Visit to Tulum

An excerpt from the vacation journal (July 12, 2011):

Today, we took the bus tour to the Mayan ruins at Tulum (Spanish for “walls,” we were told).  It’s right on the coast about as far south from Playa del Carmen as Cancun is north.  The area of the ruins is amazing but the parking lot and shopping area where you pull up is all tarted up for American tourists with the standard souvenir shacks and aggressive merchants.  At least they have the good sense to put all the touristy stuff a full kilometer inland so as not to ruin the experience – no pun intended.  We bought a small can of insect-repellent for ten bucks (!) because the tour guide on the bus warned us that disease carrying insects were not unheard of in these here parts.  (He probably gets a commission.)

The site of the ruins is breath-taking in its beauty and awe-inspiring in the sense of the “long view” it tends to invoke in a thoughtful observer.  We received a short walking tour where we learned some fascinating history about the Mayans, their religious practices and class system, their first interactions with the Spanish, and their ultimate demise.  They gave a cheezy little "demonstration" of a human sacrifice – a practice they say evolved fairly late in the arc of the Mayan story (which ran, roughly from 1,500 B.C. to 1,500 A.D).  Proper sacrifice technique was critical because the victim had to be alive long enough to see his own heart beating before dying.  And the Mayan God would not be propitiated by anything less than a still-beating heart.

At one point, the tour guide mentioned that it was considered an honor to volunteer for a human sacrifice.  The Mayan priests convinced the lower class rubes (who, incidentally, lived outside the walls of the city) that volunteers went straight to heaven – by-passing the numerous levels of purgatory and heaven-lite that normal schlubbs had to endure on their way up to the penthouse suites of the divine realm.  I found myself literally laughing out loud at this.  Not at the practice, per se, but at how little the holy-roller hucksters have changed.  We may not have any more religions that practice human sacrifice, but the priests, pastors, rabbis and imams still have the masses convinced that special favors await them if they will just do what the holy man says, which today, usually means mailing in lots of cash!  Or, fly an airplane into a tall building and get 72 virgins in paradise.  Plus ça change, plus c’est la mȇme chose.