This was a destination, something I really wanted to see. Coatlicue (‘koh-at-lee-kway’), ‘Snake skirt’, or for some people, and this is a whole different rendering, Tonantzin Tlalli Coatlicue ‘Our Mother Earth with the Serpents Skirt’. (In the National Museum of Anthropology.)

It was found in 1790 during excavations of the Templo Mayor in the centre of Mexico City. After some months it was reburied. One view is that that happened because the statue was so horrifying. A second is that the local indigenous people had discovered where she was and had begun leaving votive offerings — this is 270 years after the supposed dis-establishment of their religion and its practices.

Regardless, she is a dramatic creature. She’s hard to photograph because she’s lit from above and leaning quite a long way forward making her even more threatening. 3.5m high. Monster clawed feet with eyes inserted in them, furred legs full of symbols, and then the skirt woven out of very carefully rendered snakes/serpents and fringed with heads and rattles. The snake belt has a skull mounted front and back. The necklace is composed of human hearts and hands. The forearms are raised palms out in a pouncing gesture. At the elbows are ‘monster’ joints, zoomorphised faces with bared teeth. The lengthened breasts and small rolls of flesh on either side of her midriff indicate that she is a mother. And the head may look fierce but in fact she has been recently decapitated. The scalloped ruffle indicates that. Her ‘head’ actually consists of two serpents locking teeth with the tusks which are a consistent feature of Mexican figures. The serpents can mean wisdom but they certainly mean blood.

She is in the round. From the back she is quite similar and just as confronting as she is from the front. But she is in the round in three dimensions. Under the base of the statue is this carving. It could be Tlaltecuhtli, the Earth God or possibly Tlaloc, a more senior figure who includes a long list of matters related to water in his domain.

It is a masterpiece from any point of view, including engineering. It is likely that it was at the upper level of the temple. How did they get it up there? And how did they stand it up after carving the bottom?

Coatlicue is a crucial figure in the Mexican pantheon. She is often described in terms such as Earth Lord, eater of men, dangerous presence, and wise or at least dominant advisor to Huitzilopochtli (‘weatz-lo-poach-lee’), the dominant god, the god of warfare and The Sun. Huitzilopochtli is also Coatlicue‘s son. She was impregnated by a ball of feathers and produced a warrior whose first task was to fight and kill his sister (related to the Moon) and 400 brothers (‘the uncounted stars’).

Here are the consequences for his sister, Coyolxuahqui (‘coh-yohl-shaw-kee’), ‘Woman with Bell Cheeks’. At left as she is today in the Templo Mayor Museum. At right is as she may have been, painted and lying in a pool of blood. (Coatlicue would also have once been ablaze with colour.)

The colour makes it easy to see the nature of the dismemberment (find the scallops), the belled cheeks, the monster joints and skull tagged on her belt. She is carved into a large stone disk 3.4m in diameter which was mounted, not once but in five different iterations as the temple was rebuilt and expanded, near the foot of the main steps. It is surmised that one ritual event would be to copy what had happened to her and cast the results down the steps onto this giant medallion.

What was death in this instance? Something quite different to our sense of it. Coatlicue was the recognition of a cycle of generation and decline. In death she was simply reclaiming something that was hers, life extending into death, death a part of life, part of an endless cycle. Life had no higher function than to flow into death. Octavio Paz talks about this: ‘Since their lives did not belong to them, their deaths lacked any personal meaning. The dead disappeared at the end of a certain period, to return to the undifferentiated country of shadows, to be melted into air, the earth, the fire, the animating substances of the universe’. In some moods we might agree.

