Google Plus Photo Album

To make up for the fact that I never really finished the account of my second Guatemala trip, I've created a Google+ photo album of about 700+ Guatemala pics. Right now it's completely unsorted and unlabeled, but I'll work on that. You can see it at: https://plus.google.com/photos/114457936792556570427/albums/5763298730859843169

Rotten Cane

To get to the ruins of Kumarkaaj, the ruins of the citadel that was the capital of the Quiche empire, you can take a bus from the front of the church in Santa Cruz del Quiche for a single quetzal. When I went, everyone else on the bus was Mayan. Most of these were heading to other stops in tiny villages along the way; in fact, only one other person got off at the ruins, a young Mayan man.

They drop you off at the bottom of a small paved road that you have to climb to get to the ruins. The vegetation is mountainous, mostly tall pine trees, many hanging with long strands of Spanish moss. The ground is grassy, and littered with long pine needles and pinecones. It could hardly be more like the mountains I grew up in back in New Mexico.

At the top of the road is a guard station at which you pay Q30 to get in. This is followed by a small museum with a few relics and a scale replica of what they think the citadel must have looked like before it was destroyed by the Spanish. It was constructed on a mesa at the top of a high peak, with steep slopes and cliffs plunging off on every side.

Coming out of the museum, you are on a wide dirt road with remnants of old bricks under it. Around the road are small mounds and trenches that look like they are the remains of something artificial, though you can't be sure. The bricks on the road feel hollow when you tap them with your finger; most of the structures here were constructed of a very light pumice that may have been mined from one of the steep white cliffs around the citadel.

Kumarkaaj was also known as Utatlan, but I will call it by the English translation of its name: Rotten Cane. It was the third capital of the Quiche, the other two having been on smaller hills nearby. Each citadel was higher and more elaborate as the Quiche became more powerful.

As you approach Rotten Cane, at first all you see are small raised mounds overgrown with grass, with perhaps just a bit of stone emerging from the side. Then you see a much bigger mound, perhaps thirty feet high. This is the temple of Auilitz. It's covered with grass, with footpaths going up to the top

Auilitz was one of the three gods the stories say the Quiche brought back from the magic city of Tulan Zuyua in the east. The gods took the form of stone icons that could speak in the time of "shadows," when the First People had just been created and the sun, moon and stars had not yet shown themselves. The actual icon of Auilitz was hidden in one of the plunging canyons near here.

It's tempting to think of the Mayans as innocents who were living their lives peacefully until they were set upon by European colonists. But at least in the case of the Quiche, that would be a mistake. The Quiche were expansionary and agressive, fierce conquerors who overthrew and colonized numerous other settlements ranging from Lake Atitlan all the way up to the border of the Peten. The captives in these wars were dragged back to Rotten Cane, where they were sacrificed in front of the temples of the Quiches' three main gods: Tohil, Auiliz and Hacauitz.

I have heard that in some Mesoamerican cultures, the victims of human sacrifice were honored guests, treated well right up until their death. That may be, but as the Popul Vuh makes clear, that was not the case for victims of Quiche sacrifice. The PV states that the Quiches earned the right to sacrifice the members of bordering tribes through a horrifying story of trickery, and that they took full advantag of that right.

The time of shadows was, as one would imagine, extremely cold. All the tribes were freezing to death, but only the god of the Quiches, Tohil, was able to generate fire. Naturally all the other tribes begged to get a bit of the Quiches' fire. The Quiches said they would give them fire on the condition that later on they could "suckle at the breasts" of the other tribes. The other tribes agreed, not knowing that what that meant was in fact cutting out their hearts.,/p>

After the sun rose, the icons themselves no longer spoke directly, but instead spoke through spirits of young boys that demanded that the First Men hunt down the men of the other tribes, possibly in were-animal form, and then feed their hearts to the bloodthirsty child spirits of the three gods. When they were done they'd leave the skulls in the road as a message to everyone else. It's nearly impossible to put a positive spin on the First Men here; to a modern reader they essentially appear to be forest-dwelling serial killers. The point of this is not to put down the Quiche or excuse the depradations performed by the colonists upon them, but to point out that the Quiche were, up until their fall, what we would call Bad Mother F**kers.

