Geology as destiny
So, it’s proposed that given the weird water situation, and the fact that limestone and its soil are notoriously limited for agriculture, the Maya did amazingly well, given the extreme physical limitations of their environment. As they mastered field and crop rotation, water and irrigation, and plants that could grow in the poor soil, their population grew — to the millions, it is estimated. So many survived on such a fragile ecology that when the scales tipped — there was a drought that lasted for years — the civilization began to fracture. This was all well before the contact with Europeans… and one wonders at possible contemporary parallels — economies based almost entirely on oil, for example.
First contact
According to Lost Cities of the Maya (Baudez/Picasso) the first meeting between the Maya and Europeans was with Christopher Columbus in 1502. The ships of Columbus appeared to the Mayans first as floating islands in the bay of Honduras, islands with only 3 leafless trees on each of them (the ships’ masts.) The local king met them in the royal canoe, bringing gifts, and a pleasant exchange took place. The Mayans were slightly taken aback at the hairiness of the faces of the Europeans — to the Maya this made them appear monkey-like.
These Europeans never set foot on Mayan soil.
The next meeting was not so pleasant. A European boat was shipwrecked off the coast of Jamaica and the scrawny survivors washed up on the shores of the Yucatan.
They were taken to the Mayan city where they were seen as a God-given opportunity for sacrifice. Handy as well that they were complete strangers, so no local grievances would arise. A group of them were then sacrificed almost immediately — in the accepted manner, one assumes — the still-beating heart torn out of the chest (exactly how this operation was performed by the Maya was not described — I’ve read Aztec accounts.)
However, as these “gifts” for sacrifice were all so undernourished and scrawny they were not the best quality as sacrificial material goes. So the remaining survivors were locked up and began to enjoy the local cuisine, until they too were sacrificed. All except 2. One man became a loyal slave to the king and another managed to escape to a neighboring town where he married a local gal and settled down.
Others followed. Though the subjugation of the Maya didn’t happen as quickly or easily as the Spanish in particular might have hoped. Shades of George Bush and Co. Murderous priests intent on destroying the local culture and Christianizing the Maya, gold seekers, conquistadores and others all made inroads, but couldn’t conquer the little people.
None of the Europeans at first could believe that the little people around them, living in tiny villages of thatched huts with dirt floors, could have possibly built the massive complexes that surrounded them. How could these people have done this? And then how could they have no recollection of it?
The Europeans came up with other explanations. One explorer believed that the great Mayan cities were a remnant made by survivors of Atlantis, the disappeared mid-Atlantic utopia. Others thought that, somewhat logically, the builders of the near east must have made their way here — the ziggurats of Babylon and Sumer were similar, no? Romantically inclined explorers proposed that the classical Romans must have landed there. And if they didn’t stay, they at least imparted some of their classical skills and wisdom to the locals before departing. It seemed obvious that these locals could never have come up with this by themselves.
Priests and missionaries, possibly viewing the monstrous faces and serpents adorning the Mayan temples and other buildings, became convinced that only the Devil himself could have made these cites. They could only be the cites of the Evil One himself! Ay!
From a Catherwood painting — one can see where the missionaries got their notions.
Lastly, post-conquest, even some Maya themselves became convinced that their own ancestors could not have created the network of cites and roads around them. They saw that the only people they knew who seemed capable of such great works were their new masters. So when asked who built the cities they answered, “The Spanish.”
Wandering through these sites I ask myself, “What is this fascination with ruins? Explorers followed by tour busses, all gazing in rapt wonder and awe — what’s the deal? It’s just a pile of rocks, right?” Ruins are a classic romantic image, used again and again in paintings and poems…and now in movies and TV…of a once great Ozymandias and his people whose only legacy is an impressive and inscrutable pile of rubble. The Europeans were endlessly fascinated, as the planet seemed to be revealed to be filled with the remnants of faded greatness, now covered in jungles or desert sands.
