The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story(61)

The cache is rich in animal imagery: vultures, snakes, jaguars, and monkeys. Joyce explained that, throughout the Americas, traditional shamans and priests claim special relationships with certain animals. The “were-jaguar” head is a classic example of half-human, half-animal beings portrayed in ancient pottery and sculpture. According to creation stories and myths, jaguars, monkeys, vultures, and snakes were all seen as animals with great power, and were adopted by shamans as their avatars or spiritual doppelg?ngers.

Each species of animal has a spiritual being, a “master,” who watches over and protects them. The human hunter must appease this master of animals in order to successfully hunt that particular kind of animal. After killing it, the hunter must ask forgiveness of the master and make an offering. The master ensures that human hunters do not wantonly kill the animals under his protection, and he rewards only those hunters who are respectful, observe the rituals, and take just what they need.

A shaman who has adopted an animal as his power spirit can communicate (sometimes using hallucinogens) with that master. This is where the shaman’s power comes from: his ability to transform himself into a were-jaguar, for example, and communicate with the master of jaguars. Through the master he can influence all jaguars in the realm. Each master of animals acts as a spiritual channel to his particular species. Given this, many anthropologists believe the metates with animal heads were seats of power used by shamans or holy lords as a way to move between the earthly and spiritual planes, a doorway to the power of their particular animal.

According to Joyce, the vulture that was found in the place of honor at the center of the T1 cache, its wings hanging down like arms, is a human who has become part vulture, a shaman who has been transformed into his spirit animal. In Central American pottery and sculpture, vultures were often shown feasting on human corpses or guarding the severed heads of enemies killed in battle. And since vultures were believed to have the ability to cross from the terrestrial to the heavenly realm, the central vulture may be associated with death, transfiguration, and the transition to the spirit world. All this suggests that the meaning of the cache somehow involved death and transition. But the death and transition of whom, or what?

The motifs carved on some of the metates provide another clue. Joyce interprets the double spiral motif on one T1 metate as representing the mist that emerges from caves in the mountains, which symbolize ancestral origin places. The crossed bands, she says, appear to show entry points into the sacred earth: doorways to a place of origin or birth. The “Celtic knot” motif so common on the T1 artifacts is a quincunx, a geometric arrangement representing the four sacred directions and the center point of the world—a symbol of the universe itself. (The metates also display many additional, puzzling motifs that could be some form of idiographic writing, yet to be deciphered.)

Following this line of reasoning, it would appear that the focus of the cache was on birth, death, and transition to the spirit world. But why would the people of this city leave in this place such a concentrated mass of sacred and powerful objects, probably owned by the ruling elite, the shamans and holy lords?

Chris made two key findings that helped unlock this mystery. The first is that this was not an accumulation of offerings deposited over many years or centuries: They had all been left at the same time. The second clue is even more telling: Most of the objects were broken. Were these artifacts broken naturally over the centuries by giant forest trees falling on them? Or were they deliberately broken? In the cache, Fisher and his team found a massive mano or grinding roller carved out of basalt and polished. It is over three feet long, an awkward size and too finely finished to have been useful for actual grinding, indicating it was a ritual object. Even though it is anything but fragile, it was found shattered into six pieces. Mere falling trees are not likely to have broken up this stone so thoroughly. Nor does it seem possible, by sheer numbers, that so many of the other artifacts made out of hard basalt could have broken naturally over time. These artifacts, Chris concluded, must have been deliberately smashed. They were destroyed for the same reason the pots found in the Cave of the Glowing Skulls had been ritually “killed”; ancient people engaged in this ceremonial destruction at gravesites so that objects could journey with the deceased to the afterworld. This was true not just of pots and artifacts, but also involved the ritual destruction of sacred buildings, and even roads. In the American Southwest, for example, parts of the great Anasazi road system and its way stations were closed in the thirteenth century by burning brush and smashing sacred pots along its length, when the ancestral Pueblo people abandoned the region.

Taken together, these clues imply the cache was assembled during a ritual closing of the city at the time of its final abandonment. In this scenario, the last remaining inhabitants of the city gathered up all their sacred objects and left them as a final offering to the gods as they departed, breaking them to release their spirits.

It’s reasonable to think that the other caches of artifacts noted in Mosquitia may have been left for the same purpose, during the abandonment of those settlements. It seems that a civilization-wide catastrophe involving the “death” of all these cities occurred at approximately the same time, around 1500—the time of the Spanish conquest. Yet the Spanish never conquered the region; they never explored or even penetrated these remote jungles.

Which leads us to the overwhelming question: If not because of Spanish invasion or conquest, why was the city and the rest of Mosquitia abandoned? The organized cache suggested the last inhabitants simply walked away from their jungle home, going to parts unknown, for reasons unknown. For the answer to these mysteries, we have to revisit the legend, and the curse, of Ciudad Blanca.