Julio, our gay guide, picked up us at our hotel on Monday and drove us through the Mexico City favelas to the lost world of Teotihuacán. As we approached the steps, Julio clapped his hands and in the echo from the pyramid, we heard the call of the quetzal bird. The Teotihuacán civilization, he explained, was extremely advanced in terms of architecture, astronomy, mathematics, painting, and other facets of life — and especially urban life — which made them one of the most powerful and enlightened societies the world has seen.
The Temple of Quetzalcoatl (the Feathered Serpent) was built around 2000 years ago, but was destroyed around the year 300.
The temple was designed so that priests could speak from the top and tens (and possibly hundreds) of thousands of people in the plaza below could hear.
The heads of the gods were originally painted in bright colors and had eyes of obsidian. Now you can only see traces of the color, and the obsidian eyes are all lost, except for those of the god on the left.
Outside on the Avenue of the Dead, a vendor showed us how pigments were made from natural material (red, for example, comes from grinding up the white moth that can be seen on the cactus paddle).
The steps everywhere were very steep. Walking up and down them, I felt young and old at the same time.
The cactus on the path we took to the Pyramid of the Sun were gigantic.
We stopped at a small museum, where they did not allow liquids inside, but where they kept an orange bookshelf for visitors to store their water. I couldn’t conceive of any museum using this system in the United States.
There was a small garden where we rested in the shade among the succulents.
The Pyramid of the Sun was immense.
I couldn’t really wrap my head around it, even though there are many more immense things in the modern world.
We made our way to the Temple of the Moon, where we recreated the good spirit embodied by the lighting of the Olympic torch, which opened the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City.
An orchestra was positioned on the stage in front of the pyramid.
Surrounding the pyramid of the moon were 13 smaller temples, each one corresponding to a cycle of the moon (or 52 weeks, meaning a year). What was perhaps even more interesting about Teotihuacán society is that, sometime around the year 300, they turned away from the aristocracy that has marked many other societies (including our own) and devoted most of their public resources to communal housing developments for the inhabitants of the city. I had read about this a few years ago in ‘The Dawn of Everything’ by David Graeber and David Wengrow, but seeing it made me hopeful that perhaps we, like the people of Teotihuacán, might turn away from the inequality that is destroying our world.
One of the reasons we know that the people of Teotihuacán were relatively equal is that their art, which can be seen here on the remains of original frescoes, does not feature kings and queens or people otherwise lording their power over others. Everyone is the same size.
Also noteworthy about this scene is that it depicts a male orgy. It seems that the Teotihuacán, in addition to being more socialistic, were also not homophobic. The socialist phase of their society lasted around 300 years, which is remarkable in its duration and unfortunate in its loss.
We went to a local restaurant and felt hopeful as we watched the sun stream though the flags over and trees overhead.
