As prehistorical time in the Western Hemisphere spun silently toward 1,000 B.C. approximately a thousand years after man in the Americas had planted the foundation of the first permanent village site (in Mexico), a wave of fierce, misshapened strangers appeared.
Squat, with snarling mouths, elongated, slanted heads and filed teeth jutting like fangs, they frightened and mystified — and dominated — the early farmers of south-central Mexico.
Today, they continue to startle and mystify us. For after more than 200 years of exploration and investigation of pre-Columbian Mexico, we still know very little, really, about this band of unusual invaders. We don’t even know their name or where they came from. We call them the “Olmec” but that is merely a term picked up by Bernardo de Sahagun, the Catholic missionary scholar and 16th century (and Mexico’s first) historian, a word meaning “the rubber people” who legend had it, inhabited the Gulf coast. It was given to Sahagun by Nahuatl-speaking Mexica (Aztec) survivors of Hernan Cortes’ destruction of Tenochtitlan. The name used by these Mexica chroniclers for the supposed “home” of the Olmecs, “Tamoanchan,” is a Mayan term, meaning “The Land of Rain or Mist.”
Coming out of nowhere, scouting parties of this fiercely-religious race reached the south-central highlands before 1,000 B.C. carrying icons of their jaguar god, which had power over all the world’s elements, especially rain. Swiftly, they dominated the high, fertile valleys of Meso-America with their statues of sexless, fat, baby-faced were-jaguars, whom they celebrated with magical ceremonies in which priests chanted, daubed their faces white and black, donned masks of green jade (some representing intricate human deformities, others representing carnivorous birds), wore tall, triple-tiered hats and swirling ocelot-hide capes. Swinging rattles, snarling at the sky and screaming commands at their rain god, they danced mystic rituals that terrified and intimidated the primitive agriculturalists of the central plateaus.
Obsessed with monsters in human form, these unpredictable Magicians crafted statues and clay figures portraying men with genital and glandular deformities, with Mongoloid heads, cleft skulls and jaguar mouths. From the evidence they left at ceremonial sites and in tombs, it is obvious that these were sacred entities. The Magicians carefully practiced self-mutilation: children’s heads were deformed by encasing an infant’s skull in a frame to force it to grow into an elongated back-pointed shape; adult’s teeth were mutilated in an attempt to reproduce the jaguar-god’s snarl.
The Olmecs are called the Magicians because of these extraordinary, metaphysically-based penchants and because they are the first culture that left behind massive, enduring evidence that they believed they could control the events of the cosmos through magic — that is, through the worship of an all-powerful icon-god to whom they gave orders by way of magical ceremonies and rituals, and eventually through human sacrifice.
It is important to remember that for Mexico’s first farmers, such random natural events as unexpected crop-killing frosts, sudden floods, unseasonable snows, prolonged droughts were all terrifying occurrences that threatened them with extinction.
The jaguar cult magicians declared that through their god their priests could control such events. So convincing and powerful was their conviction that their influence spread from Veracruz and Tabasco to Puebla, Morelos, the Oaxaca Valley, to Guerrero. Armed warriors of the jaguar god invaded Chiapas, striking southward through the coastal plain of Guatemala, leaving monuments to their fanged deity as far south as Chalchuapa, El Salvador.
But it is in the modern Mexican state of Tabasco — at La Venta, the Olmec heartland — that the great Magician sites and awesome monuments are concentrated. Here in a sweltering riverine jungle zone just 125 miles long and 50 miles wide which receives an annual rainfall of more than 120 inches and was covered (before the white man’s arrival) with a high tropical forest, are clustered a series of pyramids and mounds. This was a rich ceremonial center supported by a hinterland population estimated at 20,000. Most spectacular are the Colossal Heads, weighing up to 40 tons, and Stela No. 3, weighing 50 tons. Amazingly, there is no naturally-occurring stone on the swamp-surrounded island of La Venta or anywhere nearby. The nearest source of basalt is more than 80 air miles away. It must be assumed the Magicians floated huge basalt slaps to La Venta by way of rivers.
But the Magicians were more than a race of baby-faced snarling-mouthed, squat-figured shamans that terrorized the south-central plateaus. They were consummate artists, developers of an intricate and advanced culture. Their art — fantastic and surreal — was infinitely more sophisticated than the ceramics and stone chipping of the farmers they dominated. They utilized serpentine and jade in ingenious designs, and polished concave pieces of magnetite and ilmenite into mirrors, the gleaming reflecting surfaces honed to optical precision. Experiments show that these curved mirrors are capable of throwing images on flat surfaces precisely like a camera lucida.
The Magicians developed rubber making, wove cotton thread, smoked tobacco and probably ate hallucinogenic mushrooms. Their time was an epoch of vigorous development and expansion.
Besides new levels of cultural, esthetic and social development, the Magician shamans also brought another “gift” to Meso-America: In many of their burial sites have been found hundreds of mutilated decapitated skeletons — the skulls smashed, arms and legs amputated, the remains of small children indicating violent death. From this evidence, it is believed that the Olmecs introduced institutionalized, ritual human sacrifice to this region. And though toward the end of the first millennium before Christ, the Magicians mysteriously, abruptly disappeared, much of their magical vision — that men could control the forces of the universe through ritual behavior — continued to shape subsequent civilizations.
Their influences continued to dominate civilization: green jade was prized above gold and all other substances, stone carving became the major art form of each following culture, the pyramid continued as the prime religious-cultural building form, the vision of all following art was similar to that of the nightmare minded Magicians, all the rain gods of the highlands when the Spanish arrived possessed jaguar teeth, and human sacrifice gained importance throughout the area. Indeed, the Magicians’ nightmare vision of the world — blossoming with psychic horror — continues to haunt much of Mexico today.