I was looking at material about this on a Khan tutorial on YouTube. The two presenters talk up the lurid aspects of the statue and its savagery. But then someone has commented: ‘Tonantzin is beautiful. In order to understand the image of Tonantzin Tlalli Coatlicue (‘Our Mother Earth with the Serpents Skirt’) one would have to see it with Mexicas eyes, unlike the ‘Christian serpent’ that represents everything that is evil. To the Mexicas the serpent was as sacred as the eagle. The serpent represented wisdom, because they are the closest to the earth, hence, they adorn her skirts, the open hands along with the hearts represent life, and the skulls death, because she gives life to everyone and takes everyone back when we die. In reality it is a beautiful statue.’ This is the difference between an adherent and an anthropologist.

• • • • • • •

To the visitor, symbols of death — skulls and skeletons especially — abound in Mexico. Ornaments, clothing, cutlery, home decoration, the Lucha Libre, festival puppets, children’s toys, ceramics, confectionary, earrings and endlessly on other types of jewellery. It was impossible not to notice. And art works. We spent an hour or two in the very good art gallery of Mérida and one exhibition was a collection of prints from a recent competition. Print after print was full of skeletons or versions of an imagined — in some cases terrifying, in others more benign — afterlife. This was despite there being no restriction or direction about topic. You just produced what you were inclined to, and this was the widely shared inclination.

So not just skeletons associated with death, but as the inhabitants of a busy urban setting.

And, helpfully bowdlerised by our fellow traveller Anne, this might be some sort of climax. It has to do with Pito Perez, presumably in the background, a popular fictional figure introduced for the first time in the novel, The Useless Life of Pito Perez. He is a classic picaro, a rogue, and this painting may refer to an incident in one of the books. I don’t know. But this would seem to be some sort of apotheosis in the combination of sex and death. No one (but Anne) appeared to be turning a hair.

• • • • • • •

The great celebration in Mexican life is Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. Two days really, November 1 & 2, corresponding with, but by no means the same as, the Roman Catholic commemoration called All Souls’ or All Saints’ Day.

Here’s an explanation from Mexican Sugar Skull, a confectionary company.

Indigenous peoples descending from the Aztec, Huastecos, Zapotecs, Mixtecs, Mixes, Chinantecos, Purépecha, Mexica, Otomi and Mayans were forced to adopt Catholicism and give up their multitheistic religious beliefs. Catholic priests believed they would have more success in converting the Indigenous if they could keep their cultural pagan customs and apply Biblical stories, saint’s names and a monotheistic God to what the people were already believing. Hopes were to convert slowly over several generations and this would create a less combative relationship between the missionaries and the indigenous populations.  The indigenous Indian groups all had similar but regionally unique ways to honor their ancestors. They had death rituals, burial ceremonies, beliefs about the afterlife and beliefs that souls could return from the dead at prescribed times to commune with the living. Many Pre-Conquest indigenous traditions called for feasting, building altars, drums & chanting, offerings to the dead and story telling.  …

We believe that the gates of heaven are opened at midnight on October 31, and the spirits of all deceased children (angelitos) are allowed to reunite with their families for 24 hours. On November 2, the spirits of the adults come down to enjoy the festivities that are prepared for them.

In most Indian villages, beautiful altars (ofrendas) are made in each home. They are decorated with candles, buckets of flowers (wild marigolds called cempasuchil & bright red cock’s combs) mounds of fruit, peanuts, plates of turkey mole [a rich thick sauce], stacks of tortillas and big Day of the Dead breads called pan de muerto. The altar needs to have lots of food, bottles of soda, hot cocoa and water for the weary spirits. Toys and candies are left for the angelitos, and on Nov. 2, cigarettes and shots of mezcal are offered to the adult spirits. Little folk art skeletons and sugar skulls, purchased at open-air markets, provide the final touches.

Day of the Dead is a very expensive holiday for these self-sufficient, rural based, indigenous families. Many spend over two month’s income to honor their dead relatives. They believe that happy spirits will provide protection, good luck and wisdom to their families. Ofrenda building keeps the family close. On the afternoon of the second day, the festivities are taken to the cemetery. People clean tombs, play cards, listen to the village band and reminisce about their loved ones. Tradition keeps the village close.

Oh to have confectionary companies like that one.