Now, however, their capital is a haunting forest full of dirt mounds, bird chirping in the trees.

When you come around Auilix's temple, you find yourself in the central plaza of Rotten Cane. The plaza is now a quiet field of grass, perhaps half the size of a soccer field. In the center of the plaza is a circular firepit, and as I approached a man was standing by it scattering flower petals into a fire there. On one side of the plaza stands the temple of Auilix, and on another stands the temple of Hacauitz, a slightly larger mound with similar paths climbing up it. But on a third side stand the most significant structures, the ballcourt and the temple of Tohil.

Unlike the rest of the other structures distributed around Rotten cane, which mostly resemble large mounds of dirt now, the Temple of Tohil and the ballcourt are distinct structures of stone. In fact, the ballcourt appears to be partially reconstructed, as the bricks are in far better condition than anything else in the vicinity. The temple of Tohil is taller and in better shape than any of the other structures except the ballcourt. I don't know if this is because it's partially excavated, or if it is because it's built of tougher stuff than the light pumice that makes up everything else.

My attention was drawn to the ballcourt first. This would not be the ballcourt where the PV says the Hero Twins played their games before they were drawn down into the Land of Death to play the Xibalbans. According to Dennis Tedlock, that would be up near Coban, on the border of Verapaz.

But this would be the ballcourt with which the scribes that wrote down the alphabetic PV were most familiar, the ballcourt where they likely saw games played in their lifetime. The game must have been incredibly difficult; somehow you had to knock a rubber ball through a vertical stone hoop nearly the height of a basketball hoop just using your hips. Contrary to popular belief, the losers (or, as some say, winners) probably did not usually get sacrificed. The game was played only by high-born nobles, and the Spanish colonists wrote that the nobles played for money, cacao and slaves. It seems likely to me that the losers had to give up some of their own slaves to be sacrificed by the winners, maybe as symbolic substitutes for the lives of their defeated masters.

But if you played in the underworld of Xibalba against the Lords of Death, according to the PV, it was another story. The Xibalba home court was adjoined by a Place of Ball Game Sacrifice, where the losers most certainly were killed. Among those losers were One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu, the father and uncle of the Hero Twins, and part of the Hero Twins' mission to Xibalba is vengeance for these two. The scribes of the PV most certainly would have been thinking of a similar place of sacrifice near the ball court of Rotten Cane. Most likely this would have been in front of the Temple of Tohil.

Though the Temple of Tohil is large and impressive next to the other delapidated mounds of Rotten Cane, it would be a pipsqueak compared to the much larger ruins of the Peten and the Yucatan. Neither its size or its condition is what is interesting about it.

what is interesting about this temple, and the even more ruined temples that neighbor it, is the thick smoke stains that run up the bricks around its recessed altar, the candle wax that drips down its front, and the recent offerings are scattered everywhere around it. What's interesting are the worshippers that even now burn incense in the firepit in the central plaza.

The temple of Tohil, Hacauitz and Auilitz are in every way temples in active use. They are active today, and most likely have been active without interruption since the Spanish tried to destroy them and everything they stood for.

Rotten Cane is called a citadel, but it is a mistake to think of it as a city. Like a city, Rotten Cane had palaces, offices, towers and temples. But a city is also a palce where ordinary people work and live, marry and have children, run businesses and make homes.

The people who live in Rotten Cane would have been kings, officials, lords, commanders and priests. These men were most seized by the Spanish when the city fell, to be tortured and hanged or burned, something that was also recorded in the alphabetic PV, which was written after Rotten Cane's fall. But the regular Mayans would have lived in smaller villages on the surrounding hillsides, working milpas, raising families, building houses, keeping animals and hunting.

Five centuries later, the descendants of those people still live there.

In the 14th and 15th centuries, at the height of Rotten Cane's power, the Quiche priests and lords would have led great ceremonies and sacrifices to celebrate military victories, coronations, ball games and holy days. Many of those rituals have vanished, leaving only a huge grassy plain scattered with trees growing from hills that were once their high offices.

