LDS tour of Chichen Itza and Ek Balam

While in Cancun, we took a tour of the Chichen Itza ruins and a new ruin called Ek Balam that was discovered about 15 years ago and has only been open to view for the past three years. They estimate that Ek Balam was first built about 400BC, but our guide guessed that it was a Lamanite city for a couple of reasons. 1. It has steam baths traditional to most lamanite cities. They believed your impurities and sins would sweat out of you and purify you. Kind of makes you think about the Savior sweating drops of blood to pay for our sins. And 2. For the picture of a light skinned person teaching the darker skinned people.

This ruin was built acropolis style with the government buildings and temple all on one block (but I didn't get a good shot that shows how long it is with the governement rooms.) When the ruin was discovered a guy was walking on these stairs and fell through a hole, dropping him into a tomb which you see about half way up.

Here's the tomb, which they guess the white guy is buried in. The darker skinned people respected him and his teachings so much that they buried him here with symbols that would help him remember the keys he would need to get to heaven. There were originally four statues along the top. Their wings make me think of angels, but scholars think they mean the people were visited by people from another planet. The first statue is missing, the second has the arms broken off, but the the last two are showing things that you kind of only see in one place in this world--hint: only worthy mormons are allowed in this place. Not sure I should post a close up of that, so I won't.Here's the picture of the light and dark skinned people.Here's us climbing down from the top of the temple. It was way steeper than this makes it look. The stairs were twice as tall as they were wide and Paul and I were a bit freaked out. Paul cried all the way up and Luke thought he could climb them himself. The actual temple is gone, but you can see the outline of it at the top. It had rooms very similar to Solomon's temple with a holy of holies and a veil. Mayan temples also have the two stone pillars like Solomon's temple, with three figures above them: 1. The one God. 2. An upside down figure representing the descending god who came to visit them on earth. And 3. And an empty space for the god of spirit. Sound like the godhead to anyone else? Later Mayan gods also have very familiar names like the god of rain and water: The god of living waters. The wind god: The breath of life.

Chichen Itza was built around 250AD--the same time in Book of Mormon history that the people were falling away from the church and building churches up "unto themselves." Our guide told us that arhitecture changed from the acropolis style to the taller temples, where only the high priest basically went up to the temple to offer sacrifices (which were now human sacrifices). They still kept the stlye of solomon's temple, but much smaller. And the tables at the bottom of the steps which were originally used for washing and annointing now had a more grisly purpose. After cutting out someone's heart (offering a broken heart? Sound familiar?), they'd kick the body down the steep stairs, put it on one of the platforms and eat the flesh and blood (a perversion of the sacrament?). It was pretty sad seeing how a people who once had the truth perverted so many different aspects of the gospel to glorify themselves.

This next pic is of the warrior's temple, where they also offered sacrifices, but inside is a mural with both light and dark skinned people. All the light skinned are doing the work in the picture, implying that they were slaves. When the Spanish came and saw it they asked what had happened to the light skinned people and they were told they weren't around anymore.

I won't include a picture of the ball court, but in one of the stands reserved for the High Priest, there's a gliph that has a figure with a beard. Native Americans don't have beards and scholars say that they wore fake ones. But where did they get the idea? Some scholars are now saying that more of the gliphs they are finding show semitic origins--like the guy with the beard. One guy who discovered the temple at Chichen Itza believed he had found one of the lost tribes of Isreal. When the Spanish came they thought the Indians must worship the snake because of all the snake symbols in their buildings, but the snake also has semitic origins. Moses nailed a snake to a cross in the wilderness and those that looked at it survived being bitten by poisonous snakes. To them, the snake with feathers represents the god that came down from heaven. A snake without feathers represents the god the fell from heaven (satan?). The temple shown above was built so that on March 21st, the shadows and light create the figure of a descending snake. What's really interesting is that it is at its most defined on April 6th.

Here's the gliph with the beard.