The Totonac

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Where the Sierra Madre Oriental breaks down into the hot coastal plain of northern Veracruz, the land is green almost to violence — vanilla orchids climbing the shade trees, the Tecolutla and Cazones rivers running brown to the Gulf, thunder massing over the mountains every afternoon of the rainy season. This is Totonacapan, the country of the Totonac, a homeland of the central Gulf coast that has reached, in its widest historical extension, from the lowland littoral up into the Puebla highlands. The Totonac language belongs to a small and isolated family of its own — Totonac and the closely related Tepehua, with no demonstrated kin elsewhere in Mesoamerica — and is spoken still, by something on the order of a quarter-million people across Veracruz, Puebla, and Hidalgo. They are not a vanished people. The thunder over the mountains still has a name in their mouths, and it is an old one.

That name is Tajín. It belongs to the deity of thunder, lightning, and rain, and it was given also to the greatest city the region ever raised — a city the Totonac themselves came to call El Tajín, the place of thunder, after its builders were gone. The two must be kept apart: Tajín the storm-power who answers the maize, and El Tajín the ruin in the hills above Papantla. The deity outlived the city by centuries and lives yet.

The city in the hills: El Tajín

El Tajín rose in a narrow valley of the lower Sierra, and from roughly the ninth century into the early thirteenth it was one of the most important centers of the entire Gulf coast — the urban climax of what archaeologists call the Classic Veracruz cultural sphere. Earlier occupation reaches back further; the place was a town of consequence well before its monumental peak. But its great age, the age of its carved stone and its plazas and its towers, falls in the Epiclassic and Early Postclassic, between about AD 800 and 1200, when the older powers of the Mesoamerican highlands had collapsed and the Gulf lowlands flourished in the gap they left.

Who built it is a genuine and unsettled question, and it must be stated as one. The Totonac are the people of the region today, and the city’s modern name and meaning are Totonac; but scholarship generally holds that the Totonac were the most recent of several waves of arrivals to this coast, and that their occupation of El Tajín postdates the rise of the Classic Veracruz style there. Other candidates — a Huastec founding population, a hybrid lowland mixture of Huastec, Otomí, Nahua, and Maya-affiliated groups during the Epiclassic — are seriously argued. The honest position is that the ethnic identity of El Tajín’s original builders cannot be fixed from the archaeology with certainty. What can be said is that the Totonac inherited the place, named it, made its storm-god their own, and carry its memory.

The Pyramid of the Niches

The building that made El Tajín famous is a single pyramid, modest in bulk beside the giants of central Mexico, and unlike anything else in the Americas. The Pyramid of the Niches rises in six receding tiers to a height of some twenty meters, and into every face of every tier are set deep square recesses — niches, framed by the projecting flying cornices that are the signature of Classic Veracruz architecture. Counted across the whole structure, including the niches of the stairway, they come to 365. The number is not an accident. It is the count of days in the solar year, built into stone, so that the pyramid is at once a temple and a calendar — a year rendered as architecture, each niche a day, the whole turning of the sun fixed on the hillside. The play of light into and out of those 365 shadowed mouths, shifting as the sun crosses the sky and the seasons, makes the building a kind of slow astronomical instrument. It was raised across more than one construction phase within the city’s peak centuries, and it states, in the plainest material terms a society can use, that time itself was sacred and could be counted and housed.

A city of ballcourts

El Tajín is, above all else, a city of the ballgame. No other Mesoamerican site approaches it for sheer density of ballcourts: seventeen have been identified within the urban core, an extraordinary concentration. To grasp the city is to grasp that the game was not a diversion that happened to be popular there but a central institution around which the ceremonial center was organized — woven through its plazas, repeated obsessively, set at the heart of its religious and political life.

The Mesoamerican ballgame, played across the region for millennia, was contested with a heavy rubber ball driven by the hips along a long stone alley flanked by sloping walls. At El Tajín its meaning is carved directly into the architecture. The walls of the South Ballcourt carry a program of relief panels — among the most studied sculpture in Mesoamerica — that lay out the game’s full cosmological logic. The corner panels show the ceremonies leading up to a sacrifice; one central scene depicts a ballplayer held by his companions while another sets a knife to him, the ritual death that the game demanded. From that death follows the response of the gods: the panels link the sacrifice to the welling-up of pulque, the sacred fermented drink of the maguey, and to the maguey deity who provides it. The blood given on the court returns as the intoxicating, life-bearing liquid of the gods. The art historian Rex Koontz, in the first sustained reading of El Tajín’s sculpture in a generation, traces this program through the South Ballcourt, the Pyramid of the Niches and its plaza, and the Mound of the Building Columns, reading the city’s stone as a coherent statement of rulership, sacrifice, and the lightning gods who governed the rain. Earlier scholars — Herbert Spinden and the Mexican archaeologist José García Payón, then Jeffrey Wilkerson — established the panels’ narrative reading and the astral symbolism, with Venus woven into the cycle of sacrifice and renewal.