What does Paz say? ‘Everything in the modern world functions as though death doesn’t exist. Nobody takes it into account, it is suppressed everywhere: in political pronouncements, commercial advertising, public morality and popular customs. … The Mexican, in contrast, is familiar with death, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it. True, there is as much fear in his attitude as that of others, but at least death is not hidden away.’

Could be true.

The nearest we came to death in Mexico was, after climbing up the 80 stairs to the Iglesia de Guadalupe at San Cristobal, finding ourselves watching a funeral. I found the music, of which there is a snatch here, most moving.

• • • • • • •

Another thing on my pre-expedition list was the temple of Cholula, the largest pyramid in the world. This is not a natural hill; this is dirt covering a building.

Cholula, the largest pyramid (and temple) in the world, had a Catholic church, the Santuario de la Virgen de Los Remedios on top of it. A very elegant and attractive Catholic church as it happens. There is a metaphor, an obvious one, at work here. This is how it happens: the command position is commandeered. It’s just sort of startlingly obvious here. I have written elsewhere on the topic: if you want to study really effective marketing, you must start with the Roman Catholic Church.

(I’ve just found this pic and have stuck it in for the view of Popocatepetl not available when we were standing on that terrace. It’s for me.)

But the metaphor might be too obvious. The Indigenous peoples of Meso-America were not wiped out and neither were their social and religious constructions. We saw lots of evidence of the syncretism that the confectioners refer to.

This cross is in the middle of the Peubla market. It is Christian, but we do not have a Christ figure hanging off it. The imaging has been modified to reduce the obviousness of human sacrifice as a fundamental part of the introduced religion when it was something that the good Catholics of New Spain were trying to discourage. Instead we have something like a list of symbols, nails, hammer, hands — still rather threatening.

Another reason to notice is because Peubla, a wildly attractive town full of interest is an ‘artificial’ town built by and populated by the Spaniards as a way station for their major trade route between the Mexican Gulf and the Pacific. Spaniards only. What were Indians doing in town? Running the market you’d have to think. Or, if you like, playing a major role.

This church, San Juan Bautista, is just outside San Cristobal at San Juan Chamula.

Chamula is a very particular place. It has a population of about 75,000 and almost all of them are Tzotzil, a variety of Mayan. They also speak Tzotzil, their own language. Pre-Hispanic culture, or an idea of it, has been preserved. Many of the women were wearing shawls and home-made black wool skirts on this very hot day, their hair braided in a particular way, the way of the Tzotzil. And, extraordinarily, it is autonomous, run separately from the regional and national government by members of its own community. Public behavior is managed by men dressed in sheep skin vests holding large wooden sticks.

When we were there the church was awash with flowers, and awash more generally with scrubbing and hosing going on to flush out and replace the pine needles that were covering the floor. At the same time it was decorated, perhaps functioning is the more accurate word, with thousands of lit candles in clumps, but everywhere. Also in clumps on the floor were parishioners mostly gathered round someone, sometimes dressed in white with a mirror hanging from their neck which I believe suggests access to another world. These people had taken control and were conducting their own highly individual ritual ceremonies.

The small groups were chanting, sometimes whistling, oblivious of each other. The key figures are apparently referred to as shamans not clerics, or not clerics as we know them. There appears to be a role for live chickens to absorb evil spirits and also the consumption of fizzy drinks which make you burp to rid you of the same sort of thing, and pox (‘posh’) a fierce alcoholic spirit which would influence your perception and mood.

The walls are covered with images and statues of recognisable Catholic Christian figures, although pre-eminence is reserved for John the Baptist, not Jesus. Nonetheless the church has been decommissioned or ex-communicated or whatever the word might be by the official Catholic Church.

The vibe walking back down the main street to our bus was palpable. Chamula offers tours of itself to make money out of tourism. Don’t go; you mightn’t come back.

