“It has a potent magic. It’s made from the liquid at the heart of the maguey, so it must be sacred. When you drink it, you weigh less. Your eyes see colors more clearly. Your tongue is loosened and you become a golden-voiced orator.” At this point he stopped, looked out over the valley below and confided: “When I drank some of the new liquid and looked at Coxlal, the queen’s ugly sister, she became sixteen years old, a ravishing princess.”
“It must be magic,” one of the priests said. “We must protect our city from the king’s madness.”
In the dark hour before dawn, Ixbalanque faced the critical problem: “I think we must consider carefully the king’s future,” and now his colleagues knew he was speaking of deposition. Beating his fists against his chest, Ixbalanque cried: “I should have forced a change years ago. Well, I’ll perform my duties now,” and he returned to the dormitory, where he roused his two advisers and whispered: “The king must go. This city must be saved.” And he hastened down the long flight of stone steps to the level below, where he went immediately to his quarters and prepared for the painful meeting at which he would inform the king that his reign was over.
But one of the priests who had learned of the decision scurried down the stone steps in the breaking dawn and alerted the king to what was afoot, so that when Ixbalanque appeared at the palace, the king was waiting with two henchmen secreted behind a wall. Since Nopiltzín had spent the previous night drinking huge drafts of pulque, his capacity for understanding what the high priest wanted to tell him was severely blunted, but at the first sign that Ixbalanque had come to recommend abdication, he flew into a towering rage and, summoning his two thugs, shouted: “Kill him!” and the obsidian daggers, gleaming black in the morning sunlight, plunged into the chest of the high priest.
As he fell at the king’s feet he looked up to see his drunken monarch and mumbled: “We shall have a new god, but it won’t be the one we need,” and he perished, the one man who might have saved the civilization of the Builders.
For the next two hundred years, roughly 900 to 1100, which is not an insignificant length of time as the lives of nations go, City-of-the-Pyramid enjoyed one of the greatest levels of human happiness ever attained by an early organized community. There was no war, no hunger, no forced labor on state projects, no human sacrifice, no grinding social injustice. Some were rich and some were poor, but the gap between the two was not immense. There was an army of sorts, but it played no significant role in the affairs of state. Adultery was punished severely so as to protect the family, and there was even a rude educational system that enabled even the poorest of boys to rise to the priesthood.
What gave City-of-the-Pyramid its greatest distinction, however, was its worship of the god of pulque. The beverage was fermented in great amounts at maguey plantations, which now occupied fields that had once produced only cactus. For mile after mile the spidery arms of the blue-green maguey twisted into the air like the flames of earth, and one of the most common sights in the high valley was the maguey harvester passing among his plants, armed with a hollow gourd, one end of which he pressed into the heart of the plant while the other end was kept in his mouth. Then, by sucking vigorously, he drew up the honey water, depositing it in large gourd buckets which carried it to the fermenting areas, where it was transformed into pulque, the beer, the wine of Mexico.
One of the curiosities of history is that the god of pulque was named Four Hundred Rabbits, since the king who had discovered the drink felt that any man, given enough pulque, could be as carefree as four hundred rabbits. There was a temple to Four Hundred Rabbits—not a large one because the high valley’s energy for building had long since been dissipated. The god was represented by a green stone statue of a rabbit with ears like a maguey leaf, and he was perpetually surrounded by flowers of four colors. A troupe of dancers was usually in attendance at his temple and the outer walls of the little structure were festooned with gourds and garlands of fruit. Celebrations in honor of Four Hundred Rabbits consisted of music and singing, the burning of nopal-and-rubber incense, and all who worshiped the god were supposed to be gentle, happy and, above all, kind. It is no exaggeration to say that Four Hundred Rabbits was the loveliest god who ever reigned in Mexico.
Although I’m an American and not a trained historian, I believe I’m entitled to make a judgment about the reign of King Nopiltzín because, through a quirk of Mexican history, I was born a lineal descendant of the king: my grandfather married an Indian woman who sprang directly from his line. So when I try to evaluate his performance I am speaking not of some Indian stranger long dead but of my own ancestor. My summary of his reign is this. The god of pulque acquired a significance greater than that of any other deity. No priest like Ixbalanque tried to call the city back to its high destiny, and the king, unlike tough old Ixmiq, did not dream of building a city so powerful and vast that it would be a monumental tribute to the gods. Instead, king and priest alike worshiped fairly constantly at the shrine of Four Hundred Rabbits, and a hazy indifference settled over the city and the entire valley.
I am convinced by various murals that life in the latter years of Nopiltzín’s reign was very good indeed. There is evidence from some of the memorials dug up around Mexico City that other states looked upon City-of-the-Pyramid as the apex of accomplishment, and the decorated pottery and featherwork produced in the high valley was treasured even as far south as present-day Guatemala. Some of the songs composed in those years are still sung in Mexico, including the one that accompanies the hilarious pulque dance that tourists love to photograph: the singers jig up and down on one foot like rabbits while bystanders bark like coyotes. Tradition claims that Nopiltzín himself composed both the music and the dance.
