As music is played, students are taken on an imaginary journey to a faraway place of long ago. To prepare for this journey, they have made themselves comfortable by lying on mats or blankets on the floor or propping their feet up on chairs. Their eyes are closed as they hear the wind song of waves rushing to the shore, the trickling scratch of a rainstick, the woodwinds, strings, and percussion of Agua Claras Andean music (Vol. II, End of Millennium). And so begins the journey.
__________
It is long ago. You stand on a street, alone in the warm spring evening air. Even though the street is big enough to fit more than sixty people shoulder to shoulder across its width, there is no one else around. Just you. You hear a fluttering of wings overhead. A voice whispers to you from the clouds, This is the Street of the Dead. But it is a loving voice and you are not afraid. Walk on young pilgrim says the voice.
You take your first step on the Street of the Dead. To your right you notice a great fort. There is a pyramid inside its walls. The pyramid is covered with hundreds of pictures of serpents. The sound of wings is just above your head now and the voice comes once again to tell you that this is his place.
You walk on. Many steps on. The ground beneath your feet bumps up and dips down as if you are walking on waves. The sky is magenta, a purplish red. The sun will be leaving soon for the night. The air is becoming cool. Once again you look to your right. Another pyramid, but much, much larger than the first. As you look to its top -- so high up -- you see the sun passing over. You walk to the great stairway that climbs up the pyramid wall and you wonder if you climbed to the top, could you touch the sun before it sets? But then you notice an opening at the bottom of the stairs. Where does it lead? Should you go through?
You are brave this night. A shadow of a great wing passes in front of your face. Suddenly a torch lights up and stands before you. The voice tells you, Go with this light. You take the torch and move through the opening. You walk down, down, down into a great cave. There is a whooshing sound like the sound you hear when you hold a sea shell to your ear. There is the smell of the sea. It feels cool and damp. You are below the center of the pyramid, a long way underground. What is this place? A secret place? A holy place? As you look around, you realize that this is not a true cave. People made this cave like they made the pyramids and the street. But still you wonder: Is this where the world was born?
You come back out of the cave. It has been a while and the night is beginning to pass. As you walk from the great pyramid to the Street of the Dead, you look to the sky. A brilliant cluster of stars sparkle as the sleeping sun gets ready to make another appearance. This is truly a special place.
You walk on toward the end of the Street of the Dead. Another pyramid rises larger and larger as you come closer and closer to it. Behind the pyramid, you can make out the shape of a mountain. It looks like a great shadow that the pyramid has cast. This pyramid, too, has steps. As the dawn begins, your torch magically disappears and you begin the climb. Even though you have been awake throughout the night, you are not tired. You reach the top and it feels as though you are standing on top of the world. With your back to the mountain, you look down the long street upon which you made your journey here. You see the great platforms and pyramids, which lead your eye past the first pyramid with its serpent-covered walls to a range of volcanoes. Stretching your vision even further, to your right and left you see block after block of one-story stuccoed stone houses. You realize that this is indeed a great city, but where are all the people? What city is this?
Wings as large and soft as clouds surround you. As the morning sun shines through the feathers, you are held in a sparkling world of green. The wings gently open and the voice comes again: Teotihuacan. The voice who has guided you throughout your journey now has a face. I am the Feathered Serpent. And this is Teotihuacan, a great city that was built almost 2,000 years ago. It once held almost two hundred thousand people. But they are gone now. Many years after they left, the Aztec came to this city and believed that it had been created by gods. Teotihuacan means Place of the Gods. They believed that it was here that the sun and the moon were created. You have seen their pyramids and mine as well -- the first pyramid you saw --what do you believe?__________
The visualization attempts to give students a visceral awareness of a journey down the Street of the Dead in Teotihuacan. The citys design is plotted along two axes in near perpendicular alignment. In the exercise, students begin walking from the southern end of the street heading toward the Pyramid of the Moon and Cerro Gordo, the mountain behind it. In the citys plan, this is the north-south axis. Upon emerging from the cave (beneath the Pyramid of the Sun), students are directed to a star cluster, which is the Pleiades. This is Teotihuacans east-west axis. As Mary Miller writes in The Art of Mesoamerica (p. 68): From the cave entry, a siting line to the west was drawn that linked the cave, the rising of the Pleiades during the two annual passages of zenith, and the arc of solar passage at that same occurrence . . . by the end of the first century AD, these two axes had determined the grid that informed all positioning at Teotihuacan.
After this visualization activity, students will be asked to share anything they wish about their personal journeys. Using pictures from the December 1995 National Geographic article, Teotihuacan (pp. 2-35), as well as pictures and diagrams from The Art of Mesoamerica (pp. 67-82), they will get to see the sights from which the visualization was drawn. The article features a map of the city and schematic drawings of an apartment complex and an ethnic neighborhood, both of which offer some insight into how the Teotihuacano lived (300-600 AD). We will then share in an oral reading of A Pyramids Buried Secret (TIME For Kids, February 5, 1999, pp. 4-5), which discusses Teotihuacan and the discovery of a mysterious burial room in the Pyramid of the Moon in October of 1998.