Pyramids of the Feathered Serpent

Our tour guide, a descendant of the Mayas, took his stick and started drawing in the dirt. The images illustrated his running commentary as he explained why these ancient people built the pyramid at Chichen Itza in Yucatan. It had to do with the earth and the seasons. There are 91 steps on each of the four sides making 364 steps in total. At the very top is another step leading to the inner chambers where the sacrifices were held. That makes 365 steps, the number of days in a year. But the Mayan year was a little different than ours in that it consisted of 18 months of 20 days each with five days left over. This too is in the pyramid. The pyramid's stairways divide the nine terraces on each side of the structure into 18 segments, each representing a month.

And then things get even more interesting.

The pyramid is built in such a way as to pay homage, so to speak, to the sun. Here's why. The two axes that run through the northwest and southwest corners are oriented to where the sun rises at the summer solstice and where it sets at the winter solstice. Likewise, as we shall soon see, the pyramid also tells us something about the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.

The whole imposing structure is built at a 45-degree angle and you don't realize how steep that is until you start going up the staircase yourself. Each step is at least a foot high and there are no handrails or anything else to help you along. It's probably as close as one can get to Indiana Jones' Temple of Doom. At the very top the view of the ancient capital of the Mayan world is spectacular. Many of the remaining buildings on this 11.5-acre site have been restored so you can witness their true grandeur but the pyramid is the most telling building of all.

Known as the Castle and also as the Pyramid of Kukulcan, it is a magnificent structure that wouldn't look out of place in the middle of Imperial Rome. But this isn't Roman. It's Mayan. Reaching 90 feet high, it must be the most precarious 90-foot climb on earth and if going up is for the faint of heart, then coming down is surely for the suicidal.

I'm normally not afraid of heights but still I made sure to take the ‘easy' way down the side where authorities have installed a rope. However, even walking straight down while gripping the rope wasn't good enough; I opted to ‘bum' it all the way down every one of those 91 steps. Just to make sure I wouldn't lose my balance.

It's not such a crazy thought. The guide told us there have been incidents of tourists who missed a step – one is all it would take – only to fall to their deaths, merely the latest sacrifices the place has been witness to. Having climbed the thing myself, I can see what he was talking about. This being the 12th consecutive day the guide has conducted a tour without a day off, he describes the genius of the Mayas and doesn't miss a beat.

During the vernal equinox (March 20th) and the autumnal equinox (September 21st), at 3 p. m., the sun shines on the western balustrade of the pyramid's main stairway and creates the illusion of a serpent – 37 yards long. I use the word ‘illusion' but others would say there is something far more sinister at play here. Nevertheless, during these equinoxes this giant snake appears to slither down the pyramid right into the creature's head, which is carved in stone at the bottom of the stairway. It apparently has to do with the symbolic descent of the god Kulcan to earth to begin the agricultural cycle.

I didn't know much about that but I had to ask the guide. The way he explained it these people definitely knew the world was round, not to mention its place in the cosmos, and seeing that the pyramid was built during the 11th to 13th centuries upon the foundations of earlier temples I found it rather amazing. This was hundreds of years before Galileo and we all knew what trouble he got into when he claimed the earth revolved around the sun.

"From what year did the Mayas know the world was round?" I asked him.

"They always knew it," he said.

"Then what was the problem with all those Europeans?"

This launched him into a long dissertation on the Catholic Church and how science and religion will fight for the same space in a person's mind. If you're a staunch Catholic, he implied, the Church always wins and that's what happened for hundreds of years. But the old Mayas – these primitive Indians who sacrificed so many people to the gods we'll never know how many lives were lost at the top of that pyramid – were smart.

"The knowledge of the universe is carved in the stones at Chichen Itza," the guide said.

Indeed. Especially in such fields as geometry and astronomy, the Mayas were far more advanced during the period 1000 to 1200 than any other civilization was for a long time afterward. The Mayas were one of the great civilizations of Mesoamerica. Long before the Spaniards arrived, they were already well on the way in such disciplines as mathematics, astronomy, hieroglyphics, architecture, never mind art and culture. They lived throughout Central America, in the limestone plains of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, and in Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador.

