6
The Spatial Order

Not only were the cyclic processes of the cosmos seen by Mesoamerican man as underlying his own life and the life of his divinely ordained sustenance, corn, but the temporal order apparent in those processes was integrally related to the spatial order he perceived both in the world around him and in the hidden world of the spirit. That spatial order united matter and spirit just as the temporal order united man's life with the spiritual life of the cosmos, and both were linked to the cycles of the sun. And just as the temporal order was intimately related to, and perhaps derived from, the various solar cycles carefully observed and charted by Mesoamerican thinkers, the spatial order was directly related to the diurnal passage of the sun from sunrise on the eastern horizon to its highest point at midday, from there to sunset on the western horizon, and then to a point at the lowest depth of its passage through the underworld from which it returned to the eastern horizon to begin the cycle again. The daily path traced by the sun's passage can be visualized as either a circle or a square drawn on a plane perpendicular to the surface of the earth (fig. 3). Drawing two lines through the figure, one connecting East (the point of sunrise) and West (sunset) and the other connecting the zenith (high noon) and the nadir (midnight), locates the center, which is the point of the observer as well as the point—symbolically the world center—around which the sun revolves.

In addition to thus locating the mythic cosmic center, the two intersecting lines define two other mythologically crucial dimensions. The line connecting the highest and lowest points is a familiar feature in any shamanistic religion; it is the central axis of the universe which "is conceived as having these three levels—sky, earth, underworld—. . . three great cosmic regions which," according to Eliade, "can be successively traversed because they

Fig. 3.
The shape of Time and Space.

are linked together by this central axis." The symbolic location of this axis on the earthly plane, the center of the Mesoamerican figure we have been discussing, is therefore

an "opening," a "hole"; it is through this hole that the gods descend to earth and the dead to the subterranean regions; it is through the same hole that the soul of the shaman in ecstasy can fly up or down in the course of his celestial or infernal journeys. . . . [It is thus] the site of a possible break-through in plane.^[1]

It is a manifestation of the sacred, which is not of this earth. This shamanistic view of the importance of the center as a place of mediation between the planes of the sacred and secular accounts for the Mesoamerican attribution of sacredness to mountaintops and caves and for the practice of building pyramids topped with temples (architectural realizations of the basic figure we are discussing) and creating temples that are artificial caves. In these temples, symbolically located on the world axis and on planes above and below the earth, the priests could fulfill what was earlier the function of the shaman—the mediation between this world and the world of the spirit. Thus, it is no accident that the other line drawn through the figure derived from the sun's path, the line connecting East and West, effectively defines this world, the world of the earth's surface, man's world of life and eventual death which is bounded by the point at which the sun "dies" in the west and passes into the underworld, the necessary prelude to its rebirth at the opposing point on the eastern horizon. The cross created by the intersection of these two lines is the quincunx, a cross with arms of equal length whose central point joins the points of equal importance at the ends of each of the four arms. Ubiquitous in Mesoamerica, the five points of the quincunx symbolize the earth and the cosmos, life and motion, and the endless cyclic whirling of time.

If the quincunx thus derived from the solar course is rotated in a northerly direction on its eastwest axis by 90 degrees so that it lies flat on the earth rather than being perpendicular to it, the terminal points of the quincunx become East, North, West, and South, and lines running from the center to each of those points divide the surface of the earth into four quadrants, thereby creating a very different symbolic definition of the same figure (fig. 3). There is a good deal of evidence to suggest that the Mesoamerican conception of the order of earthly space is based on exactly that mental "rotation" of the path marked out by the course of the sun^[2] which resulted in a mental image of the earth as a plane, a landmass, either square, circular, or fourlobed, "resembling our four-leafed clover.^[3] This landmass was metaphorically conceived as a crocodilian or toadlike monster floating in water which merged with the sky at the horizons to enclose the earth in an "envelope" of spirit represented by the water underneath and the sky above. The Maya visualized this concept as a house, "the roof and walls of which were formed by four giant iguanas, upright but with their heads downward, each with its own world direction and color. "^[4] This enclosing spirit was Itzamná, Iguana House, the ultimate spiritual essence.

