(horn trumpeting)
- [Narrator] The sense of God has taken many forms
since man realized that he was man.
Wind and rain, sun and stars embodied both the beauty
and the violence of an unseen power,
a power man must placate, perhaps invoke.
(rhythmic drumming)
(flute whistling)
So he built altars in high places.
And in Mesoamerica, vast ceremonial centers
to honor and house his gods.
(flute whistling) (rhythmic drumming)
Only in the last century have we realized
the wide inaccuracy of the term "New World."
So utterly were the native cultures destroyed
that their great cities became mere legend,
lost to the jungle or buried
beneath the debris of daily life.
(horn trumpeting)
The Olmecs are still as mysterious to us
as the enigmatic faces that stare, contemptuous of time,
through the swampy thickets of the Gulf Coast.
Were they portraits of rulers?
Or guardians of temples that crumbled to dust millennia ago?
They are roughly contemporary with the Exodus,
some 1,200 years before Christ.
Mysterious too is the symbolism of the jaguar,
or rather the man-jaguar,
that obsessed Olmec religious thought
and survived in simpler forms
to be revered by Toltec and Aztec cults.
The strangely believable figures, half-human, half-beast,
were depicted both in stone and in exquisite jades,
often as cherished babies.
Not only did the amazing technical competence of the Olmecs
influence the rest of Mesoamerica,
through trade and settlements,
but the power of their religious concepts
prefigured symbols that would dominate Central American art
for thousands of years.
As far as the Pacific coast,
from Guatemala through Western Mexico,
Olmec influences mingled with regional styles,
many of which were to develop a remarkable sophistication
that belies the term "village art."
Most have religious connotations,
some are obviously ritualistic or cult inspired.
Small clay figurines were almost all that survived
the lava flow that engulfed the temple pyramid
at Cuicuilco 2,000 years ago.
Wide earth mounds making, in effect,
an artificial holy mountain supported a sanctuary,
probably, of wood and clay like Olmec buildings.
Only its size and shape betray its ceremonial importance,
a modest token of forms to evolve on a vast scale.
Teotihuacan was the greatest theocracy in the Western world.
During the centuries bracketing the birth of Christ,
the agricultural groups of the Mexican plateau began
to draw together into the nucleus of an urban community
that would cover forty square miles,
larger than the Rome of its day.
At its heart was the City of the Gods,
the pyramids of the sun and of the moon,
and a complex of temples and ceremonial plazas.
A second phase of building honor the mysterious
Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent,
chief god of the later Toltecs,
and the ancient rain god Tlaloc
with round crocodile eyes and monster nose.
A temple to a butterfly-bird god came still later.
(rhythmic thumping)
And the mysterious theme of jaguar cult persisted
in murals and statues.
Little clay figures spring to life
in a fading mural of Tlatoc's paradise,
Elysian fields where blissful souls may pick flowers,
chase butterflies, or splash in the river.
Or have speech scrolls, a noisy,
or perhaps only a melodious heaven.
The fresco paintings of Teotihuacan show graphically,
the pomp and power of the priesthood,
which formed its ruling class.
The domination of ritual over life and death was universal.
To the south, in Oaxaca,
another great religious center had developed.
Small clay figures placed in surrounding tombs
witness elaborate ceremonials, guardian deities
of maize or rain offered promise of renewal
in the very graves that honeycomb the flanks
of the White Mountain, sacred hill of the Zapotecs.
(rhythmic drumming)
On its leveled summit, earlier generations had raised
altars and dated monuments of their conquests.
By the classic period, roughly 250 to 950 A.D.,
Monte Alban was a large religious complex.
The great central plaza was surrounded
by temples to gods, old and new.
An accurate observatory served the priest-astronomers
and mathematicians.
The ball court had become formal, and doubtless,
already an arena of ritual sacrifice.
The earliest stone ball courts have been found in Copán
on the border of Honduras with Guatemala.
Here flourished a dazzling Mayan city,
which by the eighth century was elaborately decorated
with sculpture of heroic scale.
History, astronomy, mythology,
illustrated and annotated with stone hieroglyphics.