The Mayan culture began to spread in the 4th century and up until about the year 800, it thrived with great cities and ceremonial centers all over the region. A large Mayan community was also at Chichen Itza and some of the early buildings there date from the 8th and 9th centuries. Between 800 and 925, however, the Mayas went into decline. What exactly went wrong is open to debate but one theory is that over a 150-year period three great droughts – each of them lasting a decade – did the Mayas in. Maybe so. But from about 900 to approximately 1200, the Toltecs from central Mexico meshed with Mayan traditions and the Toltec god Kukulcan ruled supreme. An actual leader named Kukulcan, which means the Serpent God, is said to have established order when he defeated the Mayan city tribes and made Chichen Itza his capital. This period lasted until the northern Mayas became integrated into Toltec society and then the Mayan dynasty finally died out.

But they sure had a good run.

At Chichen Itza, however, there doesn't appear to have been a break as there was elsewhere in the Mayan world. People lived here continuously. In fact, there is evidence of early Proto-Mayan tribes inhabiting the flat limestone plateau of the Yucatan Peninsula as far back as 8,000 years ago.

While Mayan ruins are found throughout eastern Mexico and Central America, it is Chichen Itza – inland and about halfway between the two cities of Merida and Cancun – where one finds the greatest collection of ruins. Chichen was largely ignored until the 19th-century American explorer John Stephens toured the area and studied many of the sites in and around the region. He and a British draftsman, Frederick Catherwood, published ‘Incidents of Travel in Yucatan' in 1843, which prompted others to come. But it wasn't until the 1920s that Mexican archaeologists, assisted by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, began restoring monuments. The result is a veritable gold mine for history and archaeology buffs.

The Temple of Warriors. The Thousand Columns Group. The Platform of Eagles and Jaguars. The Ossuary. The Observatory. And the Ball Court, which for some may be the most interesting of all. The Ball Court was where an old Mayan game was played between two teams. Depending on whom you listen to, the captain of the losing team – some say it was the winning team – was decapitated. There are different opinions about this but what cannot be disputed is that stone carvings in the walls clearly depict a player having his head severed. One might wonder then why any ball player would want to be a team captain. On the other hand, in the Mayan world it was a great honor to be sacrificed to the gods.

The great Ball Court at Chichen Itza is of sufficient size and scope to be mentioned in the same breath as the Circus Maximus or Colosseum in Rome. The playing area is 545 feet long by 225 feet wide – or almost two football fields. The two long sides are bounded by platforms with vertical faces, the two shorter sides by rectangular temples. Halfway up along each of the long sides are the ‘goals', actually large stone rings, and the objective was to propel a rubber ball through them.

During our stay in the Yucatan, my wife and I were treated to an actual game played by modern actor-athletes. This took place in a theater that could also be termed a stadium. The players couldn't pick up the ball and throw it – that would be too easy – but instead had to strike the ball with their hips. There were angled platforms at both sides of the playing field and the idea was to get the ball bouncing on the platform and for one team to maintain possession until one of its players could get a good shot at the ring.

No goals were scored in the game we saw and it was probably a good thing; there were no decapitations.

Another interesting note about the Ball Court concerns the remarkable acoustics. Stand at one end of the great playing area and whisper a sound and it can be heard at the other end as clear as a bell. Exactly why no one has been able to determine, not even the engineer who was building an opera house in Europe and who came to Chichen Itza to study the place. He left bewildered.

The Observatory is yet another Mayan building at Chichen Itza that, no doubt, baffled those early Spaniards who arrived in the 16th century and knew the world to be flat. Built between 900 and 1000 – again, many centuries before Galileo – the Tower was accessed by a series of staircases. It was a cylindrical building with a small chamber from which Mayan astronomers studied the heavens through observation slits.

They must have been doing something right because they accurately recorded the solar, lunar and even Venusian cycles, not to mention solar eclipses and movements of various constellations. Using their knowledge of astronomy and mathematics, the Mayas developed their aforementioned solar calendar which they called ‘Haab'.

