n celebration of the union of the Heaven and Earth at the
commencement of the rainy season. It would, naturally, therefore, have
been used as a decoration on the drinking vessels employed in the
distribution of fermented drinks for vivifying and curative purposes. It
is met with on Peruvian drinking bowls, as proven by several examples in
the Royal Ethnographical Museum in Berlin, for instance.

It is curious to note as an interesting analogy that the same checkered
design frequently adorns the ancient Egyptian drinking bowls represented
in the hieroglyphic writings. I have also observed it in some ancient
Greek drinking vessels, preserved at the Imperial Hermitage Museum at St.
Petersburg, where it decorated the bowl itself or the garments of
Bacchantes figured thereupon. It is also met with in ancient Peruvian
textile fabrics, in black and white, as on one figure vase in the Berlin
Museum, and, needless to remark, it is a Scotch clan tartan. Its adoption
as the basis for chess-boards of ancient Egypt seems to indicate that
there it also signified the Above and Below and that the game was thought
of as an exemplification of the eternal contest between the powers of
Heaven and Earth, light and darkness, etc. We look to specialists for
information as to the origin, meaning and employment in Egypt and Greece
of this primitive and almost universal design.

[Illustration.]

Figure 42.

In ancient Mexico and possibly Peru, it obviously pertained to a set of
ideas which, in some communities, might easily have degenerated and led to
the institution of rites and ideas such as were prevalent in the Maya
colony which had established itself at the mouth of the Panuco river, on
the coast of Mexico, north of Vera Cruz, and from which the Huaxtecans of
the present day descend. It is interesting to note that the name of the
capital founded by the colonists, who seem to have emigrated owing to
well-founded religious persecution, was Tuch-pan, a word which signifies
in the Maya tongue "the umbilicus," qualified by pan, meaning "that which
is above or excels," etc., but which was expressed in Nahuatl
picture-writings by a rabbit=tochtli and a banner=pantli.

The opposite of the checkered or xotlac design, was the native water and
air pattern which has been pointed out as encircling the mitre of the Lord
of the Above or Heaven. It likewise figures in native pictures on the