequently, the book – although quite real – has become a fanciful Mythos
mainstay.
Another
writer dabbling with the southern Americas was Robert E. Howard. In “The
Children of the Night” and later in “The Black Stone”, he introduces
Friedrich Wilheim von Junzt and his major opus Unaussprechlichen
Kulten (“Unspeakable Cults” or The Black Book) which mentions
at various points mystical “keys”, one of which is hidden in an ancient tomb in
the Honduras (although the Bridewell version of the book places it in
Guatemala). Later still, Keith Herber posited the infamous Turner Codex,
a series of copper plates etched with hieroglyphs of a Mayan character, discovered
in 1891 by the eccentric explorer Maplethorpe Turner, who was shown two of the
plates whilst investigating a small village named Rio Craso in Guatemala, deep
in the jungles of the Petén. This work was later said to have influenced the song
lyrics of the doomed rock group “God’s Lost Children”.
*****
In
summary, then, the wilds of South and Central America are definitely ripe for plundering
when it comes to the Cthulhu Mythos and the various styles of storytelling that
can take place there. However, the actual history of these countries is as
fascinating, as strange and as terrifying as anything penned by Lovecraft and
his coterie, so do yourself a favour and read a bit wider than the fruitcakes
and the fiction – you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
And
then you can rip into your “Raiders of the Lost Ark” box set – or watch “Teso
dos Bichos” (1996) the Ecuadorian “X-Files” episode from season
three directed by Kim Manners, or curl up with “The Relic” like I do.
That’ll get your jungle juices flowing!