And then there was Santa Maria Tonantzintla on the fringes of Puebla. This is the church Aldous Huxley once described as the most unique church in the Christian world. (Reputedly. Would Aldous Huxley have said ‘most unique’? Nah.)

It’s a knockout. Exquisite. Overwhelming. Plain enough on the outside (except for the topiary birdhouse on the left as you enter), you go in … KAZANG! Full tilt Mexican Baroque.

It is built on the site of a temple to a Nahuatl princess. This might have had some impact, who knows? Val told us the story, and I think it goes that a group of artists from Tonantzintla contributed to the decoration of the Puebla cathedral. They did such a good job that when they asked if they could decorate their own church approval was granted. So we have a beguiling phantasmagoria of black, brown, multicoloured as well as white golden-haired cupids, celebrations of corn and flowers, birds and jaguars, black disciples and several thousand characters completely unrecognisable in the Christian firmament. These are not my photos because no photos were allowed. If they were they would show the whole building festooned with fresh flowers and smelling like heaven must.

• • • • • • •

‘Serial Delights’, a bit of a wrap up is next.



Early in the 14th century the Mexica were a small, obscure nomadic tribe searching for a new homeland. One of the many things they were good at was dates. We can say with confidence that in 1325AD their wanderings came to an end. They entered the valley in which Lake Texcoco was situated and put down roots there because they were also a profoundly religious people. A serpent had been observed fighting an eagle on a cactus. This was a sign, the sign, to stop and settle.

This place became Tenochtitlan which two hundred years later at the beginning of the 16th century was one of the largest and, in some ways, the most sophisticated cities in the world, smaller than Constantinople but as populous as London and Paris. It was most carefully planned on a grid based on the cardinal points of the compass. It had causeways between islands for transport, aqueducts to carry fresh water and sewers to dispose of waste. It supervised and benefited from trade across the indigenous nations of the peninsula. Its scientists and mathematicians had developed a sophisticated understanding of astronomy, time and certain forms of manufacture. As Cortés was delighted to discover, they mined, smelted and fashioned precious metals including alluvial gold. They had wide well made roads, but no beasts of burden. Wheels were used only for toys. Over a reasonably short period of time (1325-1521) the city had developed from its bare, wet origins into a metropolis, the heart of an empire led by a single ruling leader supported by classes of nobles, priests, warriors and merchants.

The city was founded on a small island in the western part of the lake. To create living and farming space the Mexica sank piles into the water and formed small land masses they called chinampas, or floating gardens. Until they became stabilised which they did to some degree over time — Mexico City is still visibly wobbly — they could operate like wicking pots, absorbing water from below and not having to rely on the variable rain fall. They have now populated most of where the lake once was.

I knew about this. I’d read the book. (Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs: An Interpretation, not to be missed, masterly.) And just while we’re here, the word Aztecs, which in Inga’s book only appears on the cover. (Almost.) ‘Aztec‘ was a term coined by German explorer Alexander von Humboldt derived from ‘Aztlan’, the term the Mexica used to describe their original home in northern Mexico. He wrote about this in 1810 and the term was taken up and popularised — obviously most successfully — by American historian William Prescott. ‘Aztlan’ means ‘place of the white heron’ which suits my purposes here.

We are at Tlahuac (‘La wuck’ is close enough), and Alfredinho is telling us about chinampas. As far as she knows, Alfredinho’s forebears have lived right here since pre-Columbian times. Our guide Valeria is at right. Now I look there is an effigy of Coatlicue, ‘Snake skirt’, in the foreground along with some gaily coloured corn and a Yoplait jar. And in the background there is one of the many white herons we saw on this and other days. We are about 25kms south from the centre of Mexico City and still in the remnants of Lake Texcoco. This is somewhere you wouldn’t be unless you were on a tour, and perhaps more accurately on a very particular tour with Val who was rather wonderful. And in the background is the edge of a chinampa.

The trees planted for the purpose have constructed a bank with their fiercely interwoven roots. Several hundred years of earth moving, composting and vegetal litter has produced this result.

