Venus Platforms: Calendar Devices or What?

by Tank Girl

Tank Girl here, coming at you from atop a magnificent Venus Platform. Everywhere you go in Meso-America, these things litter the cities like McDonald’s litters New York. Nicely elevated, flat surface for ease of walking, they rise up and look great. They are often very useful for sitting on since for some reason the Meso-Americans were not too big on benches.

So what exactly were these “Venus Platforms” used for?

There are many different answers. Some suggest the veneration of the morning and evening star. Venus is both oddly enough, greedy or what? Others think that the platforms served as celestial markers on the earth to assist in charting the passage of the varying angle of the star’s progression across the heavens. Still others have suggested that the Venus Platforms were in fact nothing more that landing pads for the Venus Class Rockets of the Gods. Through out Meso-America the VCRs have their place of honor in inscription, stele and paintings.

There is a little known theory that the Venus Platforms were permanent stages for the various touring Meso-American bands that would travel from city to city with news and entertainments. Thanks to the hands of the Spanish Erasers under the guidance of Cortez and his followers little is known of who these bands were, what songs they sang, or of how well attended their shows might have been. The large size of the piazzas and plazas would seem to bear witness to huge crowds often in excess of tens of thousands.

Would it be unreasonable than to assume that from time to time great festivals would be held where hundreds of thousands would gather to listen to the music and dance in the streets? Could this in fact be the missing link to the hippie infestation of the USA? Or, were these merely two similar cultural movements from a yet unknown source?

Once again, in the absence of the light of hard fact, we are forced to use conjecture. The colorful costumes of the Meso-Americans depicted in their art would seem eerily similar to the colorful costumes worn by the hippies. That alone would be insufficient to appear more than coincidental, yet when you add in the use to mind altering herbs and cacti, the strange fascination with body art, and the rampant nudity, can one with any degree of comfort dismiss the possibly not of a linear connection but of some other ancient influence? Could today’s modern stages be based upon the same design principle of the Venus Platforms?

One needs search their history to know for sure. Greek odia and Roman amphitheaters are often said to be the source of the modern stage, and in the case of theater, there is ample evidence to support this conjecture. But in the case of large outdoor music festivals, they bear little to no resemblance at all. Yet the Venus Platform is almost identical. Could this be mere coincidence? Is it reasonable to conclude that a wildly disparate source such as Rome or Greece could be the root when at close at hand a far simpler linkage can be made?

Many of the structures of Meso-American construction appear to pay close and special attention to not only the movement of Venus across the heavens but to the solstices and the equinoxes as well. These days one must assume held great importance to the culture. It is simple common sense that these days would be thus made special, perhaps with concerts and recitals. The plethora of platforms would then make sense, as they would be required for these large festival concerts. We need look no further than a Rolling Stones tour to see the effect that these festivals would have had on the economy and the society. Arts and crafts would be expected, and the archeological digs have proven that the Meso-Americans were literally buried in artefacts, which is a word created by combining arts and crafts.

The evidence is staggeringly in favor of the view that during the pre-Columbian period Meso-America was rife with concerts and festivals, which were so well attended that many stages were required. But there is one final piece to the puzzle. Who carried this Meso-American tradition to the hippies of the USA? For that, we must go to Chichen Itza and find there the Wall of Skulls at the base of a Venus Platform at the classical site. No reasonable explanation has ever been mounted that satisfactorily meets with scrutiny. Once again we may seem defeated by the erasure of the past, yet the answer may well lie in the not so remote history. The Grateful Dead used the skull motif heavily. The Grateful Dead appear fully formed and developed at the very start of the hippie era. Inexplicably, from the beginning, the Grateful Dead had followers devoted to them in near religious zeal… colorfully festooned followers. Coincidence or a replay of previous times?

Could it then be that the Grateful Dead themselves transcended time and carried the traditions of the Meso-American Festivals to the hippies? Once again we find more striking similarities between the Meso-Americans and the Grateful Dead than the clearly lacking similarities between the Grateful Dead and either Romans or Greeks. Surely this could not be a coincidence. But what if the platforms were in fact the VCRs, which so many contend? Could it not be then that the Grateful Dead were in fact the Gods of the Meso-Americans and the common source itself between the hippie culture and that of the Meso-American? Is that the true source and reason for the Dead Heads?

From here, atop a magnificent Venus Platform, the possibilities are mind bottling.

Image credits:
Above right: View of the Platform of Venus at Chichen Itza, from Wikimedia Commons