The style reached its zenith in a great flight of steps
once crowned by a temple, glyphs record its completion
in the year equivalent to 756 A.D.
It is ironic that the Maya, who kept meticulous archives,
should have left such riddles.
Empty cities lost for centuries in the mists of time
yield no firm clues to why they were abandoned
to the encroaching jungle.
Traces of their glory survive in stone,
recording priestly rulers, and elaborate rituals.
The rains of a thousand years erode
the stucco images of gods and worshipers alike,
and the palaces are empty shells on silent hills.
In Palenque, years of painstaking work
on the great pyramid Temple of the Inscriptions,
revealed a remarkable tomb hidden in its depth.
As fragments of jade in the sarcophagus
were pieced together, a funeral mask emerged,
a powerful face, a ruler-priest dead a thousand years.
(rhythmic thumping)
As the Mayan culture declined, it was challenged,
and finally dominated by Tula,
the capital of a Nahuatl-speaking people of obscure origins,
reputedly a barbarian tribe of Chichemecas
preying upon Teotihuacan as it weakened and died.
They absorbed the remanence of its culture,
and their name Toltec,
became synonymous with artistic excellence.
To Tollan or Tula, or more specifically,
to their priest-king to appeal sin Quetzalcoatl,
legend assigned the discovery of all arts
and skills and the pursuits of peace.
But Tula is warlike in every aspect,
and the worship of Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent,
from whom the priest-kings derived their name,
was swallowed up by a rising military culture,
obsessed with death and its symbols.
Tula in its turn fell and was burned,
weakened perhaps by civil war,
for traditionally, Quetzalcoatl was driven out.
In 987, he vanished eastward promising to return,
a strange quirk of fate that opened a path for Cortés,
some five centuries later
Coincident with Topiltzin's exile,
was the arrival in the old Mayan city of Chichen Itza
of a Mexican god-king Kukulkan, or feathered serpent,
who in Maya legend introduced Toltec technology
of metalwork and painting.
(flute whistling)
It is apparent that many changes in style
did take place under the Toltec domination.
Although the native Mayan artisans softened and refined
the harsh lines when they built the temples
of a new ceremonial city.
Here warriors took pride of place,
and jaguar and eagle symbols dominated the ritual platforms.
Human sacrifice was honorable, and the walls of the vast
ball court bear witness to the ritual decapitation
of the losing players, real or legendary,
in a game that had developed symbolic,
if not prophetic significance.
The faces of the gods became more terrible,
none more than the Aztec statue of Coatlicue.
Her role was a complex fusion of spirit and matter,
the inexorable duality of life and death,
creation and destruction.
She is the cosmic force sustained by death,
the acme of Aztec philosophy.
The Aztecs who built the magnificent city of Tenochtitlan,
were perhaps the inevitable culmination
of Mesoamerican experience, a concentration of absolute
power that became a fatal mystique.
The pattern is classic, the small hungry tribe,
with nothing to lose, became the mercenaries,
and then the masters of people grown soft with easy living.
When they have snatched power,
they adopt and reshape the mythology of the conquered,
manufacturing their own history and rationale of power.
Their mission is to save the world from extinction,
their method, the regime of constant war
that fed the sun with blood.
Aztec society was highly structured,
dominated by a religious and military elite
who enforced a rigid morality and control
as the price of prosperity.
They were brave, decent, yet shackled to oracles
that subverted their art, their scholarship,
their science and technology, to an obsession with violence
that isolated their nation in a sea of hatred.
In two hundred years, the Aztecs had achieved the power
and prestige they hungered for, only to find
that their sense of destiny embodied their own doom.
In their temple of the sun, a massive calendar stone
recorded the cataclysmic death of the four previous suns
or epics, and the birth of the fifth, or present sun,
that would end in the utter shattering of the world.
Did Cortés herald the death of the Aztec fifth sun?
Or embody the birth of a new?
Or is the world today still bound to the course
of that declining sun, whose life can only be renewed
by sacrifice, perhaps of self, not others,
redeeming the world, not by bloodshed, but by compassion.
(rhythmic drumming)
(singing)