We were assured, in the most contemporary of terms, that everything grown here was completely organic and pesticides were never used, although post-Columbian plastic was used for cloches to support seedling growth and some out-of-season produce. It is worth noting that climate change had impacted on the nature of work here.

We had lunch all of which had been grown in a section of this chinampa (many families have plots here) and it was very nice indeed.

A view on the way back from lunch. The hills in the background are covered with the houses of the wealthy.

To qualify the tourist romance, other parts of Tlahuac are believed by the locals to have been built on the rubble generated by the monster earthquake of 1985. This has added to the already considerable instability of the region. Most of Mexico City is subject to subsidence (up to 15cms a year in town, 40cms a year in Tlahuac). At left is an example from right next to the cathedral and the Templo Mayor. Look at the balcony. Groundwater extraction (see The Sacred Cenote) contributes significantly to this problem.

The worst affected are those living in the pueblos originarios (pre-Hispanic towns) which scatter through the Tlahuac region, an area growing rapidly from an influx of people from other parts of the country to live on the city’s fringe in the hope of finding ways to make a living. These fringe areas also happen to be those most prone not just to subsidence but to earthquake damage as well. In The Labyrinth of Solitude Mexican Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz talks about how ‘Our territory [Mexico] is inhabited by a number of races speaking different languages and living on different historical levels.’ This has social and economic consequences.

Everything is a package.

We remain on botany.

Unalloyed good. No qualification. It is the Jardín Etnobotánico de Oaxaca, the Ethno-Botanical Gardens of Oaxaca.

You can only visit under supervision, so we were on a tour. It was very hot with little shade and the tour was to last two hours. I was sure I couldn’t possibly last one hour let alone two. But I was left wanting more. The guide was Caroline a mature-aged Canadian botanist who had lived in Oaxaca for at least part of many years, and she was brilliant. Two of the most entertainingly educational hours I have had in my life.

What did I learn?

47 varieties of corn, all manner of colours, are grown in Mexico. None of them is ‘sweet corn’ as we know it. 28 of these varieties are endemic to Oaxaca Province. The kernels are hard and, and, through selection and breeding, tend to be large. Their primary purpose for millenia has been for flour. I add: tacos, round pancakey affairs made out of corn flour are the staple of the Mexican diet. They can be found on most street corners and are served with your choice of filling: refried beans, shredded pork, guaca mole (‘avocado sauce’), carne (MEAT). To me they taste of the smell of earth, soil that is, most certainly savoury rather than sweet. That smell/taste can be found throughout Mexican food. Corn is ubiquitous.

There are several thousand varieties of peppers. Only one genera is ‘hot’. I add: which doesn’t stop it being used very widely in Mexican cooking. EXCEPT, it is very frequently served as an accompanying salsa which you can choose to include in your meal or not. Often there were three: red (conventionally very hot), green (hot but often in local and unusual ways), ‘white’ or clear (lots of differing things, garlic and onions for example). Three of goodness knows how many. Regionality is defined to some extent by the nature of the sauces served with easily recognised meals.

La Ceiba, ya’axché in Mayan, the kapok tree, is one the two trees sacred to Meso-American peoples. They considered them as a connection between the earth where their roots reached down into other realms and heaven where their crowns towered. Can grow up to 75m high, their branches distinctively stick out at right angles, their trunks are covered in very sharp, and hardy, spines which can be up to 20mm long. Impaling oneself on the spines has had meaningful gravity in a range of spiritual contexts. And of course, their fruit is full of useful fibre. En passant, Cortés ordered the hanging of Mayan emperor Cuauhtemoc from a Ceiba, just turning the knife.

The second is the ahuehuete, the Montezuma Cyprus. It has very strong and useful timber. Its resin was also widely used to treat gout, ulcers, skin diseases, wounds, and toothaches.

