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    Iconomania: studies in visual culture
    The Symposium Issue:
    Spaces of Transformation

    Precolumbian Antecedents
    for Modern Highland
    Mayan Ceremonialism
    —Allen J. Christenson

  1. The Spanish conquest of western Guatemala in 1524 under Pedro de Alvarado resulted in the abrupt destruction of much of the indigenous art, political power, and the more public religious institutions of the highland Maya.  Ancient temples as well as the carved and painted images which they contained were systematically destroyed, their stones used to build Christian churches as a token of the new faith’s victory over paganism.  While the practice of traditional Maya religion ceased to be a state function after the Conquest, many public ceremonies such as ritual dance performances survived in outlying regions which were less affected by Christian missionary efforts.  In some cases, elements of ritual dances were even encouraged as a means of attracting potential pagan converts.  As part of their programme of converting the Maya to Christianity, the earliest European missionaries in the New World often adopted the outward forms of Precolumbian ceremonialism such as sacred dances and dramatic performances in an effort to supplant the old pagan gods.  But such strategies of appropriation by missionaries opened interstices in Colonial policy which the Maya were in turn able to exploit. As a result, practices, traditions and beliefs which previously had been fostered institutionally in Maya cultures, sometimes persisted in popular forms.

  2. Sometime between 1520 and 1530, Fray Pedro de Gante wrote a number of songs which were intended to accompany a dance reenacting the Nativity of Christ.  He hoped that this performance would eventually replace indigenous dance rituals and thus speed the process of conversion: 

    And because I saw that all of their songs were dedicated to their gods, I composed a very solemn song concerning the law of God and of Faith, ...and also I gave them liberty to paint on their robes in which they danced, for thus they were accustomed to do; thus in keeping with the dances and the songs that they once sang, they now clothed themselves with joy.1

  3. Rather than destroy the practice of paganism, this policy actually fostered its continued survival.  Fray Diego Durán complained that because most priests were ignorant of the language of the recently converted Indians in the New World, they were easily deceived by them.  In their dances and festivals, they continued to honor their “heathen gods” while hiding the practice beneath a thin veil of Christian faith by occasionally shouting out the name of God or some saint.  He suggested that such dances were like a cave or forest where Satan had taken his last refuge.2 

  4. Colonial efforts to break indigenous cultural and religious institutions and native strategies to maintain cultural forms extended as well to written documents.  Prior to the sixteenth century the highland Maya were a fully literate people, recording their history and culture utilizing a hieroglyphic script in folded screen codices made of deer skin or bark paper.  However, the importance of these painted codices prompted Colonial ecclesiastical authorities to single them out for destruction in an effort to protect the Indians from their former paganism.  Fray Bartolomé de las Casas wrote that in 1540 he saw numerous such books in the Guatemalan highlands which “recorded their history for more than eight hundred years back.”  Las Casas later lamented that when found, all such books were burned.3  Of the numerous highland Maya hieroglyphic codices which once existed, not a single one is known to have survived these purges, prompting some scholars to question whether any significant remnants of Precolumbian art or ritual survived the first shock of conquest.4  

  5. It is my assertion that important elements of Maya iconography and ceremonialism were never completely suppressed.  Traditionalist Maya scribes and shamans actively sought to preserve the basic tenets of Precolumbian cosmology while grafting onto them those aspects of Christian worship which were consistent with their own indigenous world view.  Soon after the Conquest, literate members of the highland Maya nobility made a number of lengthy copies of Precolumbian books utilizing the Latin script in an effort to preserve what they could of their history and cultural heritage.  A notable example of such an extant transcription is the Popol Vuh, the most complete account of  Precolumbian history and myth known from the Maya world.  Its native Maya authors compiled the book in the mid-sixteenth century in an effort to record the acts of ancient gods who carried out their purpose “as enlightened beings, in enlightened words” long before the arrival of the Christian god.5   Thus the book contrasts its “ancient word,” which contains light and life, with that of the more recent voice of Christianity.  In highland Maya society, antiquity denotes authority.  In 1977, a K’iche’-Maya priest-shaman in Momostenango attested to me that the traditional Maya god of the earth, Tiox Ulew, is greater than Christ and the saints because he was worshiped by his people for centuries before the arrival of Europeans. 

