Submitted by coldrum --
Has a 3,000-year-old ritual survived in the highlands of central Mexico?
Alfreda Gasparillo Pineda sees me stagger on the trail that leads up to a sacred well on the side of Mount Pacho. I'm carrying a wicker basket full of tamales that is rubbing my shoulder raw and pulling me off balance. "If you are tired, one of the women can carry it for you," she suggests in Spanish. A coy grin spreads across Alfreda's broad face as she waits to see how much machismo I'm willing to sacrifice to participate in this religious procession. Everything here is about machismo and sacrifice.
Some 60 people from the town of Zitlala are going to the well as part of celebrations that mark Catholic Holy Week and the end of the dry season in the Mexican state of Guerrero.
After 20 minutes under the pounding sun and grinding weight of the tamales, I arrive at the well with the last of the group. Flowers have been placed on a sky-blue painted cross next to the concrete wall that surrounds the well. Sergio and I unload our baskets while children gather next to a staircase that leads down roughly 20 feet to the well's floor, where a trickle of water seeps into a shallow square pit. Alfreda playfully gives Sergio one of the flower wreaths that the children are wearing on their heads and suggests that he join the kids as they walk down the steps, symbolically offering themselves to Tlaloc, the god of rain.
The religious tenets of the community are a mixture of Roman Catholicism and spiritual beliefs that date to the earliest days of the Maya, Aztecs, and Zapotecs. The scene at the well recalls rituals that took place as many as 3,000 years ago, when children had their throats cut and were thrown into water-filled sinkholes as sacrifices to the rain god. Their bones have been found at cenotés across the Yucatán Peninsula, including Chichén Itzá's aptly named Cenoté of Sacrifice. As the children climb out of the well and join their parents for a picnic lunch, the idea of sacrifice seems fairly remote.
Tomorrow, the rain god will receive a different kind of sacrifice five miles away in the community of Acatlan. It is one of three places in the highlands of Guerrero where men dress in jaguar costumes and fight one another. These Tigre combats are part entertainment and part religious ritual. Many in the community believe that a fighter's spilled blood will help bring rain for the coming year's harvest. The fights in Acatlan consist of boxing matches--two days from now there will be fights with clubs made of rope in Zitlala, and later in the month, wrestling matches in Tixtla.
Art historian Heather Orr of Western State College of Colorado is one of a group of scholars who believes these fighting rituals have their roots in ancient gladiatorial combats in which the loser would become a sacrifice to the rain god. "All rain-lightning deities share features throughout Mesoamerica, but they are identified differently depending on the region and the language," says Orr. "It is Chaak to the Maya for instance, Tlaloc in Central Mexico, Cociyo to the Zapotec." In artwork, these deities are typically shown having down-turned mouths with large fangs. Cociyo and Tlaloc also have goggled eyes.
Karl Taube of University of California, Riverside, and Marc Zender of Harvard University believe gladiatorial rituals extended far beyond. They are reinterpreting images on monuments and in artwork from across Mesoamerica that show gladiatorial combat in connection with rain rituals. The Tigre combat might be the last surviving remnant of the ancient custom.
In Acatlan, a 10-year-old boy places a rawhide mask against his face while an old man wearing a brown leather cowboy hat cinches its laces tight. I stand across from him on the edge of a small oval space that has opened among the crowd of about 3,000 people. His mask is painted bright orange and decorated with black spots and stripes to resemble the face of a jaguar, or Tigre, as the animal is called here.
[The boy's] mask has big, goggle-like eyes inset with mirrors. My guide, Albino Lopez Carrillo, a former high-school teacher from the nearby community of Tixtla, tells me the mirrors are there so you can see yourself in the mask. They create a metaphorical connection between you and the person inside, showing that your fates are linked, and that all of this--the music, the prayers, and the fights--are about the survival of a community. The mask is a sacred object. It holds the spirit of the Tigre and putting it on gives the fighter the animal's strength and courage.
The boy--the Tigre--looks through the mask's gaping mouth. A blood-red tongue lolls out of the opening as if the jaguar is panting, and blue cloth hangs from the back of the mask like a tail. The old man helps the boy put on a pair of padded leather mitts. Then the little Tigre turns to face a slightly taller boy wearing a white T-shirt and a yellow mask. They bump gloves and begin.
