Teotihuacan to Time

Teotihuacan to Time

If I could travel back in time, or take a space voyage to another epoch, I would go to Teotihuacan. It is a giagantic architectural marvel located some forty kilometres northeast of Mexico City. In the first millennium CE, Teotihuacan was the largest city in the pre-Columbian Americas. The city was made a UNESCO world heritage site in 1987. It is unknown whether the city played a central or peripheral role in the empires of the age, but the speculation is that Teotihuacan was a multiethnic state consisting of Nahua, Otomi, Totonac, Zapotec, Mayan, Mixtec, and other groups. The height of the city's power was from 150 to 450, with perhaps as many as 250,000 people and 30 square kilometres under its territorial ambit. It is likely that the city fell around the 7th or 8th centuries, probably at the hands of the Toltecs.

Teotihuacan reminds us how old human history is, how it so rich and varied, and how once powerful civilizations have their springs of ascent and winters of decline. We live in a society based on lightning speed, the cults of money and technology, and the forgetful memory of the past. Yet, Teotihuacan is part of the history of my continent as a soul with a destiny in the Americas. The Americas is not merely North America consisting of New York, Toronto and Montreal, but also Teotihuacan, Chiapas, Buenos Aires, La Paz, San Jose, and the Iroquois Confederacy. Like Teotihuacan, the essence of the Americas is its multiracialism, its mestizo imprint, its meeting of Native, European, and other cultures from the Italian immigrants of Buenos Aires to the Jamaicans of Toronto.

Teotihuacan was dubbed by later Nahuatl-speaking Aztecs as the "birthplace of the gods." And the Pyramid of the Sun (photograph above), the Avenue of the Dead, and the Pyramid of the Moon in Teotihuacan all connote a spiritual connection to the forces of nature and the mysteries of life and death. Human sacrifice, particularly of enemy warriors, was practiced in Teotihuacan. In addition, animals such as wolves, cougars, eagles, and snakes that were thought to have mythical powers were imprisoned in cages and even buried alive.

Despite these sacrificial practices, what I find amazing about places like Teotihuacan is that people have always sought to find meaning from their existence. They are not merely satisfied with existing. We need to know more about ourselves, our communities, our histories, and the mysterious forces that govern human history and time. The people of Teotihuacan were making sense of their world. This is an eternal story of humankind throughout the ages. Time will not change this reality, even if today we might banish the old and valorise the new.

Time has given us various insights about what we are primarily as human beings. Marx insisted that we were essentially economic beings, moulded by class conflict. Darwin that were were principally governed by the laws of evolution. Freud that we are biological, sexual beings with pure, instinctual drives. We are all of these, but certainly more. The lesson of Teotihuacan and empires of times past is that we are also spiritual beings, sense-making-beings, making sense of a chaotic universe through reverence, worship, and evolving forms of veneration. Old gods die and new gods will always be born.

Tamir Bar-On