  6. The highland Maya were particularly successful in preserving the contents of such ancient books.  Two hundred years after the Conquest, Francisco Ximénez wrote that many ancient books, including the transcribed text of the Popol Vuh, were kept in secret by the indigenous elders of Chichicastenango so that local Christian authorities would not learn of them.  Far from being forgotten tales, he found that  these texts were “the doctrine which they first imbibed with their mother’s milk, and that all of them knew it almost by heart.”6   As recently as 1973, Robert Carmack discovered the presumably lost sixteenth century transcription of the Título Totonicapan, along with a number of other documents, which the Maya mayor of the village of Yax kept in an old chest.7 

  7. The best source for ancient highland Maya cosmology is the Popol Vuh which describes the creation of the world and the role of the gods in maintaining life.  The text relates the history of a god named Hun Hunahpu, likely a manifestation of the Precolumbian Maya god of maize,8  who descended beneath a great mountain into the underworld realm of Xibalba, there to confront the twin lords of death.  After a number of trials, the maize god was ultimately defeated and sacrificed.  The victorious underworld lords then took his head and placed it in the branches of a dead tree.  The instant the head touched the tree, it miraculously came to life with abundant foliage and fruits which resembled the god’s skull.  In ancient Maya art, this was the sacred World Tree which represented the ability of life to spring forth from the realm of the dead.  Like the maize god, the dead seed of corn is planted beneath the earth in the underworld.  With time, the grain of maize germinates and sprouts new life from its dry, bony husk.  Ancient art often depicts the maize god rising out of a cleft in the earth with his arms outstretched, a symbol of his rebirth from death as a maize plant.  In the central panel from the Temple of the Foliated Cross at Palenque, the World Tree appears as a fruitful stalk of maize, each ear bearing the head of the maize god. 

  8. Ancient Maya inscriptions on carved stone stelae and architecture continue the story.   After he rose from the dead, the maize god was paddled in a canoe to the center of the sky (Fig. 1), located at the base of the Milky Way near the constellation of Gemini, which the Maya represented as a pair of copulating peccaries.   There the maize god oversaw the setting of three great stones in the constellation of Orion.9  This was the great hearth of the universe.  Fire was kindled there, quickening the cosmos and allowing life to emerge.  Today the Maya still have three-stone hearths in the center of their houses.  It is around this hearth that the family spends much of its indoor time, gathered at the place where maize, still the main staple of the Maya diet, is prepared and cooked to sustain life.   After the foundations of the hearth were set, the maize god erected a great World Tree to support the vault of the heavens, and to serve as the axis point around which the world would be created.  Its roots extended down into the underworld, while its branches stretched out to the four cardinal directions. 

  9. Following their initial conversion to Christianity in the early sixteenth century, the Maya of highland Guatemala progressively integrated components of European Catholicism into their own indigenous world view.  This process of syncretism is particularly evident in the town of Santiago Atitlan where the Tz’utujil-Maya continue to conduct public rituals and create ceremonial objects which display iconographic elements taken from their Precolumbian past combined with Christian imagery.  Santiago Atitlan is located on the shores of a narrow arm of Lake Atitlan at a point where the slopes of three great volcanoes meet (Fig. 2).  The physical setting of the town was likely chosen by its founders as a sacred place, reflecting ancient Maya cosmology which describes the emergence of life centered at a great body of water into which three stones or mountains were set by the gods at the time of creation.  One of the volcanoes has been until recent years very much active, issuing great puffs of smoke and occasional ash on a regular basis. This, then, represents the fiery hearth of the world.  Because of its location and the ceremonies conducted there, the people of Santiago say that they live in the u muxux kaj, u muxux ulep (“navel of the sky, navel of the earth”), the place where all creation began at the center of the universe.  Women wear headdresses which they call the “rainbow serpent,” a representation of the snake-like umbilical cord symbolically connecting each person with their source in the heavens (Fig. 3). 

