The Motorcycle Diaries (Part 2)

Musing about Human Sacrifice in the Shadow of a Vanished Empire

In the Shadow of a Vanished Empire

by Crow Qu’appelle

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Ozymandias, Percy Shelley

I left for Palenque early that day, only planning to be away for a few days. The road rose up before me as I powered Eastwards. I paid special attention to the road signs since I wasn’t using GPS to navigate. When I wasn’t sure if I was going the right way, I asked someone.

The road from San Cristobal to Palenque is well-known for roadblocks. Sometimes, campesinos block the road and make motorists pay a toll, but I got through Oxchuc no problem. This area has a reputation as a Mayan wild west of sorts, though that description could also apply to large parts of Chiapas. Oxchuc isn’t a Zapatista town, but a place where the Mayan people govern themselves according to “usos y costumbres”, which means that they run their own town, and the government normally doesn’t intervene. There are many such communities in Chiapas. By no means are all of them are Zapatistas, but one does wonder whether they would exist in the same way if it wasn’t for the EZLN. Would the Mexican government have the same hands-off approach they do if it wasn’t for the Zapatista rebellion?

I remember reading about a recent disputed election in which shots were fired and some people were killed, so I won’t pretend that the political life of Mayan communities is always idyllic, but it makes my heart glad that indigenous people here really are in control of their territories.

The promise of the Mexican Revolution was that the land would belong to those who work it, and miraculously, this promise has been kept up until the current day, at least here in Chiapas. Were it not the Zapatista insurgency, would this not be the case? The movement is now almost 30 years old, and there are more autonomous communities in Chiapas than anyone’s been able to count. What revolution has been more successful in the last thirty years?

Onwards I went towards Ocosingo, which is known as a hotbed of Zapatismo. This city was taken over by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (known by its Spanish acronym EZLN) on January 1st, 1994, the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went in effect. The city was the site of some of the fiercest battles of the initial uprising.

As I drew near, I noticed signs for the Tonina, which I hadn’t realized was on route. My Croatian roommate had tried to talk me into coming with him to Tonina, which he said was one of the biggest and most important Mayan cities. I thought he might just be hyping it up because he wanted me to come with him, so I didn’t really believe him. But it seemed like Tonina really wasn’t that far out of my way, and it wasn’t too late in the day, so I decided to make a little detour on the way to Palenque. I pulled off and followed the signs down inconspicuous roads, past a military base, until the road ended at an empty parking lot where a local offered me his services as a guide.

I’ve visited a lot of archaeological sites before, but never with a guide, but I figured that it would be a good chance to practice Spanish, so I agreed to hire him. I parked my bike, stashed some gear with the guard, and headed up to the road towards the ruins with my new acquaintance. His name was Juan Manuel Navarro Navarro, and he was clearly very knowledgeable. Excavation of the ruins began about 50 years ago, and he had worked at the archaeological zone in various capacities for decades.

He showed me the ball court, which was an area carved out below the level of the surrounding ground, which would have allowed for the audience to watch the game from above. I tried to fathom what the significance of this practice was. To what extent was it entertainment and to what extent was it ceremonial? What would the vibe have been like when the grounds were crowded with spectactors? Was it really true that the winning team would be sacrificed? Or was it the losing team? According to Juan, it was the winners. Next to the ball court was an elevated stone structure, basically a mini-pyramid. I was told that this was a place where human sacrifices would take place, and I climbed, closed my eyes, and felt the energy.

This is what keeps me coming back to these Mayan sites. The energy. There is a powerful and mysterious energy in these places, something that you must experience for yourself.

I wondered whether it was true that some human sacrifice in the ancient world had been consensual. If it was the winners of the ball game who were sacrificed, that means that people would compete for the honour to be sacrificed.

This isn’t actually that hard for me to believe. People sign up for the army, don’t they? If you believe you’re going to paradise, or Valhalla, or whatever the Mayan equivalent would be, dying in a moment of glory might be highly desirable. According to Juan, the Maya believed in reincarnation. Maybe sacrifice was seen as a way as securing an advantageous rebirth. Or perhaps the people were simply brainwashed to want something a sane person would not want. Worse yet, perhaps life was so terrible for slaves in Tonina that they competed for the privilege of being killed, because death was better than slavery.

