glyph decipherment as well as a polarizing bias that sometimes hobbles Maya studies to this day. Thompson occupied an unusual position in academia. He was, in a sense, the ultimate independent researcher, the archetypal free agent—he never taught classes, never had students or held decision-making board positions at research institutions. His background involved fighting in World War I as a teenager, and perfecting Spanish while living on his family’s ranch in Argentina. Returning to England, he studied anthropology at Oxford and graduated in 1925.
While a student he developed an interest in the Maya calendar glyphs and taught himself how to compute dates in that strange system. This was a major selling point when he wrote to Carnegie archaeologist Sylvanus Morley asking to be hired on for the excavations at Chichen Itza. So it came to pass, but Thompson’s mind was restless with sifting dirt and he soon took a job at Chicago’s Field Museum. There, while still in his twenties, he began publishing insightful papers on the correlation and hieroglyphic writing.
For many years Thompson was a staunch supporter of a fairly romantic idea, that the ancient Maya were mystical dreamers, eyes on the stars, and their writing recorded the high-minded philosophies of intellects unburdened by worldly concerns. Thompson’s vision of the ancient Maya was later amended when certain independent upstarts showed how the glyphs did indeed record mundane political events and local histories. But he tenaciously insisted on a loftier function of Maya writing for the great majority of his career. Where did Thompson get this idea, one that he held close and defended like an emotional conviction?
Thompson, during his fieldwork for Carnegie in the 1920s, befriended a Maya man named Jacinto Cunil. The two were close friends for decades, and Cunil became for Thompson the epitome of Maya brilliance—hardworking, smart, and a devout true friend. Michael Coe met Jacinto in 1949 and noted that, despite Thompson’s lengthy homage to his friend in his
As Thompson’s academic star was rising in the early 1930s, the debate was raging between phonetic and ideographic approaches to deciphering Maya writing. Thompson vehemently opposed the phonetic approach. He held to a more expanded interpretation of the glyphs and resisted allowing them to be collapsed into one interpretation, one spoken decipherment (the goal of the phonetic approach). His viewpoint sometimes comes across in his writings as a belief that the glyphs were ambiguous or hopelessly complicated, that they could not be rendered into spoken language. At other times, an allowance for multiple meanings seems his position. He liked to refer to the glyphs not as phonetic components, or even ideograms, but as “metaphoragrams”—symbols that represented, via metaphor, other sets of information.
In his opus on Maya hieroglyphic writing from 1950, we hear some surprisingly mystical sentiments:
Without a full understanding of the text we can not, for instance, tell whether the presence of a dog refers to that animal’s role as bringer of fire to mankind or to his duty of leading the dead to the underworld.
He further stated unequivocally that “the glyphs are anagogical,” an incredible circumstance when you consider what “anagogical” means. The dictionary definition blandly defines the word as referring to a meaning that goes “beyond literal, allegorical, and moral” interpretations, to a sense that is “spiritual and mystical.” In the use of the term by philosophers such as Henry Corbin, an anagogical symbol is “upward leading”—it leads one upward into an integrative understanding that transcends the literal domain of interpretation. Put simply, it points to a higher transcendent reality. The symbol, or glyph, is merely a device or doorway through which the “reader” can access a higher state to embrace multiple sets of references and interrelated meanings.
Let’s get into this a little, as it is important for undertanding a key idea in this book—that of a higher, universal meaning implicit in Maya thought. Joseph Campbell said something very profound about the nature of myth, which counters the modern, tacitly agreed upon notion that “myth is a lie.” Campbell wrote “myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestations.”27 Mythologies and the symbols they contain are not merely signposts for moral decrees, but embody collective and universal themes. The symbol, which is what hieroglyphic writing most closely represents (much more so than alphabetic script), is thus a doorway that leads the open mind into a higher, more integrative space. Religious art and iconography was originally intended to be anagogical in precisely this way, to lead the viewer, the initiate, upward into the mystery of the symbol’s ineffable root.
Here we glimpse what is rightly called the Perennial Philosophy, a subject we’ll explore in more detail in Chapter 8. For now, suffice it to say that symbols are the language of this Perennial Philosophy and should be correctly interpreted as being much more than signs. As Joseph Campbell said, signs denote exactly what they say: A yield sign means yield. Symbols, on the other hand, connote something beyond their surface appearance.
We seem to have hidden in Thompson a profound multidimensional (or, as he himself said, anagogical) approach to the glyphs, true to what hieroglyphic writing requires in order to do it justice. Thompson has apparently been largely misunderstood on his insistence that the glyphs be seen as anagogical metaphoragrams. Why? Simply because science and academicians don’t allow for a “higher” perspective, or indigenous writing containing “gnosis” (even when it does). Furthermore, if scientists tend to deny the transcendent on the grounds that it is subjective and therefore less real than the objective order, one wonders to what extent this conviction colors their interpretations of Maya metaphysics and spirituality. If a metaphysics of transcendence is an essential key to Maya cosmology, how can scholars who are biased against such a notion be reliable interpreters of that worldview?
Although sensitive to a larger concept, Thompson defended his notions to the detriment of progress that could only occur if the phonetic elements were acknowledged. For the glyphs, if indeed they had multiple meanings, should also contain within them a range of components, including phonetic elements, rebus-style signs, astronomy, and references to mundane events. Notwithstanding his bias against phoneticism, the more nuanced implications of Thompson’s “anagogical” approach to the glyphs have been lost and we remember only his romanticized vision of the ancient Maya as stargazing philosophers. And Thompson’s myth of the dreamy stargazer was eventually trounced, but I think way too much of the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. Thompson was apparently a closet Gnostic, even if he himself disliked the term. He believed that the glyphs were tools for directly accessing a higher perspective. In addition to being a stubborn pedagogue, he was also a secret anagogue, one who believed in the anagogical nature of Maya writing, much as a devout Christian can gaze upon the icon of suffering Jesus and be led upward into the mystical unity of eternal love. The paradox of Thompson is probably best understood in this light, for behind every pedagogue stands an anagogue telling him he is wrong.
My reading of Thompson and Maya cosmovision is much closer to statements made by modern epigraphers (those who decipher the glyphs) than one might suspect. Stephen Houston, for example, wrote about the relationship between the built environment and Maya beliefs, observing that the two define and reinforce each other like a mutually arising chicken and egg. He asked: “Is the cosmos ordered like a house or is the house ordered like the cosmos?” (This polarity can also be stated “does the microcosm reflect the macrocosm, or vice versa?” and effectively works with any pairs of opposites.) He answered: “The concept of reciprocal metaphor allows us to resolve such questions by acknowledging the indissoluble, almost playful association between semantic domains.”28 In other words, both domains are mutually arising. What Houston said here, cloaked a bit in abstract terminology, is that the Maya held to a nondual philosophy. Their worldview was informed by the mystical vision of the transcendence of opposites. This is both Gnostic and anagogical. Of course, when I say it bluntly it sounds offensive to academic ears; better to cloak it in sufficiently labyrinthine grammatical constructs so, like Thompson but unlike Le Plongeon, you won’t be accused of cavorting with Maya mystics.
Even today, discussion on the more ethereal achievements of the ancient Maya is likely to be scoffed at as a tiresome echo of Thompson’s dreamy stargazer sentiment. The tides shift over the decades in academia. There has been, on one hand, a tendency to see the ancient Maya as high-minded philosophers advancing human knowledge in ways comparable to those of the Greeks, Egyptians, and Hindus. Then, on the other hand, scholars dispense with
