6. El Tajín: Magnificence in the Mexican Jungle, page 2
El Tajín was abandoned in 1230 AD, for reasons which are unknown
-- perhaps an attack of the Chichimecas, perhaps something else. El
Tajín was not located where it was for reasons of defense - the
site is completely open.
By the time of the Spanish conquest, El Tajín was covered by
jungle. In 1785, a Spanish engineer named Diego Ruiz was looking for
tobacco plantings that the Spanish wanted to control, and he came upon
the Pyramid of the Niches. As one of the brochures put it, he became
the first European to see El Tajín. I liked that wording better
than the more usual Euro-centric phrase, that he "discovered"
it.
A bas-relief face
El Tajín has a number of ball courts, for the ritual game famous
for its outcome of human sacrifice. I remember my horror when my family
went to Mayan sites in the Yucatan when I was nine. Memories of that
repulsion had made me wonder if El Tajín would give me the creeps.
Far from it... the sense of civilization that I felt at El Tajín
was very strong. Balance was a central concept for them, keeping the
world in balance between the opposites of duality that some scholars
see as a major part of the Totonac world view.
The Pyramid of the Niches is believed to have had 365
niches originally.
Some scholars link the niches (which were painted blue and red) with
the dualities of light and dark, good and evil.
As I mulled over the idea of human sacrifices, it seemed to me that
my own society has plenty of them: sexually molested children, Vietnam
vets, the homeless mentally ill, to name just a few groups. The analogy
is a bit thin, in that we don't often ritually murder victims, but considering
it helped me to see that the cultures of the ball game were not necessarily
any more cruel than my own world.
Being in a place of so much grandeur and mystery engenders such musings....
View from a hilltop in the further part of the ruins.
The sign on the pyramid in the middle asks people to stay off it, but
climbing was permitted on many of them.
We kept wandering, and found ourselves on a path going uphill through
the jungle. Remembering a guidebook's warning about poisonous snakes
in the thicker jungle, we stayed on the trail. Soon we came upon a hand-dug
well, with a sign asking people not to dirty it as it was used for drinking.
We had reached the far edges of the ruins, and there was a tiny house
and cornfield. We wondered about the native peoples of Totonac descent.
Did they live here among the ruins of their ancestors for all these
centuries?
Part of a model of El Tajín, at the Anthropology
Museum in Xalapa
It was delicious to see so few other tourists around. It seemed that
there were fewer than fifty at the whole site while we were there. A
rainy Monday in February didn't pull the numbers that would have been
there at other times, but still El Tajín is really off the beaten
touristic path. Travel in Mexico in the off season has its benefits.
Some friends of ours went to El Tajin at the spring equinox, and they
reported that there were thousands of people there for special ceremonies.
Eventually, we wandered back to the museum at the entrance to the grounds.
I chatted for a while with a young guard, who was also a student. He
was extremely knowledgeable about the history there. I asked a more
contemporary question, too: could we camp overnight in the parking lot?
He assured me that tourists often did and there was never a problem.
All we needed to do was come in around closing time and tell the two
night watchmen that we would be there.
We had a pleasant evening in the motorhome, going through the many
photos we had taken and reading a book in Spanish that I had bought
about El Tajín.
The dog food I had purchased came in handy. There were quite a few
loose dogs in the parking lot and over by the souvenir stands. One pretty
little brown bitch quickly adopted us, chasing off other dogs.
Brownie One, on the right, was my favorite Mexican
street dog,
standing here with Brownie Three.
I wanted to feed two other little brown dogs, but even when I put out
two and then three separate piles some distance apart, the bitch - whom
we dubbed Brownie One - ran growling from pile to pile, managing to
keep both other Brownies from getting much. When Kelly stepped out to
turn on the hot water heater, the dogs were disappointed that the match
he was holding was not something to eat. I briefly wished we could take
Brownie One home with us, but it really wasn't feasible. That night,
she slept under the RV, and the other Brownies - were they her grown
pups? - slept nearby. When a truck came through the parking lot in the
wee hours, all three dogs vigorously protected us with their barking.
Travel in Mexico involves seeing such dogs everywhere, and I greatly
enjoyed getting to know these zestful dogs.
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