  10. A notable example of religious syncretism at Santiago Atitlan is the dance ritual of San Martín conducted on November 11, the traditional day of the Roman Catholic calendar dedicated to Saint Martin of Tours.  Although the name of San Martín is venerated by the Tz’utujils on this day, the dance bears little resemblance to traditional Christian liturgy and is likely a continuation of ancient Maya ritual.  The ceremonial cycle surrounding the bundle of San Martín serves, in part, as a metaphor for the life cycle of maize.  While most cult images of saints are carved wooden images, San Martín is a red cloth bundle with five rectangular corn meal cakes placed over it.  This bundle is kept in a carved wooden chest bearing the images of a split ear of maize, a leaping deer, and other symbols representing animal and vegetal fertility (Fig. 4).  The Maya inhabitants of Santiago Atitlan consider the San Martín bundle to be the supreme patron of the maize harvest, and bless their seed corn before it prior to planting to ensure successful harvests and adequate rainfall.  San Martín is considered more ancient than any other god, including Christ, and father to them all.10   Proper observance of dance rituals in his honor are believed essential to the renewal of all life in the community. 

  11. On the evening prior to the day of San Martín on November 11, the saint’s bundle is removed from its chest and laid on an altar.  A ritual dance is then conducted before it.  Two young men wearing jaguar costumes repeatedly paw the backs of two others wearing deer costumes, one of whom is a priest charged with the care of the San Martín bundle.  The priest is eventually “killed” by the jaguar impersonators and carried back to the altar as a sacrificial offering.  Jaguars are considered denizens of the underworld, still known in Santiago Atitlan by its ancient name of Xibalba, who carry out the wishes of the patrons of death and sickness who reside there.  The dance of San Martín thus parallels the Popol Vuh’s account of the descent of the maize god into the darkness of the underworld where the lords of death defeated and sacrificed him.  The ceremony takes place at midnight, as this is considered the time when the lords of Xibalba reign over the earth from their abode in the night sky. 

  12. At Santiago Atitlan the counterpart of the underworld lords is the Mam, meaning “ancient one,” a wooden image with a carved mask tied around the head to serve as its face (Fig. 5).  The Tz’utujils believe that the ceremonial death of the San Martín priest is carried out under the auspices of this deity who is a patron of jaguars.  The Mam’s public sanctuary is located on the north side of the village’s main plaza, north being the direction associated with death, sterility, cold winds, the color black, and other expressions of the destructive elements of the universe.  In public, the Mam wears several layers of clothing and a cigar is inserted in its mouth.  His appearance and function are analogous to God L, the ancient Maya underworld god who was also associated with jaguars and, like the Mam image, is generally

  13. Following his ritual death under the authority of the Mam, the San Martín priest is carried to the altar of the confraternity as a sacrificial offering.  There the priest rises as if from death with his arms outstretched, the same posture assumed by the maize god in ancient Maya artistic convention (Fig. 7).  Members of the confraternity confirmed to me that this stance represents the outstretched arms of the great World Tree which the Maya worship as the center of the cosmos and a symbolic token of renewed life.  Although not specifically mentioned, it may be assumed that the priest of San Martín represents a corporeal manifestation of the god rising from the dead.  Such priests command great respect in Santiago Atitlan and are believed to hold the power to rise from death, an essential component of shamanic ritual.  Deceased priests are often referred to as San Martíns and are expected to continue their work in the underworld.12   The identification of the priest with San Martín reflects the important highland Maya concept of substitution, in which participants in ritual dances become the k’exel (“replacement”) for the figure being represented.  When such dance performances are sacred in nature, participants often fast and undergo other acts of purification to make themselves worthy to bear the identities of deities or ancestral beings.  The priest who dances the bundle of San Martín does so in a shamanic trance, undergoing a ritual death which appears to have profound physiological effects leaving him exhausted afterward. 