There are more than 2000 species of cactus. More than half are endemic to Mexico. Brazil has the next most, fewer than a quarter. Canada has none. Nor has Australia. They grow very slowly but, without intervention from insects, humans or disease, there is no reason why they can’t live forever. Almost literally. The primary form of threat at present is climate change because they have a low capacity to adapt to fundamentally changed climatic circumstances.

Despite it having spikes the agave, or maguey, is not a cactus. It is a succulent and was fundamental to pre-Hispanic life. It was the source of fibre, so clothes, shoes, rope, roofing thatch, thread and so on and on. Its spines were used for needles, its leaves for lining baking processes in the earth. Its sap can be used as a sweetener. It is also the source of pulque, an alcoholic drink, used for example by sacrificial victims and still drunk today. But not as widely as its derivatives, mezcal and tequila. And, yes my goodness, they do flower, a precursor to death.

The sap of the copal tree is valuable for its olfactory properties. Through history it has been used as incense, as well as a varnishing and gluing agent, and a medicine. When burned, Copal resin produces a sweet, earthy smell. But it is also excellent wood for carving. Oaxaca is known for many things, its mole sauces for example, but also its art. One of the things you can find there that you can’t really find anywhere else, certainly not in the same profusion, is alebrijes, carved and decorated animal figures the ‘product of the nightmares’ of the artists. These rather special and very big ones were produced by husband and wife, Jacobo and Maria Angeles, and in the Oaxaca art gallery.

Lastly, Caroline is pictured collecting bugs off the prickly pear in the foreground. She brought them over and encouraged tour members to squash them, then claimed that what we were looking at was the most valuable export from the Americas to Europe for 150 years. They were cochineal bugs. The bugs are about 5mm long and in the past they were collected by brushing them off the plants. The amazing red they produce is now used to colour food and lipsticks, but in the 16 and 17th centuries they were the primary source of all red dye. Red, the royal colour, was almost impossible to reproduce in any other way until artificial dyes came along. More valuable than gold.

Why do we know so much about pre-Hispanic peoples? Firstly it isn’t that long ago that they were introduced to a larger world. Secondly, they offered endless narrative imagery in carvings and drawings and their own imagaic languages. Thirdly, they spoke many languages but Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica, was translated into Spanish and vice versa very early on, not least by a Nahua noblewoman Cortés took as his mistress. (Footnote: ‘La Malinche’ who even has a major pass named after her. In contemporary accounts she is pictured marching at the front of the army with Cortés. He dumped her.) Considerable effort was also put into alphabeticising it so it could become, as it did, a written language. Vast amounts of information were stored in codices — pictures and writing on European paper — on all sorts of subjects and over time. Here we have one sheet drawn from the Codex Osuna, a message directed to the Spanish king.

The writing is in Nahuatl. The middle ideograph is about harvesting cochineal. It is a complaint about not being paid for work. Interesting that they could. This is not an entirely subject people.

• • • • • • • •

We move on. Death and religion.

A cenote is a sinkhole, a natural hole just here in limestone, sometimes very deep, which exposes the water table. There are a number of tourist-level ones on the Yucatan Peninsula where (if you’re our travelling companion Caro) photos like this can be produced.

You can imagine the durability of their cultural significance in a land mass so hit-and-miss with water that one of the four foundation Mexica (Aztec) gods was Tlaloc (and there was an equally important Mayan equivalent: Chaac), lord of celestial waters, lightning flashes and hail, and patron of land workers. His main purpose was to send rain after the dry months to nourish the corn plantings, and it is almost impossible to say how important that was. Tlaloc, perhaps punching a bit above his weight looking at that pot, married Xochiquetzal (Quetzal Flower) the goddess of fertility, sexuality and youth.

He had his own ‘earthly paradise’ (as opposed to the celestial paradises in operation) where Mexica who died from one of the following illnesses or incidents would meet and live with the family of water-related deities: drowning, lightning strike, dropsy, leprosy, scabies, gout, generalised aches and pains, and people with stunted growth who were physically similar to Tlaloc’s divine helpers. This narrative is interesting not least for the list of defined ailments. Mexica: Good. Different. So sophisticated in some ways.