The sacredness of the "enclosure" of the earth is also suggested by the fact that throughout Mesoamerica, each of the points marking the ends of the arms of the quincunx, that is, each of the cardinal directions, had a series of sacred associations: with a certain color, a particular tree, a specific bird and animal, and a god functioning as a sky-bearer. In addition, this directional system had temporal implications as each cardinal point was associated with a season of the year and with specific time units—days, weeks, months, years, and even longer units—in each of the calendric systems making up the basic cycle of time. The whole system is incredibly intricate and complex, varying slightly in its details from area to area, but it surely indicates that the solar path Coggins calls "the shape of time," borrowing Kubler's metaphor,^[5] must also be seen as the "shape" of both earthly and spiritual space. This multivocality of the symbolic quincunx suggests the essential point: throughout Mesoamerica, both space and time were seen as manifestations of a fundamental cosmic order underlying all reality, an order that expressed itself in space and time but was itself beyond space and time. And the center of the quincunx marked the center of the world, the navel of the universe, where man emerged from and therefore could return into the plane of the spiritual to experience that basic order directly.

Wherever the quincunx is found in Mesoamerica—in hieroglyphic writing, on sculpture, on the walls of temples, and, as we have seen, pecked into stucco floors and rocks—it always refers to this basic order of space and time. Of course, the figure carried various specific meanings at various times and places (fig. 4), but the ultimate referent is always the same. The Maya glyph for Kin , for example, which means "sun-day-time" and therefore indicates the "primary reality, divine and limitless,"^[6] is such a figure, as is the Kan cross found at Monte Albán and seen by Caso as representing the solar year.^[7]Lamat , the Maya glyph for Venus, is also a quincunx due, no doubt, to the Maya fascination with the sun-related cycles of that planet. The crossed band element, "which among the Maya appears in celestial bands, whatever its other meanings might be," has the same shape as well. It and the Kin sign and Lamat glyph were in use by the Olmecs as early as 900 B.C.,^[8] suggesting the great antiquity of this symbolic association of the quincunx with time.

In addition, the glyph representing the completion of a katun , a cycle of twenty solar years, is "the most complicated of the Maya quadripartite glyphs" and is similar in form to the flower symbol found at Teotihuacán "which may also refer to calendric completion."^[9] That these time-related figures have a spatial component is suggested by the various depictions of the ritual calendar found in such writings as the Mixtec Codex FejérváryMayer, the Yucatec Maya Madrid Codex, and the Book of Chilam Balam of Kaua , also from the Yucatán and dating from about the time of the Conquest.^[10] The Aztec calendar reproduced by Durán^[11]

Fig. 4.
The Quincunx Variously Applied: a. Monte Albán Kan cross; b. Maya Kin glyph; c. Maya Lamat glyph;
d. Teotihuacán flower sign; e. Maya katun completion sign; f. Teotihuacán pecked cross;
g. Maya calendar from the Book of Chilam Balam of Kaua; h. Maya calendar from the Madrid Codex;
i. Aztec calendar from Durán; j. Mixtec calendar from the Codex Féjérvary-Mayer (a-e after Coggins 1980,
figs. 2a-d; f after Aveni 1980, fig. 71a;g-j after Aveni 1980, fig. 57).

is a quincunx with the 52-year cycle "divided into four parts of thirteen years each, each part associated with a cardinal direction." The years progress in a counterclockwise, that is, sunwise, direction, and the figure is oriented, as always in Mesoamerica, with east, the place of birth or beginning, at the top. As if to indicate the many solar references in this graphic version of the calendar, the center of the circle contains a picture of the sun. This quincunx thus merges space and time and does it in portraying the 52-year cycle, the most significant and widespread of the calendrical cycles of Mesoamerica.

