David Richins has a degree in linguistics from BYU. He has lived most of his life in Ohio. He authors a fascinating blog on Mormon topics entitled "
The Lunch is Free" which is a nod to a famous essay by Hugh Nibley entitled "Work We Must, But the Lunch is Free." I find Richins' work on Book of Mormon etymologies insightful and highly creative. He corroborates and extends the impressive work Robert F. Smith, Paul Y. Hoskisson, Stephen D. Ricks, and John Gee have done in their
Book of Mormon Onomasticon. Richins delights at finding wordplay in the text as does Matthew L. Bowen whose prolific contributions in
Interpreter are defining a new sub-discipline within Book of Mormon Studies (see for example "
Father is a Man: The Remarkable Mention of the Name Abish in Alma 19:16 and its Narrative Context" and "
Onomastic Wordplay on Joseph and Benjamin and Gezera Shawa in the Book of Mormon").
I planned on joining Warren Aston and his 2016 Ramah/Cumorah Expedition for the Tuxtlas portion of their exploration. Then a family tragedy struck and I stayed home. Wishing to contribute to the effort, I wrote the article
Ramah/Cumorah which was of some use to the team in the field. I concluded in that article that Cerro San Martin was the most likely candidate for hill Ramah/Cumorah.
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| Possible Hill Ramah/Cumorah in the Tuxtlas of Southern Veracruz |
Aston emailed me upon his return to Brisbane and indicated that locals call the hill San Martin Pajapan. Searching on that name led me to this remarkable article David Richins posted on September 5, 2016 "
Fire Within, The True Meaning of Cumorah." Through methodical and far-reaching linguistic analysis, Richins comes to the same conclusion that San Martin Pajapan is a likely candidate for Ramah/Cumorah. Our efforts were entirely independent and our methods highly dissimilar, but we both ended up in the same place. Perhaps we are on to something.
The Olmecs revered San Martin Pajapan as the place of original creation, a notion that persisted through Aztec times as documented in Bernardino de Sahagun's "La Historia Universal de las Cosas de Nueva Espana" now commonly called the "Florentine Codex" because the best preserved original is in the Laurentian Library in Florence. From ca. 1,000 BC to AD 1968 San Martin Pajapan Monument 1 stood atop the summit with a cache of jade objects buried directly beneath it.
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| San Martin Pajapan Monument 1, Museo de Antropologia de Xalapa |
This colossal effigy depicts the rain god in an elaborate headdress raising a world tree. The sculpture stands 1.4 meters high and weighs more than a ton. Iconongraphy includes crosses representing the four cardinal directions, four quarters of the earth, and the center (see the article entitled "
Four Sides, Four Quarters, and a Center") and an early depiction of the bird/serpent motif best known from later images of the Central Mexican deity Quetzalcoatl.
The three most important Olmec sites: San Lorenzo, La Venta, and Tres Zapotes are precisely equi-distant from San Martin Pajapan.
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| Three Key Olmec Sites Relative to San Martin Pajapan |
On a clear day, one can see San Martin Pajapan from San Lorenzo. Not so from La Venta which has no mountains visible on its horizon. So, the later Olmecs who built La Venta created an artificial mountain, a pyramid with fluted sides consciously imitating the conical shape of dormant volcano San Martin Pajapan.
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Linda Schele's Drawing of La Venta's Artificial Mountain,
an Effigy of San Martin Pajapan |
Cerro San Martin, aka San Martin Pajapan, was a very important place to the Olmec. Ramah/Cumorah was highly significant in Jaredite and later Nephite affairs. Further research is warranted.
