Copan - The Phantom City

( Originally Published 1905 )

Rise, too, ye shapes and shadows of the past,

Rise from your long forgotten graves at last;

Let us behold your faces, let us hear

The words ye uttered in those days of fear. —Longfellow.

IT is recorded in the nineteenth chapter of Jeremiah that the apostate Israelites "built also high places of Baal to burn their sons for burnt offerings unto Baal." We will not now discuss the antiquity of building "high places" for offering sacrifice, a practice which probably antedates the deluge and may be coeval with the "mighty men" the "men of renown," referred to in the fourth chapter of Genesis. Now, the dominant character of the pre-Columbian cities of Mexico and Central America was that their temples, where human sacrifices were offered, were built, like those of the Babylonians and that of the apostate Jews in the "Valley of Slaughter," on artificial elevations. Even when nature had anticipated and prepared for the coming of the builders by placing hills in the immediate neighbourhood of the sites selected by the elders, these mysterious people insisted upon raising, at an enormous sacrifice of labour and time, their own mounds for their own temples. It is possible that in some mutilated form a tradition of the Tower of Babel may have continued with their immediate ancestors, and amid their wanderings and vicissitudes and lurid wars, continued to be a part of their national and religious life. These elevations naturally took the mound or pyramid shape, and supplied an unyielding base for the foundations of their massive buildings.

The immense mound on which I stood is built of rubble, broken sandstone, and shale, held together by a binding which practically solidifies the mass into a hill of stone. This huge pyramid is robed in a vesture of tropical weaving, whose warp and woof are vines and moss of marvellous variety and fascinating greenness. Like the Isaihan Babylon, Copan in other days was " swept with the besom of destruction," and it is now " a ruin of desolation and an hissing." Copan is probably the oldest ruin in the two Americas. It by no means follows that other cities may not have existed before it, for the builders of the city brought with them into this wilderness a civilization antedating this mound and recording other cities from which they came. The walls of the structures yet standing are of great thickness, which we would expect from an intelligent people settling in a land subject to periodic and violent earth tremblings. I have mentioned the sensation of awe I experienced when for the first time, from the other side of the Copan River, I saw the phantom city. Now that I stood amid the desolation of ruins, surrounded by a forest of immeasurable age, I felt that I was communing with the spirits of the mighty dead, and with the voiceless souls of the unhappy victims done to death on this awful stone of sacrifice beside me. Covered with moss, on which the lizards crawl and where scorpions and creeping things are found, this frightful stone is a mortuary witness to the degradation of our race when estranged from God. Within it dwells a spirit of pathos, of infinite sadness, of boundless pity for the darkness of a race whose very dust is consumed by the wrath of time. I see everywhere around me the melancholy memorials of a nation that ran its course and perished in the veiled ages of prehistoric times.

Who can say that these ruined temples and altars may not be pitiful fragments from the wreck of a civilization that was lost long ago in the awful storms of civil war, or in the gradual debasement of individual and national life ? The buildings of Copan are a confused mass of ruins worn down by the steady, relentless gnawing of time going on for ages, an invisible remorseless gnawing that never rests, and will not till the stones are pulverized to powder or buried for all time. In the dry climate of Egypt the monuments of man may defy the attacks of erosion, for there time is but a phantom, but here it is an embodied spirit of corrosive fluids and devouring acids. Here also nature is the friend of time. It creates and fashions for its ally weapons of such infinite tenuity and subtle innocency that to the eye of man they are mockeries and things to laugh at. They come out of the earth, these weapons, and have life, not the life of anything that walks or creeps or flies, but they have a life of their own. They move stealthily, and with wondrous cunning attach themselves to the thing time has sentenced to death. And now they begin to distil acids of subtle venom, and by an instinct or nameless something, akin to sight in living things, feel an opening in the adamantine joints of the great buildings. Through it they enter, and like bacilli in the blood of the sick, they multiply and increase enormously. But they grow, these vegetable bacilli; night and day they grow, and wax strong, and become large, and some night they heave in their remorseless strength the great stones from their settings, and topple them to the earth. These are the giant vines, and where they fail to overthrow or corrode, sometime, it may be at intervals of a hundred, of two hundred years, a great earthquake rocks the place, and in its elemental anger overturns a whole wall. This is what happened to the great circus which, according to Juarros, was standing in 1700. The stone benches of the eighty tiers of the amphitheatre are broken into fragments, and the beautiful pavement is strewn with the debris. Here are the idols seen by Palacio nearly four hundred years ago, the statue twelve feet high " sculptured like a bishop in his pontificial robes," and the statues of Aueralcoatte and Itzqueye (sun and moon), his wife. To these, children, twice a year, were sacrificed, and after a successful war batches of captured warriors ruthlessly butchered.

