Chichen Itza and Human Sacrifice

Pyramid of Kulkulcan

Of all the archeological sites of the Yucatan, only the ancient city of Chichen Itza--"Mouth of the Well" or "City of Water Witches"--is mobbed with tourists and souvenirs. Well restored and vast, it was a powerful city of the late Mayan era (11-13th c.) that blended Mexican cultures under the Toltec symbol of the feathered serpent, reaching a large Mayan trade network. The friezes carved into its monuments have clear, often brutal images of skeletons and jaguars and eagles feasting on human hearts, with a theme of human sacrifice. Rebuilt numerous times over the 1500 years of its existence, it displays a blend of Mayan Puuc and Chene styles with the powerful Toltec style.

Steps of the pyramid

Proud and fierce are the first impressions on entering the site (after running the gauntlet of tour guides, souvenir hawkers, multiple charges at the ticket counter, not to mention the heat of the day) where the first pyramid, the Kulkulcan Pyramid (named for the cult of Quetzacoatl, Kulkulcan in Yucatec) is 25 meters high and an architectural calendar, with 365 steps and levels corresponding to the Mayan calendar. On the days of the equinoxes, the steps cast a lengthening shadow that resembles the great serpent himself descending down the pyramid to earth.

Toltec style serpents above and jaguars below

Head of Kulkulcan

Chichen Itza was a place of pilgrimage (and human sacrifice) even when it was not a great power, and its main cenote, or sinkhole (7 fathoms deep), was a sacred place where countless bones, jewelry and other artifacts have been excavated. The US Consul to the Yucatan in 1900, Edward Thompson, bought the ruin of Chichen Itza for himself and shipped its countless precious artifacts off to the Peabody Museum at Harvard. During times of drought humans were thrown in for sacrifice. Another custom was to load the victim, often a child, with jewelry before tossing it in at dawn. If it was still alive by noon, it was made to prophesy.

Eagles feasting on human hearts

The northern Toltec-influenced end of Chichen Itza includes the Temple of the Jaguars and the Temple of Venus, named for the planet (a dreaded heavenly body), symbol of Kulkulcan. These bear symbols of eagles and jaguars feasting on human hearts. On the temple of a thousand pillars, high above, the face of the semi-mythological Kulkulcan (Quexacoatl) emerges from the mouth of the terrestrial monster. This motif is repeated throughout the Mayan world: the king emerges from multiple layers of existence, monsters, dragons, mythical amphibians and birds disgorge one another and, finally, disgorge the king.

Decapitation--snakes and flowers gush out with the blood

The most important ball court in the Mayan world is one of the ten at Chichen Itza. The ball game, which was older than Greek or Chinese games by many centuries, culminated in the beheading of the leader of the losing team, and probably the teammates as well. On the smudged walls of the ball court the theme is repeated over and over, the captain seated or kneeling while he's decapitated, his neck sprouting serpents, flowers and symbols of the fertility that comes from death. We eavesdropped on a Spanish tour guide, who insisted that it was the winning team who was sacrificed, but most sources hold that the losers were killed. Nearby is the Tzompantli, on which every stone is engraved with a skull, another Toltec innovation.

Tzompantli

The gentler, older sites were beautifully preserved--the so-called nunnery group of elaborately decorated upper stories and combs on the roofs, dense, swirling assemblies of the rain god Chaac's masks with the elements we've seen on clay totems, bird, monster man. The colorado, the red house, ornate and solitary. The many images of the rain god, Chaac, an architectural element of the Puuc.

Chene style building

It was dramatic and interesting, and yet Chichen Itza was a circus, with vendors claiming to be the real Mayans (one of the guidebooks warned us against them) lining the ancient sacbe roads with their wares, calling out Chica! Argentine? Spanish? At the end of the day they called out: Quasi gratuito! (Almost free!) The finish they polished into their wooden masks smelled of gasoline in the jungle.

Masks of curly-nosed Chaac, the rain god

What was it like to worship gods who hated, who demanded human sacrifice like wild beasts, jaguars and eagles with their taste for human hearts? We could hear guides explaining to their tourists that the Mayans were good, gentle people, it was the Toltecs who were bad. But we would hear many Yucatecans wrestle with the fact that human sacrifice had been Mayan from the beginning, and was still practiced at the time the Spanish arrived.

Puuc style - the Colorado

Though some of the placards at various sites state that until recently the Mayan were believed to be gentle and peaceful, it is hard to believe that since Friar Diego de Landa's book, written 1563-1572, details sacrificial practices which were going on at the time. They included dancing circles around victims and systematically lettting loose arrows into their hearts (some of these victims were offered by their own parents), digging out hearts (and afterwards often the priest would wrap himself in the flayed skin of the victim), and most often dragging prisoners, who had been duly sanctified and purified, to the site of the sacrifice and slowly killing them by piercing them with spears and arrows. Miguel Angel Asturias (1899-1974), the Guatemalan Nobel laureate, grew up near the Maya, wrote:

"The warriors were dancing, raining arrows on the prisoners, fully attired and tied to the trunks of trees.
Upon the arrival of the chief, a sacrificer, dressed in black, put in his hands a blue arrow.

The sun was piercing the city, drawing its arrows with the bow of the lake,

The birds were piercing the lake, loosening their arrows with the bow of the woods.

Chene style

The warriors were forgetting their victims, careful not to wound them to death, to prolong the celebration of their agony.

The chief tightened the bow and loosened the blue arrow on the youngest of the prisoners, to mock him, to adore him. Then the warriors rained arrows on him, from far, from near, dancing to the sound of their drums."