e Maya name for a
neck ornament given in the Motul dictionary. It is undeniable that all
evidence unites in proving that the ancient peoples of the Mississippi
valley were in traffic, if not more intimately connected, with a
Maya-speaking people and came under the influence of the ideas and
symbolism current in Yucatan.

Returning to the employment of the glyph kan in Maya Codices, for more
reasons than I am able to enumerate here, I conclude it served as an
indicative of the Above or Heaven. It is a curious fact that the Maya word
for cord is kaan, whilst the name for sky is caan. I cannot but think,
therefore, that a carved pendant with a serpent effigy=a kan, worn on a
cord=kaan, must have been associated by the Mayas with the Heaven or
sky=caan, and that this linguistic coincidence must have been a strong
factor in the development of the symbolism attached to the glyph can or
kan.

An interesting fact, which I shall demonstrate by a large series of
illustration from native Codices in a chapter of my forthcoming work on
the ancient Calendar System, will show that in their hieratic writings,
the ancient Mexican scribes represented the nocturnal heaven or sky as a
circle composed of a cord, to which stars were attached, whilst the centre
of the circle exhibited one or four stars. In my opinion the origin and
explanation of the association of the cord with stars are clearly
traceable to the above mentioned fact that in the Maya tongue the word for
cord, kaan, closely resembles the sound of the word caan=sky. The presence
of the cord in the Mexican symbols is, therefore, another indication of
their Maya origin. A proof that the Mayas also employed the cord as a
symbol of the sky, or heaven, is furnished by the much-discussed
lentil-shaped stone altar found at Copan, a small outline of which is
represented in fig. 21, no. 1. In order fully to understand the meaning
expressed by this stone, it is necessary to bear in mind how indissolubly
the idea of something circular was associated by the Mayas and Mexicans
with their conception of the vault of heaven resting on the horizon, and
of the Above, consisting of the two fluid elements, air and water.

It is scarcely necessary to refer again here to more than one authority
for the statement that the temples of the air (of the Above) were
circular, and the reason given by the natives for this was that "just as
the air circulates around the vault of the heaven, so its temple ha