Evening Star Newspaper, February 22, 1931, Page 83

THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, FEBRUARY 22, e 1931. 5 e WHERE AMERICA’S VESTAL VIRGINS TENDED SACRED FIRES OF WORSHIP Long Before the Days of Cortez and Columbus, Maya Indians of Yucatan Built Huge Palaces and Temples, One of the Most Beautiful Being the Eighty-Eight Room House of the Nuns. Up 90 steps of the magnificent staircase the maidens climbed, bearing garlands and gifts for the gods, keeping the sacred flame burning on the altar, with their own lives as bond for performance of this duty. - BY EMILY C. DAVIS. MERICA had its vestal virgins a thou- sand years ago. Like the vestal virgins of ancient Rome, the virgins of ancient America served the temple of a deity. Their chief duty, as the name implies, was to tend the sacred fire, and woe to the maiden who let the fire die out whils she was its guardian, Death by arrows was the penalty. These American vestals were Indian girls of the Mayan race. They wore cotton robes and sandals, and ornaments of jade and gold and turquoise, and doubtless, also, garlands of gay, exotic flowers, for their home was in the tropics in the Peninsula of Yucatan, Southern Mexico. The Indian vestals were people of impor- tance. In the cities of the Maya, built by patient workmen who learned to pile up great stone edifices and to carve and paint them most elaborately, the temples were the chief of all buildings: The entire Mayan government was a theocracy, in which priests held positions of great power. All the astronomy and the learned writings at which the priests labored were inextricably mixed up with the affairs of the gods and thz gods’ will for the people. In such cities, naturally, the temples were the most conspicuous and most important centers of activity., The stone temples, beautifully carved and krightly paint2d, were set high on pedestals shapzl like pyramids, so that the temple might appear remote and lofty and a fitting resting p.ace for the gods. It was in such temples s this that the Indian vestals held their important posts. N one city of the Mayas, the Indian temple maidens se2m particularly real. That city is Uxmal, pronounced Oosh-mahl. At Uxmal stands a nunnery where a large community of temple maidens lived. The stone cells where they slept and worked at their tasks and the court where they walked are still to be entered and examined by the traveler who goes adven- turing to the ruins of Yucatan. The old nunnery consists of four long build- ings set around a large courtyard. The build- ings contain 88 cells and rooms. Close by the quadrangle of the nuns rises a tall pyramid base, and on this stands the temple where the maidens performed their duties. The pyramid is now a confused mass of stones, weeds and trees. But in its day it was an impressive monument with a stone staircase, no less than 70 feet wide, leading to the temple perched on the top. Up 90 steps to the sanctuary you can imagine the maidens climbing with dignity, bearing garlands, or sacrifices, carrying the container of the sacred fire, or escorting a procession of the priests. The temple of the maidens is called nowadays the House of the Magician or the House of the Dwarf, not for any historic reason, but because of a long native legend which associates the ruins with a dwarf, an old woman, and much magic. All of the well known ruins of Uxmal have such picturesque names, bestowed by modern explorers and natives. Uxmal has among its ruins a governon’s palace, a house of the old woman, a house of the pigeons and @& house of the turtle. Of all the ruins of the city only one building is labeled with historic certainty. That one is the nunnery. An old Spanish manuscript, written with the ald of some ancient documents long since vanished, tells of the nunnery and the maidens who lived thcre, who were like the vestal vir- gins of Rome. This Spanish historian, Father Diego Cogolludo, writing in the wandering style that characterized so much of the early Spanish writing about America, said: “In Uxmal there is a large patio with many rooms separated in the form of a cloister wiggre these virgins lived. It is a work worthy of ad- mimtion,‘because the exterior of the walls is eologist and specialist in Mayan affairs, has spent some time at Uxmal studying the ruins. Cells that were ozcupied by Indian nuns when the city was a living thing have again been occupied, this time by members of a twentieth century scientific expedition. The stone-walled rooms were cool and comfortable, they reported. The staff set to work measurinz and photo- graphing all the buildings of the nunnery quadrangle. Casts of the scuipture were taken, and 70 architectural drawings were made to provide detailed plans of the entire structure. While the architect of the expedition, Prof. J. Herndon Thomson of Tulane University, was studying the nunnery and examining other ruins about the city, he made some surprising new discoveries. These discoveries show that the builders of Uxmal had mastered some of the most subtle tricks of the architectural trade, so to speak. Tricks of perspective, applied in Uxmal's buildings, are as clever as those prac- ticed by the temple designers of ancient Greece. Thus, it is now shown that the Maya under- stood the false perspective, an architectural feature which has come to our knowledge only in recent times. Explaining this, Mr. Blom says that the four buildings of the nunnery appear to form a rec- tangle, but in reality they are not so. The south front of the nunnery court is wider than the north. And the side buildings are built so that the north end of each one is slightly raised. To the onlooker the court appears square-cut, as it would not, paradoxically, if it were really built square and on the level. Then, too, the elaborately carved friezes on the nunnery building are tilted outward. This makes it more convenient for the onlooker to observe and enjoy the fine carvings. At the same time, the tilt produces deeper shadows, which bring the carvings into bolder relief. Earlier archeological expeditions, Mr. Blom explained, have shown that Mayan artists used paint in connection with carved friezes in order to emphasize shadow and relief. The city may bz far larger when fully revealed., When Mr. Blom exploded a single, large ter- raced mound in the center of the city he foun in it no less than 19 highly important mono- liths, preat tablets of stone with carvings on them. On the stone monuments are cut hu- man figures