Tula: Moods, Moments, and Monuments in Time

June 25 1017

I stopped en route to Mexico City to visit the Toltec ruins at Tula yesterday, my first exposure to the great archeological sites that dot Mexico. 

Why visit ruins?  As a de facto tourist destination it’s worth questioning.  One doesn’t do it for beauty, exactly, though one expects to be awed; nor for education, though the sites are basically a form of open-air museum; nor in my case for spiritual homage, for the ancient world here rather makes me shudder with its slavery and human sacrifice.

I had cause to wonder all this on the walk from my hotel.  I set out in a bad mood, still grumpy from the theft of my Miata’s license plate the day before, plus the disgusting salad dinner (lettuce with canned corn and mushrooms, no dressing) I’d had in the ticky-tack little town.  It was a hot morning, and I could have driven, but on the map the site entrance was very close, and the girl at the hotel called it a “25-minute” walk; however, that entrance was closed, and I had to walk an additonal mile or so down a highway past auto repair shops and junkyards to the correct one.  I arrived already covered in sweat, moving slow, and feeling both decoyed by the trivial and perhaps resisted by the aura of the dark past that I was trying to penetrate.

But as soon as I was in—which involved a further walk from the museum down a quarter-mile dust road through a graffiti’d cactus garden and a gauntlet of souvenir-sellers hawking sandals, dresses, and Toltec figurines—I found the site amazing, uplifting, and tranquil.  At once my sour mood was blown away by the timeless majesty of the place.

Tula was a functioning city from about 900 to 1170 AD, during which time it had a population of over 35,000.  The site has two pyramids, spread out on a great level plain of felt-like grass that includes several other partial structures and excavated foundations.  I saved the highlight—climbing Pyramid B, with its 15-foot Toltec warrior figures—for last.  Instead I explored the features at ground level, like the Great Vestibule with its forest of broken pillars.

 Many of the structures were simply insets into the field cut out by stone walls, but their geometry reached my imagination, and it was pleasant to walk the level fields tracing their boundaries, wondering what they might have been, stopping to read the plaques (that were helpfully in both Spanish and English), admiring the changing views.

It was a strange scene, strolling around the grounds.  The souvenir vendors were selling little ceramic whistles, and they seemed to be a hit with the groups of schoolchildren, so that a constant high-pitched trilling filled the air on the hot day, like poorly melodic cicadas.  The site was on a high plateau with a view of the town and beyond, and periodically great percussions would roll across the landscape from the refinery in the distance.

Some of the plaques played on the horror aspect of the Toltec society, like the little stone plinth labeled “Tzompantli” which was described (and illustrated) as a place to display human skulls.  But when I consider how long ago this was, and how many human skulls have been popped out and rolled onto the planet since then, a Tzompantli seemed an almost innocent affair.

I did finally climb the steep stairs of the main pyramid and stand among the Toltec warrior telamones, whom I found very austere and impressive.

Finally, at ground level again, I walked the “Serpent Wall” (thankfully shaded) where the relief carvings of animals and faces run in a long line of stone blocks.  Here the eternal magic of art reached undiminshed into the present, and I felt the Toltecs watching me even as I watched them.

And that, I think, is why we visit ruins.  Anything Man makes that lasts carries the spirit of the maker across time, and we go to feel that spirit moving through in its indestructible passage.  Our own world is so unconcerned with things that last, we seem but a shrill buzz and a cough of smoke around the pyramids.  Being small has its own problems, and my human skull fumbled for identity with its toy camera, hoping to leave a little magic behind.  But the Toltec warriors have seen stranger things before, and will again; they look on unperturbed.