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By Root 2810 0

the outside of the belt are carved designs, and on the front of the curve of the horseshoe shape, cut into the polished stone, is the stylized image of a toad. He has a broad mouth stretching the whole length of the curve and, behind the eyes, bulbous glands which extend back to the crouched hind legs. Zoologists have been able to identify the species as the Giant Mexican Toad (Bufo marinus). Perhaps the key to understanding this object is that this toad excretes a hallucinogenic substance, and Central Americans believed that it represented an Earth goddess. Belts for ball games were made with various underworld animals carved into them, and this tells us that they were meant to be viewed not individually but rather as part of a broader ritual. It seems that the painful intensity of the ball game symbolized the constant cosmic struggle between the forces of life and death. Michael Whittington elaborates:

I think it’s a metaphor for how Meso-Americans view the world. When you look at one of the great creation stories in Meso-America, the Popol Vuh, there are twins. Their names were Xbalanque and Hunahpuh. They were ball players, they lived in the underworld, and they played ball with the lords of death. The game re-emphasized how Meso-Americans viewed themselves in the cosmos and in relation to the gods. So they were playing out a game of gods and the lords of death every time they took to the ball court.

This is disconcertingly familiar. Whether it’s Maradona’s infamous ‘hand of God’, which he claimed scored his first goal in Argentina’s match against England in the 1986 World Cup, the carrying of the flame from the sanctuary at Olympia in Greece at the start of each Olympic Games, or Welsh rugby fans singing hymns at Cardiff Arms Park, competitive sport and religion seem often to be closely related. Few supporters today, singing hymns or cheering for their teams with fanatical enthusiasm, know that the world’s earliest known team sport also had a strong religious dimension or that the story began not in ancient Greece but in Central America.

But modern sportsmen don’t face the hazards of their predecessors. It used to be thought that the losing team was always sacrificially slaughtered, and, though this did occasionally happen later, at the time of our belt we don’t know what lay in store for the losers. Mostly the games were an opportunity for a community to feast, to worship, and to create and reaffirm social ties. It’s thought that early on this was a game that both men and women could play, but by the time the Spanish encountered the Aztecs in the sixteenth century it was being played exclusively by men. The ball courts were designed to be sacred spaces in which offerings were buried, so making the building itself a living entity. The Spanish recognized the religious significance of the courts and wanted to replace the old local pagan religion with their new Catholic one. It is no accident that they built their cathedral in what is today Mexico City on the site of the Great Ball Court of the ancient Aztec city Tenochtitlán. But, although the courts were destroyed or abandoned, the game survived the brutal conquest of Mexico and the destruction of Aztec culture. A form of it, called ulama, is even played today – proof, if any was needed, that once a sport embodies a national identity as this one does, it has enormous staying power.

Christoph Weiditz’s drawing of Central American ballplayers at the court of Emperor Charles V

The annotation on the drawing above reads:

‘In such manner the Indians play with the blown-up ball with the seat without moving their hands from the ground; they have also a hard leather before their seat in order that it shall receive the blow from the ball, they have also such leather gloves on.’

One of the striking characteristics of organized games throughout history is their capacity to transcend cultural differences, social divisions and even political unrest. Straddling the boundary between the sacred and the profane, they can be great social unifiers and dividers. There