Feathered Serpent Pyramid

The exquisitely crafted beastly heads were added during the Temple of Quetzalcoatl’s initial construction in the 3rd century. The high-relief images alternate between a serpent’s head surrounded by feathers, and a crocodile’s head who wears a headdress. The former is easily identified as the Aztec creator god, Quetzalcoatl (a Nahuatl term which translates to “Feathered Serpent”). The latter was believed to be another central deity of the Aztec, named Tlaloc, on account of its goggle-eyes, but is now thought to the either the crocodile Cipactli or the Fire-Serpent. Between the heads is a bas-relief of a snake’s body, which features the skeletal rattle of a rattlesnake. On the talud section (the small sloping wall beneath the vertical tablero section) there are full-length bas-relief images of an undulating serpent.

The Ciudela enclosure is the largest defined space at Teotihuacan and measures a massive 130m2. It would have been able to accommodate the entire population, which numbered in excess of 100,000 people. Two large complexes of rooms that mirror one another on either side of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, would have provided ideal preparation areas for the festivities and accommodation for the priests who kept account of the days. At the heart of this complex lies the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, which appears to have been designed to record the creation of the cosmos and the passing of time from that day hence. Put simply, the Temple of the Feathered-Serpent appears to be a monument to time and the heart of a giant clock, by which the Teotihuacano’s honoured their gods.
A tunnel beneath the Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl also contains strong references to the cosmos, with hundreds of clay spheres covered in golden pyrite littering the floor and metallic dust rubbed on the walls. The combined effect resembles a passage-way through space when illuminated by torchlight.