The snake and the human skull

Mr. Palomar was visiting the ruins of Tula, the ancient capital of the Toltecs, in Mexico. He was accompanied by a Mexican friend, an enthusiastic and eloquent connoisseur of Mexican culture before the Spanish rule, who was able to tell him many interesting stories about Quetzalcoatl. Quetzalcoatl was a king before he became a god, and his palace was built in Tula, where now only a row of columns remains, enclosing a patio in the style of an ancient Roman court.

The Temple of Enlightenment is a pyramid with steps, at the top of which stand four human columns, called the Pillars of the Sky, representing the god of Enlightenment, Quetzalcoatl (the human sculpture has a butterfly on its back, symbolizing the star of Enlightenment), and four columns with reliefs, which represent serpents with feathers (the serpent is the animal incarnation of the god of Enlightenment).

All this can only be believed in legend, and on the other hand, it is really difficult to refute these legends. In Mexican archaeology, every sculpture, every object, every partial relief indicates a certain meaning, which in turn indicates another meaning. The animal represents a god, the god represents a star, the star represents a certain quality of a person, and so on. Here is the world of pictures and words, the ancient Mexicans write when drawing pictures, drawing as if in writing, so each picture here is like an anagram. The most abstract and geometric patterns on the temple walls can be interpreted as arrows (if some straight lines in the pattern break into dashes) or as a series of Greek palindromic latticework. The reliefs here in Tula are all animal figures, such as jaguars and jungle wolves. The Mexican friend paused in front of each stone carving to tell the mythological story of the piece, indicating its allegorical or moral reflection.

A group of students walked through these ruins, dressed in white scout uniforms, blue ties around their necks, with facial lines like Indians, perhaps the descendants of the Indians who built these temples. The teacher who led them was a little taller than them, a little older, with a coarse but self-possessed demeanor on his brown face. They climbed a few steps to the top of the tower and stood near the columns as the teacher told what culture they belonged to, what era and what stone they were carved from, and then ended his talk by saying, "I wonder what the meaning of these columns is." The students followed him down the pyramid. For every statue, every relief or column they encountered, the teacher told the students the obvious, and always added, invariably, "I wonder what it means."

Well, such half-lying statues with a plate on their heads abound, called Shakmur. Experts agree that the plate was used in rituals to consecrate the hearts of living people. These figures could have been seen as good people or rude people under orders, but Mr. Palomar could not help but feel creeped out when he encountered such human sculptures.

The group of students approached. The teacher said, "This is called Shakmur, I wonder what it means." And he led the students over.

Although Mr. Palomar followed the friend and listened to him, he ran into the group of students everywhere and listened to what their teacher had to say. The mythological stories told by the friend, the skill with which he interpreted the monuments and the moral of them, fascinated Mr. Palomar and made him admire this supreme function of the human brain. But Mr. Palomar was also attracted by the opposite attitude of the high school teacher. Mr. Palomar, who at first thought that the teacher lacked interest in his work and was too poor to cope with it, now felt that that attitude was a scientific approach to education, a conscious choice made by a serious young man, a code that he did not want to violate. A stone, a portrait, a symbol, a word, if we look at them in isolation, they are a stone, a portrait, a symbol or a word. We can do our best to illustrate them as they are, to describe them, and do nothing else; if there is another face hidden behind their original face, then we do not have to know it. To refuse to understand what the stones do not tell us is perhaps the best sign of respect for their privacy; to attempt to guess their privacy is arrogance, a betrayal of that true but now lost meaning.

Behind the pyramid there is a corridor or alleyway, sandwiched between an earthen wall and a stone wall. The stone wall with its many carvings is called the Serpent Wall and is the most famous monument in Tula. On the wall are many reliefs of snakes, each holding a human skull in its mouth, as if it were about to swallow the skull.

Young students approached. Their teacher said, "This is the snake wall. Each snake has a human skull in its mouth. I wonder what these snakes and skulls mean."

Our Mexican friend, unable to hold his breath, blurted out, "How can I not know what they mean! They indicate that life and death are connected, the snake indicates life, and the skull indicates death; life is life because it contains death; death is death because without death there is no such thing as life ......"

The children were all open-mouthed and dumbfounded. Mr. Palomar thought to himself that any one explanation requires another explanation, and this other explanation requires another explanation, and the rings are interlocked. So he asked himself, "What does it mean for the ancient Toltecs to die, what does it mean to be born, what does it mean to be continuous, what does it mean to be in transition? What do they mean to these children? And what does it mean for me?" Mr. Palomar knew that man must not suppress his inner need to explain, to translate, to interpret one language into another, to translate concrete images into abstract words, to turn abstract symbols into actual experience, to repeatedly weave a network of analogical reasoning. It is impossible for a person not to think, and therefore not to interpret.

The group of students had just turned the corner when they heard the short teacher's voice say ploddingly, "No, that gentleman is wrong about not knowing what these snakes and skulls mean."