But the working people would certainly have climbed to the citadel to make their own offerings to these temples for blessings on their marriages and childbirths, harvests and hunts.

In the 21st century, they still do.

The towering ruins of Chichen Itza and Tikal, impressive though they are, are ancient remnants of stories long forgotten even by the people who still lived in the area. I am told that there are efforts in some places to revive these rituals, but as hard as anyone tries it can only ever be a reenactment.

But the story of Rotten Cane is still being told. Just as they have for the last five centuries, the Christan priests struggle unsuccessfully to get their parishioners to abandon their old faith completely and confine their worship to one jealous diety. And the Mesoamerican Indians still fear the oppression of Ladino overlords, whom some Mayans still call the 'Spaniards.'

Rotten Cane contains many more structures, all of them mounds overgrown with grass today. Away from the plaza the forest takes over completely, bromeliad-hung pines stretching to the terrifying cliffs at the edges of the plateau. Locals tie flowers to some of these trees and sing songs, either because certain trees have powerful spirits or just because it's away from the eyes of tourists like me. Then there is the deep sacred cave dug under the mountain by the builders of the citadel, something that will get its own post.

The citadel is a ruin, its stone structures are destroyed. But it's not dead. In spite of all attempts to kill it, it is alive as it ever was.

Pascual Abaj - The Sacrifice Stone

I suppose I hoped for more from the Museo de Arceologico in Chichicastenango, though that's not really fair. They have two long rows of glass cabinets filled with old pottery ranging from the pre-classic (before 300 BC) to the post-classic (1100-1500 AD) period, along with a small collection of jade artifacts. (Unfortunately photographs are forbidden). But given that this is the central collection of archeology from the Quiche region in the heart of the Quiche department, one could only wish they had more.

Nevertheless, I'm extremely glad I went, because I met Hector, my guide to the Pascual Abaj shrine. I spent a long time looking at the pieces, and Hector asked me if I wanted a guide to the shrine. Based on my experiences in Santiago de Atitlan, I've learned that when a person who seems to know something offers to show you around it's worth paying what he asks.

The road up to the Pascual Abaj wouldn't stand out if you weren't looking for it. You pass through an older part of town, down a road lined on one side with houses made of adobe instead of rebar and cinder block like most of the newer buildings, and on the other with a fence overlooking a slope filled with milpas, or cornfields. I probably could have found my way myself, but paying Hector to guide me turned out to be well worth it. We passed up a small rise with a little sign labeling the direction of the shrine, and then through a building of orange stucco. This building was labeled the "museum of masks," something I was curious about. It appeared to be closed, so I kept going. We came to a path through another small milpa.

At the top of this path is an open-faced construction with a tin roof held up by wooden posts and adobe walls in the back on two sides. In the center of this structure is a square firepit filled with coals and stained with dripping candle wax. In the back of the structure is a long platform with several rows of gray stones that are naturally shaped like tombstones.

These stones are littered with pine needles, and have candles placed all around them. They also have other offerings, including bundles of sticks and bunches of flowers. There were also offerings of tobacco in thick cigars, something I had only seen before at the in front of Maximon in Santiago de Atitlan. Candles in glass holders burn off to one side, and smaller candles drip wax down the side of the rocks and off the front of the platform.

Pascual Abaj's lower shrine from the entrance

One thing distinctly lacking in this room was the cross. This is significant because often in Mayan syncretist altars there are at least a few, in order to show that the ritual isn't completely pagan. Although some of the glass candle holders had the Virgin Mary on them, this was the first place of worship I'd seen with no crosses at all (though not the last).

A closeup view of Pascual Abaj's lower shrine

I thought this was it, so it was a good thing I brought Hector. He guided me further up the hill, on a steep mountain path. On the way, he told me that Pascual Abaj is a shrine to the duende, or spirit, of the hill, the town, and the surrounding area. He said that the duende was once a living person, a great and generous man, and when he died he became the spirit of the hill.

