The Romans had their two-faced God Janus, while a half-world away, the Aztecs revered the twin temples of Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc, both perched side-by-side atop the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan. There is no similarity or connection between these factoids. I mention them because there are so few points of common ground between a European mindset with its chunk of inherited cultural knowledge, and a Mesoamerican mindset, with a radically different way of looking at things.

There must be some commonalities though. After all, the Aztecs knew higher math, metallurgy, astronomy, and they had a very sophisticated sense of culture, with a developed base of chroncled history, arts and aesthetics, and organized religion. The latter is the part that offends the Western mindset, after all, aside from minor aberrations like the Inquisition, Western religions generally don't go in for human sacrifice.

What a pity. It makes for a great topic of conversation, and a heck of a good incentive for getting teenage mutant teenagers interested in spending an afternoon at the museum with you. At least when the museum is the fabulous and fascinating Templo Mayor in downtown Mexico City.

About the Site...
I honestly can't figure out what to believe and not believe about the "discovery" of the Templo Mayor. The story that keeps popping up in travel guides is that the place was discovered by happenstance as part of the construction of the Metro subway system. The story that you hear when visiting Templo Mayor is that the site was "discovered" as part of an INAH-funded exploration of the Zocalo to find out exactly where the temple was buried.

The latter sounds more plausible, but even still, I just don't quite get it....how the heck can you not know what happened to a gigantic pyramid? I can understand missing a set of keys or a beer bottle opener, but a pyramid??

You don't just butcher and bury a gigantic pyramid and then "forget" where it was. Yes, I'm aware that the Spanish conquistadors actually intended exactly that, but let's be for real, the undertaking of a huge project like the destruction of Tenochtitlan is hardly going to go unnoticed and undocumented. Neither would the immediate construction of a "new" capital city built right over the top of the old Aztec capital. This was a deliberate, well-planned and executed symbolic gesture to any Aztecs who might have held out hope that their culture could somehow rise again.

The Spanish were telling the locals, "we're the new power --- get used to it." It is no accident that the Catedral Metropolitano sits on top of what was once the plaza of the Templo Mayor --- the location tells the Aztecs loud and clear that "our European God can beat up your Aztec Gods." Every Mexican knows this story and these events, just as surely as an American schoolchild knows about the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock.

It seems to me that the Mexicans must have always known that Mexico City's Centro Historico sat on top of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. They must have always known, roughly, where the Templo Mayor could be found. In fact, almost every excavation of a downtown street or basement turns up Aztec artifacts. The 20th century is filled with records of sewer pipes, water pipes, basements, phone lines, fiber optic cables, etc. etc. being installed around the downtown area, only to cut through an Aztec wall or staircase or to unearth a tomb, or a cache of treasures. The National Museum of Archaelogy has whole exhibit halls filled with relics unearthed from these excavations, some of the most amazing finds (like the infamous "calendar stone") being dug up at the end of the 18th century.

I don't know. It all seems like a bit more conspiracy than my little pea brain can handle, but what the heck. Official party line is that the site was discovered early in the morning of February 21, 1978 and that this is the first real taste that modern archaelogists and historians had of the actual site of Tenochtitlan's Templo Mayor.

So anyway, about this site...

Templo Mayor is hugely symbolic and hugely significant. At the time Cortez landed on the shores of Mexico in the very early 1500s, Mexico was already a sophisticated (though barbaric by European standards) nation with a well-defined social order and considerable wealth. The capital of Mexico was Tenochtitlan and the ruling class were the Aztecs. When the Spanish first entered the Valley of Mexico, they were astonished to see cities --- especially Tenochtitlan --- that were larger and grander than almost anything they'd ever seen in Europe.

Tenochtitlan was the hub around which everything revolved. It was the base for the Aztec high priests and for the central government. A lot of young U.S. Marines know the hymn "...from the halls of Moctezuma to the shores of Tripoli..." without knowing what or where these places are. Well, the "halls of Moctezuma" was Tenochtitlan, and all that you can really see of the original capital city is the Templo Mayor.

The Templo Mayor was the main cathedral of the Aztecs --- it was a symbolic power base at the very center of Tenochtitlan. It was the largest structure in the Mexica capital, and the most significant.

During the 1980s, it was extensively excavated, probed, examined, brushed, cleaned, and otherwise cataloged and studied by legions of guys who study old stuff and then try to explain it to all us folks of lesser cerebrums.

Today, the Templo Mayor is one of the downtown area's most fascinating tourist sites. It is a mix of archaelogical site and modern day historical museum. It is a place where you can see first-hand what archaelogists are finding as they dig beneath the mantle of modern Mexico City, unearthing the city's pre-colonial past. The site is only half the experience --- the rest is the amazing new museum that sits at the back of the archaelogical site. It's a huge museum that is totally devoted to telling the tale of the Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec empire. Let's explore...


Strolling Through the Halls of Moctezuma....
Entrance to the ruins will set you back only a couple bucks, and the price includes entry to the museum. Both times I visited the site, they seemed to have no change. Bring coins and small bills. You can also hire a guide at the ticket booth, if you want someone to accompany you through the ruins and talk about what you're seeing and its historical importance.

