Feathered Serpent

The things that Teotihuacan did set the pattern for all other city states after it.

The central features of the complex are two large pyramids, known as the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon, as well as a temple dedicated to Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent.

These structures stand alongside a thoroughfare referred to as the Avenue of the Dead.

Over 200 smaller buildings, platforms, and pyramids are found adjacent to the avenue, and there are thousands of living quarters just outside the complex.

They believe that the place was founded by a dozen sky gods, the Lords of Thunder.

Other nearby Mesoamerican cultures had their own theories.

One associated the site with the feathered serpent god, Quetzalcoatl, who was said to have come from Venus.

It was the Aztecs who gave the place its name, Teotihuacan, City of the Gods.

There had already been four worlds, each set in motion by its own Lord Sun, and each, in turn, destroyed.

The first by jaguars, the next by winds, the next by rains of fire, and the fourth by floods, To establish the fifth sun, Lord Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, had gone to the underworld and returned with the bones of earlier people, nourishing them with his own blood to create new life.

But for them to have a world to live in, another god had to leap into the great bonfire and become the fifth sun.

The Lord of Sustenance and the Lord of Fire had chosen Nanawat for this task, while the Lord of Rain and the Lord of the Four Quarters had picked their own offering, the proud, rich Texis Tekat.

Linda Manzanilla has argued for shared government involving several rulers or sectors.

Saburo Sugiyama sees stronger individual authority behind the feathered serpent pyramid.

I suspect the disagreement is telling us something real.

Teotihuacan may not have had one political system for its entire life, It may have changed the way it ruled itself, perhaps dramatically.

Teotihuacan's builders repeatedly tied their greatest monuments to spaces beneath them.

Under the Pyramid of the Sun is a subterranean passage ending in chambers.

Beneath phases of the Pyramid of the Moon were dedicatory deposits, and beneath the Feathered Serpent Complex, a tunnel discovered after heavy rain in 2003 opened into a sealed ritual environment unlike anything visible on the surface.

That is the direction I want to follow.

Its vast underground chamber, supported by 200 columns, is unique in the Maya world.

Crowning the top, two sculptures of the feathered serpent, a divinity that was previously unknown in Chichen Itza, frame a series of columns and bas-relief warriors.

Archaeologists have long been intrigued by these architectural choices.

The structure of the platform, the central stairway, the use of columns in front, this open space, the Venus figures, the feathered serpents, all of that is similar to what we see at Tula.

Tula's Pyramid B in the former Toltec capital inspired the design of Chichen Itza's Temple of the Warriors.

A side-by-side comparison of the blueprints of the two buildings reveals an almost identical structure.

The heavens, the universe is interacting with you and with this person.

That's really powerful that whoever was the person wielding that position of authority on the landscape would have been close to the gods, if not godlike themselves.

one of the things i learned at the effigy mounds park was that there's

something called a plume serpent the plume serpent is very broadly shared across the eastern united states the plumed serpent is a flying serpent otherwise known as a dragon so in fact that idea of this flying serpent probably goes all the way back to the time before Native Americans came to the United States is probably a very ancient set of ideas.

The rituals that were created at Cahokia embodied that knowledge.

A big part of it was looking at the sun, knowing when the seasons were.

She required human sacrifices in order to grant just a little bit of light.

An honorable warrior, the Feathered Serpent, got tired of it and went up to the sky to kill the goddess.

However, when he got there, he discovered the goddess's granddaughter, who the goddess had kidnapped, and he fell in love with her.

So instead of killing the goddess, he and the granddaughter ran away together.