Duende is a term imported from Spain, where it means something like an elf or faerie. There are many Mayan tales of hills having a duende inside them that rules over the area, and provides good or bad luck depending on how well you treat them. I assume that just like in Europe, when pagan gods get demoted by the rise of monotheism, people start calling them duende or spirits instead.

 

At the top of the hill is Pascual Abaj, or sacrifice stone, itself. Pascual Abaj is in a U-shaped enclosure of black stones covered with offerings, with a small firepit inside. There is a cross here, a stone one. The Pascual Abaj stone is shaped like a roughly carved head, but most of the lower section is covered with ashes, as if it's been burned away. About twenty feet in front of the half-circle of stones is another, larger firepit.

Pascual Abaj, the 'sacrifice stone,' is the head-like shape in the center of the semicircle of rocks.

Unlike the lower shrine, this altar was in use. A man was kneeling in front of the sacrifice stone tending a fire. Other people were standing around a fire in the larger pit, which from its smell contained copal incense. One person was chanting and others were throwing in offerings of flower petals. I didn't want to take pictures, it seemed disrespectful. But Hector insisted, and several of the people at the fire said it was okay as well.

The rituals are simple, but this is syncretism in action. Offerings of flower petals, tobacco and incense were the same thing that the Quiche lords gave their gods, according to the Popul Vuh.

These same offerings are for sale in an aisle in the Chichicastenango market now: candles, flower petals, bundles of flowers, bundles of resinous kindling, and balls of copal incense. In the Popul Vuh, the mother of Hunahpu and Xpbalanque used a ball of incense just like these to trick the Lords of Death. She delivered the copal to the Xibalbans through their messengers the owls in place of her heart, which the owls were to cut out.

On the way back, I asked Hector if the Museum of Masks was closed. Hector called to a man in an adjoining workshop. The man got out a key and opened the door to the museum.

 

I entered a room that was covered from floor to ceiling on every wall with a spectacular arrangement of masks. Masks of deer, monkeys, jaguars, eagles, crows, skulls devils and heroes. In front of the room was a collection of figurines, a stone altar with candles, and a seated figure that was reminiscent of Maximon but with a painted face.

Two walls on the museum of masks

I asked if I could take a picture, and the proprietor said I could in that room, but not in the next. I asked what was in the other room. He said that these masks were old, but in the other room were new masks that he had made.

The masks in the other room were spectacular. Unlike the older masks, which were mostly stained wood with only a little decoration, these masks were finely painted in bright colors. Many of them were human faces with animals above them, animals that played an important part in Quiche mythology: owls, falcons, jaguars, snakes and toads. There was a mask with two catfish, which I recognized as symbolizing the reincarnated form of Hunahpu and Xbalanque after they are burned in the fire of the Lords of Death. There was another double mask labeled with the names of the Hero Twins, which warmed my heart.

Masks seem to play a bigger role to the Quiche today than I had anticipated. Nearly every room I entered in Quiche seemed to be hung with masks, and countless booths in the Quiche Market were selling masks as well. But none of them were near the quality I saw in the Museum of Masks.

I spent another day in Chichi, just to see the market, but I didn't buy anything. It's nice stuff, but it's heavy and I am carrying enough already. I'm having serious shoulder problems; I've tried to minimize the weight of my pack by taking a bunch of stuff out and carrying it in a separate bag, but the damage is done and from my experience it will likely last a few weeks at least.

While I was in the market I ran into my old roommates, who told me that they'd been up to Kumarkaaj yesterday and seen a ceremony of some sort. I was kind of furious that they'd seen it and I hadn't, since they had neither interest in it nor appreciation. If I'd stayed with them I'd have seen the ceremony they saw, but seeing it with them might have been worse than not seeing it at all.

In any case, I went up to Santa Cruz del Quiche the next day, and then to Kumarkaaj. I didn't see a big ceremony like they saw, but I saw plenty. I'll write about that when I get back.

