Sacred Cenote of Chichén Itzá

The water is green. Not the advertised turquoise that the rest of Yucatán sells by the busload, but a flat, opaque, algal green, the colour of water that has been left to itself for centuries. Sixty metres of open limestone, walls falling sheer for the height of a seven storey building, and at the bottom that still green disc looking back up. Diego de Landa stood at this rim in the middle of the sixteenth century and decided the colour came from the thicket of trees leaning over the edge. He was not far wrong. He was also standing at the most famous hole in Mesoamerica, and he knew it.

Northern Yucatán has no rivers. Rain falls on porous limestone and disappears, and everything a person drinks has to come back up out of the ground. Where the roof of a cave gives way, the water table shows through, and the Maya called that opening a ts’onot, which Spanish tongues bent into cenote. The city took its name from one of them: Chichén Itzá, the mouth of the well of the Itzá. What is easy to miss, standing there, is that this particular well never watered anybody. Chichén Itzá drank from a second cenote, Xtoloc, a short walk to the south, and from dug wells. The Sacred Cenote was reserved for something else entirely.

A pilgrim came at it the way visitors still do, north from the great pyramid along a raised white causeway, three hundred metres of plastered limestone running dead straight through the scrub. At the far end the ground simply stops. On the southern lip there is a low ruin whose western room was fitted out as a steam bath, and beside it a platform built out over the drop. Copal smoke, wet rock, and then the long quiet of something falling a long way.

Landa recorded what the smoke was for. He wrote that the Maya held Cozumel and the well at Chichén Itzá in as much veneration as Christians hold the pilgrimages to Jerusalem and Rome, and that in times of drought it was their custom to cast living men into the water as a sacrifice to the gods, “and it was their belief that they did not die, although they never saw them any more.” He added, with the flat greed of a man taking inventory, that if this country had contained gold, this well would hold the largest part of it.

A report written by the Spanish municipality of Valladolid in 1579 fills in what Landa left out, and it is the strangest document the cenote has produced. The lords fasted for sixty days beforehand and did not raise their eyes in all that time, not to look at their wives, not even to look at whoever brought them their food. At daybreak they threw women in, unbound, flung out from the rim the way you would throw something off a cliff. Then everybody waited. At precisely noon the one who was coming back cried out for a rope. She was hauled up half dead and they built large fires around her and perfumed her with copal until she could speak, and what she said was that there were many of her own nation down there, that they had received her, and that whenever she raised her head to look at any of them they struck her hard on the back of the neck to keep it bowed. Then she told them whether the year would be good or bad. And if nobody called for the rope at noon, they understood that the god was angry, and they threw great stones into the water and fled the place shouting.

One man did not flee. The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel preserves a single terse line about a lord called Cauich, Hunac Ceel, who put his head out over the mouth of the well on the south side when no messenger had surfaced. Then he went to get it, and then he came forth to declare the prophecy. That is the entire passage. Ralph Roys, who translated it, held that there can be only one reading of a line that terse: Hunac Ceel went into the water himself and came back up with what the lords needed. He went on to rule Mayapán and to break Chichén Itzá. Nothing records what he saw down there, which has never stopped the story working, because the point of it is that he was the sort of man who would go in and get it.

The hole itself is an accident of geology, a cave roof that failed at some point nobody can date. Everything else about it was built by people. For more than seven centuries, through the height of Chichén Itzá and long after it had stopped being a power, people kept walking to that edge to throw things in, and the offerings that came out of the mud show how far the roads reached: jade carved in the style of the Pacific coast of Guatemala, gold discs hammered thin in Costa Rica and Panama and reworked at Chichén Itzá into battle scenes, copper bells, turquoise, rubber, cotton textiles, carved wood that should have rotted centuries ago and did not, because the deep water holds almost no oxygen. Much of it was wrecked on purpose before it went in. Jade plaques were burned and snapped, gold discs punctured and torn, bowls of copal stuffed with beads. Killing the object seems to have been part of giving it away.

In 1904 Edward Herbert Thompson, the American consul who had bought the ruins outright, dropped a clamshell bucket into the water and started hauling. Désiré Charnay had tried the same trick in 1882 and given up when the jaws kept closing on submerged tree trunks. Thompson had better luck and worse manners. In 1909 he changed method, put on a diving suit and went down with two Greek divers, and reported a floor full of long narrow cracks radiating from centres, as if the glass bottom of a dish had been broken by a pointed instrument, with grey mud in the fissures and the heavy gold and jade and copper bells sitting in it. He also shipped thousands of the objects out of Mexico to the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, which is why most of them are still in Massachusetts.

