ATM cave is known world-wide as the cave of the Crystal
Maiden. She was a sacrificial victim left deep in a cave by the Mayans near the
village of Teakettle, Belize. The cave is a very popular attraction, and as
such may be closed to the public in the next few years if damage to the
artifacts continues.
You can visit it ONLY with a licensed guide and with a local
tour company. We went with Destiny but PACZ is also highly recommended.
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No photos allowed inside,
I took a pic of a tour poster |
We also went to Tikal with Destiny. I loved Tikal, but
didn’t care for the guide they gave us. He was smart, spoke English, and was
well informed as to dates and the subject matter. The problem was that he had
some kind of New Age Spirituality agenda that didn’t sit well with six scientific
types. For instance Donelo said new studies show that all people in the world
are descended from the Maya, that Mayan is the root of all languages in the
world, the Mayans first invented
the number zero, and they introduced ideas of heaven and hell to the Vatican.
He also talked a lot about higher spiritual planes, energy vortexes, and other
new age ideas that may or may not have resonated with the ancient Mayans.
So I asked a perfectly legitimate question: If the Mayans
had achieved such a high level of consciousness, why did they engage in human
sacrifice? He said it had to do with the blood of Christ (who died quite some
time before the first Mayan ceremonial city was built) but got very defensive when
I pointed that out.
All that sounds like a digression, but it leads to the fact
that our guide for ATM, Danny, was not only knowledgeable, he offered an
excellent reason for the sacrifices, especially when it involved children. And
there was no new-age agenda.
The walk in to the cave took about an hour, slogging through
slimy mud and muck. We forded the same river three times. Once at the staging
area we ate our lunch and then swam into the pool of water at the entrance. The
water was “refreshing” as the Belizeans put it. Damned cool, a shock to enter,
but we were able to get used to it.
Immediately our headlamps revealed beautiful formations;
draperies, stalagmites, stalactites, and flowstone the likes of which I’d never
seen. It was full of tiny crystals, and the water had formed little ridges making
patterns of small triangular depressions that might fill with water during the
rainy season. Danny asked us not to touch certain especially beautiful
formations, but the rest of the cave we often needed to touch in order to
steady ourselves.
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| Photos from PACZ tours, taken before the ban. |
The river in the cave flowed by with a forceful current,
though not strong enough to knock anyone off their feet. All day, until we were
deep into the cave, we were at least knee-deep in water and often needed to
swim for a few yards.
The rocks were not slippery. Algae doesn’t grow in the dark
and that’s what usually makes rocks dangerous. Most of the time we walked on a
sandy or pebbly bottom between largish rocks, easily seen with our headlamps. But
sometimes the way was blocked by huge angular chunks of limestone that had
fallen from the ceiling. Then we had to climb, or slip through very narrow
passages that would have made a claustrophobic person scream and run back out
the entrance.
One passage involved fitting your helmet through an opening
between two giant rocks while turning the head so the neck slid between a flat
surface and an angled one. There was plenty of room below for the body but
anyone with an exceptionally thick neck might have had a difficult time. The
only alternative would have been to climb up and over the boulders, a far
scarier option I thought.
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The slim passage where you
had to turn your head just so to get through. |
The cave is very popular and some groups of people race
through it. A few guides sign up for two groups a day, one
starting at 8am, the other at 2pm. We started into the cave around 10:30 and finally
emerged around 5:00. Our guide clearly planned for us to be the last people
with the Crystal Maiden. We helped him by being really slow, most of us were
over 60.
So while we slogged along walking upstream, we would
sometimes step to the side while a group of 20-somethings raced past, laughing
and chatting, and then much later, still slogging along, that same group would
race by on their way out.
Danny was so meticulous, helpful, and caring. He lent a hand
to anyone who needed support, allowed others to hang onto his shoulder while he
swam, and practically supported my whole body in one scary drop down the side
of a cliff. (It wasn’t scary to anyone else, but I’m petrified of heights.)
He used our waiting times to tell us about the geology of
the cave, the ancient people who used it, and to show us obscure places where
they’d left things. I doubt any of the racers got such a thorough and deep
understanding of the cave. In fact, I’m sure most didn’t as we saw them passing
back out with red paint on their faces. They’d been through some whooping and
hollering ceremony that may have been their guide’s idea of a human sacrifice
re-enactment. Danny had too much
sensitivity and reverence for such nonsense.