  14. Maize and World Tree imagery is also prominently displayed in the main village church.  The priest’s chair is decorated with a carved image of the maize god similar to one found in the lowland Maya Dresden Codex.  Another depiction of the maize god occupies the central position on the church’s lectern, surrounded by four animals representing the evangelists (Fig. 8).  Maya and Christian syncretism is evident in the arrangement of these beasts.  The eagle of St. John is replaced by a quetzal, the sacred bird of the ancient Maya, while a winged deer substitutes for the bull of St. Luke.  The periphery of the lectern is adorned with ears of maize.  Behind the altar, there is a huge carved wood retablo which represents the mountain of creation.  At its base are scenes representing important stages in the San Martín and Mam rituals.  In the center of the carving is the Mam image in his shrine.  On the left are three San Martín priests wearing deer costumes.  The carved images of Tz’utujil priests are shown climbing the mountain-shaped altarpiece toward a world tree laden with fruit.  Ears of maize and images of the maize god mark it as a mountain of sustenance.  Standing before the altarpiece is a great wooden cross which is always kept wrapped in a heavy white cloth (Fig. 9). A member of the confraternity which administers rituals associated with this cross explained that the covering concealed its true nature as the “loq’olaj u chee’ ulep” (“sacred world tree”) from visiting Catholic authorities who mistook it for a crucifix.  Beneath the cloth, the cross is painted green with black striations reminiscent of leaves, scales, or feathers.  Such foliated crosses are common in highland Maya villages, and are traceable to similar verdant cross-shaped World Trees which are prevalent in Precolumbian Maya art, such as those depicted in the sanctuary panels of the Group of the Cross and the sarcophagus lid of Hanab Pakal at Palenque (Fig. 10). 

  15. By dancing the contents of the bundle to the four cardinal directions, the San Martín priest symbolically centers the dance at the axis point of the cosmos, the place of creation.  The setting of the San Martín dance also reflects its cosmic importance as the center of creation.  In the small confraternity room where the bundle of San Martín is kept, the rafters of the ceiling are strung with intricately cut strips of colored paper representing the vault of the heavens (Fig. 11).  Near the main altar hangs a pair of stuffed peccaries and other animals which confraternity members confirmed represent important constellations associated with creation.  Three altars, perhaps representing the three hearthstones of creation in Maya cosmology, are placed against one wall of the confraternity.  Each is carved with creation imagery, including a central table adorned with a small mountain cat (reminiscent of the first jaguar throne stone set in the constellation of Orion at the behest of the Maize deity), a woman giving birth, and a sacrificial deer (symbolic of sacrifice and rebirth from the underworld). 

  16. Following the San Martín priest’s symbolic “resurrection” from death, the Mam image is placed on a priest’s shoulders and hurriedly taken away to be dismantled, with the mask laid upside down to “render it harmless.”13  Death and sterility are thus symbolically banished from the community. In most other highland Maya areas, similar Mam figures are torn apart and scattered on the ground.  I saw one particularly evil looking Mam on the outskirts of Solola thrown onto the nearby highway so that trucks and buses would run over it. 

  17. Sacred bundles of the type worshiped by the Tz’utujils of Santiago Atitlan under the name of San Martín were well known by the indigenous people of Mesoamerica prior to the Spanish conquest, suggesting a relationship with Precolumbian ritual practices.  Las Casas wrote that soon after the Spanish Conquest, he observed that Indians in an unidentified highland Guatemalan village kept in the sanctuary of their temple a wooden ark containing an image of their god wrapped in many layers of cotton cloth.  When the ark and image were destroyed by the Spaniards, the people wept greatly and believed that this sacrilege would cause the earth to open and swallow them all.14   The token of the supreme god of the highland Maya lineages, Tojil, was the bloody skin of a sacrificed deer which was wrapped in a bundle and kept hidden in a wooden chest.  The sacred deer skin bundle was called “Our Lord Deer,” and was venerated as the symbol of power within the highland Maya royal family.15   Mendelson associated the sacred deer skin of the ancient Maya with the garments found in the bundle of San Martín at Santiago Atitlan.16   According to Ximénez, highland Maya rulers reenacted through dance the symbolic death and descent of this god into the underworld during an elaborate festival which included the “Dance of Tojil.”17   The Título de Totonicapán places the Dance of Tojil in the month of Tz’ikin Q’ij, just prior to the harvest in mid-November.18  

  18. Ruth Bunzel wrote that San Martín was arbitrarily selected as the patron of the earth’s fertility by the first Christian missionaries, thereby replacing the name of an earlier Maya god.19   I think it unlikely that this association was arbitrary.  I propose that the supremacy of the festival of San Martín at Santiago Atitlan is due to the coincident appearance of that saint’s day on the Christian calendar at a time which corresponded to the ancient Maya observance of the Great Dance of Tojil.  The Maya were thus able to continue their veneration of the old god at the appropriate time of year by transferring his festival to the day of a Christian saint. 

