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The Unwritten Calendar
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10854 |
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CULTURE
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| Issue
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7 / 1986 |
2,239 Words |
| Author
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Anthony F. Aveni
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In the middle of downtown Mexico City lie the remains of the Aztec Templo Mayor, a monument that fused the religious and political life of the ancient inhabitants of Tenochtitlan, the greatest city of the New World at the time the Spanish explorers intruded upon it.
The relevance of Templo Mayor to the study of astronomy may not be as apparent as in the case of Stonehenge in Britain, with which we feel a strong identity. For some reason, we tend to think we can know what the megalithic builders were up to merely by looking at the alignments. When we examine what is known about the culture and people who built the Mexican temples, their astronomical motives and modus operandi often appear strange to us.
Several facades of the Templo Mayor, which was rebuilt on a number of occasions by a succession of kings, now lie completely exposed, one on top of the other, like the layered skin of an onion. Measurements of the recently excavated walls reveal that all the facades are aligned seven and a half degrees south of east. Now the "uncultured" archaeoastronomer, armed with surveying and mapping equipment, who enters the site with the aim of decoding it, may take all the alignment measurements he wishes and employ all the potential astronomical targets imaginable in his computer program. Without cultural data relating to the use of astronomy, however, he is almost certainly bound to fail.
What does the Mexican cultural record say? One Spanish chronicler, present shortly after the time of the Spanish invasion of the Americas, tells us that the Aztec rulers, a combination of priestly and military factions, erected the structure with the intention of orienting its stairway to the spring equinox. They wanted the sun to appear over the temple so that the image of its disk would evoke the need to sacrifice live human hearts, the blood of which was deemed necessary for the continuation of the sun god on his course.
Though the sacrificial act possessed deep philosophical meaning (the continuity of the solar course symbolized the continuity of life), such ostensible barbarity taken out of context leaves our civilized contemporaries shocked and outraged. Surely no self-respecting scientist can find anything of astronomical import in it! The wonder of the science of astronomy, however, is that it can be practiced with the utmost precision for reasons quite different from those that motivate us to look through our telescope.
Leaving the reader to ponder the thorny problem of how a building skewed by seven and a half degrees from the cardinal directions can have anything to do with the equinox (Hint: Remember that in making lines of sight in ceremonial architecture one needs to consider the third dimension!), let us confuse the issue further. A research team--consisting of Edward Calnek (anthropology, University of Rochester), Horst Hartung (architecture, University of Guadalajara), and myself--recently reported the discovery of a possible relationship between the principal Aztec temple and another place of worship located on the eastern horizon overlooking the Templo Mayor at a distance of 44 kilometers.
High on Mount Tlaloc (elevation: 4,130 meters) we find the remains of a shrine that is still active today. (Local people worship at the site, as evidenced by candles, crosses, and pictures of Christ.) It consists of a rectangular enclosure
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