Modern science regards the white, yellow, black, red and brown, even when the latter is eliminated or classified with the red as a subgroup under the yellow, with profound distrust. Thus the deeper structural differences are leading the foremost thinkers to suspect the old classifications so strongly that they are going out of fashion in any scientific discussions worthy of the name.

  For example, Huntington contends that skin color is now distributed over the Earth’s surface according to the strength of the sun’s rays, and is only man’s reaction to his environment. Dixon of Harvard University argues that all men are to be divided by skeletal differences into round-heads with narrow noses, round-heads with broad noses, long-heads with narrow noses, etc., completely ignoring hair texture and the color of the skin. Both of these eminent scientists have agreed that the Negro is not a primitive, but a recently evolved tropical type. In other words, a group of the long heads, finding themselves in a tropical environment, evolved the spreading nostrils, thicker skull and blacker skin of the Negro. Thus the Negro is a late adaptation of Modern Man to a tropical environment.

  Now it is interesting to note that mankind may be divided into two rather distinct types, which are called “harmonics.” One is a long-headed, long-faced individual with long eye sockets. The hair in cross-section is inclined to be very oval, thus giving it a tendency to curl. The type is the Ancient Egyptian. Let us call him the “proto-Negroid” because in its extremity, the type becomes more Negroid—the hair becoming exaggeratedly curly, etc. The Negro is a late branch from the type. In its earlier form, the skin is a tan shade and the eyes are long and deep sunken, the nose delicate, the lips not too full. The stature is slight and slender. The hands and feet slender and delicate.

  The “proto-Negroid” is sometimes called the “ancient longhead” and sometimes called the Mediterranean Race. This latter name is somewhat incorrect, for though the people are to be found in the Mediterranean, they are centered in the area of the Indian Ocean. A better name for them would be the “Peoples of the Sea,” for they are found upon every ancient shoreline.

  In London, for example, when dredging for a new building, in the lowest basement, while digging in the gravels in which are to be found the remains of the Great English Channel forest which once covered that submerged valley, the human skulls which are brought up are the true type of the ancient long-headed “People of the Sea.”

  Again in the Channel Islands of California, when the earliest skulls are unearthed, they are once more harmonic long-head. A map of the cephalic-index of living populations today would reveal that the long-heads would live along the seacoasts, with the exception of the western coast of the Americas, where round-heads have displaced the ancient long-headed population.

  The other “harmonic” type is the round-headed, round-faced Asian with round eye sockets and straight hair that is in the cross-section completely round. In the extremity this type develops the mongoloid eye fold and becomes the typical Chinese.

  These round-heads are concentrated most thickly in the region just north of the Himalayas. From here they pour in a thick stream from the Caspian into the Mediterranean and through Greece and Albania into Europe. Another arm runs northward through Russia into the Baltic while a third stream sweeps northeast across the Aleutian Islands and down the western coast of the Americas. Thus from the map of present distribution, it is easy to see that the round-head is an Asian and a landsman.

  Now where does white man enter this picture? Is he a cross? We learn with surprise that his is not a true or a harmonic type. Between the poles of the long-headed proto-Negroid and the round-headed Asian, in head form, shape of the face, eye-sockets and cross-section of the hair, varies that section of Modern Man that we designate as the “White Race.” The variation is so profound that not only do we see all combinations within the same nationality, but often within the same family group.

  These facts force us to one of two conclusions. Either the white race is a very profound cross which has never remained in isolation long enough or inbred deeply enough to set its type, or it is the original stem from which the other two harmonics branched.

  To meet these facts, some ingenious classifications have been offered. For example, there is Duckworth, who would make the round-heads the general type from which the long-heads, making their way into the Indian Ocean and spreading from this point, were an early branch. However, that of Wissler* seems to be the most logical. He would make White Man and perhaps also the Polynesian Race the original stem. As he points out, the White Man is the most hairy of all the races and this is certainly a primitive characteristic.

  When studying the very ancient nations it is important for us to keep in mind the characteristic of facial hair. It is anthropological nonsense for us to classify the beardless Egyptians and Cretans as “White Men.” It would be more honest for us of the white race to admit that the first civilizations were not founded by men of our race, but by the tan-skinned “People of the Sea,” some of whom, nevertheless, have contributed to the blood of the modern European.

  As for this matter of superiority, the honors for geniuses are so evenly divided between the two harmonics that one could not truthfully give the palm to either the one type or the other. It would be a controversial question, for example, whether the round-headed Beethoven and Socrates were any greater than the long-headed Wagner and Shakespeare. And I would venture to wager that the honors in the prisons are just as evenly divided! Apparently the only fair judge of potential intelligence is brain capacity in proportion to the frame, for much brain space is taken up in mere muscle control.

  As for blondness, it is a stumbling block, for it is to be found in Northern Europe among both round- and long-heads. Dixon suggests that there may be something about the food grown in this soil or some other physical reason that might contribute to fair hair and pale skin. However, the blonds to be found among the San Blas Indians of Colombia are a denial to this theory of Dixon. The Indians have their own names for their whites. Significantly they are called “yapisas,” or “hairy ones.” Sometimes they are nicknamed “moon-children” in reference to the fact that white is the color sacred to the moon.