Pictures from Lake Atitlan

Here are just a few pictures taken from the boat on Lake Atitlan

Santa Cruz de la Laguna

Yesterday I took a boat to Santa Cruz de la Laguna to see if I wanted to stay there. There are a couple of hotels right by the water, and they do look nice. But the hotels are completely separated from the village by a long winding pathway twisting up the mountain. I climbed up to the village there (actually one of several that are part of Santa Cruz de la Laguna). The view up the climb was spectacular.

The village reminded me a lot of San Mateo de Ixtatan; if anything it was even poorer. The houses are on a steep slope, maybe thirty degrees all the way up. Most are made of stones or cinder block, with some made of adobe. Like any Mayan village there are dogs everywhere in the street.

There was a small church, with kids playing basketball out front. There were some American or European volunteers playing basketball with them. I thought that if I went up far enough I'd find a road with a bus station that might have chicken buses going to Chichicastenango, but the town doesn't appear to be connected to a road.

On the way back down I wanted to find a place to change a Q100 note, since the boat drivers don't always have change. I stopped in a small restaurant that was run by a nonprofit that is educating the young Mayans in trades. When I opened the door the first thing I saw was a room full of sewing machines and weaving looms.

They had a small restaurant, run by culinary students. I ordered a tamale plate, and they made a fantastic little dish with small vegetable tamales under sauce and three kinds of salsa. There was a Mayan man in there who appeared to be in charge, and I asked him about the school. The vocational center is called CECAP, and in addition to sewing and culinary skills, it teaches metalwork, carpentry, computer skills, as well as traditional academics. It's run by an organization called Amigos de Santa Cruz. On the way back down I saw a sign off the main path that led to a cafe and event organizer, the Tours Atitlan Adventure Center. I stopped in for some coffee, and met a young man named Isalas, who worked for Tours Atitlan. He asked me what kind of things I wanted to do, and I explained to him that I wasn't that interested in things like kayaking and paragliding and so on, I was more interested in Mayan culture and history.

Isalas turned out to be incredibly knowledgeable, though I think he's still in his teens. His father and mother are Quiche and they were in the Quiche department when the military committed some of their worst atrocities, and barely survived themselves. He told me that the man who is president of Guatemala now was a general during that time, so not surprisingly most Mayans hate him. He showed me a book that described the civil war well, and I want to find it.

He had also been reading extensively about Mayan culture himself. He said that he felt a lot of it was being lost and forgotten. He knew of the events in the Popul Vuh very well, and was able to tell me some things I didn't know. He had been to Copan (should have an accent, but I can't figure out how to put it in), which was said to be the "magic city in the east" where the first people got their gods. He told me that there is a place near there called Sopas where the first people had their children, and had to wait six months before they could return. I asked him if he knew of a play about how the Mayan king Tekun Uman was killed by the Spanish. He said that he knew about it, but that it was being performed less and less. He also told me of a book that claims that that Tekun Uman wasn't really a king, just a mask. I need to find this book, preferably an English version, so I can understand that better. Today I'm heading up to Pana. It will cost a little more money to stay there, but I need to be closer to Chichicastenango and Santa Cruz del Quiche. I'm going to get my own place with wifi, maybe even a bathroom. Then I'm going to find the cheapest way to go north.

Random observations about Guatemala to wrap up the trip

Just reserved a minibus ride back to the airport tomorrow. But I have lots of pictures and observations I haven´t shared yet, so I should be putting up some more Guatemala stuff for the next week or so. Maybe I´ll do a Flickr or Picasa slideshow or something.

I have mostly been writing today. I can write anywhere, of course, but today´s the last day I can write on the shores of Lake Atitlan!

To wrap things up, here´s some random observations about Guatemala:

Guatemalans love fried chicken, and you can get some of the best fried chicken I´ve ever had here. There´s a Guatemalan chain called Pollo Campero which has become the KFC of Central America, but way better.

