Chapter 15
We drove south-east from Tula, by-passing Mexico City on an anarchic series of fast freeways that dragged us through the creeping edge of the capital’s eye-watering, lung-searing pollution. Our route then took us up over pine-covered mountains, past the snowy peak of Popocatepetl and thence along tree-lined lanes amid fields and farmsteads.
In the late afternoon we arrived at Cholula, a sleepy town with 11,000 inhabitants and a spacious main square. After turning east through the narrow streets, we crossed a railway line and pulled to a halt in the shadow of tlahchiualtepetl, the ‘man-made mountain’ we had come here to see.
Once sacred to the peaceful cult of Quetzalcoatl, but now surmounted by an ornate Catholic church, this immense edifice was ranked among the most extensive and ambitious engineering projects ever undertaken anywhere in the ancient world. Indeed, with a base area of 45 acres and a height of 210 feet, it was three times more massive than the Great Pyramid of Egypt.1 Though its contours were now blurred by age and its sides overgrown with grass, it was still possible to recognize that it had once been an imposing ziggurat which had risen up towards the heavens in four clean-angled ‘steps’. Measuring almost half a kilometre along each side at its base, it had also succeeded in preserving a dignified but violated beauty.
The past, though often dry and dusty, is rarely dumb. Sometimes it can speak with passion. It seemed to me that it did so here, bearing witness to the physical and psychological degradation visited upon the native peoples of Mexico when the Spanishconquistador Hernan Cortez almost casually ‘beheaded a culture as a passer-by might sweep off the head of a sunflower’.2 In Cholula, a great centre of pilgrimage with a population of around 100,000 at the time of the conquest, this decapitation of ancient traditions and ways of life required that something particularly humiliating be done to the man-made mountain of Quetzalcoatl. The solution was to smash and desecrate the temple which had once stood on the summit of the ziggurat and replace it with a church.
Cortez and his men were few, the Cholulans were many. When they marched into town, however, the Spaniards had one major advantage: bearded and pale-skinned, dressed in shining armour, they looked like the fulfilment of a prophecy – had it not always been promised that Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent, would return ‘from across the Eastern Sea’ with his band of followers?3
Because of this expectation, the naive and trusting Cholulans permitted the conquistadores to climb the steps of the ziggurat and enter the great courtyard of the temple. There troupes of gaily bedecked dancing girls greeted them, singing and playing on instruments, while stewards moved back and forth with heaped platters of bread and delicate cooked meats.
One of the Spanish chroniclers, an eyewitness to the events that followed, reported that adoring townsfolk of all ranks ‘unarmed, with eager and happy faces, crowded in to hear what the white men would say’. Realizing from this incredible reception that their intentions were not suspected, the Spaniards closed and guarded all the entrances, drew their weapons of steel and murdered their hosts.4 Six thousand died in this horrible massacre5 which matched, in its savagery, the most bloodstained rituals of the Aztecs: ‘Those of Cholula were caught unawares. With neither arrows nor shields did they meet the Spaniards. Just so they were slain without warning. They were killed by pure treachery.’6
It was ironic, I thought, that the conquistadores in both Peru and Mexico should have benefited in the same way from local legends that prophesied the return of a pale, bearded god. If that god was indeed a deified human, as seemed likely, he must have been a person of high civilization and exemplary character – or more probably two different people from the same background, one working in Mexico and providing the model for Quetzalcoatl, the other in Peru being the model for Viracocha. The superficial resemblance that the Spanish bore to those earlier fair-skinned foreigners opened many doors that would otherwise certainly have been closed. Unlike their wise and benevolent predecessors, however, Pizarro in the Andes and Cortez in Central America were ravening wolves. They ate up the lands and the peoples and the cultures they had seized upon. They destroyed almost everything …
Tears for the past
Their eyes scaled with ignorance, bigotry and greed, the Spanish erased a precious heritage of mankind when they arrived in Mexico. In so doing they deprived the future of any detailed knowledge concerning the brilliant and remarkable civilizations which once flourished in Central America.