So important was this symbol of the ultimate temporal and spatial order to the peoples of ancient Mesoamerica that they placed it on the very earth itself in the arrangement of their cities. At Teotihuacán, for example, a quincunx is formed by the intersection of the Street of the Dead with the main east-west avenue, an intersection intended to divide the city into the four-quadrant design rigidly adhered to during the centuries of its

growth. All the evidence suggests that this design was a conscious replication of the sacred figure. Millon believes, for example, that the Ciudadela, which is located at this intersection, the very center of the city, was the political and religious center of Teotihuacán,^[12] so that just as the center point of the quincunx joins the east-west, earthly axis and the zenith-nadir, spiritual axis, the Ciudadela "joins" the secular and sacred functions of the urban center. The north-south line of the quincunx that formed the city was what we now call the Street of the Dead, and just as the north-south line corresponds to the zenith-nadir line of the sunderived quincunx which connects the planes of the spiritual world with the material world, so at Teotihuacán the Street of the Dead was a Via Sacra lined with temples, fronting the all-important Pyramid of the Sun and ending in the courtyard of the Pyramid of the Moon. The street was intended to "overwhelm the viewer, to impress upon him the power and the glory of the gods of Teotihuacán and their earthly representatives."^[13] This design was laid out using the cross petroglyphs (fig. 4) that are themselves the familiar quincunx.

These petroglyphs are found all over Mesoamerica at sites laid out according to the same directional orientation and general plan as Teotihuacán, which obviously functioned as a sacred model. The last to follow this model was Tenochtitlán where four avenues led from the gates of the ceremonial precinct in the center of the island city to the cardinal directions, thus marking out the quadrants. Each quadrant had its own ceremonial and political center,^[14] indicating that the quadripartite division of the city had both sacred and secular significance and that the religious and political worlds were united in the symbolic form of the quincunx here as they were much earlier at Teotihuacán. Thus, "the structure of the universe was conceived as the model for social space at Tenochtitlán. . . . The circuits defining the boundaries of social space replicated the geometric structure that the universe was thought to have."^[15] Throughout the development of Mesoamerican civilization, the "pervasive [worldwide] tendency to dramatize the cosmogony by constructing on earth a reduced version of the cosmos, usually in the form of a state capital,"^[16] gave cities the sacred form of the quincunx, using them as "masks" to cover the randomly arranged natural features of the earth with an artificial symbolic construct revealing the underlying spiritual order of the cosmos.

The structures with especially sacred functions were often located in a sacred precinct at the center of the city which was, like the Ciudadela, symbolically "the center of the world, the point of intersection of all the world's paths, both terrestrial and celestial,"^[17] the point at which the breakthrough in plane of which Eliade spoke was possible and therefore the location of the temple in which the priest or ruler could communicate with the world of the spirit. Typically, throughout Mesoamerica, more than anywhere else in the world, these temples were located atop pyramids that in their very structure replicated the sacred form of the universe. Viewed in profile, the pyramid emphasized three of the four points marking the sun's daily passage, the two horizon points and the zenith position symbolizing the heavens which was, appropriately, the location of the temple. One of the ways of visualizing the celestial world of the spirit throughout Mesoamerica confirms this identification of the pyramid with the path of the sun. The Maya, for example, believed the heavens

rose in six steps from the eastern horizon to the zenith, following the sun god as he moved across the sky, and then descended in six more steps to the western horizon. Below the horizon, on into the underworld, there were four more steps down to the nadir, then four back up to the eastern horizon.

The profile of the pyramid on earth atop an imagined inverted pyramid underground creates again the sacred quincunx. In fact, Hammond continues, "the design of the twin-pyramid groups at Tikal may epitomize the solar cycle through day and night."^[18] According to Krickeberg, the peoples of Postclassic central Mexico shared this association of the pyramidal shape with the "shape" of the sun's path.