Ogling ruins is way of meditating on our own inevitable deaths, and also, one assumes, of acknowledging our own hubris and that of our own civilizations. A humbling reminder that, yes, it all does return to dust, no matter how tall, massive or impregnable the buildings might be. There is, I admit, impressive survival — the tombs of Egypt — but it’s all for nothing in the end. The collapse, one senses, is always inevitable, despite leaders’ claims to eternal good and greatness.
I asked myself, “Where are the contemporary ruins? Where are the ruins in progress? Where are our once great cites that are being abandoned as these ones were?”
I came up with Detroit. (Sorry, sports fans.) Vast stretches of the city are already uninhabited, crumbling. The central temples, yes, are still in use — the temples for sports, conventions and ritualistic music concerts — but for how much longer? Will the beautiful deco buildings erected as working shrines by what were once the largest companies in the world (GM, Ford) soon be abandoned? They’re already surrounded by a no man’s wasteland; it seems only a matter of time. And then how long before people wander into that zone and ask themselves, “Who built this incredible building?”
Detroit inner city urban decay (thanks to Ian Freimuth for the photos):
Or New Orleans, possibly, the first urban victim of global warming.
I can also imagine formerly vast Soviet cities in the Russian heartland that may have already been abandoned. Cities, like Detroit, of steel, industry and manufacturing. With temples to the Party and the Worker, now derelict — filled with grass and stray cats, like the once great factories of the Ruhr valley.
The beautiful Fisher building, Detroit:
Part 2, Tulum
Various European explorers canvassed the region during the 1800s. John Stephens and Catherwood, his illustrator, published books based on their travels around 1841 that entranced the English-speaking world. Catherwood’s engravings and paintings were romantic, as were Waldeck’s before him, but Catherwood’s possessed more accuracy and had the aura of scientific objectivity, as did Stephens’ texts. They still indulged in the romantic aesthetic of Lost Worlds and were entertaining as mysterious and dangerous adventures, but their renderings of the architecture and reliefs were more accurate and less pseudo-classical than those of Waldeck or Castañeda. Catherwood used a camera lucida, an optical device that made drawing more accurate. It made the drawings and lithos look like what the eye was seeing. (See Hockney’s theories about historical artists using scientific optical devices.)
(You use the lens to view your subject and the drawing becomes more like copying, to our sensibilities, a photograph. Here is a camera Lucida. $7 at the time.)
Here is one of his works — apocalyptic and yet accurate:
Naturally, like any kid now who has seen Scooby Doo cartoons or Tomb Raider, the 19th century world was entranced when they saw these images. These were tourist brochures for the unconscious. A confirmation, in fact, of what the European imagination had seen only in their darkest dreams. Freudian and Jungian images, before those men existed.
Charney, a French explorer, visited Uxmal, the site pictured in the postcard style view earlier. He came upon the large plaza just beyond the pyramid of the Magician (a structure of 3 low buildings now called the Nunnery) and decided he needed to stay there in order not to waste time traveling to and from the nearby village where they had set off. He decided to camp inside one of the rooms that faced the large plaza. The Mayan helpers begged off — they wouldn’t stay the night — which he naturally attributed to silly local superstition. You can tell what’s coming next.
The first two nights he set up his gear and a hammock in one of the ancient rooms and nothing happened. But on the third night he awoke in the middle of the night to find himself covered in huge bugs, crawling all over him, even in his face. They were everywhere, and they were sucking his blood. He fought back, massacring the lot, in a horrible bloody rampage. He went back to sleep, but it was no use, they had discovered him.
He moved to another room — the plaza has many rooms facing it — and had another good night. But soon they discovered him again. He moved once more, and the insects found him once again. It seems the native “superstitions” were not so crazy after all.
His account of all this, like Stephens’ book with Catherwood’s engravings, could be seen as an early blog, an entertaining (I hope) journal, of which this one is a much abbreviated contemporary example.