What, for example, was the true history of the glowing ‘idol’ that rested in a sacred sanctuary in the Mixtec capital Achiotlan? We know of this curious object through the writings of a sixteenth-century eyewitness, Father Burgoa:
The material was of marvellous value, for it was an emerald of the size of a thick pepper-pod [capsicum], upon which a small bird was engraved with the greatest skill, and, with the same skill, a small serpent coiled ready to strike. The stone was so transparent that it shone from its interior with the brightness of a candle flame. It was a very old jewel, and there is no tradition extant concerning the origin of its veneration and worship.7
What might we learn if we could examine this ‘very old’ jewel today? And how old was it really? We shall never find out because Fr Benito, the first missionary of Achiotlan, seized the stone from the Indians: ‘He had it ground up, although a Spaniard offered three thousand ducats for it, stirred the powder in water, poured it upon the earth and trod upon it …’8
Equally typical of the profligate squandering of the intellectual riches concealed in the Mexican past was the shared fate of two gifts given to Cortez by the Aztec emperor Montezuma. These were circular calendars, as big as cartwheels, one of solid silver, and the other of solid gold. Both were elaborately engraved with beautiful hieroglyphs which may have contained material of great interest. Cortez had them melted down for ingots on the spot.9
More systematically, all over Central America, vast repositories of knowledge accumulated since ancient times were painstakingly gathered, heaped up and burned by zealous friars. In July 1562, for example, in the main square of Mani (just south of modern Merida in Yucatan Province) Fr Diego de Landa burned thousands of Maya codices, story paintings and hieroglyphs inscribed on rolled-up deer skins. He also destroyed countless ‘idols’ and ‘altars’, all of which he described as ‘works of the devil, designed by the evil one to delude the Indians and to prevent them from accepting Christianity …’10 Elsewhere he elaborated on the same theme:
We found great numbers of books [written in the characters of the Indians] but as they contained nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the devil we burned them all, which the natives took most grievously, and which gave them great pain.11
Not only the ‘natives’ should have felt this pain but anyone and everyone – then and now – who would like to know the truth about the past.
Many other ‘men of God’, some even more ruthlessly efficient than Diego de Landa, participated in Spain’s satanic mission to wipe clear the memory banks of Central America. Notable among these was Juan de Zumarraga, Bishop of Mexico, who boasted of having destroyed 20,000 idols and 500 Indian temples. In November 1530 he burned a Christianized Aztec aristocrat at the stake for having allegedly reverted to worship of the ‘rain-god’ and later, in the market-place at Texcoco, built a vast bonfire of astronomical documents, paintings, manuscripts and hieroglyphic texts which the conquistadores had forcibly extracted from the Aztecs during the previous eleven years.12 As this irreplaceable storehouse of knowledge and history went up in flames, a chance to shake off at least some of the collective amnesia that clouds our understanding was lost to mankind for ever.
What remains to us of the written records of the ancient peoples of Central America? The answer, thanks to the Spanish, is less than twenty original codices and scrolls.13
We know from hearsay that many of the documents which the friars reduced to ashes contained ‘records of ages past’.14
What did those lost records say? what secrets did they hold?
Gigantic men of deformed stature
Even while the the orgy of book-burning was still going on, some Spaniards began to realize that ‘a truly great civilization had once existed in Mexico prior to the Aztecs’.15 Oddly enough, one of the first to act on this realization was Diego de Landa. He appears to have undergone ‘Damascus-road experience’ after staging his auto-da-fé at Mani. In later years, determined to save what he could of the ancient wisdom he had once played such a large part in destroying, he became an assiduous gatherer of the traditions and oral histories of the native peoples of the Yucatan.16
Bernardino de Sahagun, a Franciscan friar, was a chronicler to whom we owe much. A great linguist, he is reported to have ‘sought out the most learned and often the oldest natives, and asked each to paint in his Aztec picture writing as much as he could clearly remember of Aztec history, religion and legend’.17 In this way Sahagun was able to accumulate detailed information on the anthropology, mythology and social history of ancient Mexico, which he later set down in a learned twelve-volume work. This was suppressed by the Spanish authorities. Fortunately one copy has survived, though it is incomplete.
