Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg


Charles-Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg was a noted French writer, ethnographer, historian archaeologist, and Catholic priest. He became a specialist in Mesoamerican studies, travelling extensively in the region.
His writings, publications, and recovery of historical documents contributed much to knowledge of the region's languages, writing, history and culture, particularly those of the Maya and Aztec civilizations. However, his speculations concerning relationships between the ancient Maya and the lost continent of Atlantis inspired Ignatius L. Donnelly and encouraged the pseudo-science of Mayanism.

Early life and writings

He was born in Bourbourg, a small town with many Flemish influences near Dunkirk, France, as the First French Empire was ending.
As a youth he went to Ghent in newly independent Belgium to study theology and philosophy.
He became interested in writing during his studies there, and in 1837 aged 23 he began contributing essays to a Parisian journal. He wrote several historical accounts, including one concerning Jerusalem. He published several novels of Romantic style which was then very much in vogue. One of these, Le Sérapéon, received reviews which implied it had a very close resemblance to François-René de Chateaubriand's 1809 novel Les Martyrs. Such near-allegations of plagiarism and inaccuracies in his works were to be made several times during his career.
Despite such criticisms, his reputation as a notable young writer and intellectual continued to develop. He transferred his studies and residence to Rome, where in 1845 he was ordained into the Roman Catholic priesthood, at the age of 30.

Dispatched to Quebec

A year previously he had come to the attention of the Canadian Abbé, Léon Gingras, whom he had met in Rome. Abbé Gingras entreated his friend and colleague the vicar-general of Quebec, Abbé Charles-Félix Cazeau, to have Brasseur de Bourbourg assigned to a job in the seminary there. Correspondence began in late 1844, with Abbé Gingras claiming that the seminary should "...move heaven and earth to ensure that such a splendid bird does not escape us and fly to Montreal, where it would be so highly thought of".
A year later after having obtained his ordination, Brasseur de Bourbourg's job in Quebec was approved by the Archbishop, Joseph Signay, and in the autumn of 1845 he left Europe for the British colony of the Province of Canada, stopping briefly in Boston along the way.
Upon his arrival in Quebec City he began work as a professor of ecclesiastical history at the seminary. After only a brief time however, his series of lectures was discontinued, for some unspecified reason.
Perhaps having extra time, Brasseur de Bourbourg began a programme of research of the history of the archdiocese of Quebec, and in particular of its 17th-century founder, François de Laval, the first Roman Catholic Bishop of Quebec. The results of his archival investigations were published in early 1846 as a biography of Laval. The contents of this pamphlet seemed to displease his Canadian colleagues somewhat, for a dispute began which made his position there uncertain, or at least uncomfortable. Also, he apparently disliked the harsh winter climate, and may also have been a factor in his departure which was soon to ensue.
He left the seminary later in that year, returning to Boston where he found a job with the diocese of Boston. The then current Bishop, John Bernard Fitzpatrick, with whom he was evidently on better terms than with his previous superiors, made him vicar-general of the diocese.
Towards the end of the year Brasseur de Bourbourg returned to Europe, to spend some time conducting research in the archives of Rome and Madrid, in preparation for a new project—travel to Central America.

Travels and expeditions to Central America

From 1848 to 1863 he travelled extensively as a missionary in many parts of Mexico and Central America.
During these journeys he gave great attention to Mesoamerican antiquities and became well-versed in the then-current theories and knowledge about the history of the region and the Pre-Columbian civilisations whose sites and monuments remained, yet were little understood.
Using information he had collected during his time spent travelling there, as well as that compiled by other scholars of his time, he published during 1857–1859 a history of the Aztec civilization, containing what was then known or speculated about the former kingdom, which had been conquered some three hundred years previously by the Spanish conquistadores in alliance with local enemies of the Aztecs.
He also conducted research into the local languages and their transliteration into the Latin alphabet. Between 1861 and 1864 he edited and published a collection of documents in the indigenous languages.
In 1864 he was archaeologist of the French military expedition in Mexico, and his resulting work Monuments anciens du Mexique was published by the French Government in 1866.
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Discovery of de Landa's work

In 1862 while searching through archives at the Royal Academy of History in Madrid for New World materials, he came across an abridged copy of a manuscript which had originally been written by the Spanish cleric Diego de Landa sometime around 1566. De Landa had been one of those charged with disseminating the Roman Catholic faith amongst the Maya peoples in Spain's new Central American possessions during the period after the Spanish conquest of Yucatán, and had lived there for several years. His manuscript had been written upon his enforced return to Spain, where he was charged with illegally or improperly conducting an Inquisition. In the manuscript de Landa had recorded much information about the Maya peoples and customs, based on his own observations and discussions with Mayan informants. Brasseur de Bourbourg's main interest in the document, however, was a section in which de Landa reproduced what he termed "an alphabet" of the as-yet undeciphered Maya hieroglyphics, the writing system of the ancient Maya civilization. In this passage de Landa had annotated the Mayan symbols which supposedly corresponded to the letters of the Spanish alphabet, as given to him by a Maya informant who he had quizzed. Brasseur de Bourbourg realised that this could prove to be basis of deciphering the Maya script, and he announced this discovery when republishing the manuscript in late 1863 with the title, Relation des choses de Yucatán de Diego de Landa.
However, upon initial analysis by Brasseur de Bourbourg and others, the so-called "de Landa alphabet" proved to be problematic and inconsistent, and these immediate attempts to use this alphabet as a kind of "Rosetta Stone" to read the glyphs failed. Nevertheless, Brasseur de Bourbourg's uncovering of this document and de Landa's alphabet would much later prove to be vital in the eventual decipherment of the Maya glyphs. Brasseur de Bourbourg's attempts, and those of others which followed, were misled insofar as they interpreted the signs alphabetically. When the signs were recognised to be mainly syllabic, significant progress was made.

