Within the framework of the prolonged controversy surrounding the origin of the Mayan peoples, Augustus Le Plongeon and Alice Dixon strongly supported the possibility that they were the first inhabitants of Plato’s Atlantis and of Mu (Lemuria, in the Pacific), who found refuge within meso-america after a series of catastrophic floods marked the start of the Holocene Epoch.įor Alice Dixon, it was in the ancient Mayan books where a large part of the historical and scientific secrets of this civilisation were to be found. Meanwhile, his wife Alice Dixon was by no means an obedient follower of her husbands beliefs, but was herself an accomplished photographer, author and public speaker, often lecturing with the Theosophical Society and publishing her own literary works on maya life in the Yucatan peninsula.īoth Alice and Augustus were also heavily involved in social work, often times raising funds to build local churches for the poor, whilst largely self financing their archeological expeditions and being called upon by the govenor of Yucatan to vaccinate any Maya person suffering from the 1874 outbreak of Smallpox, which he did free of charge.īoth also learnt the local customs and language and had the full trust and support of many conflicting maya communities, which gave them even greater access to ancient ruins during times of civil unrest.Īll this however is overshadowed by their theories concerning the origins of ancient civilisations and Augustus’ outspoken belief that the Maya were world culture bearers, descendants of the Atlanteans, and founders of the Babylonian and Egyptian civilisations, which were condemned by scholars of the nineteenth century and still carry conflicting sentiments ranging from curiosity to indignation amongst the contemporary public. “electro-hydropathic" therapy in his clinic in Lima, Peru (1862). A civil engineer, surveyor and town planner in America, a Freemason, a master in the art of photographic development, an amateur archeologist and a trained doctor, where some reports suggest that he tried to pioneer ![]() This kind of cultural climate, although on the one hand heavily influencing empathic social movements in the development of the humanities, such as the Abolitionists, Woman’s Suffrage and the Temperance Movements (who all occupied an alternative spiritual dimension to the dominant social politics of the time), left the early archeological work, field research and ultimately the personal lives of the Le Plongeon’s completely entangled and open to unfair amounts of derision which subsequently left their contribution to Maya history relatively obscured.Īugustus Le Plongeon was a man of many purported professions. This, in turn, had prompted an overly sceptical response regarding their archaeological research from the material sciences and academics, who were unwavering in their established historical timelines of the development of the world’s mother cultures. Nevertheless, Schleimann was convinced and overcame his critics.Īlthough they were two of the earliest individuals to investigate extensively the Maya civilisation, Augustus Le Plongeon and his wife Alice Dixon Le Plongeon are today dismissed by nearly all Maya scholars as little more than troublesome eccentrics, who spent a considerable time working in Yucatan, concocting theories of cultural diffusion in an era when esoteric philosophies relating to aspects of spiritualism and mediumship were becoming popular throughout western society. Up until Schelimann’s discovery, Troy had been thought a purely literary creation by academics and historians with no real basis in the historical timeline. ![]() ![]() Taking place mostly during the late nineteenth century, the research of Augustus Le Plongeon and his wife Alice Dixon Le Plongeon, within the field of archeology, a discipline still in its infancy yet dominated largely by male inflections upon cultural narratives, were inspired by the earlier drawings of English artist, architect and explorer, Frederick Catherwood and the contemporary discovery of the ancient, mythical city of Troy (in modern day Turkey) by amateur explorer Heinrich Schliemann, who, armed with only a copy of Homer’s ‘Illiad’ and his intuitive passion for archeology, discovered the lost city, along with a cache of golden artefacts he dubbed ‘Priam's Treasure’, later to be identified as the mask of Agamemnon.
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