Diego de Duran, a conscientious and courageous collector of indigenous traditions, was yet another Franciscan who fought to recover the lost knowledge of the past. He visited Cholula in AD 1585, a time of rapid and catastrophic change. There he interviewed a venerated elder of the town, said to have been more than one hundred years old, who told him this story about the making of the great ziggurat:
In the beginning, before the light of the sun had been created, this place, Cholula, was in obscurity and darkness; all was a plain, without hill or elevation, encircled in every part by water, without tree or created thing. Immediately after the light and the sun arose in the east there appeared gigantic men of deformed stature who possessed the land. Enamoured of the light and beauty of the sun they determined to build a tower so high that its summit should reach the sky. Having collected materials for the purpose they found a very adhesive clay and bitumen with which they speedily commenced to build the tower … And having reared it to the greatest possible altitude, so that it reached the sky, the Lord of the Heavens, enraged, said to the inhabitants of the sky, ‘Have you observed how they of the earth have built a high and haughty tower to mount hither, being enamoured of the light of the sun and his beauty? Come and confound them, because it is not right that they of the earth, living in the flesh, should mingle with us.’ Immediately the inhabitants of the sky sallied forth like flashes of lightning; they destroyed the edifice and divided and scattered its builders to all parts of the earth.18
It was this story, almost but not quite the biblical account of the Tower of Babel (which was itself a reworking of a far older Mesopotamian tradition), that had brought me to Cholula.
The Central American and Middle Eastern tales were obviously closely related. Indeed, the similarities were unmissable, but there were also differences far too significant to be ignored. Of course, the similarities could be due to unrecorded pre-Colombian contacts between the cultures of the Middle East and the New World, but there was one way to explain the similarities and the differences in a single theory. Suppose that the two versions of the legend had evolved separately for several thousands of years, but prior to that both had descended from the same remotely ancient ancestor?
Remnants
Here’s what the Book of Genesis says about the ‘tower that reached to heaven’:
Throughout the earth men spoke the same language, with the same vocabulary. Now as they moved eastwards they found a plain in the land of Shinar, where they settled. There they said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks and bake them in the fire.’ For stone they used bricks and for mortar they used bitumen. ‘Come,’ they said, ‘let us build ourselves a town and a tower with its top reaching heaven. Let us make a name for ourselves, so that we may not be scattered about the entire earth.’
Now Yahewh [the Hebrew God] came down to see the town and the tower that the sons of man had built. ‘So they are all a single people with a single language!’ said Yahweh. ‘This is but the start of their undertakings! There will be nothing too hard for them to do. Come, let us go down and confuse their language on the spot so that they can no longer understand one another.’
Yahweh scattered them thence over the whole face of the earth, and they stopped building the tower. It was named Babel, therefore, because there Yahweh confused the language of the whole earth. It was from there that Yahweh scattered them over the whole face of the earth.19
The verse which most interested me suggested very clearly that the ancient builders of the Tower of Babel had set out to create a lasting monument to themselves so that their name would not be forgotten – even if their civilization and language were. Was it possible that the same considerations could have applied at Cholula?
Only a handful of monuments in Mexico were thought by archaeologists to be more than 2000 years old. Cholula was definitely one of them. Indeed no one could say for sure in what distant age its ramparts had first begun to be heaped up. For thousands of years before development and extension of the site began in earnest around 300 BC, it looked as though some other, older structure might have been positioned at the spot over which the great ziggurat of Quetzalcoatl now rose.
