Disk of Death

As you walk through the galleries of the Teotihuacan exhibit in Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology, your eyes may be instantly drawn in the direction of a manifestly morbid sculpture.   

In front of you stands a slate disk depicting a huge grinning skull, its sightless eyes glaring malevolently while a long protruding red tongue lolls from its maw. But perhaps most strangely of all, it is surrounded by what appears at first glance to be an elaborate halo, oddly reminiscent of a Catholic saint.