|  | | In the Church of San Juan Chamula; pine needles carpet the pewless floor while the scent of candles and burning copal incense fill the air. Pilgrims moved slowly from statue to statue, praying to saints for health, wealth, and luck in love. An elderly woman is diagnosed by a shaman using fresh eggs and a chicken. Egg in hand, the shaman traced the woman's body several times, praying aloud as he worked. He then broke the egg into a bowl, the pattern of its yolk revealing the affliction. With further incantations and offerings, the shaman "transferred" the illness to the chicken, which he then sacrificed by breaking its neck. A three-foot-tall figure of John the Baptist stood near the altar, dressed in layers of embroidered garments--tokens of gratitude from those whom he had helped. Patron saint of this Tzotzil Maya church in highland Chiapas, Mexico, the Baptist was responsible for bringing rain and ensuring the fertility of crops and animals. He had thus assumed the mantle of Chak, the Classic period water god.
In recent years, archaeologists and anthropologists have begun to hold discussions with those who practice the old ways, and are coming to realize just how much Precolumbian ritual has survived. Considering that 500 years have elapsed since the Spanish Conquest the enduring nature of Classic Maya religious concepts and beliefs is strong.
In the Chol town of Tila, in highland Chiapas the cult of a "Black Christ" known as the Señor de Tila, an blend of Christ and Ik'al, a Precolumbian cave-dwelling earth deity remains widespread. Each January and June, tens of thousands of pilgrims come to the town to seek the support of the Señor de Tila, who is venerated both in the local church and in a nearby rock-shelter, which contains a large stalagmite believed by townspeople to be a representation of Christ. According to local tradition, Ik'al is a manifestation of "Earth Owner," the master of souls who holds the key to health and wealth and must be petitioned and rewarded through prayers and sacrifice. For the people of Tila, the Precolumbian idea of making sacrifices to ensure the well-being of one's family and loved ones echoes Christ's giving of his life to pay for the sins of the world."
"Modern Maya see little conflict in merging the two faiths," says Robert M. Laughlin, an anthropologist with the Smithsonian Institution who has lived among the Tzotzil of Zinacantan for more than 30 years. "It is common on feast days for a procession to begin at the Church of San Lorenzo with a mass for Christ the Sun God and his mother the Moon Goddess, and then proceed to a nearby hill for the veneration of ancestors and Maya gods, including Chauk, an earth and water deity."
Caves have played a key role in Mesoamerican religion for more than 3,000 years, serving as doors to the Otherworld--the realm of deities, demons, and ancestors. There are more than 25 known painted caves in the Maya world, the earliest being Loltún in Yucatán, whose paintings have been dated to the Late Preclassic, ca. 300 B.C. James Brady of George Washington University has documented the continued veneration of Naj Tunich, a two-mile-long painted cave in the southeastern Petén region of Guatemala. Naj Tunich began attracting pilgrims early in the first century B.C., when stone platforms were erected just inside the cave's entrance. Offerings such as ceramics and jadeite pendants were deposited atop platforms adjacent to several large stalagmite columns. The majority of the cave's painted inscriptions, some 40 in all, were drawn during the seventh and eighth centuries.
Three verbs associated with pilgrimage--hul (to arrive), pak (to return), and il (to see or witness events at a foreign place)--pervade the Naj Tunich texts, according to Andrea Stone of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, who has studied the inscriptions. The presence of emblem glyphs from a number of cities suggests that the cave was used by people living throughout the region. One inscription notes that lords from the Lowland Maya city of Caracol, 30 miles to the north, performed a k'ak' kuch, or "burning" ritual in the cave in A.D. 744. Burning incense may have served to appease local gods and guarantee safe passage for dignitaries traveling through foreign territory.
Today's pilgrims, mostly from the Kekchi villages of Tanjoc and Alta Verapaz, ten to 15 miles away, come to the cave before the rainy season, which begins in late May and early June, to burn incense and light candles to ensure a good harvest. Though some ritual aspects have certainly changed, cave worship continues to figure prominently in Maya religion."
