Tula (Hidalgo, Mexico)

OnceUponAPond · 10 Octubre, 2026 14:20

Tula

Scope note: In the retrievable corpus, the principal published-book treatment occurs in The Eagle’s Gift, Chapter 1, “The Fixation of the Second Attention.” Later workshop material and interviews expand the subject, but their transmission history is less secure. This entry therefore distinguishes four categories: published canonical text, attributed archival report, historical/archaeological evidence, and interpretation. The first two are statements within the Castaneda corpus; neither automatically constitutes independently verified history.

The evidence model below shows how these categories are kept separate before comparison.1 2 3 4

Tula Source Evidence Model Figure 1: Evidence model used in this entry: published canonical claims, attributed reports, later testimony, and archaeology are classified separately before comparison.

Overview

Tula refers historically to the major pre-Hispanic urban center in present-day Tula de Allende, Hidalgo, commonly identified with Tollan-Xicocotitlan, the Toltec capital known from later Central Mexican traditions. In the Castaneda corpus, the same physical site is presented through a second, specifically sorceric interpretive framework: the monuments are associated with the fixation of the second attention, dreaming, the nagual and tonal, and lingering intentions attributed to ancient practitioners.

The two presentations overlap only at a general level: both recognize Tula as an important ancient center containing monumental architecture, warrior imagery, specialized sculpture, and evidence of destruction. Archaeology does not, however, independently verify the corpus’s claims about dreaming, the second or third attention, statues walking, cyclic beings, or the site’s creation through dreaming.

Historical and archaeological Tula

Identification and chronology

The archaeological site occupies part of the ancient city of Tula in Hidalgo. INAH describes the site as the principal center of Toltec culture between approximately 900 and 1100 CE, with influence extending across portions of central and northern Mexico and through exchange networks farther south.3

Recent archaeological chronology is more complex. Excavations indicate that:

Tula Chico originated as an earlier settlement during the Middle Classic period, with monumental construction developing during the Epiclassic.
Tula Grande later became the political and ceremonial center of the Early Postclassic city during the Tollan phase.
The Tollan-phase city reached its apogee approximately 900–1150 CE.
Tula Grande appears to have been abandoned and already partly ruined before the arrival of Aztec II populations; later Mexica activity included offerings, burials, reuse, imitation, and removal of objects from the ruins.5 4

Archaeologists therefore regard Tula not as one construction episode but as a changing city with earlier and later ceremonial centers, long-term occupation, rebuilding, dismantling, burning, reuse, and later veneration.5 4

Pyramid B and the “Atlanteans”

The figures commonly called the Atlanteans stand today atop Pyramid B. The term atlantean is an architectural designation for a human figure serving as a support; it does not refer to the legendary Atlantis.

Archaeological research indicates that Pyramid B originally carried a roofed temple supported by anthropomorphic and zoomorphic columns. The four monumental figures were therefore structural columns within the temple rather than freestanding public statues in their present exposed arrangement.6

The figures’ clothing and equipment are ordinarily interpreted as those of high-ranking male warriors. A recent reassessment by INAH archaeologist Elizabeth Jiménez García interprets the sixteen individuals represented on the accompanying relief pillars as warrior-kings in sacred dress, carrying weapons associated with the Tollan-Xicocotitlan elite.6 These interpretations remain archaeological readings of iconography—not identifications supplied by surviving Toltec explanatory texts.

Chacmool sculpture

A chacmool is the modern archaeological name for a reclining human figure supported on its elbows, with the head turned and the hands positioned over the abdomen, sometimes holding a receptacle. Examples are known across Mesoamerica, with notable concentrations at Tula and Chichén Itzá.7

The name itself is not an established ancient Toltec title. Augustus Le Plongeon coined it after excavating a reclining sculpture at Chichén Itzá in the nineteenth century. It subsequently became the conventional scholarly term for the entire sculptural type.8 Interpretations of the figures’ meaning and function vary; architectural context associates several examples with entrances, platforms, thrones, rulers, offerings, and ritual space.8

Tula in the published Castaneda books

The Eagle’s Gift: the principal treatment

The discussion begins when Castaneda reports returning from Tula, Hidalgo, where he had visited the archaeological ruins. He describes the four approximately fifteen-foot, columnlike basalt figures on the pyramid and the second row of rectangular columns behind them. He reports the archaeological interpretation available to him: that the front figures represented Toltec warriors with military equipment.1

A friend then tells Castaneda that a custodian had heard the Atlanteans walking at night and felt the ground shake. This is important source-wise: the initial walking-statue story is presented as a report passed from a custodian to Castaneda’s friend and then to Castaneda, not as Castaneda’s direct observation.1

Pablito’s interpretation

Pablito says that he formerly lived in Tula, knew its pyramids, and had been told that don Juan also lived there and “was a Toltec.” Castaneda adds that the apprentices had previously described don Juan as a cultural descendant of the Toltecs, and he calls Tula the ancient epicenter of the Toltec empire.1

Pablito then supplies the principal sorceric interpretation:

The four Atlanteans are said to be women, associated with the four winds or directions and with the foundation or stability of the pyramid.
The Atlanteans are also identified with the nagual, dreamers, and the order of the second attention brought forward.
The rectangular relief pillars behind them are associated with the tonal, stalkers, and the order of the first attention.
A particular pyramid at Tula is described as a guide to the second attention.