  19. To the Maya, this curious blending of seemingly disparate beliefs does not seem unnatural.  Periodic attempts by the Catholic clergy to suppress pagan elements has been met with great resistance and even violence.  On at least two occasions, in 1914 and, again, in 1950, Catholic priests conducting Easter Mass at Santiago Atitlan attempted to destroy the Mam image.  In both instances, the priests were driven forcibly out of the village.20   For the most part, village priests today tend to wink at “irregularities” in Christian ceremonies as practiced by the Tz’utujils, so long as they maintain their central emphasis on Christ and the other Christian saints.  Modern traditionalist Tz'utujils-Maya insistence on preserving indigenous cultural imagery and ritual attests an ongoing struggle to assert this people's own unique identity and world view. The efforts of generations of Maya to preserve the core aspects of their ancient faith since the sixteenth century has resulted in the survival of a surprisingly rich array of beliefs and practices which may be traceable to pre-Columbian antecedents

    ——Allen J. Christenson
    DEPT OF ART HISTORYXX
    University of Texas at AustinXX
    XXADDRESS
    "Precolumbian Antecedents for Modern Highland Mayan Ceremonialism"
    Iconomania: studies in visual culture (http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/arthist/Icono/Christenson/maya.htm) 1998.
    christenson@mail.utexas.edu


    Notes to Text

          1 "Carta de Fr. Pedro de Gante al Rey D. Felipe II, 23 de Junio de 1558"; in Nueva colección de documentos para la historia de México, II, Joaquín García Icazbalceta, editor (Mexico, 1889), pp. 231-232. [back] 

          2 Carroll Edward Mace, Two Spanish-Quiché Dance Dramas of Rabinal (New Orleans: Tulane University, 1970), p. 101. [back] 

          3 Bartolomé de Las Casas, Apologética historia de las Indias (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 1958), I.346. [back] 

          4 René Acuña, "Problemas del Popol Vuh," Mester. Revista de Literatura, 5 (Abril), 1975, pp. 123-32; René Acuña, "El Popol Vuh, Vico y la Theologia Indorum," Nuevas Perspectivas Sobre el Popol Vuh. Robert M. Carmack and Francisco Morales Santos, eds. (Guatemala: Editorial Piedra Santa, 1983). [back] 

          5 Popol Vuh, Dennis Tedlock, tr. (New York: Touchstone, 1996), p. 63.  [back] 

          6 Francisco Ximénez, Historia de la provincia de San Vicente de Chiapa y Guatemala (Guatemala: Biblioteca "Goathemala" (1722), 1929) I.5.  [back] 

          7 Robert M. Carmack, El Título de Totonicapán (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1983). [back] 

          8 David Freidel, Linda Schele, and Joy Parker, Maya Cosmos (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1993), p. 110. [back] 

          9 Freidel, Schele, and Parker, Maya Cosmos, pp. 80-85. [back] 

          10 E. Michael Mendelson, "The King, the Traitor, and the Cross: An Interpretation of a Highland Maya Religious Conflict," Diogenes, No. 21 (1958), p. 5. [back] 

          11 Sandra L. Orellana, The Tzutujil Mayas (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984), p. 58. [back] 

          12 E. Michael Mendelson, "A Guatemalan Sacred Bundle," Man, Vol. 58 (August 1958), pp. 89-90. [back] 

          13 E. Michael Mendelson, "Maximon: An Iconographical Introduction," Man, 87 (April 1959), pp. 58-60. [back] 

          14 Las Casas, Apologética Historia II, pp. 157-8. [back] 

          15 Tedlock, Popol Vuh, p. 174. [back] 

          16 Mendelson, "A Guatemalan Sacred Bundle," p. 124. [back] 

          17 Ximénez, Historia de la Provincia, I.101. [back] 

          18 Carmack, Título Totonicapan, 1983, pp. 196, 252; Robert M. Carmack, The Quiche Mayas of Utatlan: The Evolution of a Highland Guatemalan Kingdom (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981), p. 88. [back] 

          19 Ruth Leah Bunzel, Chichicastenango, American Ethnological Society, Pub. XXII (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1952), p. 57. [back] 

          20 Samuel K. Lothrop, "Further Notes on Indian Ceremonies in Guatemala," Indian Notes, Vol. 6 (1929), p. 23; E. Michael Mendelson, Los Escándalos de Maximon (Guatemala: Seminario de Integración Social Guatemalteca, 1965), p. 65. [back] 

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