Sacred Mysteries Among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 Years Ago Their relation to the sacred mysteries of Egypt, Greece, Chaldea and India. Free Masonry in times — Text and Context

Reading a Mural as History

Le Plongeon treats the painted tableau at Chichen Itza as a precise historical event. He identifies the figures: Queen Moo seated in a garden, a basket of oranges at her feet (refused), a messenger entreating, and Aac (whose name means “serpent”) on a lower plane. Over Aac’s head is a serpent “looking as lovingly as a serpent can be made to look” at a macaw, the queen’s totem. A monkey guards the tree, which Le Plongeon equates with the Egyptian cynocephalus as an emblem of wisdom.

From this single image, he reconstructs a civil war: Prince Coh murdered, Queen Moo rejecting Aac’s marriage offer, and eventual defeat. He claims Aac placed his statue—feet on flayed bodies—over the palace entrance at Uxmal, where “its remains may be seen to-day.” The interpretation is vivid but rests entirely on Le Plongeon’s symbolic decoding, not on independent textual evidence.

The Troano Manuscript as a Source

Le Plongeon cites the Troano Manuscript (Plate xvii, part second) to corroborate his reading. He states that the manuscript “asserts that she refused to listen to Aac's entreaties,” leading to continued civil war. The manuscript is a Maya codex, but Le Plongeon’s use of it is selective: he does not explain how he translates its glyphs or whether other scholars agree with his reading. Instead, he treats it as a straightforward chronicle.

He also notes a modern Yucatec custom—sending fruit or flowers as a marriage proposal—to argue that the basket of oranges signifies Aac’s offer. This ethnographic parallel is one of the few concrete links he provides between ancient practice and contemporary observation. Yet the leap from custom to historical event remains speculative, and the excerpts offer no further manuscript evidence.

Comparative Claims Without Direct Evidence

Le Plongeon asserts that the Maya mysteries relate to those of Egypt, Greece, Chaldea, and India, but the excerpts contain no detailed comparisons. He mentions Egyptian embalming practices—removing internal organs, cleansing, embalming with spices, depositing in four vases—only to note a similarity with Maya rites, without specifying what those rites were. The connection is asserted, not demonstrated.

Similarly, he claims that the monkey in the mural corresponds to the Egyptian cynocephalus as a symbol of wisdom, but he provides no evidence that the Maya used the monkey in that way. His argument relies on analogy rather than documented cultural exchange. The catalog subjects list Freemasonry, yet the excerpts do not discuss Masonic rituals or symbols; the title’s promise of “Free Masonry in times anterior to the Temple of Solomon” remains unfulfilled in the available text.

Readers should approach Sacred Mysteries Among the Mayas and the Quiches as a period piece of speculative archaeology, not a scholarly consensus. Le Plongeon’s interpretations are inventive but unsupported by modern epigraphy. The book’s value lies in its documentation of nineteenth-century attitudes toward pre-Columbian civilizations and its detailed descriptions of murals and customs, even if the conclusions are dubious. For a balanced view, compare his claims with contemporary Maya studies.

Reading Le Plongeon’s insistence that these stories were already ancient before Egypt woke, I remembered sitting with my grandfather’s old encyclopedia set. The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 03 — Edition Insights felt similarly heavy, each page holding fragments of peoples who thought themselves first. Both books hummed with the same quiet ache—that we are always late arrivals, deciphering echoes.