Beginning at the End

Dreams are another way of perceiving. Like pictures, they have no start or finish. You have of a vision and then find yourself in another reality. The chronology of events that occur is less important than the colors, sounds, or feelings the event inspires.

We are stretched out on a dreamy white beach in Progresso, Yucatan with palapas dotting the sand. A cruise ship sits at the end of El Muelle, a mile-long pier. Next to you us is laughter from a group of New Orleanians who are throwing back shots of tequila as their women’s Rubenesque bodies are being pummeled by Mexican masseuses whose tables nestle under the nearby shade of a large open cabana. Two children are digging away throwing up geysers of sand, now and then stopping to examine blackened fossils of charcoal from someone’s long ago beach fire.

If they could dig far enough down, down, down, they would eventually discover similar black material, only this would not be the remnants of someone’s campfire. It would be the skin of a monster: Chicxulub.

We are lounging on the exact spot where part of the earth was torn asunder by the impact of the Chicxulub meteor. It slammed into the earth’s mantle, blowing trillions of tons of vaporized planet into the atmosphere and beyond, while igniting worldwide conflagrations. The meteor’s punch reset the earth’s clock, annihilating seventy percent of all terrestrial life and branding the entire earth with a black stripe, the fragmentary codex of the disaster, that you can still see today. The shocked crystals from the blast, compressed into the limestone bedrock here, permeated all things Mayan – the crops, the people, and the stunning ancient cities - with stardust.

The Snail observatory

Deer sacrifice

Of the three spectacular ruins close to the Chicxulub impact site, Chichen Itza is the best known. Chichen is, in a way, two cities, or better, two iterations of one city. The first Mayans built the foundations of the empire with mathematics, astronomy, agriculture, and engineering. They created a religion from dreams and myths that required obedience and ritual sacrifice, usually a deer, to unpredictable but generally benign gods. At its peak, 600 years of Mayan culture collided with the Toltec “crusaders”. The Toltecs usurped Mayan culture and welded a terrifying and bloody cosmology to a ferocious appetite for conquest and war. They demanded human sacrifices and imposed a strict caste system, somewhat like the samurai culture in Japan that carried Chichen-Itza to the pinnacle of power on the Yucatan peninsula. Yet the very moment of supremacy was, ironically, an exclamation point, an extinction of a 600-year cultural experiment and the opening paragraph of a catastrophic decline that lasted for another two to three centuries, hastened by natural and cultural upheavals. By the time the Spanish conquistadors arrived, Chichen Itza was already overgrown and partly obscured by the surrounding jungle. There was only a tattered written codex left of a cultural treasure.  Even that was lost when a priest, at the behest of the Spanish Catholic Church, burned all of the long-calendar records he found. Those historical records would have been the key to understanding the wonders of this culture.

El Castillo

The buildings and surviving structures that marked the genius of the Mayans are spectacular as we see them today. The centerpiece of the current site is El Castillo, a huge pyramid in the center of the city. It played some part in virtually every important ritual throughout the city’s history and was a throne of the all-important feathered serpent Quetzacoatl, whose image adorns virtually every part of the old city. Some years ago Eric was able to climb down inside the pyramid to see a jaguar throne buried deep within, a representation of an important deity mentioned in Mayan creation myths. Nowadays, in part because one unfortunate tourist became an offering to the Mayan gods by plunging down the 91 steps of one side of the structure, and, in part, because of the deterioration of the temple as a consequence of human foot traffic, all other interior spaces are closed.

Pelota or ball field was almost too big to photograph

One structure, equally awesome, that is not closed is the ball field, the pelota, where a life or death game that seemed to be a cross between rugby and basketball took place. The game was steeped in religious significance and was centered on negotiating a very heavy, bowling ball-sized, rubber puck through stone rings placed nearly 24 feet up the side of opposing walls. Standing in the field and trying to imagine what it must have taken to “score” is an exercise in magical physics, since the ball apparently had to be knocked through the ring using protected parts of the hips and arms. There is much discussion as to when the game was played, how it was played, how long it took to complete, who the losers were, and what the consequences of losing (or winning) might have been. What is very clear is that one team captain, depicted in a frieze along the side of one of the walls, literally “took one for the team” by giving up his head.

Sacred Cenote

On and on we walked, to the Temple of the Jaguars, the Temple of a Thousand Columns (which seemed more Grecian than Mayan), the Monastery, the Nunnery, and the Snail. All of the modern day names are the work of the Spaniards who tended to lean towards Catholic references – not towards accuracy of the functions of these buildings. The one exception, the Snail, was clearly understood to be exactly what it was: An elegantly designed and incredibly precise astronomical observatory that represented the crux of the priesthood’s power of prediction for when to plant, sow, and prepare fields for the harvest cycle. Our last stop was the Sacred Cenote, that was at the end of a long straight road out of the main square. Based upon archeological excavation, this was a place of offerings and sacrifices (sometimes human) to please the gods. We knew it was time to leave when one of the Johnny-come-lately tourists (American, of course) said, “Oh yeah, this is where they threw in their disabled children.”

By the time we worked our way back to the entrance of the city, huge tour buses had arrived, disgorging thousands upon thousands of sightseers. At first, it was disconcerting, but then, on reflection, we reminded ourselves that this was what Chichen-Itza had always been: a concentration of peoples from all over Mesoamerica and beyond. It had probably always been noisy, always filled with gaping, awestruck spectators wondering at the power and majesty of their god-like hosts.