Digression: I thought a lot about water in Mexico. Mexicans drink only bottled water, mainly from 20 litre garrofons, the sort of thing you’re supposed to stand around at work, but from little bottles as well. They buy around 28 billion litres annually spending $US15.9b to do so. The cost of 1,000 litres from the tap (mostly but not always non-potable without treatment) is about $US2; the same amount of water, sold in bottles, costs between $US450-650. The bottled water is mainly artesian. The water table is declining, a process which climate change may hasten. 90m plastic bottles are disposed of annually.

And they drink Coke. Bottom rows, 5-litre bottles for just over 3 Australian dollars.

We’re back: The focus is this cenote, Chichen Itza’s Cenote Sagrado sometimes referred to as the ‘Well of Sacrifice’.

It doesn’t look like much here but it is of enormous cultural significance to Mayan peoples.

Chichen Itza is the largest complex of Mayan buildings discovered to date. It is in the middle of the north of the Yucatan Peninsula and dates from 600-900AD. It covers 30 or 40 square kilometers and has an absolute host of buildings including 5 or 6 major temples, an observatory, a market square, domestic buildings, and a colonnade several hundred metres long.

These buildings are of many different architectural styles suggesting the cosmopolitan nature of Mayan society at its peak. Many surfaces are covered in detailed carvings. Hard to imagine, but they would have all have been painted, mainly red, green, blue and purple.

It also has a massive pelota court (160 x 70m), its sides covered with quasi-realistic figures as well as symbolic narratives. Pelota is one of those fascinating oddities (to us) of Meso-American life. Played with a rubbery ball a bit bigger than a grapefruit, you could only use your elbows, thighs and buttocks to move it with the apparent object of getting it through rings mounted at variable heights in the air, here about 6m.

And it might have been if you lost, you really did lose.

But what the hundreds of thousands, the millions, come to see is this, the Temple of Kukulcán, the ‘feathered serpent’ prominent in many Meso-American mythologies, or, post-Cortesian, El Castillo.

It was almost certainly built over the top of another pyramidal temple. In addition, in 1990, it was determined that both were built over a cenote, which would thus be in the middle of a straight line north-south axis with the Cenote Sagrada, about 500m from the core of the temple, and another less important cenote, Xtoloc (‘iguana’) about 350m away, powerfully amplifying the significance of each. Maya and Mexica alike attached enormous gravity and import to the cardinal directions.

Although its political significance had diminished, there were still Mayans living at Chichen Itza (just as there are today) when the Spanish arrived in the Yucatan in 1526. The Cenote Sagrada was still of high order religious significance. Its status remained stable for centuries after that. Perhaps until influencers decided to use it as a backdrop.

When, after several failed attempts, the Spanish eventually conquered the Yucatan this area became a cattle ranch albeit called Cuidad Real, Royal City. But over time it was reclaimed by the jungle. In 1843 John Lloyd Stevens, an American, by profession a diplomat and by inclination an explorer, published a book with illustrations by Frederick Catherwood called Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, an account of his explorations of Mayan culture. It excited considerable public interest. Could such a building actually exist readers wondered? (This photo will be explained further below, but Catherwood’s illustration is in the foreground being held.)

In 1894 the United States Consul to Yucatán, Edward Thompson, purchased the Hacienda Chichén, which included the ruins of Chichen Itza. He explored his ‘property’ avidly and with the interests and sensitivities of his time. He is best known, however, for dredging the Cenote Sagrado over a period of six years. He recovered artifacts of gold, copper and carved jade, as well as the first-ever examples of what were believed to be pre-Columbian Mayan cloth and wooden weapons. He also found a number of skeletons and human bones indicating that this had been an arena of human sacrifice. Thompson shipped the bulk of the artifacts to the Peabody Museum at Harvard University.