• • Some pyramids are characterized as monumental not-doings: places where ancient warriors practiced dreaming and fixed their second attention.

The destruction of the pyramid is attributed speculatively to another kind of warrior, identified by Pablito as warriors of the third attention who opposed the earlier practitioners’ fixation on the second attention.1

These statements belong to Pablito’s explanation as narrated by Castaneda. They should not be silently converted into archaeological findings or into direct statements personally delivered to Castaneda by don Juan.

Castaneda’s own inference

Castaneda subsequently attempts to explain how the Atlanteans might “walk.” His reasoning is explicitly framed as a chain of propositions based on the corpus’s concepts of luminous beings, divided attention, deliberate fixation, and the projection of attention into material objects. He acknowledges that walking stone figures do not belong to ordinary “serious speculation,” then proposes that the custodian might have perceived a fixation left by ancient sorcerers.1

This is best classified as Castaneda’s in-text interpretation, not direct observation and not an independently corroborated event.

Tula as a dangerous ruin

The chapter broadens the claim beyond Tula. Don Juan is reported to have considered archaeological ruins—especially pyramids—potentially harmful because their objects and designs recorded modes of attention alien to modern people. Pablito calls such ruins “traps of the second attention” and associates repeated visits with sadness, fatigue, and misfortune.1

Later in the chapter, Pablito goes to Tula, described as “the place of his ancestors,” intending to die there. This reinforces Tula’s narrative role as both an ancestral location and a site charged with danger or destiny.1

The meaning of “Toltec”

The corpus does not use Toltec consistently as a conventional archaeological or ethnic designation. In The Eagle’s Gift, Tula, Toltec descent, and a Toltec “empire” are discussed in a recognizably historical-cultural sense. Elsewhere, especially in The Fire from Within, don Juan explains Toltec as a term for men and women of knowledge rather than a racial, national, or archaeological population.1

For reference purposes, these meanings should remain distinct:

Archaeological Toltec: the material culture, political formation, and inhabitants associated with ancient Tula.
Castaneda’s practitioner usage: “Toltec” as a category of seer or person of knowledge.
Lineage or symbolic descent: claims that don Juan or others stood in continuity with ancient Toltecs.

The second and third meanings cannot be established through archaeological classification alone.

“Chacmool” in Readers of Infinity

Readers of Infinity uses Chacmool as the name of a warrior function within the lineage and offers an origin story involving a Maya place called “Chacmool” and an incense-burning sculpture.1 Historically, however, chacmool is a nineteenth-century archaeological label coined after Le Plongeon’s discovery at Chichén Itzá, not a securely documented ancient town name or lineage office.8

The corpus’s Chacmool terminology should therefore be treated as its own internal etymology and office-name, not as settled Mesoamerican history.

Attributed workshop and archival material

Carol Tiggs’s reported Tula tour, May 22, 1995

Castaneda Compendium - All Notes & Periodicals (1).pdf preserves an account titled “Carol Tiggs Speech at Tula, Mexico – May 22, 1995.” The compiler identifies it as an account of a private speech and guided tour given to Cleargreen insiders rather than as an official publication or independently authenticated verbatim transcript.2

Within that account, Tula becomes a setting for a narrative involving:

cyclic beings, explicitly distinguished from reincarnation;
Carol Tiggs and the death defier/Xoxopanxoco;
locations including a museum, chapel, plaza, and hotel;
the claim that invoking Xoxopanxoco’s name at Tula could interrupt internal dialogue;

• • “dreams upon dreams” said to have been woven into the locale.2

The report also says that Carol Tiggs later brought Cleargreen members to Tula and, according to subsequent workshop accounts, put them into dreaming.2

Evidentiary status: attributed archival report. It is materially relevant to the later corpus, but it should not be cited as though it were a published statement by Castaneda or a proven archaeological history of the site.

Mariví de Teresa’s later testimony

A translated interview with Mariví de Teresa reports that Castaneda asked to be driven to Tula during one of his later Mexico visits. According to her recollection, Castaneda described Tula as a city made by ancient practitioners in dreaming and connected it with a “final feat” involving transformation into plumed serpents and an attempt to overcome death.2

This testimony is consistent with the broader corpus’s symbolic association of Tula with dreaming, transformation, and the crossing of ordinary limits. However, it is a later participant’s recollection, transmitted through an interview and translation. It is not equivalent in source weight to The Eagle’s Gift and cannot establish what occurred historically at ancient Tula.