The sky was conceived of in the form of five or seven superimposed layers which decrease in length as they proceed upward. Depicted graphically in two dimensions, they form a stepped triangle with its apex at the top. The earth was similarly disposed in a series of five layers which two-dimensionally took the form of an inverted stepped triangle.^[19]

This conception is also embodied in Aztec ritual and can be seen in at least two different festivals celebrated during the solar year. Twice during the year, on March 17 and December 2 of our calendar, the Aztec day 4 Motion occurred, and on those days, festivals were celebrated to honor the present world age, that of the Fifth Sun, whose name (i.e., birthdate) was 4 Motion. At these festivals, a captive was prepared for sacrifice, given numerous sacred objects, and ritually instructed to deliver them to "our god," the sun. After hearing the message he was to deliver, he began to ascend the pyramid, "little by little, pausing at each step . . to illustrate the movement of the sun by going up little by little, imitating [the sun's] course here upon the earth." Reaching the top, he placed himself in the center of the Cuauhxicalli, in this case the monumental Stone of Tizoc, the top of which is covered with solar symbols, delivered his message, and was sacrificed. Durán says that "the hour had been cal-

culated so artfully that by the time the man had finished his ascent to the place of sacrifice it was high noon."^[20]

In addition to marking the dates of the sun's birth with festivals and sacrifice, the Aztecs also celebrated the sun's zenith passage following the winter solstice with the Feast of Tóxcatl,^[21] one of the veintena festivals marking the end of each of the eighteen months of the solar year, this particular one honoring Tezcatlipoca, the highest of the ritual gods, the one from whom the others derived and, in that sense at least, an equivalent of the sun. During this festival, a young impersonator of the god who "had been honored and revered as the god himself" for the past year was sacrificed at high noon (again, after a ritual ascent of the pyramid), his heart offered to the sun, and his body rolled down the steps of the pyramid.^[22] As his body tumbled down the pyramid, the sun "fell" from the zenith position and began a new cycle, which would end a year later. A new impersonator of the god was selected at this time as well, one who would ascend to the zenith of the pyramid in a year's time to meet his death in another reenactment of the sacred annual cycle of the sun. As each of these men who impersonated the god and "became" the sun climbed the steps of the pyramid in the annual rite, the quincunx itself came to life in the ritual enacted on the pyramid's staircase.

Their ritual ascent indicates the tremendous symbolic importance of the steps leading to the top of the pyramid which is still felt by the present-day Tzotzil Maya for whom "the sacred mountains symbolize the sky, and to ascend one is tantamount to rising into the heavens. . . . [The mountains] are imagined as linked from top to bottom by a huge stairway, in many ways suggesting the ancient Maya pyramids."^[23] Eliade suggests that "the act of climbing or ascending [universally] symbolizes the way towards the absolute reality ." A stairway, he says, "gives plastic expression to the break through the planes necessitated by the passage from one mode of being to another,"^[24] from the natural world symbolized by the surface of the earth to the enveloping world of the spirit.

But the stairway suggests another way of seeing the pyramid as a quincunx since many Mesoamerican pyramids have square bases and stairways leading up each of the four sides. Such a pyramid seen from directly above as a two-dimensional figure would look exactly like the graphic depictions of calendars found in the codices. Seen in that way, the stairways would take on an even greater significance, becoming the arms of the quincunx and leading from the sacred cardinal points to the center, which symbolized the central axis of the cosmos. Thus, in climbing the stairway, the impersonator approached ever closer to the point of passage to another plane of reality. Not surprisingly, then, those stairways are often flanked with masks (pls. 20, 49) as if to emphasize their significance. The Preclassic Maya Structure E-VII Sub at Uaxactúin provides an early example of this form, and the fact that it was probably the viewing point in a solar observatory designed to chart the annual cycles of the sun suggests that its design symbolized the cycles of time and space by taking the "shape" of those cycles.

