The ghosts of this ancient civilization emerge from the stifling heat of the jungle like broken and dismembered bones. Stones once bleached for centuries in the unrelenting sun that radiated off the wide courtyards and ornamental plazas then rotted, moldering like compost as the city was abandoned and the encroaching jungle wrapped itself around the brightly painted temples dragging them deeper into the darkening rot and held them in its grip for 1,000 years, rupturing, crushing, squeezing this once gleaming city, the enormous trees breaking apart the carefully placed stones, the endless steaming rain relentlessly washing away the painted facades.

There is a great silence here as if the needle had been lifted from the grooves of the spinning circle of voices of this magnificent city as it was suddenly abandoned and the world came to an end.

The structure shown above was named the Temple of the Skull for the reason pictured in the foundation detail below, but its original purpose remains unknown.

Roof combs, an intricate stone latticework rests atop virtually all of the temples. Some think that it played ever shifting patterns of light across the city as the sun arced across the heavens. Others suggest it created a kind of music as the warm winds lifted off the savannah below. Perhaps it was both, aligning precise patterns of light across the vast open plazas and amplifying the music of the spheres, the sound of the planets moving through the heavens that no one can hear because it has been playing forever and so sounds the same as silence.

The Mayan name was Lakam Há, "Place of Many Waters" and indeed rivers, springs, streams and waterfalls crisscross through the entire landscape, with aqueducts, and tunnels channeling the water in intricate patterns throughout the city. Archeological finds indicate that the city was inhabited by at least 200 BC. but reached its peak in the seventh century A.D. under the rule of K’inich Janaab Pakal, also known as “Pakal the Great.” But the jungle guards her secrets jealously and gives them up only reluctantly. In 1567 Father Pedro Lorenzo de la Nada became the first European to encounter these ruins but it wasn't until three centuries later that exploration began in earnest. By 2005, the discovered area of the city extended over one square mile, but it is estimated that less than 5% of the total area of the city has been explored, leaving thousands of structures still covered by jungle.

In 1952 a Mexican archeologist found a curiously round hole in the floor of the Temple of the Inscriptions. Lifting the stone he discovered a narrow stairway leading into the depths of the temple. At the bottom were six skeletons guarding a chamber dominated by an enormous, elaborately carved sarcophagus. The walls of the chamber were a deep cinnabar and covered with stone carvings painted in brilliant reds, yellows, and blues. This, as it turned out, was the tomb of K’inich Janaab Pakal who ruled this Mayan Empire in the 7th century at the height of its glory.

The Mayan calendar is testament to the astonishing affinity these people had with the heavens and their relationship with the gods. The path of the sun and the placement of the stars seemingly determined the arc of their lives. At first glance the layout of the buildings seems almost random, one structure turned a few degrees from its neighbor.

But the concept of randomness does not fit with the precise construction of these massive stones painstakingly shaped to form exquisite temples, and indeed the grand scheme may not be deciphered until more of the city is excavated, but it is apparent that all of these structures are in fact aligned with the heavens. Pakal's tomb in the Temple of the Inscriptions, for example, is aligned with the Sun. At winter solstice, the Sun sets behind the high ridge beyond the temple, in line with the centre of the temple roof. As the Sun crosses the sky, it enters a doorway in the temple, hits the back wall and, as it heads for the horizon beyond the temple, appears to descend the temple stairway into Pakal's tomb.

Ancient Astronaut of Palenque

The excavations have taken years of digging to uncover what is visible today but no one has dug to such an extreme as Erich Von Daniken in search of an explanation of the site's existence. Pakal’s tomb has been heavily connected to the ancient astronaut hypothesis. In Von Daniken’s 1968 best seller Chariots of the Gods, the lid of Pakal's sarcophagus was reproduced by the author who compared the drawing to a man inside a spaceship, noting similarities to depictions of astronauts inside a spacecraft during Project Mercury.

Von Daniken wrote: “In the center of that frame is a man sitting, bending forward. He has a mask on his nose, he uses his two hands to manipulate some controls, and the heel of his left foot is on a kind of pedal with different adjustments. The rear portion is separated from him; he is sitting on a complicated chair, and outside of this whole frame, you see a little flame like an exhaust…”

Other more traditional scholars have variously described the image as Pakal falling into the open maw of the underworld upon his death, or alternately being resurrected and rising into the Mayan Tree of Life.

The sarcophagus lid is massive, measuring 7' x 12' x 11" thick, and weighing 7 tons. It is far too large to have been lowered down the narrow interior steps of the temple that lead to the hidden chamber. The temple was instead build around the tomb.

Interior walls of the temples still contain remarkably well preserved sculptures and hieroglyphs that provide a fleeting glimpse of this extraordinary civilization's art and culture. These temples were once decorated as finely on the exterior as on the interior.

Many remark at how astonishing and intimidating the Spanish Colonial cities in the New World must have appeared to the indigenous people with their cathedrals and fortifications, their art and architecture, but had the conquistadors arrived a thousand years earlier it would have been the Spanish who stood in awe and wonderment at this magnificent city.

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Photography by Bill Sheehan

March 2019, Chiapas, Mexico