  It is interesting to know that these blond Indians exist by the thousands. Some were taken to the Smithsonian Institute to be studied by the scientists. One of the most interesting facts to be discovered was that about one-third of their words come from the ancient Norse. After realizing that these Indians did not have the white hair and pink eyes of the true albinos, but blue eyes and various shades of golden hair, the scientists decided that they were partial albinos. One sage expressed the opinion that the San Blas tribe was in the process of changing its racial type and that the proceeding would have gone much further if an abnormal hatred for the conquering Spaniard had not caused the blonds to be placed under a marriage taboo. (This fact was attested to by the Indians themselves.)

  The designation that the blonds were partial albinos is an interesting one. The question that naturally arises is: if these people with their various shades of light hair and fair skin are to be scientifically classified as partial albinos, what are white Europeans? What is white man in general? Is he partial albino? Is white skin to be considered as various degrees of partial albinism? And if so, was this a general condition of the original stem along with a tendency to body hair, from which diverging types acquired a more hairless skin and a deeper color?

  What do you think?

  THE END

  L. Taylor Hansen, “Scientific Mysteries: Footprints of the Dragon”

  Amazing Stories, May 1944

  The trail of the Dragon can be followed over all the Earth and through the legends of many isolated races of humankind.

  We have seen how, in trying to track down to its lair the ancient colossus of the seas, the giant Dragon Totem, the weight of much evidence seems to point to two very important conclusions: (1) that the long-headed peoples of the Americas who occupy the refuge locations (thus indicating an early strata of population) also seem to carry the strongest suggestions of very ancient Dragon ritual, and (2) that the ceremonies and legends which these isolated tribes hold in common apparently center in the Antilles.

  These facts certainly do not fit in with the centralization of the Dragon Totem in Asia, where it is at present carried largely by a round-headed population. Furthermore, if the Dragon entered Amerind ritual from Asia, then we would expect to find its traces through the Northwest of North America and down the Pacific Coast. This is not true. The Wolf Totem is the most powerful in the Northwest, with Coyote-Man the first figure in their pantheons. The Great Bird is second, but even the Whale Totem is more powerful than the Reptile-gods. In fact, in no other part of the Americas, with the possible exception of the Southwest part of South America, are the Reptile-gods as weak as they are in the Pacific Northwest.

  Yet certainly there is some meaning in the pattern which the distribution of Dragon-ritual presents, rippling outward as it does from the Antilles and resting most strongly in the Aztecan family of languages, which number most of their members from Mexican tribes. Just as there is most certainly a meaning behind the three main types of face painting and the distribution of each. The division of the face into two halves originally indicated the Totem of the Eagle, or the Great Bird. This is most strongly characteristic of the hawk-nosed disharmonic Old Red Race, which is largely crowded into the eastern part of North America. The painting or tattooing of the face into concentric whorls or circles is typical of the Spider Totem and is scattered through the South Seas and up some of the South American coasts. The horizontal banding of the face indicates the Serpent or the Great Dragon Totem. (The various colors stand for the four directions, which differ from tribe to tribe.)

  For a moment, let us concentrate upon this horizontal banding, which some authorities have noted is so typical of the wild tribes islanded in refuge locations that they have suggested it may be typical of hunting tribes in general. The various Karib peoples of the Antilles, including the Aruaks, who speak a tongue akin to these Indians of the Caribbean, wore nosebands or in some manner indicated a horizontal line across the cheeks. The Itzaes* wore a hollow tube through the septum of the nose into which breathing holes had been punched. At the present time the Mayas wear a veil across their nose and mouth at night. When questioned about the matter, they insist that the night air is poisonous and they must protect their air passages (The Ancient Mayas by Stacy-Judd).

  It was an old Indian sage who gave the present writer the needed hint that might serve to unravel this mystery. In remarking upon the continual connection between the horizontal banding of the face, in ritualistic dances of the Veiled-One (if not actually veiling the features) and the other characteristics of the Great Serpent or Great Dragon as compared to those of Egypt, he suddenly remarked: “Was the ‘Veiled-One’ of this Ancient Egypt always known as Ammon-Ra?”

  “Why, no,” I answered thoughtfully, “that was the joining of two sun gods into one. Ra came into Egypt from the east while Ammon or Amen came from the direction of the Atlantic …” But my mind was leaping ahead of my words. Was this Egyptian Amen the Zamna of the Mayas, the Tiaman of the Guatemala tribes—even the Tanama “Trembling-One” (Earthquake) of the Apaches?* Tanama had once walked among them, teaching them how to live. (Apparently this was a confusion with a later culture-hero, similar to the Quetzalcoatl legend.) Yet if this remark was thought provoking, the next observation by the old sage was almost startling.

  “Of course, he does not always go by the same name. He is the god of breath or life. Therefore he sometimes goes by a name with a hissing sound.”

  “Osiris! The god of life and learning! The Egyptian son of Amen!” I gasped.