Publication of the Popol Vuh

In 1861 he published another significant work: a French translation of the Popol Vuh, a sacred book of the Quiché Maya people. He included a grammar of the K'iche' language and an essay on Central American mythology.

Speculations concerning Atlantis

Brasseur began to write about Atlantis in his publication Grammaire de la langue quichée, in which he expressed his belief that the lost land described by Plato had existed with an advanced degree of civilization before the beginning of civilizations in Europe and Asia. He suggested that the origins of European and Persian words could be traced to indigenous languages of the Americas and that the ancient cultures of the New and Old Worlds had been in constant communication with one another.
In 1866, Monuments anciens du Mexique was published with a text by Brasseur de Bourbourg accompanied by lavish illustrations by Jean-Frédéric Waldeck. Although Waldeck's depictions of the ruins at Palenque were based on first-hand knowledge, his artistic reconstructions and embellishments implied a close relationship between Maya art and architecture and that of Classical antiquity Greece and Rome. This was subsequently demonstrated to be spurious, but not before Waldeck's artwork had inspired speculations about contact between New and Old World civilizations, specifically via the lost continent of Atlantis.
These speculations were reinforced by Brasseur de Bourboug's own references to Plato's descriptions of the culture and society of Atlantis, which Brasseur believed was continued by ancient Maya civilization, in his book Quatre Lettres sur le Méxique. In this publication, Brasseur de Bourbourg made extensive parallels between Maya and Egyptian pantheons and cosmologies, implying that they all had a common source on the lost continent of Atlantis. He developed these ideas further in his publication Quatre lettres sur le Mexique, which presents a history of Atlantis based on his interpretation of Maya myths. His writings inspired Augustus Le Plongeon and also Ignatius L. Donnelly, whose book contains numerous references to Brasseur de Bourbourg's scholarship. However, an academic wrote in 1875 that not a single contemporary scholar accepted Brasseur de Bourbourg's theories about Atlantis.
The combination of Brasseur de Bourbourg's interests in spiritualism and these speculations about relations between the ancient Maya and Atlantis provided the basis for Mayanism.

Identification of a Maya codex

In 1866, Brasseur de Bourbourg had an opportunity to examine an artefact in Madrid which was in the possession of a Spanish paleography professor named Juan de Tro y Ortolano, who had purchased it some six years earlier. This artefact was an old codex, a book made from paper-bark in the form of a folded screen of continuous pages, several metres in length when extended. The codex contained numerous signs and drawings, which Brasseur de Bourbourg was readily able to identify as being Mayan in origin, having seen and studied many similar markings and glyphs while in Central America.
Tro y Ortolano gave him permission to publish the codex in a reproduction, and Brasseur de Bourbourg gave it the name Troano Codex in his honour. His identification of the codex was significant, as it was the only third such Maya codex to have been uncovered. In particular, Brasseur de Bourbourg recognised its exceeding rarity, since de Landa's Relación, which he had earlier rediscovered, gave an account of how he had ordered the destruction of all such Maya codices he could find, and many volumes had been burned.
During 1869–1870 Brasseur de Bourbourg published his analyses and interpretations of the content of the Troano codex in his work Manuscrit Troano, études sur le système graphique et la langue des Mayas. He proposed some translations for the glyphs recorded in the codex, in part based on the associated pictures and in part on de Landa's alphabet, but his efforts were tentative and largely unsuccessful.
However, his translation would later inspire Augustus Le Plongeon's pseudo-science and speculation about the lost continent of Mu. The name Mu was actually used first by Brasseur de Bourbourg.
A few years later, another Maya codex was found possessed by another collector, which became known as the Codex Cortesianus. When Léon de Rosny examined it later, he determined that it was actually a part of the Troano codex, the two parts having been separated at some indeterminate time in the past. The two parts were later rejoined and are known collectively as the Codex Madrid or Tro-Cortesianus; they remain displayed in Madrid.

In 1871 Brasseur de Bourbourg published his Bibliothèque Mexico-Guatémalienne, a compendium of literature and sources associated with Mesoamerican studies.
His last article, "Chronologie historique des Mexicains" refers to the Codex Chimalpopoca and identifies four periods of world cataclysms that began about 10,500 BC and were the result of shifts of the Earth's axis.

Death and legacy

He died at Nice at the beginning of 1874, at the age of 59.
His archaeological fieldwork, as well as his diligent collection, discovery and republication of source materials, proved to be very useful for subsequent Mesoamerican researchers and scholars. The interpretations and theories he advanced proved to be mostly inaccurate.

List of publications

A listing of his publications, by original publication date. The place of publication is annotated, and the shorter or common name of the publication is bolded. The list is not necessarily complete.
A collection of travel accounts and reports which Brasseur de Bourbourg sent to the French Minister for Education and Religion from Mexico, Guatemala and Spain is stored at the Archives Nationales, F17, 2942.