The Myth of Our Vision

As I turned onto the access road, I remembered the stories of this place.

A thriving, ancient, mysterious culture vanishes, leaving their village to be discovered a thousand years later. Stories of war, stockade walls, pyramids, and even cannibalism. All this... in Wisconsin?

Driving to the ruins of Aztalan, I was on a hunt for my childhood imagination.

I arrived.

My jaw dropped.

Stockades soared like skyscrapers, still guarding their ancient ghosts. Seizing my camera gear, I approached. Anxiety infused my gut as if I were a teenager sneaking into a house said to be haunted. Inside, platform pyramids rose from the ground. I weighed what they were used for. Human sacrifice? Burials? I recalled the horror stories I heard of war and death at this place. Yet one thing stood above all - the calm.

In soundless stillness, mythology faded and reality set in. It looked small. I felt ashamed.

There, standing in what once was the home of a people I once looked at almost as a charachature, I gazed upon what used to be their burial mounds. I watched the grass bend in the wind on the pyramids where their temples once stood. I listened to the current of the Crawfish River, where I knew they fished for food. I envisioned the stockades - now crude reconstructions - fully intact, three times as high as they stand now, and covered smooth with fired clay and ornamentations.

The temples were gone. The round houses were gone. The plaza, once the heart of this semi-fortress, gone. Also gone was the hyperbolic, exaggerated version of this land and it’s people I knew as a kid.

Archeological evidence at Aztalan shows it thrived during a violent time. War was frequent, as was human sacrifice and, in some cases, cannibalism. There are some who use this to define those who lived at Aztalan as a sinister people. This is a mistake.

While driving to Aztalan, I envisioned photographing images to demonstrate the enigmatic, yet ominous mood I felt as a kid hearing about this place. I left without taking any of those. The photos I did take were of how I believe they would've wanted us to know them. Not as a black-hearted, war-happy people, but as a community of families, craftsmen, hunters, men, women, and children.

Around 1200 AD, the people of Aztalan disappeared. We don’t know why. For centuries it lay as it was left, untouched until stumbled upon in the 1830s.

The dark narratives of Aztalan proved to be only partly true, but believe me, the magic still remains.