Page:Queen Moo's talisman; the fall of the Maya empire (IA queenmoostalisma00leplrich).djvu/21

 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.

Booking 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