Similarly square-based pyramids are found everywhere in Mesoamerica, and the form is often used for small platforms with four stairways located within the confines of the centrally located ceremonial precinct, examples of which are found at such widely scattered major sites as Teotihuacán, Monte Albán, Tula, Chichén Itzá, and Tenochtitlán and at numerous smaller sites. These platforms, often called dance platforms by archaeologists, were used for ritual activity, frequently calendric in nature, and thus the shape of the quincunx would seem again to fit the use of the structure. For these reasons, it seems at least possible that the basic pyramidal form, varied in countless ways throughout Mesoamerica but always associated with the sacred, was derived from the quincunx, a possibility suggested by their shared fundamental association with the underlying cosmic order from which grew space and time and which required ritual reenactment of its sacred processes.

The Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán is a particularly significant example as it was "perhaps the greatest single construction project in Mesoamerican history"^[25] and perhaps the most sacred. From the time of its building at about A.D. 100 until the Conquest, long after Teotihuacán had fallen and been abandoned, it served as the focal point of pilgrimages, its sacred quality undoubtedly connected, both as cause and effect, with Teotihuacan's dominance of much of Mesoamerica at the height of its power. For the later Aztecs, inheritors of the religious traditions of the Valley of Mexico, Teotihuacán was "the place where the gods were made," the site of their manifestation on the earthly plane. Perhaps their gods really were "made" there.

At least four [mural] paintings at Teotihuacán seem to have elements of the Fifth Sun creation myth. If this belief was espoused at Teotihuacán and related to "the day that 'time began,'"^{[ 26]}it could represent a crucial system of beliefs and rituals that transformed the city's shrines and temples into great pilgrimage centers. Teotihuacán's distinctive east of north orientation [which was the model for the orientation of ceremonial centers all over Mesoamerica]^{[ 27]}would have commemorated when time began, because Teotihuacán would have been where time bega n.^[28]

Thus, the Pyramid of the Sun seems to have been connected throughout the history of the Valley of Mexico with the fundamental Mesoamerican sense

of the cosmic order as it manifests itself in space and time. Why this is so, why a pyramid of such magnitude was built where and when it was built, why it was built in one long burst of construction rather than being the result of successive rebuildings of an originally small structure as is more characteristic of Mesoamerica, and why it was oriented as it was are all questions that have been endlessly debated. While it is clear that there is no single answer that will fully resolve these questions, the discovery by Ernesto Taboada in 1971 of the entrance to a natural cave at the foot of the main stairway of the pyramid provides at least the framework for an answer, which connects caves and pyramids on the basis of their both being penetrations into the enveloping spiritual realm accessible only on the vertical cosmic axis.

As an understanding of the answer to those questions requires an understanding of the Mesoamerican symbolic conception of the cave, we will explain that conception briefly before returning to our consideration of the pyramid. Caves, like mountaintops, have always been venerated and used for ritual in Mesoamerica; archaeological evidence of such ritual activity goes back to the Preceramic period,^[29] and both caves and mountains continue to be held sacred by Mesoamerican Indians thousands of years later.^[30] It is undoubtedly this attribution of sacredness to those natural features which led to their use as models in the construction of artificial sacred spaces—the mountain became the pyramid; the cave became the temple—and they were perceived as sacred by a people whose shamanistic world view posited a "layered" reality because they are natural penetrations into the planes of the spirit providing a "god-given" means of communication between humanity and that world of the spirit. They are thus highly liminal places, to use the term Turner borrows from van Gennep's studies of rites of passage. He defines liminality as the state of being "betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. . . . Thus, liminality is frequently likened to being in the womb, . . . to darkness, . . . and to an eclipse of the sun or moon."^[31] While Turner uses the term to describe a part of the ritual process, as we have in our discussion of masked ritual, it seems a particularly appropriate term to describe the Mesoamerican perception of the position of the mountaintop or cave "betwixt and between" the earth and the heavens or the earth and the underworld. The fact that the cave was and still is used for rites of passage in Mesoamerica^[32] suggests a continued awareness of this liminality. Temples located at these liminal points were appropriate for the oracles who could penetrate into the "will" of the world of the spirit^[33] and the priests who could mediate between the planes of matter and spirit; there the gods could be petitioned, and there they would respond.

