Message #34794

[Bianca]

The Sanskrit word for serpent is naga and she explained that from time immemorial the serpent, as the dragon, has in every part of the world signified a "wise man, endowed with extraordinary magic powers." She further alluded to the clear relationship between the reference to nagas or wise initiates residing in Patala (America), and the nagals, a Mexican Indian name for "the (now) sorcerers and medicine men."

This brings us to Professor Gordon's research in the Aztecan and Mayan (and also South American Indian) tradition that it was a white, bearded personage who brought the arts of civilization to America, arriving from the east by boat. Both the Aztecan and Mayan titles for this personage, Quetzalcoatl and Kukulcan respectively, mean "Plumed Serpent." Additional testimony to the ubiquity and central religious importance among early American peoples of the snake or serpent need hardly be given, but we can briefly refer to the Snake Tribes among the North American Indians, the gigantic Serpent Mound over 700 feet in length that was constructed by the mound-building peoples of ancient Ohio, and the use of the feathered serpent (often dragonlike in appearance) in the magnificent pre-Columbian stone structures throughout Central America.

What Dr. Gordon has done is to provide evidence that:

The classical Old World has something to say about bearded white men who are at the same time plumed serpents. A pediment from the Athenian acropolis portrays on one side three plumed serpents, each with the head of a bearded man. This embodies the essential traits -- at two levels -- of the American iconography. There are too many details involved to be attributed to accident. (Before Columbus, pp. 51-53.)

Dr. Gordon has included in his book a photograph of this pediment of an archaic temple on the Acropolis.

Another very interesting corroboration of Old World links with the Plumed Serpent tradition, not mentioned by Professor Gordon, is offered by the Scots antiquary, Dorothea Chaplin, who, writing in 1938, (Mythological Bonds Between East and West, pp. 35-36.) discusses linguistic evidences for prehistoric links between the Celtic hero Cuchulinn (or Kukil Can) and the Mayan Kukulcan, noting that both of these figures were characterized as the Feathered Serpent.

For his courage in allowing his evidence to stand or fall on its inherent cogency and appeal to our sense of logic and probability, Professor Gordon deserves a loud vote of thanks, for, as he correctly observes, his conclusions do "help us more fully to understand ourselves, our place in the order of things and our responsibilities."