Maya Archaeology...

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!