  Other names were flashing to my mind. Some of the names of the ancient cities that history records once belonged to those mysterious veiled Tuaraks who rule the Libyan desert. Tafassaset! Khamissa! Essouk! And the mysterious secret society of the Sahara whose wasm* is the Serpent—the Senussi! Did the hissing sound of the serpent cause it to be early connected with breath and life? And the veil which the Tuaraks of today place upon a boy at puberty and which thereafter no one sees him without—they explain its presence by saying that they wish to protect their nasal passages from evil spirits! What connection did that have with the fact that Amen was known as “the Hidden One?”

  There was another fact about Amen “the Two Horned” which kept pounding itself rhythmically to my attention. Amen had been known as the “Lord of the Two Lands.” Sometimes he had been spoken of as being seated upon the “Throne of the Two Lands.” What were these two lands? And what did the Tuaraks mean when they pointed to the Atlantic as their homeland?

  Possibly all of this was mere coincidence. Yet there were the curious little three-sided stones found on both sides of the central section of the Southern Atlantic. Both Northern Africa and Central America had yielded them. On one side was a face, on the other side feet, and in the center the peak. They are distinct representations of a man buried under a mountain. What could they mean? What ritualistic significance did they have or what story were they trying to tell?

  And then from both sides of the Atlantic at this point was the legend of the warrior-women—women who had removed the right breast in order to better handle their bows. Upon the American side there was the legend of the women warriors who met the men of another tribe upon a certain designated night of each year and at that time returned all male infants born to them during the previous twelve months.

  The Spanish did not find the legendary tribe. Yet they did find that the Karibs had fighting women. These women fought beside their men in battle, did no work and were very strong in all tribal councils. The work was all done by captive women from other tribes.

  Strangely enough, the French priests traveling up the Mississippi River during the following century discovered that the Choctaws, who painted their faces with the sinuous horizontal of the Serpent and who boasted that they were immune from snakebite (evidently an ancient remedy, since all Serpent peoples the world over seem to share this knowledge), had a legendary woman chief who had been a particularly savage warrior. This is the most notable case of the Serpent Totem being found outside of the Uto-Aztecan block of languages with the exception of the Antillean group. As the relationship of the Antillean group is as yet very little understood, it is quite possible that they will be found to be connected, while the Choctaws, speaking a Muskhogean tongue related to the Creeks, shared with the Creeks their legend of a Mexican origin.

  As yet so little is known of these various Indian tongues in their relation one with another that the investigator must be cautious and creep over the paths which, in another hundred years with the subsequent investigation of Central American and South American tongues and comparisons of them all, will, we hope, no longer be obscure and uncertain paths. Certain it is that here, in the Americas, there is more knowledge of the ancient figure of Ammon-Ra than the Old World has known since the burning of the great Egyptian and Alexandrian libraries. Yet that knowledge is in the form of fragmentary legends held in the memory of a priesthood that is gradually losing the fight against the encroachments of a much younger religion.

  If this priesthood decides to die with their lips still sealed, then our scientists will write in blissful ignorance that the Red Man has childish notions of nature worship, and the last strands which connect the Americas to untold millenniums of forgotten history will fade away under the very spectacles of twentieth century science without that august body even suspecting its existence.

  It is time for science to stop riding comfortably upon the theory of entire Asian migration. It is a theory that will no longer fit all of the facts. As more is learned about Amerind thought, it should become increasingly evident that the Americas are culturally closer to ancient Egypt than they ever were to Asia!

  It is high time for some young scientist with vision to begin a lifetime pursuit of this figure of Amen from tribe to tribe. His names may vary but his characteristics are the same. He will spill over the barriers of the Uto-Aztecan tongues into the Athapascan Apaches of Arizona, where he is Tanama, or the Muskhogean Creeks and Choctaws of the lower Mississippi River, where he is the fire god and Master of Breath—Esskata-Emishe, or he will supervise the dancing ceremonies of the Matto Grosso, with his long whip and his banded face.

  It is time for some young intellectual to raise the pertinent question—“If it is true that the god of a people is a deified culture-hero, and the oldest records we have from the archives of Ancient Egypt tell us that this Amen once sat upon the throne of two lands, are we any longer justified in accepting the long-held belief that these lands were Upper and Lower Egypt?” What were those two lands? Is it not possible that one of them was the land that today we so ironically call the New World?

  REFERENCES

  Daniel G. Brinton: “The Maya Chronicles,” “The Annals of the Cakchiquels.” (More recently discovered ancient Amerind books that had been rewritten with the Aryan alphabet.) Published in Philadelphia 1882 and 1885. Now out of print.

  Brasseur de Bourbourg: “The Manuscript Tronano.” Studies on the system of writing and the language of the Mayas, claiming to translate the original. Published in 2 vols., “Historical Researches,” “Archeology and Languages of Mexico.” Published in Paris 1869–1870. Now out of print.

  Stacy Judd: “The Ancient Mayas.” A Creek migration myth by Gatschet. Published in D. G. Brinton’s “Library of Aboriginal Lit.” (Now out of print but on ref. in many libraries.)

  E. Squier (not the scientist): “Children of the Twilight.” (A collection of legends.)

  Clarke Wissler: “Indians of the U.S.” (for Uto-Aztecan).