This petitioning was often for the rain sent by the gods to ensure the survival of life on earth, and the same temples were used for sacrifices providing the gods the sacred fluid, blood, that sustained them. The mythic equation is clear; the gods gave the nourishing liquid they possessed in return for man's sacred fluid, which "nourished" them. These gifts were exchanged at the liminal locations always associated with rain in Mesoamerica: the mountain "penetrates into the sky whence came the winds, rains, storms, and lightning,"^[34] while the cave often contains springs where water arises from within the earth, from the spiritual plane of the underworld, as a direct "communication" from the gods. Today's Maya, for example, still believe that mountains are actually hollow and filled with water that can be reached through caves^[35] and that water from springs found deep in caves is "virgin," still close to the original source of all water and thus ritually pure.^[36]

Such beliefs explain the ubiquitous association of caves with rain, lightning, and thunder throughout Mesoamerica.^[37] The gods of rain—especially the Maya Chac and Tlaloc in central Mexico—are associated with caves, and Tlaloc's pervasive connection with the jaguar, a creature always related in the Mesoamerican mind to the earth, caves, and transformation, further strengthens the link between rain and caves and indicates again their fundamental sacredness. In addition, the sun in its night journey through the underworld was thought of as a jaguar,^[38] thus providing yet another link with Tlaloc, whose name, according to Durán, meant Path under the Earth or Long Cave,^[39] suggesting that solar night journey and further linking the god of rain to the cave, the symbolic source of all water.

The vital agricultural role of water was no doubt partially responsible for the Mesoamerican association of caves with fertility, but the identification of the cave as the womb of the female earth^[40] suggests another reason for that belief. Not only does the seed sprout from the earth and grow with the aid of water into the corn that the gods have provided as man's sustenance but a widespread Mesoamerican origin myth held that man himself, in the beginning, emerged from the maternal earth. Its Aztec version at the time of the Conquest designated Chicomoztoc, Seven Caves, as the place of that emergence, while "the jaguar mouth from which the man with the 'baby' emerges" on the Olmec altar/thrones (pl. 12) was perhaps the earliest mythic "statement" of this belief. This metaphorical identification of the cave with the womb is but another way of describing the emergence of matter from spirit, of man from the gods. The cave becomes the liminal point of transformation where the planes of spirit and matter touch and a basic symbol of creation in the shamanistic, transformative sense understood throughout Mesoamerica. In fact, the transformation through fire by which the

sun and moon were created in the cosmogony of central Mexico has a variant that places the site of that transformative creation in a cave.^[41]

Following this logic, then, the place of emergence becomes the place of return. In death, man is returned to the earth by burial, often in caves, signifying a return to the underworld, the world of spirit, from whence he came.^[42] Often, this connection with death made the cave a focal point of the ritual associated with the veneration of the ancestors who provided a link between this world and the world of spirit,^[43] suggesting again the cyclic nature of Mesoamerican thought, which constantly links birth and death. Just as birth provided a passage from that other plane of existence to this one, death completed the cycle by providing the passage back. As the cave served as an entrance to the world of the spirit through death, it was thought of as an entrance to the underworld in a more general sense. Among the Maya, caves were "pathways to Xibalbá,"^[44] and the Nahua-speaking people of the Sierra de Puebla, the heirs of the traditions of the Aztecs, still believe that "the paradisiacal underworld . . . of Talocan as [the Aztec] Tlalocan is called in the Sierra de Puebla . . . is entered through places called encantas , caves, which are entries to the ideal world."^[45]