In any case, I said a prayer atop of that stone surface, and felt the presence of the spirits around me. I felt very strange.

I haven’t even described the palace. “Tonina means House of Stone in our language,” Juan told me, “but the ancient Maya called it Po.” A massive stone structure towered above us. It seems to me that the rulers of Tonina had concentrated their efforts on building up one single structure of unparalleled grandeur. “Back in the day, it was completely white, and shone in the Sun,” my guide told me, and I tried to imagine what a sight to behold it would have been in its heyday. It must have taken many generations to build up such a monumental structure, and for what? Truly, the ego knows no bounds.

The pyramids and temples of the various ancient sites of Chiapas must have required absolutely mind-blowing amounts of hard physical labour, especially if we are to believe that the ancient Mayans did not have knowledge of the wheel. Some of the things that stood out to me were several statues of what appeared to be subjugated slaves or prisoners, which jutted out from the walls overlooking the ball pitch in submissive poses. It struck me that the designers of this city were obsessed with the desire to strike fear into its visitors, and impress upon them the power of the state.

Such art stands as a tribute to the enjoyment of such power that the rulers of that era savoured... Or does it? I always like to consider alternative explanations for things. Could we be misunderstanding the significance of these statues somehow?

Above the far edge of the pitch stood a statue which appeared to be a bloody slave on its knees, hands bound in an expression of agony. It was pretty hard to interpret it in any other way than as the relishing of cruelty. It looked out of place, that is to say, unusually well preserved in the midst of ruins, and upon questioning my guide I learned that all the artifacts on display are replicas. The originals are highly valuable, and have been removed. In other words, what you are presented with is a curated version of history.

Later on my guide mentioned participating in the project of reconstructing a fallen tower on top of the main pyramid, and I started to wonder how much editorializing had taken place in the process of preparing this site for visitors.

We marveled at a calendar stone, which is a type of round stone disc used to commemorate certain important rulers of antiquity, in which a central figure is surrounded from glyphs which apparently refer to important dates in the life of that person. My guide knew quite a bit about the figure depicted, a female ruler named Smoking Mirror, who looked like more like a demon than anything remotely human. As for the glyphs I was told that experts don’t agree on their interpretations. “There’s never been a Rosetta stone for deciphering Mayan inscriptions,” Juan told me.

But I was thinking about something else. What I was looking at was a stone disc that was shaped like a wheel. So we’re supposed to believe that the ancient Mayans had wheel-shaped objects, but not wheels? No one ever had the idea of putting it on its side of rolling it? Have you ever tried to move a heavy tire? Are you telling me that you wouldn’t roll it on its side, even if you’d never moved a tire before? It’s hard for me to believe. If they didn’t use wheels, it must be because they didn’t need them. How did the ancients move thirty-ton stones without the use of cranes? There’s only one reasonable conclusion: They must have had technology unknown to us.

We climbed up the palace, observing the features as we went. There were passages carved in the stone which appeared to be for water to run through. How did they get the water up there? Perhaps they had some form of watch catchment, or perhaps they had slaves carry water up the steps, or perhaps they used technology unknown to us, but it does seem that they had running water at the top of a giant palace.

Before descending, Juan took me to a platform halfway and faced the imposing idol of Tonina’s greatest ruler.

He stood in a specific place facing the idol, and clapped his hand. It was the weirdest thing. The clap would provoke a sharp, staccato sound that sounded somewhat like the squawk of a bird, with a cackling, mocking tone. It was unnerving. Stranger still was that if you clapped multiple times, the sound seemed to come from different directions, as if coming from different hidden creatures. Clap once and the sound came from the left. Clap again and it would come from the right. I have no idea what this could possibly be, and if anyone’s got any explanations, I’d love to hear them.

My guide told me that the reign of Tonina had lasted for some 800 years, and they had been powerful enough to subjugate the mighty city of Palenque. Apparently, the excavation of Palenque began more than 50 years before Tonina, and that that is the reason that Palenque is more well-known. Perhaps because it is located in the heartland of Zapatismo, Tonina has not been marketed to tourists as the marvel that it is.