In a country that grows some of the best coffee in the world, everyone drinks instant! It is pretty much impossible to get a decent cup of coffee in this country except in tourist towns like Panajachel or Antigua. If you can persuade a Guatemalan to brew a cup of coffee in most places it will be so weak you can see through it to the bottom of the cup. In Pana you can get espresso, and you can also buy Guatemalan beans to take home. But it´s kind of ridiculous to do so. There are five or more places within 15 minutes walk of my house where I can get several varieties of Guatemalan coffee, either by the cup or in beans, more easily than I can get it here. Of course this is partially about economic inequality, but not entirely. I spoke to a woman whose father works on an international award-winning coffee plantation who could get the beans free but still prefers to drink instant coffee.

Guatemalan picante sauce is made with pickled cauliflowers, cabbage, peppers, onions and other vegetables in a sort of greenish sauce.

In a nod to Guatemala´s German influence, Mayan food will often have a side of something kind of like cole slaw. But this slaw usually will be made with potatoes and carrots instead of cabbages, which is weird because the Mayans eat lots of cabbage otherwise.

Corn tortillas here are about half the diameter of the kind you get in the US, but about twenty times as good, especially straight off the grill. In Mayan meals especially, you always get way more tortillas than you can possibly eat. But it´s hard to get tortillas packaged to take home, I guess because people assume that everyone knows how to make them.

In Mayan villages, people just tie their pigs up anywhere. The piglets just run through the town, along with the chickens and turkeys and of course the dogs.

Speaking of dogs, in Mayan villages they almost never go inside and rarely get pet except maybe by kids when they´re puppies. Even the most neglected dog in the US would be ridiculously spoiled by the standards of Mayan dogs, who mostly hang around outside with visible ribs waiting for any scrap anyone throws them. To give you an idea how how hungry a Mayan dog is, when I was cleaning dishes outside before I left Santiago de Atitlan I scraped off a large chunk of plain dried rice left over in a pot, and a dog that had been hanging around the house ate every bite of it. Find me a dog in the US that will eat dried rice!

Houses, especially in Mayan villages, are painted in brilliant pastel oranges, blues and yellow over stucco or adobe. Doors are painted with geometric multicolored arcs, stars and crescents reminiscent of Moorish Spain.

The country of Guatemala has a schizophrenic relationship to Mayan culture. On the one hand Mayan history is the center of the country´s identity. There are pictures of pyramids and Mayan glyphs everywhere. The Mayan sacred bird the quetzal is both the national animal and also the namesake of the currency. And a one-quetzal bill has a watermark of the Quiche prince who died resisting Pedro de Alvarado. On the other hand, Mayans themselves remain the lowest social class. In fact nearly everyone here is part Indian. But Ladinos, who are more Spanish than Mayan, run nearly everything and have most of the money.

In Panajachel you will see Mayan men wearing traditional Mayan clothes of brightly colored striped pants and shirts. But in most places Mayan men wear the kind of clothes that from the waist up wouldn´t seem out of place at the State Fair in New Mexico: western shirts and cowboy hats. For pants they tend to wear slacks instead of jeans and on their feet they wear a sort of tough outdoor wingtip shoes instead of cowboy boots. Boys, when they can get away with it, prefer jeans and hoodies pretty much like American kids.

On the other hand Mayan women and girls nearly always wear traditional Mayan skirts and blouses. The popular headgear in the Highlands is a striped scarf tied around the head with a double knot covered with another scarf, usually in a paisley or flower pattern, wrapped over the knots. The whole arrangement looks like a sort of bulbous hat that projects over their foreheads, and also conveniently keeps the sun off.

Mayan women can effortlessly balance enormous bundles wrapped in Mayan blankets on their heads, and walk for miles with them. If they have to carry something especially heavy, like a load of firewood, both men and women use a sort of rope net-pack that hangs down their back from a strap that goes over their foreheads.

The longest, most arduous hike you´ve ever been on would probably be a routine stroll to most Highlands Mayans. It happened all the time that while riding in a bus through a mountain forest with no habitations of any sort in sight a Mayan man, woman or family would whistle to the bus driver then jump out in the middle of nowhere so they could walk several miles up some nearly vertical little dirt path to a house or two at the top of the mountain. And this would be their daily commute.