With the Mayas there was no separation of science and religion. It was all one and the same. But astronomy was central to their view of the world and they regarded the cosmos as the chess board, if you will, for sacred forces. The gods were the heavenly bodies they observed with so much accuracy and, of course, all human life depended on the gods.

Today, especially during the spring and fall equinoxes when greats crowds come to witness the symbolic descent of Kukulcan down the north staircase of the Castillo, we can admire the intelligence of the Mayas. At the same time, we can cringe at their eager relish of human sacrifice. It is unlikely there was a more imposing place than the Castle in which to pay the supreme price so let's take a closer look at it.

The Castle or pyramid sits on a square base with nine recessed stories – representing the planes of the underworld – as it climbs into the sky. At the very top is the temple, its entrance divided by two columns in the shape of serpents; there are a great many serpents to be sure at Chichen Itza. Strangely enough, another smaller pyramid is inside the Castle. The Mayas traditionally built temples and pyramids over earlier ones and they did the same here. Tourists are allowed to climb the 60 steps of the inner pyramid through a three-foot-wide tunnel and this is definitely not for those who are claustrophobic. Or asthmatic for the air is very thin. At the top of the inner pyramid you are greeted by a red throne or altar in the shape of a jaguar.

Astronomy aside, there is yet another mystery associated with the pyramid and, just like the echo at the great Ball Court, it involves sound. At the 1998 meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, which met in Norfolk, Virginia, an acoustical consultant named David Lubman delivered a paper called ‘An archaeological study of chirped echo from the Mayan pyramid of Kukulkan at Chichen Itza'. As people have noted over the years, clapping one's hands at the base of the pyramid produces what Lubman called ‘chirped echoes' from the staircases. Physics will explain the phenomenon as periodic reflections from stepfaces.

Said Lubman: "What is very interesting is that the chirped echo sounds arguably like the primary call of the Mayan scared bird, the resplendent Quetzal. This magnificent bird, now near extinction, has for thousands of years represented the spirit of the Mayas." Lubman concluded that the Mayas may have intentionally coded the sound of their sacred bird right into the architecture of the pyramid.

It may sound a little like Ripley's Believe it or Not, but with the Mayas we might be wiser to believe it.

Not far from the Castle is a natural well – the Sacred Cenote. Used for religious and ceremonial purposes, which means sacrifices, it was in honor of the cult of Chaac, who was the god of Rain and Water. The well, some 200 feet in diameter with walls 70 feet deep, was where people – children, virgins and warriors – were thrown in after being purified in a steam bath. The cenote was always central to Chichen Itza as the first nomadic people who lived here thousands of years ago also knew about it.

What transpired in the Sacred Cenote was evident after explorations began in the late 19th century. In addition to the many skulls found at the bottom were gold and copper bells, gold disks, mirrors, jade beads, carvings of snake heads and rattles, clay vessels and arrow heads.

Over the years many experts have been to Chichen Itza to study the Mayan ruins and determine just what they mean. But interpretation of what is found here varies. Of course, there is no doubt about the sacrifices but the artwork is open to speculation. Consider the Platform of Eagles and Jaguars, built to honor two animals greatly revered by the Mayas. A staircase on each side of the square platform is carved with large heads of feathered serpents. On the walls of the platform are panels with reliefs of eagles and jaguars devouring human hearts; the raised panels depict the eagles and sunken ones the jaguars. These animals relate to the sun's journey across the sky during the day and its descent into the underworld at night.

As morbid as such reliefs may be, they must take a back seat to the Wall of Skulls. This is a rectangular platform showing symbols of death and, by all accounts, was where the heads of those who were sacrificed were put on display. Rows and rows and more rows still of human skulls carved in the stone relate the story of the many who honored the gods. The T-shaped stone structure is 200 feet long and 40 feet wide and dedicated to the glory of military conquest and ritual sacrifice. Along with the horizontal rows of skulls are carvings of eagles and warriors carrying away human heads. When the platform of this building was first excavated, many human skulls were indeed found here.

Chichen Itza is a contract in extremes. While the Maya here brought the arts and sciences to great heights of achievement, they simultaneously plumbed the depths of inhumanity and savagery.