The area where you first enter the ruins is where the first excavations took place in the late 1970s.

When you enter the site, you're in an exposed, bombed-out looking kind of pit with the ruins of the temple all around you. There are catwalks built over and around various structures, and on a first glance, the site seems to make no sense --- it doesn't look at all like the mammoth pyramids that you see in pictures of all the great pre-Columbian cities. It looks more like some M.C. Escher fantasy place where stairs go nowhere and everything seems to go up and down and left and right, all at the same time.

That's because the Spanish lopped off the top of the pyramid and much of its outer skin, using the blocks to construct their own city.

The thing to be aware of here is that so much of the stone statuary has powerful religious connotations to an Aztec. It's kind of like walking into an old Catholic church where every nook and cranny is stuffed full of statues of saints and angels and artistic icons of biblical events. Except that the Aztecs weren't into cute little flying cherubs with halos on their heads --- they were into serpents with their fangs bared, and soldiers wearing screaming eagle beaks, and cool stuff like that.

The one thing that kinda gets me though is their representation of the Main Dude --- Huitzilopochtli. Here you've got a deity of all deities, a ferocious God of war, who demands the still beating hearts of human sacrifices, and what does his name mean in Nahuatl? It means "hummingbird looking left".

Huh? What is UP with those Aztec dudes!?!?

Personally, I think the scholars made a mistake here someplace. Maybe Huitzilopochtli is really the God of love and beauty and it's really Tlaloc who is the God of war (at least Tlaloc looks fierce and barbaric --- I think his name must mean "gigantic robot transformer who can stomp your puny little body into dust whenever he wants" --- cuz that's what he looks like). Hummingbird. Harrumph. Like I'm gonna be worried about pleasing some flitting little annoying feathered thing...yeah, right.

One thing that really strikes me about the Templo Mayor site is the colors that abound everywhere. When you see pretty much any archaelogical site in Latin America these days, they're invariably brown or gray looking places. That's the ravages of time and neglect speaking, though. Spanish historical records show that Cortez said that when he first saw cities like Tenochtitlan, that they were brilliantly colored places, filled with vibrant reds, and yellows, and blues. It's great to be able to get up close to the walls and statuary in a place like Templo Mayor where you can see for yourself that the temples of the Aztec were once places of artistic beauty with an aesthetic sense that must have been shocking to the first Spaniards to enter the valley.

Shocking to my sensibilities though is that huge brick-lined sewer pipe that just drills its way right through the middle of the temple! Now tell me again, how the heck does a pyramid get lost smack dab in the middle of the world's largest city? This pipe was supposedly built in 1900. Didn't somebody back then realize what they were digging through when they built the thing?

Are you into the macabre? Head toward the back wall of the temple and check out those racks of fossilized skulls. Scholars think that the Aztecs decapitated their human sacrifices after ripping their hearts out and then they stored the skulls in these racks. Criminey! There's a heck of a lot of racks here! The Aztecs must have been as good at killing off their own people as the State of Texas Death Row. Too bad Texas doesn't have a wall of skulls. I think I'll suggest it to the governor next time I see him. He's a Republican, so he'll probably go for it...

It doesn't take a lot of time to poke around the ruins themselves --- probably a half hour, tops. But the ruins are really just the beginning of the reason for visiting Templo Mayor. The real treat is the museum, which you enter as you exit the ruins themselves --- and this is one of the coolest historical museums you'll ever visit!


Re-Living Ancient History...
The museum at the Templo Mayor is absolutely wonderful, with exhibits that easily rival the Mexica Salon inside the Museo de Antropologia (National Museum of Anthropology). What makes this museum so cool is that it's big, it has an extensive collection of absolutely first-rate antiquities, and because it focuses only on Tenochtitlan and its Templo Mayor. Almost everything you see in this museum was excavated from right underneath it --- that really makes an impact when you think about the significance of this place and the way that a whole culture regarded the spot you're standing on as THE Center of the Universe. I was very glad to be informed of this fact, because then I knew that for once in my life, the whole world really did revolve around me....

The museum itself is very modern, attractive, inviting and bright. On a hot late May day, it's also good to know that their A/C system is as first rate as the exhibits...

The first gallery of the museum sets the stage for the rest of the exhibits. There's a fascinating model here of how Tenochtitlan was laid out. The model shows the Templo Mayor at the center of what was called The Sacred Precinct of Mexico. I imagine it was to the Aztecs like the Forbidden Palace to the Japanese. The Sacred Precinct was also the center of government and power, and an elite military group called the Eagle Guard were housed here. There were several smaller temples, outside the Templo Mayor, and also a classic ballcourt --- like those you find in almost all the major Mayan cities.