This is the architecture of a sacrifice-ritual made permanent in stone. The ballgame at El Tajín was not sport with religious trappings; it was a ritual enactment of cosmic order, a contest whose stakes were the renewal of the world, presided over by a priesthood that read the sky and kept the calendar. The court was an altar with rules.

Rulers and the end of the city

The Mound of the Building Columns, on the higher ground of Tajín Chico, carries carved columns whose reliefs appear to record the deeds of a ruler known from his calendar name as 13 Rabbit — a lord shown in scenes of conquest and ceremony, the nearest thing El Tajín offers to a named individual. The upper city, Tajín Chico, with its more domestic and administrative buildings, represents the city’s later expansion as it grew into a complex of plazas, platforms, and elite residences.

Then it burned. In the early thirteenth century, around 1230, El Tajín was destroyed by fire and abandoned. The destruction is generally attributed to an incursion of Chichimec peoples moving down from the north as the old order of the region fractured. The great court fell silent, the niches filled with vegetation, and the jungle took the towers. The surviving population drew off and founded a smaller settlement near what is now Papantla — and there, in the towns of the Papantla district, the Totonac line continues to the present, the spiritual elders of the communities around the ruin still called the Abuelos de Tajín, the grandfathers of Tajín, taking their name from the dead city of the thunder-god.

The flying men: the Voladores

If the ballgame is the architecture of Totonac sacrifice frozen in stone, the Voladores is its descent ceremony, alive and turning in the open air. It is among the most striking ritual survivals in all of the Americas, and in 2009 UNESCO inscribed the Ritual Ceremony of the Voladores on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

A pole is cut from the forest — a tall, straight tree, taken with petition to the mountain and the spirit of the wood — and raised at the center of the ground, rising eighteen to forty meters into the air. Five men ascend it. Four take their places at the four corners of a small frame at the summit; the fifth, the caporal, stands on the very top, and there, balanced above the world on a platform no wider than a man, he turns to face each of the four cardinal directions in succession, playing a flute and a small drum — songs to the sun, to the four winds, to each quarter of the horizon. It is an invocation of the whole structured cosmos from its center and apex. Then the four launch themselves backward into the air. Bound to the frame by long ropes wound about the pole, they fall as the frame revolves, and the ropes pay out in a widening spiral, so that the men descend head-down in slow turning flight, arms spread, circling the axis of the world until they reach the earth.

The meaning runs through every element. The descent is rain: the flyers come down as the rain comes down, and the ceremony is, at root, a cult of fertility and of the renewal of the world, an appeal for the waters that the maize requires. A widespread account ties the geometry to the calendar — each of the four flyers circling the pole thirteen times, four times thirteen making fifty-two, the count of years in the Mesoamerican calendar round, so that a single descent rehearses the closing of a full cycle of time. In the older symbolism the flying men are warriors of the sun, those who died in battle or on the altar and return transfigured as birds, following the sun to its zenith and then bringing its gifts down to the earth. The pole is the world-axis; the ascent is the climb to the sun; the spiraling fall is the descent of the sacrificed and the falling of the rain, all at once.

Two cautions belong to any honest account. First, the ceremony is not a museum piece performed for memory; it is a living rite, transmitted within Totonac communities, with the spiritual responsibility that a living rite carries — and what is described here is its architecture and meaning, not its making, which belongs to those who keep it. Second, and contrary to a common impression, the Voladores is not exclusively Totonac. It is a regional Gulf-coast and central-Mexican tradition shared among several peoples — the Nahua, the Otomí, and the Huastec practice it as well, and the rite is generally thought to have spread across the region in antiquity rather than belonging to any single nation. UNESCO’s recognition acknowledged the dense concentration of flyer groups and ceremonial poles in the Totonac country around Papantla, and named that region the modern cradle of the practice, while the rite itself remains the patrimony of more than one Gulf-coast people.