And there was blue. Fourteen feet of blue sediment lying across the floor of the well, the pigment now called Maya Blue, indigo locked into palygorskite clay by heat. Dean Arnold worked out how it was made by studying a small three legged bowl of copal that Thompson’s bucket brought up in 1904: the incense was not just an offering but the reagent, the fire that fused the dye to the clay. Whatever else happened at this rim, the colour was being made here, in the open, and going into the water on the things people gave away.

The bones are where the story most people know falls apart. In 1923 the journalist Alma Reed interviewed Thompson for the New York Times and wrote that prisoners of war and virgins of flawless loveliness had been sacrificed at the cenote, that the maidens were raised from early childhood with physical perfection as the goal, and that martyrdom for the public good was their spiritual ideal. It is a lovely sentence with nothing at all underneath it. When Earnest Hooton went through the crania recovered from the well he counted thirteen males, eight females, seven children of ten to twelve, and fourteen children of about six. Nothing found since has moved the picture back toward maidens. Guillermo de Anda, who has spent a career in Yucatán’s cenotes, finds the victims skew male and skew very young. The well took children.

What the place offered was an answer, and the machinery for getting one was appallingly simple: fast, throw a person in, wait for the sun to reach the top of the sky. The limit was built into the method. The only way to hear from the gods was to send someone who could not come back unaided, and the silence of an empty water surface at noon counted as a reply, the worst one available. The last pilgrimage anyone recorded set out in 1536, during a famine so hard that people were eating the soft inner bark of the cumche tree. The Xiu lords of Maní resolved on a great offering at the well and asked their enemies the Cocom for passage. The Cocom answered courteously, housed the whole party in one large building, and set fire to it. Nobody from that group reached the water, and the wars that followed did more to end the pilgrimage than any friar managed.

The cenote is still there, still green, still undrinkable, and still slowly swallowing leaf litter. Two more campaigns went into it, one with an airlift dredge in 1961 and one in 1967 that tried to pump the water out and clarify what was left, and neither got far; about four metres came off the top and the water cleared for a little while. Thompson’s bucket took the objects out and left behind the order they were lying in, which is the part no museum can lend back.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Sacred Cenote of Chichén Itzá?

The Sacred Cenote is a water filled limestone sinkhole at the Maya city of Chichén Itzá in Yucatán, Mexico, about sixty metres across, reached by a three hundred metre causeway running north from the main pyramid. The Maya used it as an offering place and an oracle rather than a water source, and the city drew its drinking water from a different cenote nearby. It is also called the Cenote Sagrado, the Cenote de los Sacrificios and the Well of Sacrifice.

Were virgins sacrificed in the Sacred Cenote?

No. The story of sacrificed virgins comes from a 1923 New York Times interview in which the journalist Alma Reed described “virgins of flawless loveliness” being thrown into the cenote, and it has no support in the remains. Earnest Hooton’s study of the crania recovered from the well counted thirteen males, eight females, and twenty one children, and later work by Guillermo de Anda finds the victims skew male and skew young. Colonial sources disagree with each other too: Diego de Landa wrote that living men were thrown in, while a 1579 Spanish report describes women.

What has been found in the Sacred Cenote?

Thousands of objects, including jade plaques and beads, hammered gold discs, copper and gold bells from Costa Rica and Panama, obsidian, flint, rock crystal, shell, pottery, rubber, cotton textiles, carved wood, bowls of copal incense, and human skeletal remains. The oxygen poor water preserved organic materials that would have rotted anywhere else in the Maya lowlands. Many of the objects were deliberately burned, broken or punctured before being thrown in, and much of the material recovered by Edward Thompson between 1904 and 1910 is held at the Peabody Museum at Harvard.

Why did the Maya throw offerings into the Sacred Cenote?

Cenotes were understood as openings between the surface world and the watery underworld, and this one was associated with the rain god Chac and with petitions for rain and a good harvest. Diego de Landa wrote that living people were cast in during droughts, and a 1579 Spanish report describes the ceremony as a way of asking the gods directly whether the coming year would be good or bad. Offerings of jade, gold and copal accompanied the human ones.

Did anyone survive being thrown into the Sacred Cenote?

According to the 1579 Valladolid report, yes. A woman thrown in at daybreak was expected to call for a rope at noon and be hauled out half dead, revived beside a fire with copal incense, and then questioned about what the beings below had told her. If nobody called out at midday, the lords took it as a sign that the god was angry, threw stones into the water and fled. The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel records that a lord named Hunac Ceel went into the cenote himself when no messenger returned, and came back with the prophecy.

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Chac, Itzamna, Ix Chel, Kukulkan, Ah Puch, Xibalba, Vucub Came and Hun Came, Hunahpu, Xbalanque, Vision Serpent, Alux, Huracán, Mictlan, Lake Guatavita, Castalian Spring