On the walls of the dilapidated buildings still standing, on the two altars and on the stone shafts or monoliths, are carved in relief ornamental designs which, with the rude tools of the sculptors, must have taken a long time to chisel. Human figures are posed in groups portraying in their attitudes, devotion, joy, or horror. Here, as in all the abandoned cities of Central America, the snake is conspicuously prominent. There are isolated figures of animals, and of almost all those creatures that " swarm in the waters and the creeping and flying species of the land," but the serpent is the dominant and most terrible figure on these monuments. He is represented in repose, feathered, double-headed, and striking. From his loathsome mouth protrudes a woman's head, out of the jaws of some hideous idol he is coming, now he is fashioned with others into a turban covering the head of a priest offering sacrifice, again he is coiled around the body of a writhing victim—some Quiche Laocoon—or woven into the vestment of a famous sculptured warrior. The statuary is most elaborately carved. Some of the persons represented are in an attitude of devotion, with hands crossed, and head uplifted; others hold sceptres of authority, and are gorgeously apparelled, wearing elaborate head-dresses ornamented with the plumes of the quetzal or cacique bird.

All these are of priestly or royal rank, wearing the robes and insignia of their high offices, and hinting that by this perished race the priesthood and royalty were on the same plane of reverential equality as among the Chaldeans, Egyptians and Jews. "Kings were my ancestors," said Agrippa to Caesar, " and among them were high priests, whom our family considered equal to royalty itself." These priestly and royal personages have cone-shaped heads fashioned by pressure in infancy, the Phoenician or Semitic nose, and full voluptuous lips. These statues, but not all, are scattered on the ground, some entire, eight and ten feet long; others in fragments, and one of them, like Dagon of the Philistines, "was fallen on his face to the earth, the head and both the palms were broken." The two altars, now coated with algae and tropical moss, are panelled and carry abundantly, the Maya hieroglyphics, or, to quote from Las Casas, "writings of certain characters which God only knows." If these mystic writings be ever deciphered something may yet be learned of this ancient race, its inherited civilization, and the devolution which ended in savagery or national extinction.

Standing amid the wreck and ruin of the temples, statuary, and altars of this vanished race, whose language no man may speak, whose, faces are unlike those of any people known to us, it is impossible not to credit them with a certain grandeur of thought, high architectural skill, indomitable energy, and a debasement of the moral and religious life supremely sad and pitiful. With infinite loathing, but with commiseration for their mental and spiritual darkness, we recoil with horror from the contemplation of their human sacrifices and human flesh-eating, done to propitiate the wrath or invoke the good-will of some monstrous god. But we must not forget that, before the coming of our divine Lord, these horrible rites were universal, even among the most civilized nations. Hecuba was sacrificed by her own people on the tomb of Achilles, ' the Greek. Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon, was given up by her father and sacrificed to propitiate the gods of Greece when the nation was threatened with extinction. From the Greeks human sacrifices passed to the Romans, nor does the refined critic Horace object to it, only suggesting that the death of the victim should take place in secret.