Blood and guts. It sells movie tickets today, and the Aztecs sure knew about its entertainment potential way back a millenium ago. You get that picture from the model of the Templo Mayor, which is capped by, you guessed it --- a temple to the God of War. Nice. As if that isn't enough, the museum has this entire, enormous, gallery dedicated solely to the Aztec art of sacrifice. The directors of Texas Chainsaw Massacre 34 and Nightmare on Elm Street 86 need to check this place out! Those Aztecs truly knew the meaning of pain and suffering and utterly grotesque ways to kill people.

The stuff of ripping out still beating hearts is legendary, but the Aztecs didn't stop there, oh no. They also had ways to slowly kill people by draining their blood into a sacrificial bowl, and they weren't beyond merely tossing a few folks into a lake or volcano when the Gods could be appeased in such a manner.

There also a lot of cool exhibits showing ways that the Aztecs buried their revered dead --- whether nobility or honored sacrificial victim.

There are six more galleries in this sprawling museum, each centered on some aspect of Aztec life. It makes the museum a very living kind of place --- a museum that centers on the culture of the society and not on a mere chronological scale, nor on a succession of royalty (although there are exhibits that will tell you who all the rulers of the Aztec domain were, from the king who ruled when Tenochtitlan was established, in 1325, right up until the demise of the hapless Emperor Moctezuma and the extremely short reign of Cuahtemoc, last of the Aztec ruling class, who made his final defiant stand against the Spaniards a few miles from downtown, at Tlatelolco. But that's not really the story of Templo Mayor, so I'll save that for a future review...

Anyway, this museum seems to me to be more like a snapshot in time of Aztec culture right up to the point where the Spanish invaders come on the scene. There's a gallery devoted to the religious side of their culture, with its heavy emphasis on the God of War (in addition to a host of other deities). There's a gallery devoted to the military (no big surprise, I suppose, seeing as the Aztecs were as enthralled with military conquest and using force to impose their will over other peoples. There's a fascinating gallery devoted to agriculture, which might not seem like a topic that can spark a lot of imagination, but the Aztecs had developed some very unique technologies to achieve amazing agricultural yields --- but I don't want to spoil the fun here, I'm going to talk about that stuff in a few days when I get around to posting my review of Xochimilco --- don't touch that dial!

Every gallery is filled with sculptures, paintings, tools and weaponry, tapestries, and artistic works of amazing vision and passion. The beauty of the space itself really enhances the whole experience. The galleries look modern in the extreme, often with deep black matte walls, brilliantly polished black or deep gray marble floors, and dim spot lighting of artifacts.

I mentioned earlier that Tenochtitlan was a colorful place when the Spanish invaded the city, and the color palette that the Aztecs used seemed to focus mostly on a kind of pastel blue, a deep ochre red, and a bright brilliant yellow --- at least those are how the shades look today, I suppose the colors may have changed significantly over time, but I see some symbolism in some of them that is easy to explain away by overlaying my own irrelevantly western mindset. For example, I think its very appropriate that the bright colors of the museum's Chacmool sculpture has bright red hands, after all, he was the messenger of sacrifices, and it seems only fitting that his hands be as bright red with the blood of his sacrificial victims as MacBeth's were with the blood of his king. But alack and alas, I suspect that the Aztec artist who painted the sculpture might have chosen the colors on some totally different premise, the motives of which will never make sense to someone weaned on too much Elizabethan-era British literature and Saturday afternoon B movies.

Coolest exhibits in the museum galleries? Tough call. The B movie side of me positively loved the wall of skulls, but then I liked the racks of 'em outside in the archaelogical site too. Skulls as artifice is a concept that's just too grisly to ignore. A lot of people think the Aztec Eagle Warrior statues are the coolest. They are pretty cool --- and to me, it's just positively amazing how good the condition of that sculpture could be after centuries of being buried under hundreds of tons of rubble and modern construction.


Logistics...
The Templo Mayor is located in the historic center of Mexico City, just off the Zocalo at the corner where the cathedral and the National Palace meet. The easiest way to get here is via the Metro subway system. Take Line 2 to the Zocalo station and you're here.

There's an admission fee that works out to a couple dollars --- extremely reasonable for what you get for the money. You probably don't need to worry about the sun block, hats, and bottled water here --- you're not outside in the sun long enough for it to be a problem.


Bottom Line...
If you're planning a trip to Mexico City, one of the places you want to visit is the Templo Mayor --- especially if you have any interest at all in history and non-Western art. The Templo Mayor if a fascinating archaelogical site that gives you a glimpse of the greatest structure in the most powerful Aztec city that existed in the pre-Spanish new world. With the very impressive, beautiful, and intelligently structured interpretative exhibits of the neighboring museum, Templo Mayor is a site worth going out of the way to see....but fortunately, with its location right in the heart of the downtown area, it's a no-brainer to add it to any sightseeing agenda. Do it!


More Ideas for Sightseeing in Mexico City?
Here are a few of my other reviews of some of the incredible sights in downtown Mexico City...

* Chapultepec Castle
* Palacio de Bellas Artes
* Museo Nacional de Arte (National Museum of Art)
* Museo de Antropologia (National Museum of Anthropology)
* The Murals of Mexico City





Recommended: Yes

Best Suited For: Students
Best Time to Travel Here: Mar - May