About 500 yards into the cave, we stopped and climbed up a
cliff onto a platform that was the floor of a cave so large the guides call it the
Cathedral. It was dry. The floor was made of flowstone so smooth and
fragile that shoes are not allowed inside. We had to wear socks to prevent any
human oils from damaging the rock.
Danny described food offerings, and showed us where the
Mayans had made fires between three stones, a sacred number representing the
first three mountains made by the gods. Some of the pots showed blackened sides
and had been used to cook food indicating people probably stayed inside the
cave for days at a time. In places the ceiling was blackened from the smoke
All of the pots were broken as the Mayans believed
everything and everyone has a spirit that must be released upon its death. The
pots were, in essence, sacrificed. One pot in particular had a strange
perfectly round hole with no ragged edge, and a tiny slot emerging from one
side like a keyhole. Danny told us that some skulls also showed that same kind
of hole, but healed up, indicating the Mayans performed brain surgery. Since
they also wrapped the heads of royal infants to slope them, the adults may have
had headaches and opening up a hole could relieve the pain.
Immediately upon entering the Cathedral there was evidence
of human sacrifice. In a hollow on the floor were bones encased in rock. The
dry cave isn’t always dry. During the rainy season, water flows over
the rocks adding calcium to the bones and pots left behind. A bit of orange tape surrounded a small
u-shaped ridge, all that was left of an infant’s skull. In another place the
vague shape of a skull encased in a thick coat of calcium could be seen.
Other places the bones or skulls were merely cemented in place.
Many of these artifacts have been damaged. One skull is
missing part of the face because some idiot dropped his camera onto it. Another
lost two front teeth when a lens cap fell off, and another skull has a big hole
where a tourist was leaning against the wall above it and dislodged a rock. It
is up to the guides to keep people inside the boundaries marked with orange
tape, but that’s got to be a challenge if the people are young and energetic,
and there are eight of them to one guide. The job is doubly difficult when
there are dozens of groups going through the cave every single day.
Hence the rules: No cameras allowed inside, no cell phones
or electronics, no packs or bags, no food or drink, socks only in the upper
chambers, etc. Guides carry a pack, but it has emergency supplies and is water
proof. No one else is allowed to carry in anything. In addition, all people
going into the cave must be respectfully dressed, in shorts and shirts, no
swimming suits or bikinis.
Eventually the total number of visitors may have to be
curbed, or the cave closed altogether.
At the very back of the Cathedral cave is a little alcove
with the Crystal Maiden. Our guide said the latest archeological measurements
have discovered that she is a he.
From the position of the body, it looks like he was struck with a severe
blow to the middle of the back and left to die. The middle two vertebrae are
clearly smashed. The position he is in is how he must have died, struggling to
move, pushing with feet and pulling with his right arm. For years people
thought it was a female in a sexual pose.
Another boy, about 14, whose skull had been reshaped as a baby, was left
to die, arms tied behind his back and bound to his feet. The bones piled up in
a way that suggests that position.
Other sacrifices in the cave were less intact. Danny pointed
out a scattering of bones that indicated the victims had been killed higher up
in the cave. The bones washed down before becoming glued to the floor with calcite.
All in all there were 16 known sacrifices, and many of them were children.
Apparently as the ecological disaster that ultimately took
down the Mayan civilization was worsening (drought, deforestation, soil
erosion, climate change) the people began to think the gods had abandoned them
and they performed human sacrifices. Finally they resorted to sacrificing the
most precious of all, the children. At the bitter end, they lost faith in their
god-kings and political upheaval finished off the upper classes. Because they
were the only educated people, most knowledge of the Mayan rituals, astronomy,
math, and poetry was lost.
We were the last people in the silent cave. When traveling
in, the light reflections of other groups illuminated the walls and ceiling. But
traveling back through the empty cave, that inky blackness was punctuated only
with our small lights.
It was a sad and lonely feeling to have witnessed evidence
of the last desperate hopes of people who thought the only solution was to
sacrifice children and leave them to die in that deep darkness. They believed
all caves to be entrances to Xibalba, home to the gods of the underworld. It truly was the gateway for those young
people tortured and left behind.