Religion: the storm and the maize

Totonac religion is a religion of the rain and the field. Its great power is Tajín — the Old Thunder, given many names across the communities (Aktsini’ among them), the storm-lord who withholds the waters when the people neglect their obligations and looses them when the proper offerings are made. Around him stand the lesser thunder-powers; a vivid strand of Totonac thought knows the storm not as one being but as a company of old thunder-grandfathers who command the weather from the mountains. Above them, in the older pantheon, stood a Sun deity reckoned the highest god, to whom human offerings were made, and beside the Sun his consort, the Corn Goddess — to whom, by an old reckoning, only animal offerings were due, for she would not accept human blood. The full pantheon ran to a great many figures arranged in ranks: major gods, lesser gods, the Owners or proprietors who held particular places and creatures, and the gods of the underworld. It is a cosmos densely populated and carefully ordered, and the whole apparatus of ritual and offering was bent to a single practical-sacred end — the rain in season, the maize in the field, the world kept turning.

A note of method is owed here. The interior theology of the Totonac must be drawn from Totonac sources and from the archaeology of the Gulf coast itself, not borrowed from the far better-documented Nahua world to the west. The temptation, given how much survives of central-Mexican thought, is to read Totonac belief through Nahua categories — but the Totonac are their own people, with their own language and their own gods, and their religion stands on its own ground.

Cempoala and the year of the strangers

When El Tajín fell, the Totonac center of gravity shifted, and in the Postclassic the great lowland city became Cempoala, near the coast, a walled city of plazas and stuccoed temples — including the distinctive round structures of the region — that at its height held some twenty-five to thirty thousand people. By then the Totonac had fallen under the overlordship of the Mexica, the Aztec power of the central highlands, who had subjected them in the later fifteenth century and bound them to a heavy tribute — goods, labor, and human captives carried off toward the highland altars. The resentment was deep and recent.

Into that resentment, in 1519, came Hernán Cortés. Landing on the Veracruz coast, the Spanish came first to Cempoala, and there its ruler — the lord remembered by his title Xicomecoatl, the “Fat Cacique” of the chronicles — laid before them the whole weight of Mexica exaction: the tribute that had stripped the country, the children taken for sacrifice. Cortés counseled the Totonac to seize the next Mexica tax-gatherers and refuse the tribute, an act of open revolt, and the Totonac of Cempoala became the first substantial Indigenous allies of the Spanish in the war that would bring down Tenochtitlan, contributing warriors and porters to the march inland. The calculation was rational and bitter: to throw off one empire by siding with another. The consequences neither the Fat Cacique nor anyone else could have measured.

What followed was conquest and the long pressure of colonization — disease, the encomienda, the missions — and with it a thoroughgoing syncretism. The Totonac were drawn into Catholicism, but the old powers did not simply vanish under it. Tajín the thunder-lord survived inside and alongside the new calendar of saints; the Voladores continued, its pole rising beside the church; the Old Thunder and the Owners of the places kept their hold on a religious imagination that took the new forms and filled them with the old content. The result is not a relic but a working religious world, in which a Catholic feast and an appeal to the rain-grandfathers are not felt as contradictions.

Cempoala itself was never built over by a major Spanish town, and so its plazas and round temples stand much as the Totonac left them in the sixteenth century, a city emptied but not erased. The Totonac who left it did not leave the land. They are in the highlands and on the coast still, in Papantla and a hundred towns around it, speaking a language that owes nothing to any neighbor, raising the vanilla, and on the appointed days cutting the pole and sending the flyers down through the air after the rain — the same descent, the same turning, the storm-god’s people calling the water back to the maize as they have done since before the strangers came.

Sources and scholarship

The modern archaeology of El Tajín runs from the late nineteenth century through the long campaigns of the Mexican archaeologist José García Payón, who excavated and consolidated the site across decades of the twentieth century, to the survey and chronological work of S. Jeffrey K. Wilkerson and the iconographic synthesis of Rex Koontz. Koontz’s Lightning Gods and Feathered Serpents: The Public Sculpture of El Tajín (University of Texas Press, 2009) is the standard study of the city’s carved program, the first extensive treatment of its sculpture in more than thirty years, reading the South Ballcourt panels, the Pyramid of the Niches ensemble, and the Building of the Columns as a unified statement of rulership, sacrifice, and the lightning gods; it is held by the press at utpress.utexas.edu. The South Ballcourt’s sacrifice-and-pulque iconography, building on Spinden and García Payón, was developed by Wilkerson in the journal National Geographic and in specialist literature. The site is administered and documented by Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, whose record of the El Tajín zone and of the later Totonac capital at Cempoala gives the official chronology and description. The Voladores ceremony is documented in the inscription file of UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list, which sets out its meaning, its roles, and its standing as a tradition shared among several Gulf-coast peoples and concentrated in the Totonac country of Papantla.

→ Related: Sacrifice Ritual · Cult · Priest · Ritual · Syncretism