showing the types of people who lived in Uxmal centuries ago, and on some of the tablets, too, arz bands of hieroglyphics re- cording dates in the Mayan method of stringing together a series of picture symbols. A dramatic incident had happened on this monument hill at some unknown time, Mr. Blom's researches showed. In the center of the terrace on which the monuments once stood was a deep hole, like a shell hole. The monu- ments had been thrown out from this hole on all sides. From this it is inferred that a treas- ure hunter went hunting at this site with dyna- mite, at some time. If so, the vandal seeker for gold failed to realize that the carved stones all about him were a find of great interest, though not the financial haul he was seeking. Monuments with their carved inscriptions prove that Uxmal was in existence 500 A.D. Heretofore the city has been thought to date from the year 1007 A.D. Reading the new- found inscriptions, therefore, was like adding five centuries to the age of the city, all at one stroke. Mr. Blom’s explorations at Uxmal carried him off in some tours of scouting around the fringes of the unknown ruins. And there, too, he found the unexpected. Twenty-three groups of buildings not heretofore recognized were found off in the jungle growth away from the cleared section. All of which shows that Uxmal is not only an older city than anybody thought, but a much larger one. BY the time Father Cogolludo came to Uxmal and wrote his description of the nunnery, the city was abandoned, though he was told a good deal about its grandeur and its history. The Spaniard climbed up the steep way to the The ornate east front of the Nunnery, resplendent even today as it emerges from the jungle obscurity. Beyond it is the temple where the Vestal Virgins served strange gods. all of worked stones, where there are brought out figures of armed men in bas-relief, a di- versity of animals, birds, and other things, and it has not been made out who were the artificers, nor how th2y worked in this land. All of the four fronts of the buildings of that patio are encircled by a snake worked in the same stone as the walls, the tail terminating under the head, and being in all its circuit 400 feet.” As you can sze, the Spaniards who discovered the Mayan and Aztec country had very small realization of the abilities of the natives they had encountered. The Europeans could scarcely imagine the natives building and carving in stone so skillfully without tools other than sione blades. Nor had the civilized Europeans any idea that the Americans they came to conquer and to teach really had a calendar more exact than any in Europe, and other scientific knowl- edge worthy of respect. UT the nunnery did command the interest and wonder of the Spanish writer, and to- day even in its ruined state the nunnery is so beautiful an example of prehistoric American architecture and of such romantic interest be- sides that it has been selected to represent the Mayan age at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933. Several acres of land have been set aside for this purpose. On this land, archeologists and architects are to build a copy of the nunnery quadrangle, with as much of the atmosphere of a Mayan city of a thousand years ago as they can capture and reproduce. As a first step toward this project, a Tulane University expedition, led by Frans Blom, arch- THE experiments of the old Indian architects in their search for beautiful effects recall the skillful handling of perspective by the Greeks. Scholars long ago pointed out that one of the secrets of beauty of the Parthenon at Athens lay in the slanting of the corner col- umns inward and the bulge of the columns. Another discovery made by Mr. Blom's expe- dition serves to explain how the Mayan build- ers constructed their arches. With all their cleverness in some respects, they never learned how to complete a true arch with a keystone. Always they formed an arch by pushing stones together, as two piles of books might be slipped into arch form, and to complete the arch they filled the gap by a capstone on top. The sup- position has been that the builders put up a scaffold when they set about building an arch. But the new discovery is that the Indian work- men did not need a scaffold. They weighed the stones of the wall and arch with the poured concrete fill of the center of the wall itself. The main entrance to the nunnery quad- rangle is a fine corbel arch of the sort, more than 16 feet in width. The city which built so magnificent a nun- nery for its temple maidens was one of the leading cities of the Mayan empire in Yucatan. It is today a city that is well known and that is probably very little known. This paradox is explained by the fact that many of Uxmal’s ruins stand well above ground and are so beautiful that they have become fa- mous, yet at the same time comparatively little excavating has been done to find out what may lie hidden beneath the ruins or beyond them. top of the temple by the nunnery and found there some of the figures of the gods which the Indians had worshiped. Indians were still worshiping these idols, the priest feared, for he found offerings of copal incense and cacao which had been made there not 13ng before his visit. Even today Uxmal is a place of religious rev- erence and fear to the modern natives of Yuca- tan. The ancient houses of Uxmal are invoked in a prayer of an Indian ceremony to the gods of the harvest. Natives of the region still live nearby in al- most the same manner as did their ancestors who built the magnificent temples and cities. But they do not live within the ancient ruins themselves, and sometimes it is hard to per- suade them even to work there. For they have their legends and stories, passed down from father to son through the ages. And at the Temple of the Magician and the nunnery, rumor says, the carvings on the walls become animated at night and walk abroad. And that, like other paradoxes of Uxmal, is said to be because Uxmal, the religious, was not re- ligicus enough. The old story goes that the god who reigned in thg Temple of the Magician was long patient with pis people when they neglected him. At length, however, his patience was outworn and he angrily turned the population of the city into stone, and waved them up to the walls to serve as decorations for the buildings. There they remain, except that at evening they are set free to wander forlorn and silent about the ruins of their beautiful, lost city. $