Thousands Will Climb a Pyramid and Ask the Sun for Energy

Teotihuacán will draw a great number of people this Friday. They will dress in white, climb the Pyramid of the Sun, raise their arms, and wait for something to happen. They are there for the Spring Equinox. They are there, as the tradition goes, to recharge.

The ritual as it is practiced today: the white clothes, the red bandanas, the arms raised toward the sun, is not ancient. The civilization that built those pyramids is still not fully understood. What is known is that they did not perform this particular ceremony. The equinox gathering as Mexicans know it today grew primarily out of New Age movements in the latter half of the 20th century, grafted onto a pre-Hispanic site because the country needed somewhere to put people in white clothes.

The need to feel connected to something older than yourself is real. But there is a difference between a living tradition and an invented one, and Mexico has a complicated relationship with that distinction.

The country has spent two centuries constructing a relationship with its indigenous past that is simultaneously reverent and extractive. Pre-Hispanic imagery appears on the national seal, on state murals, on every brand that wants to signal authenticity. And yet the descendants of the people who built those structures remain among the most economically marginalized populations in the country. The sun belongs to everyone. The land underneath it is a different matter.

None of this makes the equinox gathering cynical. Most of the people who will climb that pyramid are not thinking about land rights. They are thinking about the year they have had. They go to the pyramid because the city offers nowhere else to put it.

That is worth something. It is also worth asking why a country with one of the richest living cultural ecosystems on earth; active ceremony, oral tradition, craft, language, cuisine, routes so much of its collective spiritual energy through a site that belongs to a civilization nobody can quite claim.

Perhaps because living culture is harder to photograph. Perhaps because the communities still holding those traditions have not been given the platform, the infrastructure, or the economic stability to project them at scale. Perhaps because it is easier to climb a pyramid built by someone else than to sit with the discomfort of what happened to their descendants.

Mexico is very good at the moment. The question is always what surrounds it.