The Tabasco Museums [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION When man began to pay closer heed to his surround-ings and sharpened his powers of reasoning, he ceased to be a wandering hunter, fisher and food collector and be-come a sedentary agriculturist. The sun and the heavens were his earliest sourees of information and he acquired a notion of the passage of time and turnéd himself into a rudimentary astronomer. He deified the sun, the moon, air, fire, earth and water and worshipped them with fear and gratitude; and the mighty Universe began to fit within his tiny brain-case. He then found it ne-cessary to find symbols to represent the Higher Powers: the gods had to resemble humán beings in their ap-pearance, although they had to be deathless and wor-kers of great wonders. Hence the need for a visible and palpable representation of things divine. We may be certain that art had always a religious origin. Every religious idea has always aspired to height: even when temples were not set on high, their walls, at least, were made higher than those of the ordinary humán dwellings. The prehispanic temples of Mexico are small and were always placed on platforms or py-ramids. To raise the god above the multitudes seems to have been the generál tendency of the priesthood in the aneient Mesoamerican mythologies. Whilst the Egyp-tian pyramids were always tombs, in Mexico they always served as substructures for temples, with the almost solitary exception of the Temple of the Inscriptions, at Palenque, where the well-known archaeologist Alberto Ruz uncovered, in November 1952, a magnificent fu-nerary chamber.