I´m sure I´ll think of some more. Thanks to everyone who has been reading. Now that I´ve got my blog going again I´m going to try to keep it active, though I´m not entirely sure what I´ll be writing about. In any case, I´ll try to keep it interesting.

Bad dentistry and daykeepers

By most people´s standards today was a ¨wasted¨ day. Not that I didn´t do anything, but I didn´t do anything I could have only done while I´m in Guatemala. In the morning I was writing -- rewriting actually, the scene where the Hero Twins kill the demon Seven Macaw with bad dentistry. This is one my favorite scenes in the Popul Vuh, and one of the scenes that inspired me to write this trilogy. So naturally I want it to be really good in my book as well.

As an utter bonus, I have discovered that fancy artificial teeth are quite popular in Guatemala, especially among the Highlands Mayans. I assume this is partially because of the dreadful state of dentistry (along with any other modern medical care) for the people in small towns in the Highlands. I have seen a number of pairs of gold front teeth with golden crosses or other symbols in the middle of the white enamel. It is not much of a stretch to imagine someone replacing the enamel of the teeth with brite green jade, as Seven Macaw did in the PV. Since this is in the PV this was presumably a normal part of dental care even in pre-Columbian times. I wonder to what degree they still use the same methods?

I might have gone out, but I stopped into ¨Bus Stop Books,¨ and English-language bookshop and coffee shop here. I was just going to buy a couple of scifi paperbacks as I always do when I find an independent bookshop I want to support. But then in the ¨library¨ section I saw a book called ¨Breath on the Mirror¨ by Dennis Tedlock. Tedlock wrote the most authoritative translation of the Popul Vuh, and he is the only non-Mayan I know of who has learned enough of the language and culture of a Mayan tribe (the Quiche, in this case) to earn the title of daykeeper.

The Mayan ceremonial system is centered around the counting of days. This is not on the 360+5 day calender that´s part of the ¨long count¨ system that has everyone freaking out unreasonably about 2012. (If anyone asks you, tell them that not even the Maya believe that year represents the end of the world.)

But the daykeepers focus on the ceremonial 260 day calendar. There´s disagreements about where the 260 days come from: it could be connected to the growing cycle of corn, or the orbit of Venus, or the gestation period of a human pregnancy, or some combination of all of them. But mathematically it´s pretty clear: 260 is the product of two important numbers, the 13 ¨day numbers¨ and the 20 ¨day names.¨ The day names are things like Deer and Marksman and Cane, and they confusingly move backwards while the day numbers move forwards, giving each day a name like Seven Wind or One Yellow. Each day has a meaning which can also change depending on how far along in the numbers it is. For example Yellow means ¨ripeness¨ but while One Yellow represents something just coming into its ripeness, 13 Yellow, being at the end of the number cycle, means something that´s going rotten. Daykeepers can count the day numbers and names together and know what each combination means. This means they can say something about you based on the day you were born, sort of like a horoscope (I was born on the day ¨E¨ or ¨Ey,¨ which can mean ¨tooth¨ but also means ¨path¨). But more importantly they make predictions by a system of tossing and counting ceremonial beans.

And the predictions of the daykeepers, called aj´chun (at least in the language of the Chuj that live in San Mateo), are still central to the lives of the Maya. Angela´s Mayan husband Alberto uses their services routinely. Among other things, he told us, he told us he talked to an aj´chun to see if she was being truthful to him. She was sitting right there when he said that, so maybe he was being playful.

One important role of an aj´chun is when you get sick. Not that an aj´chun can cure you, since their only job is to see fortunes. But if you get a swelling in your leg or a mysterious sickness in your stomach, the most likely explanation is that you have been curse by a bruja, or witch. Specifically this kind of witch is known as an aj´lep, someone who puts sicknesses on the body. Since the only one who can really cure the curse is the person who cast it, the aj´chun can tell you who the aj´lep who cursed you is. From there, presumably, it´s up to you.

