Cancun to Palenque, the Whole Enchilada

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Up until January this year, tourists could climb the steep steps of the pyramid. Then an elderly American tourist, well past her 80’s (and advised not to climb but hell, she did it anyway), fell, and died. One might argue this is not the first time that a misguided, over-zealous American idiot has ruined things for the rest of us, and so today the steps are roped off and clear of people which, admittedly, makes for better photos. The pyramid itself, 70% of which was reconstructed, is actually a very complicated, but very accurate cosmic calendar. Like the Pyramid in Egypt, not a brick is in place by chance, and I could go into the mathematics, but that would be full of numbers and equations and other things that might have made sense if I had more than a 14-year-old’s ability to do math. Better to talk about the fact that twice a year (March, September) the shadow of a snake magically creeps down from the top of the pyramid (Mayans worshipped Kukulcan, the feathered serpent god, along with some 7000 other gods). A pint-sized race of people, the Mayans were seriously into death, as in sacrifice, as in rip my heart out while its still beating and throw it to the warriors for dinner. Death by sacrifice was considered an honour, a cause to celebrate, and hell, everyone loves to party! Unless you were born between August 6 - 10th, in which case you were chosen at birth to be sacrificed between ages 4-12 (happy birthday, now we’ll rip out your heart!) although to be fair, only the noble class had this honour, while the peasants were just worked to death in the fields to support the ruling class. Average life expectancy of the Maya - a cool 30 years old (hell, most people believe there’s no life after 30 anyway!). That is unless you were a priest, gorging on the hearts of young children, in which case, you lived into your 80’s. Politically, it sounds like a rotten taco, but the masses were placated with massive sporting events – the Mayan sport of Pok-Atok was a precursor to soccer, basketball, tennis hockey, and first-degree murder. Opposing teams would fight over a rubber ball, which would be bounced between two enormous walls (the sacred ball court at Chichen Itza is about the size of a football field, but the game was played side to side against the opposing 26 foot walls) with a stone hoop in the center. Only one score was needed to win the game, with rival spectators cheering from above the walls, and chiefs able to communicate on either end through perfect medieval sonic-engineering.

The winning captain, get this, would be sacrificed to reward him for his team’s victory. Incentive, it seems, comes in many, strange forms. Anyway, the peasants were too busy cheering at pok-atok games to notice that the priests lived like kings, refused to let the masses use the wheel even though it had clearly been discovered, and bled the nations riches for their own personal gain. Sounds just like modern politics to me!

I walked around the ruins, peppered with fascinating tidbits like the ones above, and I pictured how this might have looked when it was rediscovered in the jungle in 1841. For as great as the Mayan nation were, Chichen Itza was abandoned for centuries, and the culture went into decline. There are various theories as to why this happened, the best being, according to our guide, that human sacrifices finally took its toll. Surrounding the temple complex are dozens of cenotes – sinkholes of fresh water filtered through limestone to provide wells of unlimited groundwater. Most were used for drinking, but one massive cenote, adjacent to the pyramid, was used to throw the bodies of many a sacrificee (if that’s not a word, it is now). The Mayans, for all their celestial genius, did not realize the cenotes are linked together through underwater channels, and as such they were poisoning their water with rotting corpses. People began to die, so they sacrificed more people to appease the gods, causing more people to die. This would be the very definition of irony in a very twisted dictionary.

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