Introduction: The Central Crime as Foundational Reconciliation
Symbolic language shapes our world, allowing us to reconcile with the burden of existence. The Templo Mayor in Mexico City’s Historic Center is a testament to this, serving as the cosmic center, structural pleasure, and organizing force of a Mexica Empire’s law since its demise in 1525.
Each level, orientation, and offering of the Templo Mayor was a precise inscription within an order that understood the piramide’s body as cosmic, acknowledging that unstructured pain would be meaningless and time must be nourished to avoid collapse.
The Body as Act, Not Art
In the modern world, art represents rather than enacts. It has become detached from reality, often depicting fictional scenarios. This disconnect creates a senseless theater, as some argue rituals, ceremonies, and sacrifices also have become.
Philosophers like Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard have explored the division between act and meaning in modern society. Guy Debord stated, “In the truly inverted world, truth is but a moment of falsehood.” This fragmentation of thought has resulted in a detached world, fabricated with artifice.
Templo Mayor: A Living, Total Stage
The Templo Mayor was not mere backdrop; it was the complete stage. There was no separation between action and its meaning. Myths were not depicted but embodied through each sacrifice, which was a cut on the world’s body. This ensured the sun’s rise and prevented the sky from collapsing.
The heart extraction was a structured act, not driven by cruelty but cosmic precision. This heart was a ritual phrase, and blood pushed the sun to fulfill its duty of burning.
The Mexicas did not pray to the sun; they kept it alive through these acts.
Is this not art? It is an art that has had meaning, organizing time and sacrificing to ensure the world’s continuity.
Coyolxauhqui: The Mexica Original Crime
In Western narratives, the original myth often revolves around patricide to claim law. However, in Mexica mythology, the central crime is not against the father but the sister.
Huitzilopochtli, the sun god, kills his sister Coyolxauhqui, the moon, dismembering and casting her down the temple’s stairs. This celestial fratricide establishes solar order by fragmenting the lunar feminine and dispersing night to usher in day.
Coyolxauhqui aimed to kill their mother, Coatlicue, for the perceived offense of becoming pregnant without honor. Coatlicue knew it was due to a fallen feather from the sky.
Huitzilopochtli, emerging from Coatlicue’s womb with weapons and treasures, slays Coyolxauhqui and the Centzon Huitznahua (“Four Hundred of the South”).
Each night, Coyolxauhqui dies; each day, Huitzilopochtli burns. The Mexicas are children of the sun; each sacrifice at the Templo Mayor enacts their cosmogony.
Unlike the Edipal prohibition, this ritual seeks to maintain cosmic rhythm and cycle rather than enforce a restrictive law.
Coyolxauhqui embodies excess, and her dismembered body is the axis of the Templo Mayor, where her death is repeated in every sacrifice.
This scene is not about repression but absolute presentation, where the night is killed for day to emerge.
The Persisting Logic
There was fear of disorder. In modern times, we don’t eliminate others to ensure community peace; instead, we offer what is valuable, precise, and necessary to the whole.
This isn’t expiation but sustenance. We give the sun what’s most precious—life.
Here, desire isn’t repressed but fragmented into staircases.
This psychoanalytic-political deployment lacks a law but emphasizes rhythm, continuity, and cycles.
The sacrificed were given extraordinary food, beautiful women’s company, visions, and sacred substances to aid their transition.
Today’s present is a symbolic lynching. We still seek someone to sacrifice, publicly destroying their heart, to prevent the sky’s fall.
In social media, political discourse, and family dynamics, we create scapegoats whose destruction maintains the illusion of a crumbling order.
The World
The world is not fixed but requires constant nurturing. Value lies in giving rather than wielding power.
The cosmos is not static or eternal but sustained through repeated ritual acts.
Sacrifice is purification, a tool for political control, power legitimization, and cosmic organization.
For the Mexicas, the cosmos is an ongoing experiment. Fire, jaguars, water, and wind ended previous attempts—four suns.
Our current world is the outcome of this fifth attempt: the Quinto Sol.
Final Epiphany
This world, however, is destined to vanish, according to some accounts, destroyed by cataclysmic earthquakes along with all of us.
“Here, desire is not repressed but fragmented into staircases.”
That’s why those ancient gods echo in the night, reminding us:
We Have Yet to Find the Pyramids.
Of all suns, ours is the most deviated, having forgotten its axes.
We haven’t found those pyramids because our psychic sacrifice fails to reconnect us with the cosmos.
Perhaps modernity, which represents itself, is also a sacrifice—but without myth, rhythm, or heaven.
It’s an inverted pyramid.
What I aimed to convey is an advocacy for symbolic sacrifice.
Sources
- Eulalio Ferrer — El lenguaje como símbolo
- Eduardo Matos Moctezuma — El Templo Mayor, Muerte al filo de obsidiana
- Miguel León-Portilla — La visión de los vencidos
- Sigmund Freud — Tótem y tabú
- René Girard — La violencia y lo sagrado
- Georges Bataille — La parte maldita
- Mircea Eliade — Lo sagrado y lo profano
- Nancy Jay — Blood Sacrifice and the Nation
