Teotihuacán Pyramids and More

 We hired a guide, Cesar, to take us out to the pyramids. It took an hour to get to the park, passing the otter suburbs of Mexico City. Those suburbs consist of houses extending almost to the top of mountains. People commute using cable cars, which was super fascinating. Seeing cable cars move above us while we were driving on the highway. César said that the neighborhoods were populated by people who could not afford to live in Mexico City, proper and many of them more immigrants from other central in South America countries. 

The ruins themselves were immense dating from 300 BC to around 500 AD. These ruins were not built by the Aztecs but by an earlier civilization that didn’t seem to have a written language. There are references to Teotihuacán in Mayan texts as a center for commerce. 

There are two main pyramids…to the Sun and the Moon…surrounded by many other lesser structures. 

Many of the homes contained “reflecting pools” from which to gaze at the stars. The pyramids are also configured to track the sun and the moon. 

Temple of the feathered serpent. This is a not-so-good shot of the earliest pyramid, neither the sun or the moon. It was necessary to climb a long stone staircase to get to this point. The heads represent snake/jaguars. The square heads represent crocodiles. Originally these creatures had obsidian eyes but they were removed by later invaders.

The people who who inhabited this land, believe that Heaven was underground, and so many of the pyramids have tunnels underneath them. In fact, the area is filled with many caves.

The pyramid would also have been Stuccoed and painted.

To the right is the pyramid of the moon, which can be climbed, although I used all my mojo climbing the first one, so I declined. It’s hard to tell from this picture, but the pyramid is immense and covers a huge amount of territory. It was designed to look like the adjoining mountains.

In the foreground are Max and Larissa. . . Oddly, I thought they had been Squirrley in front of the pyramid, but this is showing some of the outer structures as well. Hard to imagine, but this complex would’ve looked like, but it was covered with Stucco and painted.

This mural is from a small housing complex, they think inhabited by lesser dignitaries, dating from 300 AD. They date the murals by the paint colors. The swirly things emanating from the chest were described as glyphs and related to language that has not yet been deciphered.

  

Sadly, I neglected to photograph the largest temple, the temple of the sun. This one cannot be climbed and we had to drive to it from the temple of the moon. This site was that it’s most populated. There were 200,000 people, living there, equivalent to the population of Rome at the time.

There is so much to know about these sites, we merely scratch the surface.

After sightseeing we had an interesting lunch in a cave restaurant called La Gruta. After lunch, we were given a candle, and we’re told to place it on a staircase to represent a rebirth as we emerge from the cave.

Neither Max nor Larissa wanted to be reborn because they liked this life they were living! So I was the one who ended up, placing the candle on the staircase, although I suspect that we were all to be reborn via the one candle.