But after his death the city began to decline. As the years passed, artists in the rest of Mexico began to depict City-of-the-Pyramid not as a triangle accompanied by a flute but as an Indian dignitary whose many headdresses were cocked to one side, as if he were drunk. The envy of others had given way to contempt, even by local artists.
And there was an ominous development whose menace the rulers of the city were too befuddled by pulque to appreciate. From time to time, starting in the year 992, when Nopiltzín was long dead, a strange group of Indians who occupied caves far to the north began wandering down to the high valley; we know this from the decorated pottery of the period. Invariably they are depicted as barbarians, ugly and ferocious people lacking the graciousness that had marked the citizens of City-of-the-Pyramid. We find not a shred of evidence that any of the pulque people appreciated the significance of these stragglers. Just as the rest of civilized Mexico now treated the Builders with contempt, so the latter dismissed the northern barbarians as insignificant.
One aspect of this darkening period around the year 1000 saddens me, for it reflects on what I had come to think of as “my people.” The descendants of Ixmiq, those fine people who had built some of the grandest structures in all the Americas, would be known in history only as the Drunken Builders, a name taken from the days of their decline. This misnomer has deluded many into thinking that men who were habitually drunk could have built those enduring memorials. I think those ancestors of mine should more generously be termed the Beautiful Builders Who Took to Drink. But I know that’s too cumbersome, for historians, like us journalists, seem always to prefer the simplification, whether it represents the truth or not.
6
INDIAN ANCESTORS: THE ALTOMECS
At the beginning of the tenth century, when Nopiltzín was preoccupied with the discovery of pulque, there existed in a series of dark caves along a network of rivers that ran through the steaming jungles several hundred miles north of Mexico City a tribe of Indians who for three or four thousand years, at least, and possibly much longer, had kept alive in their tribal traditions memory of an age when they had lived in a high place. This recollection was so persistent that after the Conquest the tribe was given the name Altomec, a mixture of Spanish and Indian meaning “Those who
seek a high place,” but during the time of which I speak they were called by others either the Cave People or the Followers of Glittering-Fish Color-Bird.
They were a short-statured, very dark people. Their standard of living was abysmal. In three or four thousand years, huddling in their caves, they had failed to invent cloth, or to develop any simple decoration for their pottery, or to tame the turkey. But they had made two discoveries that were to remake the history of Mexico. Along with their relatives, the Aztecs, who were a little more advanced, the Cave People had learned the effectiveness of organized tribal action, and they had found a god ideally suited to lead them.
Their capacity for unified movement was remarkable, and all during the first half of the eleventh century their rulers sent out disciplined bodies of men to scout the rest of Mexico in the search for a new homesite, for it had become apparent that continued life in the caves was not desirable. Some of these scouting parties penetrated as far south as the areas beyond Guatemala. Others had spied upon the lands of the Drunken Builders, and these had reported favorably on that domain.
Sometime about 1050 the Cave People decided to abandon the caves. Loading their men and women with heavy burdens, they set forth with rude implements, statues of their god weighing thousands of pounds, seeds, gourd baskets, totems of one kind or another and hundreds of small children. Each year, from September to April, they moved a few miles from their old camping ground to a new site, where in the spring they planted the seeds they had been carrying through the winter. For five months they tended their crops and during another month they harvested, and then they pushed south. Scouting parties were constantly probing the areas ahead and for a period of ten years it was intended that they would settle somewhere in the Yucatán peninsula. It was a strange fact that most of the people in the areas spied upon by these nomads were not aware of their presence, so stealthy were their operations. But they did leave a trail, for wherever they probed, a few local men would mysteriously disappear; Glittering-Fish Color-Bird required the constant sacrifice of young warriors.
The powerful god of the Cave People acquired its name Glittering-Fish Color-Bird in this curious way.
Sometime around the birth of Christ the Cave People had seen in a river a fish whose scales seemed to be made of some glittering substance that caught the sun and held it prisoner. After three days of marveling at the phenomenon, the priests proclaimed the fish a god, for it was apparent that it had some control over the sun, and for six or seven hundred years it was worshiped as one of the Cave People’s principal deities.
In the year 753, three hundred years before the Cave People set forth on their tribal journey through Mexico, one of their scouting parties brought back from Guatemala a dead specimen of that extraordinary bird the quetzal, whose bright bronze-green and red plumage and immensely long tail would excite all Indian tribes who saw it. The priests were convinced that no such bird could have been placed on earth without the direct intervention of the gods, so on the spot they added the divinity of this colorful bird to that of the glittering fish to create one god.
When trying to explain Glittering-Fish Color-Bird to people who do not know Mexico, I have found it helpful to remind them that the god was a composite whose two halves had originated seven centuries apart. Glittering-Fish was a primal god who could be represented by any kind of shimmering material, and since the Cave People had no metal of any kind, they used waxy leaves, fish scales, polished bones and human teeth to indicate the glittering quality of their deity. The glitter also represented the movement of water that brought fish, the movement of the heavens that brought the growing seasons, and the radiance of the sun. Thus Glittering-Fish was one of the most practical gods in Mexican history, and one of the most serviceable, for he served as intermediary with the rivers, the fields, the flowers and the life-giving sun.
