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Mexico Rising: The Gods Are Alive 35
healing powers. I splashed some fountain water
on my head and neck and immediately felt refreshed.
My headache left me after some time.
I had been under the impression that all of
Mexico was poor and backward. Though poverty
exists, Mexico City certainly is not backward. I
saw a beautiful city with lush trees lining wide
avenues and dignified people walking along sidewalks
past chic stores and cafes.
The National Museum of Anthropology is one
of the finest museums I have seen—better than
the museums in Vienna, a city famous for preserving
art and historic treasures. Upon entering
one walks out onto a patio that is surrounded
by exhibition halls featuring Olmec, Aztec, and
Mayan artifacts. I passed an interesting fountain
shaped like a huge umbrella from which water
was dripping and cascading to the ground.
Outside the spacious hall with the Aztec exhibit
is a model of Teotihuacan, an ancient city
that contains some of the largest pyramids built
in the pre-Columbian Americas. The inhabitants
must have kept God in the centre of their
lives and activities to build their city around
pyra mids and temples.
As I walked over the beautifully inlaid marble
floor of the Aztec exhibit hall, I wondered what
visitors would do if all these gods and goddesses
would come alive. I passed a tour group huddled
before the perhaps most famous artefact in the
museum—the round Aztec Sun Stone, a calendar
consisting of a 365-day solar agricultural calendar
cycle and a 260-day sacred ritual cycle. Today
people wear this beautiful Aztec calendar on their
T-shirts, though they hardly know its significance.
Coatlicue, Mother of Gods
Looking past historic artefacts, a giant monolithic
statue on the other side of the hall caught
my eye. I stood in awe when I reached the colossal
figure of Coatlicue, the mother of Aztec
PB July 2011
gods and celestial bodies. She is a powerful representation
of Mother Earth, who gives life and,
when the time comes, takes it back into herself.
She is decorated with skulls and wears a garland
of human hearts and a skirt of squirming serpents.
In the native Nahuatl language ‘Coatlicue’
means ‘the one with the skirt of serpents’.
Coatlicue’s appearance could be described
as terrifying but, to me, it was familiar because
for so many years I have been worshipping the
Hindu goddess Kali. My Divine Mother Kali is
the power of time that devours everything. She
creates and she destroys. Awed to find my Divine
Mother in Mexico City, I knelt on the museum
marble floor and bowed before Coatlicue.
Just then I heard a booming voice behind
me calling out, ‘Thank you, thank you!’ Suddenly,
a man in uniform pulled up in a wheelchair
next to me. ‘I am glad that you pay respect
to our goddess,’ said Angel Rodriguez, a guide
from the tourist office. He went on to explain
that Coatlicue represents the creative power of
Mother Earth as well as the three planes of the
universe: heaven, earth, and the underworld.
From her neck upward, she represents heaven.
Instead of a head Coatlicue has two emerging
serpents that symbolize the dual nature of life
and her role as creator and destroyer.
According to Angel, Aztecs believed that all
things originated from duality, from the feminine
and masculine. The Aztecs also had a god of
duality whose name is Ometecutli, which means
in the Nahuatl language ‘two in one and one
in two’. For Hindus, the Shiva-Shakti—malefemale—principle
is of utmost importance. The
goddess Kali symbolizes duality through her four
arms. Her right hands promise fearlessness and
give boons, while her left hands hold a bloody
sword and a severed demon head. One could
call her right arms good and left ones bad but,
in reality, she is beyond good and bad, just like
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