After the tour I drank some beers out with Juan and we talked about life. He was a musician, who had his own band pre-COVID, but since there weren’t as many opportunities to play anymore, they broke up. He asked me to tell people about Tonina and to encourage them to come. The government shut them down because of COVID and tourism has slowed to a trickle. I told him that I would do my best, because it truly is incredible.

After a while it started getting dark and I decided to go find somewhere to get something to eat and to pitch my tent. Just a stone’s throw away, I found a perfect spot for both, and soon I had pitched my tent and was relaxing in a hammock under a palapa, reading some stories from the Arabian Nights.

After dark I ate dinner at the restaurant. I was the only customer there, and I wrote in my diary, my pencil scratching along to the song of the crickets and the roaring of the howler monkeys. I wrote:

It’s got me thinking about the nature of human existence, because it is clear that the Ancient Mayans were incredibly brutal in their relishing of power. Did the ruling class feel mercy for their captives? Because it certainly seems to me that they enjoyed the exercise of their dominance. Was there a place in their religion for what I am accustomed to as thinking of as morality? What did morality consist of for them? The city of Tonina lasted for 800 years. How many thousands of people were sacrificed here? It defies the imagination to think of the incredible amount of labour that would have been necessary to bring this project to fruition. How many people toiled their whole lives to satisfy the whims of their rulers? It puts into focus the true nature of political power. Has the construction of the empire that I was raised in been any less brutal? Of course not.

And yet, I continue to believe that most people are mostly good. Yet it seems abundantly clear that for thousands of years, throughout many different parts of the world, there have been groups of people who have brutalized their fellow man in incredibly brutal ways. We can’t write this off as some kind of aberration. If something has occurred time and time again, in different parts of the world, it speaks to something inherent in us, does it not?

In any case, I felt glad that I had been born in 20th century Canada rather than the Tonina during the reign of Smoking Mirror. Despite my feeling that my home country is no longer a free country, it’s good to put things in perspective. There have been many generations of many different empires where the masses were forced to toil at back-breaking labour for their entire lives. All empires are built upon conquest, slavery and oppression. This is also the foundation that our society rests atop.

There is a difference, however, between the Anglo-American Empire and that of Tonina. Whereas today the brutality of the system is hidden, obscured, and disguised, it seems that the rulers of Tonina took pleasure in advertising their dominance. I’ve visited many sites before and don’t remember seeing such a vulgar display of power. In Tonina, there was no velvet glove over the iron fist. It’s worth nothing the fall of Tonina was also the ened Classic Mayan civilization. The last ever Long Count date inscription was recorded here, in 909 A.D. I’ve visited a bunch of different Mayan sites, and this one feels more sinister. Perhaps the Mayan ruling class became more and more depraved over time, and somehow brought ruin upon themselves. Maybe they over-consumed resources and exhausted their land base. Maybe they got hooked on weird drugs and went crazy. Or maybe there was a revolution.

Maybe the people finally had enough of building monuments to their oppressors, and overthrew them. Maybe, centuries earlier, they declared their own version of the Zapatista cry of Ya Basta! Despite what you may have heard, the Mayan people didn’t disappear. There are millions upon millions of them throughout Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize. What happened is that they abandoned the cities. Maybe they wanted to leave. Maybe the reason they left was because they could. Maybe they preferred working their own land in harmony with nature to lugging rocks around in the hot sun.

According to one source, “The wave of mysterious abandonment that swept through Classic Maya cities ends at this remote city in Chiapas, Mexico. The wave seems to have begun along the Usumacinta River. The last recorded date at Bonampak is 792, at Piedras Negras 795, at Palenque 799, and at Yaxchilán 808. The wave then moved east into the heart of Maya civilization in the Petén region of what is today modern Guatemala and south into Honduras. Quiriguá fell silent in 810, Copán in 822, Caracol in 859, and Tikal in 889. The very last Classic Maya date—909—appears at Toniná. Strangely, no record of impending doom appears anywhere in Maya iconography. Scholars have advanced many possible causes of the collapse—among them plague, famine, earthquake, invasion, and peasant revolt—but the enigma remains.”

That’s right. Peasant revolt.

Maybe the anarchists won.