Where Men Become Gods 2

“Custom is the enemy of awareness, in individuals as much as societies. It
  regularizes the fears and cravings of everyday life. I wanted to shake them off. I
  wanted to use this journey to see things whole and clear, for I would never pass
  this way again.”
                                                                          Ted Simon, Jupiter’s Travels



The history of Mexico began thirty miles north of the city. Just before Christ was crucified (and they would all eventually know about it), in an elongated basin fringed by mountains, there was a small village on the northeast shore of Lake Texcoco, a crystal fresh body of water that went for fifty miles. It was called Teotihuacan, ‘the place where men became gods.’ Over the next four centuries, it would grow to 200,000 inhabitants, and rule as far south as Guatelmala. Each of the three pyramids they constructed, the Sun, the Moon, and Quetzacoatl, are as big as the largest pyramid in Egypt. The Temple of the Sun was built over a deep, 300 metre cave created by a lava tube, thought to be the place where humankind emerged upon the Earth. The pyramids were spatially oriented to the three stars in Orion’s belt. The city was administered from the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, across from the pyramids along the Avenue of the Dead, as dead they were all to be. There is a Wal-mart within walking distance today. The priceless artifacts, uncovered during the store’s construction, were reportedly trucked off to a local dump, and workers fired when they revealed the carnage to the press.
We took the same route back to the city as history. The poor and primitive Mexica, who came to Lake Texcoco around 1250 A.D., were driven south by enemies and fled to a swampy island. One of their priests had a dream of an eagle on a cactus, sunning itself. They found him with a snake in his beak, and he eventually landed on the country’s flag. The Mexica merged with two other groups, to form the Triple Alliance, although we still think of them as the Aztecs. They went on to build Tenochtitlan, the largest city on the planet, then and now. There were a quarter of a million people living in Tenochtitlan’s wide boulevards, markets, and ornately carved buildings. There were three grand causeways, interrupted by bridges that allowed flotillas of boats and foot traffic to pass without hindrance through the spider web system of canals, but which could be pulled up at a moment’s
notice to defend the city. The springs at Chapultepec supplied fresh water along two terracotta aqueducts, each over 4 kilometers long. They grew maize, beans, squash, tomatoes, amaranth, chili peppers, and flowers, on long manmade floating gardens called chinampas.
The Aztecs had compulsory education, and their philosophers, tlamatini , achieved an ethereal level of sophistication. Their poetry spoke of ‘flowers and song’ and ‘jade and quetzal feathers.’
But they were flawed. They were still psychologically traumatized from their experience with the tribes that once ruled the Mexica. They burnt the codices of those they had conquered. And they burnt their own, so no one would discover any weakness. Their principal deity was a left- handed hummingbird helmet, carrying a fire-breathing serpent as a weapon. His name was Huitzilopochtli. He was a god of war and the god that whispered in the ear of the priest, the founder of Tenochtiltlan. But Huitzilopochtli was also a sun god, and not very secure in his role, as he only supervised its workings. Sunlight, it seems, had to battle the moon and stars every day, as it rose into the sky. This constant struggle against darkness required life-energy nourishment in the form of human sacrifice, to ensure it (and the gift of fire it provided) would also survive the recurrent cycle of potentially apocalyptic extinguishment. Every year, an image of Huitzilopochtli was fashioned from amaranth seeds, glued together with honey and human blood. Inside were bags of jade, bones and amulets, to give him life. He had a mask of gold and rich vestments. At the end of the annual festival, the idol was broken up for the people to consume. At least 3,000 souls were killed every year in ritual sacrifice. Every full cycle of the 52-year calendar, one was of particular importance. The Aztecs called the belt and sword of Orion the ‘Fire Drill.’ The New Fire Ceremony, the Binding of the Years, was performed every half century, to prevent the end of the world. Five days before the ceremony, preparations involving abstinence from work, fasting, ritual cleansing and bloodletting, destruction of old household items, and observance of silence, began. At sunset on the last day, all eyes were fixed on a temple platform upon an extinct volcano summit, in full view of the city. Every fire in the Aztec realm was extinguished. When Orion’s belt rose above the horizon, a man was sacrificed and a fire drill was placed on his chest. When the first sparks of fire sprung from the device, the New Calendar was declared, and the flames were fanned into a huge bonfire. From this inferno, torches were carried by runners, to every ward of the city, where hearths could be rekindled.
It was into this scene that Cortes marched. Leaving a hundred men behind, he fought the Tlaxcala to a draw, and moved forward with twenty thousand of their troops behind him. He massacred thousands of unarmed nobles in the central plaza of Cholula, the second largest city in Mesoamerica at the time. He then set it on fire, to let the Aztecs know he was coming. On November 8, 1519, Cortes and his allies entered Tenochtitlan, in awe of its size and splendor. They came from a world ankle deep in sewage, to a metropolis that had a thousand men just to keep the streets clean. They saw their first botanical gardens. They learned of prostitutes that painted their teeth, chewed chicle noisily to attract clients, and then gave away their favors for free. Montezuma came out from the center of the city to greet the strange apparition with gifts, but it didn’t go well, did it. Cortes took him captive in his own palace. Eight months later, on La Noche Triste, the Aztecs killed three quarters of the Spaniards, and drove the rest out of the city. Foolishly, they didn’t hunt them down. Cortes recruited 200,000 troops from disaffected vassal states, built 13 ships to attack Tenochtitlan from the water, and still would have failed, except for a submicroscopic detail. While he was thus engaged, smallpox killed ninety-seven percent of the 25 million people living in Central Mexico at the time. Even with this calamity on his side, he still needed to kill 100,000 more, street by street and house by house, to finally capture the city in May of 1521. It was, and still is, the costliest battle in history.
We returned to the Aztec ruins near the Zocalo for an ice cream. Chocolate seemed fitting. We went on to St Marie de Acolman monastery, the Palaccio Nacional, Place des Belles Arts, Cathedral, and the Zona Rosa. Over the next couple of days I saw the Museo de Anthropologia, the top of the Torre Latino Americana, Museo de Historia in Chapultepec castle, and the Museo de Arte Moderno, with it’s weird acoustics under the dome. The last evening was punctuated by a meltdown from Luis. He had been quiet and moody, and was drinking too much. He was young.
“You will have many more nights with her?”
David told me he was jealous that Lydia had come to Teotihuacan with us. He told me but I couldn’t get my head around it.
D.H. Lawrence had described Mexico as a country where men despised sex, and lived for it. Which is suicide. In a country where men become gods, every new arrival is suspect. Which is potential homocide.
An hour after my final morning coffee with La Familia Hernandez, I caught a cold, and an oil tanker to Cuernavaca. My prospects for immortality were shaken from both.