Comparison of corpus claims and archaeology

Claim	Source category	Comparison with archaeological evidence
Tula was a major Toltec center.	Published canonical statement and historical claim	Broad correspondence. Archaeology identifies Tula as the capital of an important Early Postclassic regional state and strongly supports its identification with Tollan.3 4
Tula was the “epicenter of the Toltec empire.”	Castaneda’s narration	Partly compatible but overstated. Tula exercised substantial regional power and long-distance influence, but the nature and territorial extent of a “Toltec empire” remain scholarly questions.3 9
The Atlanteans portray warriors.	Archaeological interpretation reported by Castaneda	Supported and refined. Current archaeological work interprets the figures and adjacent reliefs as elite martial or ruler imagery and confirms their architectural support function.6
The Atlanteans are women representing four directions and the nagual.	Pablito’s canonical explanation	Discrepancy or symbolic reinterpretation. Archaeological iconography identifies the figures as male warriors; no archaeological evidence establishes their identity as women, dreamers, or the nagual.6
The rear pillars represent the tonal and stalkers.	Pablito’s canonical explanation	Not archaeologically supported. The relief figures have instead been interpreted as warrior-kings in sacred dress.6
Tula’s monumental buildings were used for dreaming and fixation of the second attention.	Canonical sorceric claim	Not independently testable from archaeology.Archaeology establishes ceremonial, political, architectural, residential, and ritual functions, but not “second attention.”
A Tula pyramid was deliberately destroyed.	Canonical claim	Partial correspondence only. Archaeology documents burning, dismantling, iconoclasm, collapse, and selective destruction, but agents and motives remain uncertain. There is no evidence identifying “warriors of the third attention” as the destroyers.5 4
The Atlanteans walk at night.	Custodian story and Castaneda’s inference	Unverified. The book itself presents this through hearsay followed by metaphysical interpretation, not observation.1
Tula was created in dreaming and used for a final transformation into plumed serpents.	Later interview testimony	Unverified symbolic or lineage claim. Archaeology does document feathered-serpent imagery at Tula, but not literal transformation or creation of the city through dreaming.2 5
Invoking Xoxopanxoco at Tula affects internal dialogue or perception.	Attributed Carol Tiggs report	Not independently verifiable. This belongs to the internal experiential claims of the later corpus.2
“Chacmool” was an ancient place-name and lineage office.	Castaneda-specific terminology	Historically discrepant. The archaeological term was coined in the nineteenth century and later generalized to a sculptural form.8

Interpretive assessment

Tula functions in the corpus on at least three levels:

Physical Tula: the archaeological city in Hidalgo, including Pyramid B, the Atlanteans, relief pillars, plazas, temples, and other ruins.
Lineage Tula: a place associated with don Juan’s stated Toltec connection, Pablito’s ancestry, ancient seers, and the opposition between first, second, and third attention.
Later symbolic Tula: a setting for cyclicity, Xoxopanxoco, dreaming, transformation, and accounts connected with Carol Tiggs and Castaneda’s later associates.

The first level is substantially accessible to archaeology. The second and third belong to the claims, experiences, and symbolic vocabulary of the Castaneda corpus. Similar imagery—warriors, feathered serpents, ritual buildings, destruction, and later veneration—creates points of contact between the systems, but similarity does not establish identity of meaning.

The safest reference conclusion is therefore:

Castaneda’s Tula is the historical archaeological site in Hidalgo, reinterpreted through a sorceric framework. Some physical descriptions and the site’s general Toltec importance correspond with archaeology. The identifications of monuments with dreamers, stalkers, women of the four directions, second-attention traps, cyclic beings, or transformations into plumed serpents remain corpus-specific claims that archaeology neither confirms nor adequately tests.

Compact source guide

Published corpus

Carlos Castaneda, The Eagle’s Gift, Chapter 1, “The Fixation of the Second Attention”: principal treatment of Tula, the Atlanteans, Pyramid B, second-attention fixation, and Pablito’s ancestry.1
Carlos Castaneda, The Fire from Within: practitioner-oriented use of Toltec, distinct from ordinary archaeological ethnicity.1
Carlos Castaneda, Readers of Infinity: internal explanation of the Chacmool office and name.1

Broader archival corpus

“Carol Tiggs Speech at Tula, Mexico – May 22, 1995,” in Castaneda Compendium - All Notes & Periodicals (1).pdf. Treat as an attributed tour/speech report with limited provenance.2
“The Pieces of the Puzzle – Interview with Mariví de Teresa,” in the same compendium. Treat as later translated testimony.2

Archaeological and historical context

Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, "Zona Arqueológica y Museo de Sitio de Tula."3
Healan, Cobean, and Bowsher, “Revised Chronology and Settlement History of Tula and the Tula Region,” Ancient Mesoamerica 32 (2021).4
Cobean, Healan, and Suárez, “Recent Investigations at Tula Chico, Tula, Hidalgo,” Ancient Mesoamerica 32 (2021).5
Jiménez García, “Warriors, Kings, and Teohuaque at Tula,” Ancient Mesoamerica 32 (2021).6
INAH, "Chac Mool: entre Chichén Itzá y Tula."7
Mary Ellen Miller, “A Re-examination of the Mesoamerican Chacmool,” The Art Bulletin 67 (1985).8