CHICH'EN ITZA

Mountain Paths and Pools

Text is taken from The Mayan Cosmos and all of the pictures from slides by Richard Effland
After over a thousand years of success, most of the kingdoms of the southern lowlands collapsed in the ninth century. In the wake of this upheaval, the Maya of the northern lowlands tried a different type of government. They centered their world around a single capital at Chich'en Itza. Not quite ruler of an empire, Chich'en Itza became, for a time, first among the many allied cities of the north and the pivot of the lowland Maya world. Yet it also differed from the royal cities before it, for it had a council of many lords rather than one ruler. Even with this form of government, the traditional components of sacred place remained the same. The Pawabtunob-Bakabob are still there, raising the sky just as they do in the sanctum inside the Creation mountain at Copan. They squat on their carved jambs, straining against massive wooden lintels in the doorways of the temple on top of the four-sided temple mountain called, by today's modern pilgrims, the Castillo. This mountain was a Creation mountain complete with Vision Serpents....

Instead of a single stairway that rose to its summit, this pyramid has four, one running up each of its four sides. Here we see yet another symbol of the fourfold partitioning of the world at Creation. Unlike the temple-mountains of Copan or Palenque, however, this temple sat at the center of time as well as space. The axes that run through the northwest and southwest corners of this pyramid are oriented toward the rising point of the sun at the summer solstice and its setting point at the winter solstice. This declaration of the four corners as solstitial points makes the pyramid a massive sun dial for the solar year.

The balustrades along the four stairways descend in the shape of enormous Feathered Serpents, their mouths gaping at the bottom of the stairs. Cutting across the dominant four-part pattern, the main doorway of the outer temple on the summit is on the northern side, and the sanctum sanctorum of the temple on the summit opens only to the north. The northern stairway is clearly the principal sacred path: on the evenings of the vernal and autumnal equinox, the stepped terraces of this pyramid cast triangular shadows across the northeast balustrade wall, manifesting a serpent like diamond pattern of the rattlesnake this sculpture represents.

A broad plaza surrounds the Castillo on four sides. We can tell by the northern orientation of the innermost chamber inside the temple on the summit of the Castillo that the plaza on the north side of the Castillo was a major location of ritual activity. This, like the plazas in the other Maya cities..., is Chich'en Itza's Primordial Sea of Creation. In the center of this north plaza stands a low platform with four stairways oriented to the solstitial directions, symbolizing the four partitions set by the gods at the beginning of the world. The walls of the platform carry elaborate reliefs celebrating the Venus war god, a supernatural.... This plaza connects the Castillo, as Creation mountain, with two other portals, one natural and one human- made. The first, an enormous cenote known as the "great well of the Itza," is reached by a causeway leading northward from the Venus platform. Here the earth is pierced by a natural portal, revealing the watery depths that lie beneath the surface of the earth certainly a dramatic symbol of the Maya view of the world.

At the west end of the plaza lies the second portal, the largest ballcourt ever built in Mesoamerica. Here the people of Chich'en Itza celebrated the myth of the Hero Twins through sacrificial pageant. Here they also painted murals documenting the founding wars of the Itza that gave the kingdom its sacred charter. Their descendants today believe that the cosmic umbilicus lies under the floor of the ballcourt and will emerge again one day through the great cenote.

On the eastern side of the plaza stands the Chich'en Itza equivalent of a Popol Nah, the Temple of the Warriors, its porch held up by the Northwest Colonnade. Although this meeting house is not marked with the huge mat signs we saw at Waxaktun and Copan, it bears its own equivalent of the lords represented on the roof of the Copan shrine. Converging on the central staircase of the Chich'en Temple of the Warriors are portraits of the council members, resplendent in the regalia of their offices, carved on the stone columns of the outer colonnade. To enter the council chamber above, the living council members had first to pass the stone lords in the shadows of the lower chamber, then ascend to the upper chamber by means of a steep stairway. For witnesses on the plaza below, a procession up that stairway would take on a magical appearance as it passed through the huge Feathered Serpents whose rattle tails held up the lintel of the doorway of the upper sanctuary. Such a vision might call to mind the images of their ancestors and the spirits of their prophets and leaders, thought to hover above the roof of the Popol Nah during times of ritual.

