Empire of Signs

Teotihuacan was, once, the center of the world. The pre-Aztec Teotihuacanos modeled their great capital in what is now central Mexico on the universe itself, imbuing their everyday lives with a sense of holy grandeur. Before the Temple of the Moon, a foundation was laid out on the pattern of a quincunx, a model of the five-pointed compass that defines Teotihuacan cosmology. This is architecture as cosmogeny: by constructing Teotihuacan at the center of the world, they were really creating a world centered around it. Its construction was a matter of divinity—the name “Teotihuacan” is a later Nahuatl word meaning “Birthplace of the Gods”—but also of power, and thus of violence. The city’s great pyramids were consecrated with the sacrifice of foreign warriors and nobles, their bodies laid out in sacred patterns beside snakes, cougars, eagles, and owls. There could be no construction without death, no prosperity without holy destruction.