This story is only partly about the religious significance of water. It is also about co-incidence and the little epiphanies which occur when you travel.

From Cancun we travelled to New York City. The central mission was to go to MOMA to look at its collection of seminal modern art. But the crowds were thick, thick beyond compare really, and everything looked promising so we decided to go to a side exhibition called ‘Chosen Memories’ just to get out of the ruck. It was all wonderful but two contributions stuck out.

The first was series of lithos by an Argentinian, Leandro Katz, revisiting and reconstructing Catherwood’s illustrations, to make comparisons over time but also to try to provide visual commentary on the way Catherwood may have romanticised what he was seeing. The photo above is one of those lithographs.

It was a how about that! moment. Engrossing.

This is another one suggesting that Catherwood was not far off the mark. Catherwood at the left, Katz on the right.

And following, just in a slightly different direction, putting myself in the story …

But then there was a second contribution by Gala Porras-Kim, a Columbian artist focused on this, a very careful rendering in pencil she had made of all the pieces of textile (including the museum’s centimetre reference marks) which Thompson had dredged from the Cenote and donated to the Peabody Museum.

It was a multi-faceted work which included a copy of a letter she had sent to Jane Pickering, the Director of the Peabody. Part of it reads:

… I am interested in objects suspended from their original function by being stored and displayed in institutions solely as historical objects. In this case, these votive offerings were submerged as tributes to the Mayan rain god Chaac, and probably never meant to leave the cenote. It is clear from the documents regarding the provenance of these objects that human laws were used to displace them from their intended place to their current location at the Peabody. Their owner, the rain, is still around.

Some of the objects had been preserved over centuries because they were submerged in water in the cenote. Their current state of dehydration, caused by their extraction and maintenance by conservators, permanently changed their composition so now they are just dust particles held together through conservation methods. The Peabody is, in fact, preserving this dust as a shell of its past shape. Your storage, being in one of the driest environments in which they can exist, is in complete opposition to their submerged wet state.

The museum is tasked with caring for the object, but should not be limited only to the physical conservation of material form, by extending this care to the immaterial and preservation of the ritual function — the dignitary interests — that still may exist within the object. Since we can only speculate on what the rain might want, we can, by extension, consider ways in which we can reinstitute the ritual life they continue to have within them as well.

[Offering a discussion of possible ideas for restitution]

 … Thank you again (etc.)

Two days later we could be in the Peabody (in the suburbs of Boston) and I looked forward to checking signs of increased reverence to ritual function.

There were many signs of ritual function as we walked up through Harvard.

The Peabody is really the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology with a particular focus on the Americas. It is ‘one of the oldest, largest, and most prolific university natural history museums in the world’. (‘Self praise is no recommendation.’ B. Findlay’s mother.)

It specialises in paleontology and had skeletons of big things. But I was more interested in how it treated the First Peoples of Meso-America and their artefacts. Had it learnt its lesson and repatriated materials to their natural homes?

It had certainly learnt some lessons in the arena and, perhaps of course, was a model of political rectitude. Notices everywhere explained and apologised, well justified really, justified and explained, not that they had much to apologise for, and nothing that I could write to Gala Porras-Kim or the curators at MOMA about. Models of a temple, a copy of a statue, couple of other bits and pieces, a terrific Day of the Dead altar,

and a water colour copy of a Guatamalan mural suggesting that gossip existed well before The Modern Era.

My favourites turned out to be a Lakota dance head dress and the Penobscot canoe.

We moved on quite quickly to the Museum of Natural History next door and found a truly weird and wonderful collection of glass flowers. All glass. All. Every single bit.

And minerals. OH those minerals!

Is that full circle? … Hmmm. No. Oh well. True stories can lack a narrative arc. Quite strong linearity though. We have at least got to America, for a time the home of revolution. But first, art. The 10 Best Paintings in the World. Phoooot, … just imagine.