Chichen Itza
Everybody has to be somewhere on New Year's Eve, and I was in the Hotel Mayaland, in Mexico's Yucatan, glumly staring into a dish of soup that looked like wallpaper paste and tasted like that same paste mixed with 11 teaspoons of sugar. The soup had been preceded by a sad little shrimp cocktail and would be followed by a piece of meat that had been microwaved for 20 or 30 minutes and then dipped in A-1 sauce. All around the table were strewn festive noisemakers, streamers and party hats -- everything in fact that a Mexican hotel manager who had watched one too many Guy Lombardo evenings on his satellite dish would consider essential to a Norteamericano New Year's.
It was all in all a pretty macabre evening, but it brightened up toward the end: The hotel had for some mysterious reason built a wooden replica of a pirate ship in the swimming pool and decorated it with fireworks. Only they weren't fireworks -- they were signal flares, like those the police use to mark off accidents on the highway. At midnight, the bandleader lit the flares and they spewed fire all over the boat, igniting the billowing sails on which the words "Happy New Year" had been painted in English and Spanish. As the boat burned, the pall was lifted from the party and we all began to feel that 2001 might turn out to be a pretty good year after all.
"We," in this case, were wife and self, my in-laws Peter and Yvonne Worthington, and two National Post colleagues, Hugo and Meghan Gurdon, and happily we were at the Mayaland not for the food or the party hats, but to tour the Mayan ruins of ChichŽn Itz‡.
About the ruins, there's not a lot to be said that hasn't been said more astutely by people who know a lot more about Mayan art and architecture than I ever will. But when our party regrouped at the hotel at the end of the day, we discovered that we had all observed the same thing: Throughout the ancient city -- at the top of the big pyramids, at the base of the obscurest temples -- one saw American tourists at prayer. Don't misunderstand: These weren't Baptists come to bring the Good News to the benighted heathen. They weren't praying to Jesus. They were praying to Chac and Kukulkan, the gods for whom the Mayans used to strip their children naked, paint them blue, tie their hands, and throw them into the deep limestone well just outside the town walls.
One hot afternoon, my wife and I had climbed to the top of the city's biggest pyramid, turned inside to tour the ancient stone temple atop it ... and stumbled into a group of about a dozen middle-aged women, holding hands in a circle inside the temple, quietly humming to themselves. They stood there for a long time and then one by one broke away from the group stepped into the sunshine and hugged each other -- at approximately the spot, I reckoned, from which the ancient priests who used the pyramid would have hurled to the ground the corpses of the victims from whom they'd just ripped out the beating hearts. These women were the largest group of pilgrims we saw, but there were plenty of others who had come to pay their respects to the spirits of the place in ones and twos.
Now there's no doubt that the aboriginal civilizations of Mexico were impressive in many ways: in art, in architecture, in astronomy and other sciences. But their religion was pretty lamentable, to put it mildly. The Maya may not have been quite so bloodthirsty as the Toltecs who took over ChichŽn Itz‡ or the Aztecs further north. But they were bloodthirsty enough, one would have thought, to discourage modern people from wanting to pay homage to their gods. But one would have thought wrong.
At the end of the day at which our group had its run-ins with the New Age Chac-worshippers, we gathered on a balcony overlooking the ruins to compare notes. We began speculating: What on earth did those dozen women in the temple think they were doing? Did they hate their own culture so much that they forgave the Maya their human sacrifice, in much the same way that political leftists used to excuse Soviet labour camps because, after all, we in the West had unemployment? Did they, like some Indian activists, reject the evidence about the bloodthirstiness of Maya religion as some kind of European slur? Or were they possibly titillated and excited by that bloodthirstiness?
"You know," I said to the group, "I bet there's a really good article to be written about ..." My voice trailed off as five pairs of journalistic ears perked up: "... about Stockwell Day and the Canadian Alliance." It was too late. I had dangled a roast beef sandwich in front of a roomful of hungry puppies. I arrived home very late the following night and woke up late the following morning. I got to the office around noon, hit the button for my e-mail -- and Worthington had already beaten me to the punch in his column for the next day's Toronto Sun. In his characteristically terse style, he'd even answered my question about what it all had meant: "One muscular nitwit genuflected and meditated before walled carvings of jaguars and eagles eating human hearts, near the sacrificial site marked by stone wall carvings of human skulls. Silly ass." Pretty much sums it up, doesn't it?