That this symbolic linkage of places above and below the surface of the earth accounted in part for the layout of the ceremonial centers of Mesoamerica is evident in both the earliest and the latest of those sacred precincts. By 1000 B.C., that symbolic passage from mountaintop to cave, that is, from zenith to nadir, had already been recreated in the 01mec ceremonial center of La Venta. There were, of course, neither mountains nor caves on the island in the Gulf coast swamp on which this early ceremonial center was built, but its conical, probably fluted pyramid seems an obvious attempt to replicate the volcanic cones of the nearby Tuxtlas, which the Olmecs held sacred. After building the pyramid, "along the central line which forms the axis of La Venta the Olmecs made great offerings and left the famous mosaic floors representing jaguar faces. These mosaics were not left visible; they were covered [i.e., buried ] immediately after they were laid down."^[46] Numerous Olmec sculptures identify jaguar mouths with the openings of caves, a symbolic association that continued throughout Mesoamerican history, so it seems probable that these mosaics functioned symbolically as entrances to the underworld, and their placement on the central, north-south axis in literal and symbolic opposition to the pyramid suggests exactly the same zenith-nadir relationship as that of mountaintops and caves. And it is now clear, according to Johanna Broda, that the Aztec pyramid at Tenochtitlán known as the Templo Mayor was conceptually the same. "The temple itself was a sacred mountain covering the sacred waters like a cave."^[47]

Returning now to our discussion of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán, the sacredness of the cave in Mesoamerican thought lends substance to Millon's contention that the pyramid "must be where it is because the cave is there";^[48] the pyramid was constructed to form the zenith that would complement the nadir of the cave and replicate on the earth the sacred cosmic axis.

The existence of the cave must have been known when the pyramid was built, inasmuch as the entrance to the 103 meter long tunnel coincides with the middle of the pyramid's original central stairway . .. and the tunnel itself ends in a series of chambers almost directly under the center of the pyramid .^[49]

The location of the cave and the obvious desire to make the "entrances" and centers of cave and pyramid coincide seems to account for the location and orientation of the pyramid; the magnitude of the pyramid and its construction in one prolonged burst of sacred energy must have been a result of the belief that "the cave below it was the most sacred of sacred places. . . . The rituals performed in the cave must have celebrated a system of myth and belief of transcendent importance."^[50]

Both the natural characteristics of the cave and the modifications the Teotihuacanos made to it give reason for this belief. The cave itself "is a natural formation, the result of a lava flow that occurred more than a million years ago. As it flowed into the Teotihuacán Valley, bubbles were formed, and when new lava flowed over them, the bubbles remained as subterranean caves."^[51] The shape of the cave is that of a long tube culminating in a chamber considerably wider than the tubelike passage. The shape is suggestive of the womb and vagina and would surely have suggested the mythic cave of origin to the Teotihuacanos. The cave runs in an east-west direction, opening to the west, and as does the Pyramid of the Sun, the opening of the cave faces the setting sun directly on the ritually important days of zenith passage.^[52] Thus, it is a long cave that naturally recreates the sun's path under the earth, and as Durán indicated, Tlaloc's name meant Path Under the Earth or Long Cave to the Aztecs who inherited the culture of Teotihuacán, and the rituals conducted in the cave (discussed below) suggest the significance of this connection.

All these natural characteristics of the cave must have given it the highest sacred character, and the modifications that were made enhanced these characteristics. The chamber at the end of the cave was given a four-lobed shape that looks very much like the shape of the calendars in the later codices as well as the caves of origin also depicted in those codices. This quincunxlike shape was oriented to the cardinal directions just as the city itself was divided into quadrants by the avenues running in the cardinal directions. The end

chamber must have "constituted the sancta sanctorum ,"^[53] and it was reshaped to give it the symbolic form of the cosmic cycles to the veneration of which it was no doubt dedicated. In addition to these alterations, the shaft of the cave was modified to give it "a more sinuous appearance than it originally had."^[54] But perhaps the most significant alteration was the addition of a series of artificial drain channels to allow water to be made to flow from the end chamber to the mouth of the cave. Although it was once thought that the cave was originally the site of a natural spring, according to Millon, "we now know that water did not ever flow naturally in the cave" so that the symbolic connection between caves and the origin of water had to be made by man. As Millon concludes, "everything that was done to the cave and in the cave proclaims ritual,"^[55] ritual based on man's symbolic recreation of the work of the gods which, according to Eliade, "is efficacious in the measure in which it reproduces the work of the gods, i.e., the cosmogony."^[56]