As the children fight, some of the adult Tigres make their way to and from a spring on the other side of the mountain, where they go through ritual preparations that outsiders are not allowed to observe. The adult Tigres are the main attraction. Fights seem to start up randomly throughout the crowd. A Tigre in a white mask with a cross painted on its cheek wears a shirt with the words "Jesus is the road to truth and life" hand-painted in Spanish across the back. The combats may seem like a giant party, but religion is everywhere. On the nearby mountainside, small fires burn in front of portraits of Catholic saints. Albino has explained to me that there is one almighty God, but there are other gods like Tlaloc who act as intermediaries. If the rituals are performed correctly, people here believe, Tlaloc will take the community's petition for rain to God, rain will fall, stars will keep turning in the night sky, and the order of the cosmos will be preserved.
The origins of Tigre combat are murky, but artwork from archaeological sites across Mesoamerica displays scenes of combatants adorned with symbols relating to jaguars and rain gods. The Tigre fights were forbidden by Mexico's colonial government and only started up again, publicly at least, around the time of the Mexican revolution, which lasted from 1910 to 1920. The centuries of suppression make it hard to be sure that indigenous rituals like the Tigre combat are the continuation of an ancient tradition.
One connection between the ancient and modern rituals is the similarity between the Tigre masks and the helmets depicted in the carvings at Dainzú. "What caught my attention was the fact that the Tigre players were wearing these big, hefty masks," says Orr. "At the same time as they are protecting themselves, the desired outcome is that blood will be let." The Dainzú masks have feline ears like the Tigre masks, and several headdresses in the carving are decorated with "lazy-s" scrollwork, an early hieroglyph associated with rain. "Often what you find among different indigenous peoples is they equate the roar of the jaguar with the roar of thunder," she says.
"The jaguar is closely identified with rain gods going way back to the formative period Olmec [3,000 years ago]. The jaguar probably is related to powers of lightning and thunder," says Taube. "Its ability to smash things with its heavy paws could be related to a lightning strike." He adds that being a predator at the top of the food chain makes the jaguar an obvious symbol of strength and bloodshed.
"Blood is considered an essential life force," says Taube, "blood falling on the ground is a way of ritually seeding the earth." In a forthcoming paper, he and Zender note that some of the stone weapons were carved with symbols for lightning and thunder. "They were fighting with some pretty scary handheld weapons. The ancient combats were a lot bloodier and probably often resulted in death," adds Taube. "Today, nobody is expected to die."
On our last day in Guerrero, two guides lead Sergio, Alfreda, and me into the cave complex of Juxtlahuaca, 25 miles from Zitlala, where some of the oldest paintings in the Americas adorn the cave walls. On our way we pass small shrines tucked into nooks in the rock formations. Juxtlahuaca is a National Heritage site but it is also an active place of worship.
About a mile into the cave the air is warm and thick from the decaying bat guano that coats the floor. A painting of a warrior dressed in jaguar skin wearing a feathered headdress decorates one cave wall. He holds something that looks like a rope in his left hand, and a three-pronged object--possibly a weapon or an elaborately worked piece of flint--in his right. The warrior towers over a smaller, unarmed person sitting on the ground, who appears to be wearing a black mask. Mesoamerica expert Michael Coe believes the painting is Olmec in style and more than 2,500 years old. The scene apparently shows a ruler about to behead a sacrificial victim.
The painting is a long way from the Olmec homeland on the Gulf Coast, an indication of how widespread jaguar symbolism had become. Seeing the jaguar associated with power and the rope in the ruler's hand reminds us of the Tigres in Zitlala. The rope doesn't exactly look like a cuarta, and the ideas about what a sacrifice should be have changed drastically. But, if we had any doubts about the antiquity of jaguar warriors and human sacrifice in Guerrero, the Juxtlahuaca painting puts an end to them. "This is no coincidence," Sergio says, "these people didn't pick up this custom from somewhere else."
For more, see the article in Archaeology.org by Zack Zorich.
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