Feathered Serpent columns, with jaws open and menacing, were the sentinels of the upper chamber. They symbolized both the War Serpents of the Itza and the ancient Maya concept of the path of communication to the Otherworld. Pawahtunob, holding up the stone doorjambs, flanked them on either side. Ornate long-beaked masks of the Itzam-Yeh bird marked off the corners of the pyramid, establishing the fourfold space of the sacred mountain's summit. On the outer walls of the upper chamber, we find the time-honored theme of the bird of creation descending to rest on the mountain. Several mosaic sculptures of creation birds are represented as screaming, sharp-taloned battle beasts flanking the doorway and guarding the four sides of the temple. The heads of warrior ancestors emerge from their beaks. The stone councillors frozen in their colonnades stride up the stairs beneath them.

As described in ethnohistorical sources, the meeting places of Maya councils were also the sites of much ceremonial dancing. We think the dancing place of Chich'en Itza was right next door to the Temple of the Warriors, a building found within the structure called the Group of the Thousand Columns. Images of dance processions and of other ceremonies conducted there are carved on the benches lining the colonnade. It is much more difficult at Chich'en Itza than at other sites to identify which buildings were the palace homes of the councillors. But a building called the Mercado was probably residential. It forms, along with the Temple of the Warriors and the Group of the Thousand Columns, the southern side of a vast quadrangle. The design of this building, an open interior patio surrounded by roofed space, is replicated in smaller residential structures throughout the city.

If Chich'en Itza did without a dynastic monarchy, seat of Maya worldly power for a thousand years, it still clung fervently to the transcendent cosmology that had buttressed those lineages of holy lords. The watery surface of the Otherworld revealed itself naturally and magnificently in the great cenote at the northern apex of the ceremonial center. The white stone causeway traveled south from this portal to the Venus platform, then farther south, onward up the stairway of the Castillo, the Creation mountain, into the sanctum at the summit. The mountain, the path, and the pool are connected here by the same spatial axis as at the ancient Olmec site of La Venta. The north-south axis of Chich'en Itza's center is not limited to the city's ceremonial center. This road continues southward from the sacred precincts through the dense residential areas of the city. Just as significantly, the Temple of the Warriors faces westward across the plaza to the Lower Temple of the Jaguars on the Great Ballcourt. Its doorways held up by aged Pawahtunob and skull-headed, bare-breasted women, the Lower Temple of the Jaguars declares the presence of the Father-Mothers, the ancestors, in this portal as it faces the dawning sun rising in the east. Just as the four partitions were set at Creation, so the four partitions and the center had to exist for the life of humanity to exist in balance with the cosmos.

Mesoamericans still care deeply for such spatial patterns and orientations in modern communities. When the La Venta kings and the rulers of Chich'en Itza laid out their mountain, path, and pool on the north-south axis, they forged these symbols into a coherent cosmogram endowed with the power and integrity of the sky axis itself. But neither the Olmec nor the Maya after them allowed this pattern to become frozen and inflexible when they created their ceremonial centers. The ceremonial centers of the ancient world display not a single rigid pattern but the unique, personal expression of the Maya cosmic vision as created through the imaginations of each reigning king.

....each king also had his own political agenda when he raised his sacred buildings, his own problems to solve. These sacred spaces were arenas not just for religious pageant but also for the political activities of the kingdom for the Maya made no separation between these domains of activity. Pageant always had both functions, so that architecture that replicated the time and space of Creation sanctified all the activity that took place within it. A king who controlled Creation and the power of the Otherworld was by definition a successful king. There was also an aesthetic element involved in the crafting of these sacred spaces. Both king and community sought to enhance and amplify the natural potential of their landscape. As the landscapes varied, from mountainsides to valleys to plains and coastal swamps, so did the centers. The miracle of Chich'en Itza is that even as they declared the death of the holy kingship, its lords managed to reach deeply into their heritage for the vision needed to forge a new, revolutionary and hopeful future in the shadow of the social collapse occurring in the south.

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