During one of our meals in Mexico city we had a soup called Pozole which has shredded pork and corn in it. Matt casually asked me if I knew why they used pork - and then told me that the soup is a traditional Aztec soup ritually prepared as offerings to the gods with sacrificed human flesh. Since pork is the closest you'll get to that taste, it was substituted when human sacrifices were no longer a thing.
I have to admit that this stuck with me for days and when we took a tour of the famous Mesoamerican pyramid near Mexico city a couple of weeks later we were treated to more horrifying detail by a guide who took us around for a small fee.
But first, we had bought the package that included a balloon ride over the pyramids,
followed by a hot breakfast and a tour of an artisanal craft market before going to the pyramids.
This was our first balloon ride ever and Anne had to bail from the experience because of her stomach bug so we invited Gina, a friend of ours also working in Mexico, to take Anne's place.
The takeoff and fight over the pyramids was so tranquil and peaceful
but the landing was pretty stressful because the comfortable large field we appeared to have been heading towards passed by to our right and we ended up landing in a small cultivated patch of land, much to the disgruntlement of the farmer working on his crops.
The ground crew managing the landings are impressively adept and quick-minded to steer the balloons in the last minute or so, so that they land snug in the trailer that will take them back to the launching spot several miles away.
After breakfast the trip to the artisanal market brought us to where we were shown a traditional drink called pulque (pronounced pull-ke) which has 5% alcohol and has been used as a sacred drink since the time of the Aztecs. The taste is a little sour but not unpleasant. Also on show were amazing hand-crafted obsidian masks, mirrors and sharpened implements as well as locally produced silver jewelry.
At then end of the tour we were approached by a smooth-talking man who convinced the three of us (out of a busload of tourists) to pay $225 (pesos $11 US) each for a guided tour of the pyramids which was well worth it - excepting that I don't remember as much of it as I wish I did.
A number of times I thought to myself - remember to google this afterwards, only to find that a lot of what he was debunking in his presentation was what was reported in the descriptions from 2018 and earlier that I found. Of course it is possible that his facts/suppositions are not supported by archaeologists but I'll mention a few that were mind-blowing to me.
The site was named Teotihuacan by the Aztecs when they arrived and discovered these pyramids built hundreds of years before them and decided that this place was where the gods were - and named the two prominent pyramids the temple of the sun and the temple of the moon. It is thought to have been created between 250BC and 1BC but the civilization that created it had abandoned it by around 650AD.
There is evidence that the creators of these pyramids had sophisticated math which included two calendars and knowledge of the phases and orientation of the moon which influenced the architecture. From a platform in the middle of the central square you can see the full moon rise over 13 separate smaller pyramids. The calendars are embedded in the number of horizontal tiers in the pyramid (91) - 4 of these multiplied = 364 and each combined provide days until planting, days till harvest as well as a combination of 3 of them the time for gestation of an human infant.
The base and height of the pyramids have the ratio of pi and there is a carving in the middle that had a line to delineate the deviation of magnetic north from true north (based on the north star).
But this is where it gets weird and horrifying. The cultures that existed around this area practiced ritual sacrifice. There is evidence uncovered in archaeological digs here that society was divided into different groups - warriors, farmers, artists and "those to be sacrificed" where, with permission of the whole community, people were identified at birth or soon after to be sacrificed for religious rituals to ensure that rain would fall and that the people would remain powerful.
The guide said that in these earlier civilizations it is likely that these children were treated as royalty until they were sacrificed.
The lines get blurry here for me - because the Aztecs when they arrived took these practices to the next level. For them sacrifice appears to have become very regular and was not always volunteered by parents and the community but was inflicted on captives and other members of the community in cruel ways.
Anne had visited the anthropology museum in Mexico city and has seen horrific implements and a table with a cavity in which human hearts had been placed after ritual killings.
Our guide pointed out that there is a difference between cannibalism for the pleasure of eating humans and ritualistic cannibalism where, for example a warrior's heart was eaten to get his strength or a violent criminal was served for dinner to a family who had been the victim of his crimes.
We had a somber walk back to the car after hearing about all of the beauty of their art and mathematics and then the brutality of their offerings to appease the gods.
At the end of the walk our guide mentioned a woman who had married a Spaniard who had ended up in Central America (the Vikings, Chinese and Spanish had apparently made it across the ocean to this region centuries ago). She had learned the language of the Mayans, Aztecs and Spanish and had suffered the brutality of Aztec rule to the extent that she helped the Spanish convince all of the subjugated tribes in their kingdom to rise up and defeat them - leading to Spanish conquest and pillage of all the wealth of the rulers. As is always the case the details are more nuanced than this when you read up about it.
You are no longer allowed to walk up the largest pyramid - they have found seismic cracks in the top and 3 recent incidents where a person's pacemaker stopped from magnetic energy of some kind and two hikers had collapsed after taking on the steps without proper regard for how strenuous an effort it would be.
I was happy to comply.
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