Although we can never know the exact nature of the ritual carried out in that cave so long ago, the people of Teotihuacán have left us some tantalizing clues. The clearest of all is the water channel they constructed through which water, which had been carried into the cave, could have been made to flow out the mouth of the cave. Such a ritual would have been consistent with the pervasive Mesoamerican belief that caves penetrated symbolically to the original source of all water in being a reenactment of the original provision of water by the gods, a reenactment designed, of course, to assure the coming of the rains with the beginning of the rainy season. Such an interpretation of the physical facts of the cave accords amazingly well with the scenes depicted in the mural found at the Tepantitla apartment compound (colorplate 3) near the cave. As we have shown, the upper half of the mural depicts a deity or deity impersonator who unites the symbolic attributes of the gods of rain and fire to suggest the reciprocal relationship between man and the gods which ensures fertility and the continuation of life.

The upper painting abounds with allusions to water, an emphasis also found in the lower panel of the mural, which refers directly to the cave under the Pyramid of the Sun. In the center of a scene generally interpreted as Tlalocan, the paradise of the rain god, stands a pyramidal hill that contains the mouth of a cave from which emerges a stream of water that divides to flow in either direction along the base of the scene, nourishing the plants growing luxuriantly there. After thus fulfilling their function, the streams disappear into holes in the earth guarded or represented by toads. The similarities between the painting and the actual pyramid and cave are too great to ignore. In both, the mouth of the cave is at the center of the base of the pyramidal structure; in both, water flows from the mouth of the cave and brings fertility and agricultural abundance to the land; both are sacred and fundamentally associated with ritual. Further support for this interpretation comes from the most recent excavations, which uncovered within the cave "offerings of fragments of iridescent shell surrounded by an enormous quantity of tiny fish bones," the remnants of ritually burned fish;^[57] the association of aquatic creatures with water symbols is a common motif in the murals and relief sculpture at Teotihuacán and suggests the ritual use of the cave in calendrically determined rain petitioning ceremonies, and the ritual burning fits perfectly with the allusion to the god of fire in the mask of the figure in the upper mural. Were we to have been present in ancient Teotihuacán on the day of the ceremony at the beginning of the rainy season, we might well have seen a priest impersonating the deity in the mural's upper scene calling forth the waters from the sancta sanctorum inside the cave in a ritual reenactment of the original work of the gods in providing water to ensure the fertility on which life depended. Thus, the solar ceremonies connected with the ritual probably performed on the staircase and in the temple atop the Pyramid of the Sun symbolically merged with the fertility ceremonies associated with the cave in a vast cycle imitating and guaranteeing the continuance of the cosmic cycles of time and space of which earthly life was the product and on which it depended.

The building of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán thus provides a significant example of the way the peoples of Mesoamerica combined their view of cosmic order, their art and architecture, and their ritual practice in the imposition of form on nature. Of course, they would have seen themselves as merely making apparent the implicit inner form rather than imposing one in their linking the center of the natural cave to the center of the man-made pyramid and using the resulting configuration as the center of ritual reenactment of the cosmogonic forces. The form they used was, for them, the basic form of the cosmos, a form that existed before space and time and from which space and time were derived. And that derivation of both space and time from a common source is no doubt the fundamental reason for their linkage in Mesoamerican thought. That they are both expressions of an underlying spiritual order is further suggested by their probable derivation from and constant association with the course of the sun, the ultimate symbol of spirit and the ultimate source of order.