tiates to whom they communicated it in the land of their adoption, amplified it, and composed the "Sri-Santara," making each part of easy comprehension.

This, at first sight, may appear like an assertion of private opinion. It is not, however. It is the stating of an historical fact, that becomes evident when we study said "Sri-Santara," and notice that the names of its different parts, from Aditi, the "boundless," to Maya, the "earth," are not Sanscrit, but pure American Maya words.

Now, if the Hindoo priests, the Brahmins, did not receive their cosmogony from the Mayas, together with the diagram by which they symbolized it, how did it happen that they adopted precisely the same geometrical figures as the Mayas to typify their notions of the creation of the universe, which we are told they borrowed from "the materialistic religion of the non-Vedic population; "1 and that, in giving names to the various parts of said figures, they made use of vocables not belonging to their own vernacular, but to a language spoken by the inhabitants of a country distant many thousand miles from their own, and separated from it by the wastes of the ocean, the traversing of which was by them, as it is by their descendants, regarded as a defilement ?

We must not lose sight of the fact that the Danavas and the Nagás were peoples who did not belong to the Aryan stock, and that they suffered a fierce persecution at the hands of the Brahmins when these acquired power.2

As to these, their origin is one of the most obscure points in the annals of ancient India; they are barely mentioned in the Vedic hymns. When, in remote times, the Aryans invaded

'J. Talboys Wheeler, History of India, vol. iii., p. 56.
2 Ibid.

2

They

the Punjab, the Brahmins had no power or authority. were merely messengers and sacrificers. No food so pure as that cooked by a Brahmin.' Others among them, having a devout turn of mind, were hermits doing penance, immersed in contemplation. At the time of Alexander's conquest of northern India, many lived in convents, practising occultism. They were called gymnosophists by the Greeks, and were regarded as very wise men. But it must be remembered that the period between the establishment of the Vedic settlements on the Saraswati and the conquest of Hindostan by the Aryans, when they had become the leading power, probably covers an interval of thousands of years.3

"The Aryans appear to have had no definite idea of a universe of being or of the creation of a universe." From them, therefore, the Brahmins could not have borrowed their account of the creation, which differs from that we might infer from the Vedic hymns.5 Still "Manu borrowed some of the ideas conveyed in his account of the creation of the universe by Brahma."6

From whom did he borrow them?

“The Brahmins rarely attempted to ignore or denounce the traditions of any new people with whom they came in contact; but rather they converted such materials into vehicles for the promulgation of their peculiar tenets."7

The Nagás, we have seen, were a highly civilized people,

'J. Talboys Wheeler, History of India, vol. ii., p. 640. 'Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana, lib. ii., chap. 15, p. 242; lib. iii., chap. 11, p. 8. Translation of Charles Blount, London, 1680. J. Talboys Wheeler, History of India, vol. ii., p. 624.

Ibid., p. 452. Adolphe Pictet, Les Origines Indo-Européennes, vol. iii., p. 410.

'J. T. Wheeler, History of India, vol. ii., p. 452.

Ibid., p. 449.

1 Ibid., p. 450.

whose rulers held sway over the whole of Hindostan when the Aryans established their first colonies on the banks of the Saraswati. Later on we shall see that these Nágás were originally Maya adepts, who in remote ages migrated from Mayach to Burmah, whence they spread their doctrines among the civilized nations of Asia and Africa. How else explain the use of the American Maya language by the Hindoos, calling Maya the material world? (Ma, "country; yach, the vérêtrum of the ancestor, through which all living earthly things were produced.)

This query may be answered by another. Why do we find English customs, English traditions, English language, in America, India, Australia, Africa, and a thousand and one other places very distant from each other, among peoples that do not even know of each other's existence? Why, any one will say, because colonists from England have settled in those countries, and naturally carried there the customs, traditions, language, religion, sciences, and civilization of the mother country. Why, then, not admit that that which occurs in our day has taken place in past ages? Is not man the same in all times? Has not the stronger always imposed his ideas on the weaker? If in the struggle toward eternal progress, the most civilized has not always been physically victorious, history teaches that intellectually he has obtained the victory over his conqueror in the long run; proving, what has so many times been asserted, that mind is mightier than matter.

Civilization is indeed like the waves of the sea; one wave follows another. Their crests are not of equal height. Some are higher; some are lower. Between them there is always a trough more or less deep. The wave behind inevitably pushes that immediately before it, often overwhelms it.