There was a precedent for this which further strengthened the intriguing possibility that the remnants of a truly ancient civilization might still be lying around in Central America waiting to be recognized. For example, just south of the university campus of Mexico City, off the main road connecting the capital to Cuernavaca, stands a circular step pyramid of great complexity (with four galleries and a central staircase). It was partially excavated in the 1920s from beneath a mantle of lava. Geologists were called to the site to help date the lava, and carried out a detailed examination. To everyone’s surprise, they concluded that the volcanic eruption which had completely buried three sides of this pyramid (and had then gone on to cover about sixty square miles of the surrounding territory) must have taken place at least seven thousand years ago.20
This geological evidence seems to have been ignored by historians and archaeologists, who do not believe that any civilization capable of building a pyramid could have existed in Mexico at such an early date. It is worth noting, however, that Byron Cummings, the American archaeologist who originally excavated the site for the National Geographical Society, was convinced by clearly demarcated stratification layers above and below the pyramid (laid down both before and after the volcanic eruption) that it was ‘the oldest temple yet uncovered on the American continent’. He went further than the geologists and stated categorically that this temple ‘fell into ruins some 8500 years ago’.21
Pyramids upon pyramids
Going inside the Cholula pyramid really did feel like entering a man-made mountain. The tunnels (and there were more than six miles of them) were not old: they had been left behind by the teams of archaeologists who had burrowed here diligently from 1931 until funds ran out in 1966. Somehow, these narrow, low-ceilinged corridors had borrowed an atmosphere of antiquity from the vast structure all around them. Moist and cool, they offered an inviting and secretive darkness.
Following a ribbon of torchlight we walked deeper inside the pyramid. The archaeological excavations had revealed that it was not the product of one dynasty (as was thought to have been the case with the pyramids at Giza in Egypt), but that it had been built up over a very long period of time – two thousand years or so, at a conservative estimate. In other words it was a collective project, created by an inter-generational labour force drawn from the many different cultures, Olmec, Teotihuacan, Toltec, Zapotec, Mixtec, Cholulan and Aztec, that had passed through Cholula since the dawn of civilization in Mexico.22
Though it was not known who had been the first builders here, as far as it had been possible to establish the earliest major edifice on the site consisted of a tall conical pyramid, shaped like an upturned bucket, flattened at the summit where a temple had stood. Much later a second, similar structure was imposed on top of this primordial mound, i.e. a second inverted bucket of clay, and compacted stone was placed directly over the first, raising the temple platform to more than 200 feet above the surrounding plain. Thereafter, during the next fifteen hundred years or so, an estimated four or five other cultures contributed to the final appearance of the monument. This they did by extending its base in several stages, but never again by increasing its maximum height. In this way, almost as though a master plan were being implemented, the man-made mountain of Cholula gradually attained its characteristic, four-tier ziggurat shape. Today, its sides at the base are each almost 1500 feet long – about twice the length of the sides of the Great Pyramid at Giza – and its total volume has been estimated at a staggering three million cubic metres.23 This makes it, as one authority succinctly states, ‘the largest building ever erected on earth.’24
Why?
Why go to all that trouble?
What sort of name for themselves were the peoples of Central America trying to make?
Walking through the network of corridors and passageways, inhaling the cool, loamy air, I was uncomfortably conscious of the great weight and mass of the pyramid pressing down upon me. It was the largest building in the world and it had been placed here in honour of a Central American deity of whom almost nothing was known.
We had the conquistadores and the Catholic Church to thank for leaving us so deeply in the dark about the true story of Quetzalcoatl and his followers. The smashing and desecration of his ancient temple at Cholula, the destruction of idols, altars and calendars, and the great bonfires made out of codices, paintings and hieroglyphic scrolls, had succeeded almost completely in silencing the voices of the past. But the legends did offer us one graphic and powerful piece of imagery: a memory of the ‘gigantic men of deformed stature’ who were said to have been the original builders.