Boundaries

What makes these temple cities unique is their square shape, first, and their boundary, second.  The boundary will become important later because it can be measured and this may be symbolic.  As for the square, its equal sides lend themselves well to an ordered sense of balance and harmony.  Little wonder, then, that these places typify heavenly order here on earth.

It is not easy today, however, to truly understand this sense of sacred space.  So to illustrate this, I suggest focusing on something more familiar to us, namely the boundaries in sporting events.  While sport has been thoroughly secularized, it has not always been so.  The Olympics, for example, sprang from a festival in honor of the Greek god, Zeus; and the earliest known team-sport— Ulama—was a ruthless game of life or death to early Mesoamericans that remained popular from time of the Olmecs, beginning about 1500 B.C., right through the Teotihuacán, Mayan, Toltec, and Aztec civilizations until the Spanish Conquest in 1521 A.D.

But isn’t it interesting that the sacred square boundaries of the temple cities is also shared by many of our most popular sporting areas?  The baseball “diamond”, to give the simplest example, is actually a perfect square with a circle in the middle (the mound).  Handball courts consist of double squares.  Indeed, most elongated playing fields approximate double squares, from field hockey to basketball to football with its 100 yards…

And, as before, the Asians seem more sensitive to this type of thinking: judo, karate, and kung-fu matches take place within square bounds (much like wrestling).  Similarly, the Japanese sport of Sumo (hearkening back to indigenous Shinto rites) occurs within a circular area outlined in a square “ring”—much like a boxing “ring” (that is actually a square).