Templo De Kukulkan

Located in the dense jungle of the Yucatan Penninsula, Mexico, the Temple of Kukulkan, the Feathered Serpent God (or Quetzalcoatl in Aztec culture), is the the biggest pyramid in the ancient Mayan city of Chichen Itza. The pyramid was built in about the 1100 to 1300 a.d. and stands 90 feet tall. The four-sided pyramid is an architectual, mathematical and astronomical masterpiece in that it encodes the Mayan calander by having 91 step staircases on each side that, together with the top platform, all add to to the 365 day Mayan calander. The pyramid is also celestially alligned with the various solstices and equinoxes throughout the year so that the changing of the seasons was precisely marked--coinciding with important agricultural and ritual dates. Another engineering fact is that the axes that run on the southwest and northwest corners of the pyramid allign with the rising point of the sun in the summer solstice and its setting point in the winter solstice.

In "A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya", Shele and Fridel write that, "To the Maya, the world was alive and imbued with a sacredness that was especially concentrated at special points, like caves and mountains. The principal pattern of power points had been established by the gods when the cosmos was created. Within this matrix of sacred landscape, human beings built communities that both merged with the god-generated patterns and created a second human-made matrix of power points. The two systems were perceived to be complementary, not separate....The world of human beings was connected to the Otherworld along the wacah chan axis which ran through the center of existence. This axis was not located in any one earthly place, but could be materialized through ritual at any point in the natural and human-made landscape".

Mayan Temples

I have always had a fascination with the Aztec and Mayan culture. What impresses me the most about those civilizations was an interweaving of the spiritual, intellectual and physical world. This interweaving of the physical and spiritual world is most appearent in their elegant architecture, artwork and writing system. It is by no accident that the all three elements consisted of a dualism between the physical and spiritual world. The construction of massive pyramids in the south of Mexico and Central America are but one example of this dualistic world view. In one sense, the pyramids are a perfect representation of the obsession with the secular and heavenly or the mathematical and natural. This paradigm was so well imbeded in the culture that their great pyramidal structures allighned perfectly with corresponding celestial bodies as to precisely detect the arrival of winter, spring, summer and fall solstices.