Page:Queen Moo's talisman; the fall of the Maya empire (IA queenmoostalisma00leplrich).djvu/18

 the south of the Hindostan peninsula. Plainly, the poet personified as one hero the Maya colonists who long ago made their way westward, across the Pacific, and settled there.

On the shores of the Mediterranean we find nations whose ancestors seem to have been intimate with the Mayas, for the names of their country, of their cities, and of their divinities can be traced to the Maya tongue. Furthermore, their traditions, customs, architecture, mode of dress, weapons, and even their alphabetical letters are like those of the Mayas. From records in stone and MSS. we learn something of the philosophy of the Maya sages; and the same ideas are found among nations living in Asia and Africa.

Nothing could be more significant than the universality of the word Maya. In one country it is the name of a god or goddess; in another that of a hero or heroine; elsewhere that of a cast, tribe or country. This word is never used to indicate anything unimportant. In Greece the goddess Maia was daughter of Atlas, mother of Hermes, the good mother Kubéle, the Earth, Mother of the gods. We see a vestige of her worship in the still popular festival of the Maya or May Queen, fair goddess of spring, May, that very month when the Earth, matter, Maya, lives again, refreshed by the nourishing rain which, then particularly, after a season of drought, pours down upon those latitudes where the Maya nation had its birth.

The Maypole dance is yet performed among the natives of Yucatan, the land where it probably originated. The dancers are invariably thirteen in number, which may be another reminiscence of the land submerged beneath the waves of the Atlantic on the thirteenth day of the Maya month of Zac.

This Maypole dance, called in Yucatan "Ribbon Dance" is