Mexico City 6

Posted on January 27, 2003 in Myths & Mysticism Photos Vacations

Tonight’s narrative will be brief. Today’s one and only photo is a panorama shot, delivered as both as a large jpeg and as an even larger java-driven panorama that will allow you to pan around and examine the details of the Templo Mayor.

The Spanish did a fair job of wrecking the two headed-pyramid after their diseases overwhelmed the population. The Great Temple honored the war god Huitzilopochtli or “Hummingbird on the Left” (whose temple stood on the right hand side as the devotee faced it) and Tlaloc or “Earth Lord”, the god of rain and male fertility.

What remains is a cross section of several structures which were covered by successive constructs as the Aztecs sought to make their center of worship bigger and better than it had been before. To maul the character of the site with triteness: what the visitor sees today is like a Russian doll sawed across the top. Many of the dolls inside are headless, but you get a good view of the structure of the whole in cross-section.

It’s appropriate here, perhaps, to recall that the Templo used to be the centerpiece of an island city. The weight of Mexico City continues to bear down on the now extinct lake bed. Some thirty five feet or more of the Templo Mayor remain unexposed because of property concerns and because of the high water table. It’s strange for me to think that I was walking on a city district adrift on wooden stakes driven into the mud. Reexamination of my shots of the cathedral show a distinct tilt to the structure and the sinking of its annexes. To build the monuments of the new Aztec religion, which was Christianity, the Spanish used the same system the Aztecs had used to shore up the Templo Mayor: wooden stakes or pilings driven deep into the ground.

The island of Tenochitlan still remains beneath the asphalt. Drive a well nearly anywhere in the level parts of the Valley of Mexico and you will drink the sacred waters of the Aztecs.

Montezuma seems to have had no bone to pick with me. I drank of these wells and never once suffered dysentery.