There are five classes of sacred topography among the Tzotzil of Zinacantan--vits (mountains), ch'en (holes in the ground such as caves), hap 'osil (mountain passes), ton (rocks), and te' (trees)--geographic features filled with spirit activity. The veneration of mountains stretches deep into the Precolumbian past, serving as the impetus behind the building of pyramids. Pyramids are artificial mountains. The building is actually labeled 'mountain,' its doorway, the gaping maw of the earth monster, a metaphor for a cave. Priests would have entered the "cave" to converse with the ancestral spirits, in association with all sorts of ritual activities, including incense burning and bloodletting."
As caves and mountains occur together in the landscape, both serve as doorways to the Otherworld. To journey through them and return alive, however, requires the special talent of a shaman. In antiquity, Maya kings interceded with the gods and ancestors on behalf of their cities. Today, in many Maya communities, mayors and healers are one and the same, responsible for their people's physical and spiritual health.
An altar, known as a ka'an te' or "wooden sky," represents the cosmos. Leafy green saplings, tied together several feet above the table's center, symbolize the arching of the Milky Way across the night sky. Thirteen gourds suspended from the saplings represent the constellations of the Maya zodiac. The building of the ka'an te' can be traced back as early as the Classic period, from which there are depictions on several stone vases.
Shamans are also traditional healers--bone setters, midwives, and herbalists. The most skilled are the h'men, doctor-priests who treat the minds, bodies, and souls of villagers. For the Maya, physical and spiritual health are one and the same. Ailments could be brought on by a restless soul or profaned gods and ancestors. To cure an illness took not only prescribed remedies but spiritual reconciliation.
Among the Quiché of highland Guatemala, says Barbara Tedlock, a State University of New York, Buffalo, anthropologist and trained shaman-priest, "some illnesses can even be a call to serve gods and ancestors." There are six such illnesses--snake, horse, twisted stomach, dislocated bone, inebriation, and money loss--all of which incapacitate a patient. To cure them requires becoming a daykeeper, one who burns incense and offers prayers at shrines on designated days of the tzolkin, the 260-day sacred calendar.
The Quiché believe that when great shamans die, their souls congregate at lineage shrines where they worshiped during their lives. As the shamans' souls accumulate, the shrines--known as warab'alja, literally "sleeping places"--are endowed with increasing power. Each lineage group has four such shrines built in the form of small stone boxes where prayers are offered on specific calendar days and to commemorate births, deaths, marriages, plantings, and harvests.
"These shrines are also used to demarcate lands owned by a lineage group," says Dennis Tedlock, also a trained Quiché shaman-priest. "When a property is sold in the Quiché region, new landowners remember previous landowners in prayers at recently acquired shrines. The location of each shrine is dictated by the landscape, there being a distinct preference for mountains, caves, lakes, and springs."
By studying modern Maya religious practices, archaeologists and anthropologists are beginning to gain critical insight into rites often depicted in ancient Maya art. The next decade promises to bring even more discoveries on Maya culture."
Today, like so long ago, violence is frequent in the Mayan world. Guatemala only recently ended a 30 year long civil war. Random killing still occurs. In Chiapas, Mexico, Mayans calling themselves Zapatistas rose up against the government. The outside world looks at what is happening to try and understand the problems of the people in light of the political and economic troubles of our time.
But the truth lies elsewhere. The truth is that the Mayan war began almost 500 years ago and has never stopped.
The indians in the Yucatán peninsula who speak la maya; Tzeltals, Tzotzils and Chamulas from Chiapas; Lacandons in their jungle; Cakchikels and Quichés from Guatemala; Kekchís from Belize; Chontals, Choles, Tojolabals, Mams, Motozintlecs and Itzáes in the Petén - all of them are the descendants of the ancient Maya, whose long lost cities, civilization, mathematics, calendar and astronomy amaze us even today.
They are the same masked rebels that often appear in the news arriving from Chiapas. Today, the Maya live in the same land that belonged to their ancestors, from Campeche and Yucatán to Honduras, and they keep being the same old headache to the white people who came to take their homeland in the first quarter of the 16th Century. The Maya nation today counts more than six million, making them the most numerous indian people in the Americas, north of Perú.
The Mayan land has never been really at peace since the white people arrived. Just take a look to any historical timeline to see that peace for them, has been but a brief rest between war periods, revolts, insurrections and riots. |
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