The attributes of glorious Color-Bird, represented by feathers, flowers and iridescent stones, were the intangible virtues such as love of beauty—even though the Cave People were deficient in this—honesty and loyalty. Color-Bird was worshiped by displaying before him featherwork, bouquets of flowers and costumed dancers. The figure chosen to represent this benign deity was, appropriately, an androgynous figure with a benevolent countenance and an all-embracing smile.
About the year 1000, a small group of priests serving the Cave People decided that their tribe might be better guided if their rather languid god Glittering-Fish Color-Bird was replaced by one with more clearly defined manly virtues. One of the younger priests, a man of vision and vigor, argued: “If we are ever to move south into the good lands we’ve been scouting, we’ll meet enemies who will want to prevent us from coming into their territory. Since we’ll have to fight them to gain what we need, we must have a god who will lead us in battle.” So slowly the priests began to transform Glittering-Fish Color-Bird into a more commanding figure with more rigorous demands. His smile became a scowl, his hands held not flowers but obsidian-studded maces. He now gave the impression of being eager to lead men into battle rather than to protect them in their homes and fields.
This new god, taller and bigger than his predecessor, demanded for tribute not flowers and colored feathers but war clubs, obsidian daggers and shields made of closely woven matting. At his stone feet a hollow was kept filled with short lengths of wood to feed the fire that smoldered perpetually, producing soot that darkened the figure and gave it a menacing look.
The transformed god transformed his worshipers. Under his triumphant guidance the Cave People moved slowly but steadily south, thrusting aside small communities of Indians less well organized than they and occupying always more attractive land. In these first years of their migration they met no armed resistance, but they felt confident that if battle was forced upon them they would win.
Even with their new, belligerent god the Cave People might have proved a commendable force in Mexican history if they had not remained totally ignorant. If their priests had been aware of the extraordinary discoveries in astronomy made a thousand years before by Indians in other parts of Mexico they would not have found it necessary to initiate the horrible rites that have severely damaged their image in later years.
For more than three thousand years, learned men in various parts of Mexico, priests and astronomers alike, had been aware that in what we now call the month of December the sun wandered each day farther and farther south until, as the twenty-first of December approached, it looked as if it might continue its flight south until it disappeared altogether. Primitive men must have feared that it would never return, so curious rites, mainly involving sacrifices, were invented to lure it back, and since they invariably worked, they became fixed in religious practices. But thoughtful men deduced the rules governing the seasons and realized that the sun was bound to return to perform its functions whether or not it was appeased by rites of any kind. Had the Cave People known this simple fact the abominations I am about to describe would not have happened.
The Cave priests repeatedly told their people: “We sacrificed to our gods, and the sun came back. If we had not, our crops would never have grown and we would have starved,” and the listeners agreed, for they saw that the sun did return. But as the first millennium ended, the priests argued: “Since you are determined to move south in search of better living, sooner or later we will encounter strong tribes who will forbid us to touch their land. So we need his continued help in new and more persuasive ways to ask our god to help us. To a god leading us in battle, the offering of fruit and flowers is no longer proper. Our god deserves the ultimate sacrifice, a human being, one a day in the critical period, so that he not only will dissuade the sun from leaving us in the chill darkness but also will guarantee our victory in battle.”
When one listener asked, “How will the sacrificial man be chosen?” the high priest replied quickly: “No member of the Cave People will ever be selected. We will offer only enemy soldiers we have captured in battle. The best and the bravest, men of valor. Our god wi
ll recognize them as major gifts and will be eager to help us, so let us accept this new form of worship gladly.”
On a day in mid-December when the sun was perilously low, citizens assembled in the area facing the image of the new god and watched as a prisoner from a recently vanquished tribe was brought forth, a handsome young warrior who had fought with valor and who now stared defiantly at his captors. He was half led, half dragged toward a huge rounded log, and four priests, grabbing his ankles and wrists, lifted him high in the air and then brought him down forcefully on his back across the log. In this position the young warrior looked into the eyes of a ferocious priest who approached with a long, sharp dagger, which he drove into the prisoner’s chest under the last rib and across the belly. Reaching with his left hand into the cavity to tear out the living heart, he offered it as food for the god of battle.
The people were awed by the terrible power of their new god, that he could command such a sacrifice, and in the days that followed they watched five successive ritual murders. After the final sacrifice everyone gathered in a public square to spend the night in prayer and religious ritual, imploring the sun to return. As dawn approached, a priest who was monitoring the sun’s movement turned to the waiting crowd and shouted triumphantly: “The sun has halted his flight south. He’s coming back to save us.”
Later, in a year when no prisoners were taken for the good reason that this barren part of Mexico had no inhabitants, December approached with no captives to sacrifice. But the ritual had become so sacred, so vital, in the life of the Cave People, that it was an easy transition from sacrificing enemy warriors to plunging the obsidian knife into the chest of the tribe’s own warriors. Within the space of a mere fifty years the priests had convinced the Cave People that this was the noblest way to leave this earth, a death that was more to be desired than life itself.