Why are the Mayan Gods so monstrous? Here is one from the Lost Cites book that to me looks an awfully lot like the monster in Predator:
Is the spirit world so full of danger and death that it is almost entirely populated by demons of one sort or another? Are there no angels or beautiful Goddesses? Is there no blissful heaven with glowing maidens beckoning? Are these scary creatures possibly a truer reflection of the natural world and the struggle for survival than the images of Athena and Aphrodite? The word for love in Mayan — yail — means both love and pain.
Here is a (protected) skull from the center of a ball court. This game was for keeps.
Here’s one that looks like Darth Vader at the end of Star Wars 6. The European eyes are a conceit — added by the European artist, but the teeth — those are meant to be teeth — are accurate.
Pain was something the Maya were familiar with. Not only were prisoners and slaves ritually sacrificed (children — bastards and orphans — were highly prized for this) but even the elite during the Classic period let their own blood be shed. On specific dates men would use a stingray spine or an awl to pierce their penises and, as is shown on some stelae, the holy blood would drip down. The blood splattered on “paper” which was then used to anoint the idols. Women used a different technique, of course. They would draw a thorny branch or tendril (like that of a rose) through their tongues! Priests engaged in fire walking. Needles were jabbed through ears, cheeks and lips as well, but that all seems tame these days.
Many of the Gods, and many of the personal doppelgängers, are animal/human hybrids. Dog-faced or jaguar-faced humans. Parrot beaks on jaguar heads on a human body. And of course the serpent with feathers — now confirmed by dinosaur science to have actually existed in some form. Birds are indeed descended from dinosaurs, and flying feathered lizards did exist as one time — so this stuff is not all imaginary, it’s not all the result of those peyote enemas.
Part of the Mayan aesthetic mixed aspects of youth and age in these creatures — a creature with a child’s body and the face of an old man was common. The Gods, being of many aspects and avatars, crossed what we see as the line between humans and animals. The Maya saw no such dividing line.
What if, and this is a big if, not all of these chimeras were mythical? What if not all of them were figments of the Mayan imagination? What if the Maya had some kind of genetic science, lost of us now, which enabled a limited creation of these monsters? Don’t laugh. Plenty of the world’s knowledge has been lost, though much of it has been “found” again — the science and astronomy of the Arabs was “lost” to Europeans for centuries, then “rediscovered”, resulting in great leaps forward. Other skills and techniques of ancient cultures are still a mystery to us.
So, given that we now know you can indeed mix a pig with a fish, maybe these people actually did it. Maybe the monsters on these walls and frescoes are not mythical, but are historical. This nasty dog below probably existed. It is known that dogs were bred to be hairless (the escuintle still exists) and barkless.
It took centuries for archeologists to realize that much of the rest of what is left carved in stone is historical. Previously they had thought it was all religious décor. These are the records of kings, of their times. There are kings entombed in the pyramids — well, in some of them, for sure. Long descending stairs — purposely blocked with earth and huge triangular stones — lead into the heart of the structures, where bodies of the kings lie, the desiccated corpse wearing a beautiful jade mask. The carvings illustrate real battles, real rulers and…real monsters?
The beauty aesthetic too is far from ours. Babies, right after they were born, had their heads bound between two boards, to achieve, as far as possible, the aesthetically pleasing look of fore and aft flattening.
Being cross-eyed was also seen as a pleasing look, so mothers would leave the babies with a beads on a string dangling right between their eyes, in the hopes of training the eyes to go more inward.
O.K., this seems a sure sign of cultural and aesthetic relativism. We might like to think that our ideas of the beautiful — swollen botoxed lips, emaciated women, men obviously on steroids — are universal. Or at least approach some universal ideal of physical beauty. Others maintain that the Kouros figures and sculptures of Michaelangelo and others evince the true ideal.
But no, as we can see, there are others whose ideal is, and this is but one example, a cross-eyed pinhead, so where is the universal ideal?
Evolutionary biologists maintain that the universal ideal is found in symmetry and suitability for child bearing and rearing, for women, and survival and security, for men. The signs we interpret as beauty, they contend, are actually obvious outward signals of biological health and potentiality. Do swollen lips do that?
More to come.