Then there are the men that kill the snakes. If you get a snakebite, it will continue to hurt if you are still alive. The ¨snake-killer¨ (Alberto didn´t give a Chuj name for this profession) will give you a treatment that involves drinking tobacco juice and massaging and blowing on the place where the the snakebite happened. If the treatment works, it will kill the snake and cure the bite.

The nearest hospital to San Mateo is a bumpy 5-hour dirt road bus ride away. There is a small pharmacy that sells some prescription medicines, and some medicines are sold randomly out of boxes on market days. But even if there is a doctor there that can prescribe what you need, most Chuj couldn´t afford an appointment. And if they could, the pharmacy might not have the right prescription anyway. So for many people finding the witch that cursed you is as effective a treatment as modern medicine.

Alberto´s an intelligent and sophisticated guy, who also knows a lot about his people´s traditions. He also enjoys talking about them, and is a natural storyteller. A person like me is tempted to want to press such a person, to find out exactly how much of what they´re saying they really believe.

But I don´t think questions like that can ever have a simple answer. Mayans have been forced for a very long time to live in two (or more) worlds, balancing their old faith with Christianity and traditional practices with modernity. And really, don´t the rest of us do the same thing? Nearly everyone I know mixes some ¨alternative medicine¨ practice with modern medicine.

Mostly I am just thankful to Alberto for opening up and sharing as much as he did, which helped me connect the beliefs in the books I was reading with what I was seeing around me. It´s amazing how many connections I have found.

That´s why I had to read the Tedlock book right then. Tedlock has an incredibly useful section describing the exact day name and number connected to the various events in the Hero Twins´ battle with the Lords of Xibalba, or Death, and what each of those days mean. That´s perfect for me, as I will be writing that book in about 6 months, which is exactly as long as a piece of research needs to sink in before you can really use it in your fiction.

¨Do you want to see where we lived when the soldiers came?¨ -- Parque de la Paz

Alex was a fantastic guide, but he only spoke Spanish. I did my best to listen to what he said, but my weak Spanish interfered. Mostly this didn´t matter much, because most of what he showed me was routine tourist things I understood well enough.

Then he took me to Parque de la Paz. The story of the park is clear enough. During the Civil War Santiago de Atitlan suffered as all the Mayan villages did from the near-genocidal efforts of the Guatemalan military. A Catholic priest, Father Stanley Rother, was killed in 1981, and all through the 80s people from here ¨disappeared.¨ In 1990 an angry crowd gathered and threw stones at a Guatemalan military base, and the military massacred 13 people. But because Santiago de Atitlan is a tourist facility the military was forced to withdraw to avoid further embarassment.

In memory of those massacred the village has erected ¨El Parque de La Paz,¨ a beautiful stone park with small marble memorial stones to those killed in the massacre. The story that I didn´t understand from Alex I could read in the marble plaque on the side.

I didn´t understand exactly what Alex said next, but he asked me if I wanted to see the houses.

¨What houses?¨ I asked.

¨The houses where we lived when the soldiers came,¨ he said.

So I followed him. We passed a residential part of the village. Some women were weaving on traditional looms. Then we passed a school, but it was empty even though it was a school day.

Then we passed a hospital, also abandoned. Alex pointed to a field across from the hospital. Many people lived there, he said, though I didn´t understand the rest of the sentence.

Then we walked a little further. We came upon the wrecks of a number of stone houses. They looked burned out, and there was ash in the dirt. Alex walked to one of the houses. I understood what he said next.

¨I lived here. The river used to pass this way. I was five years old. They killed my father and my mother right over there.¨

A couple of times I have had people ask me what the Popul Vuh ¨means.¨ I have found this a difficult question to answer, and not just because I am still an outsider studying it. What does the Bible mean? What does the Odyssey or the Gilgamesh mean? It is the story of the people, and it would be ridiculous to try and sum it up.

But I´ve still put some thought into one strong message that comes from the book. The PV is ridiculously violent. Through the course of the book the heroes lose limbs, have heads cut off, are killed and chopped up and burned and thrown in the river. And yet they always come back. In a sense there is something almost cartoonish about it, and Hunahpu and Xbalanque aren´t supposed to be normal people. ¨They were just gods,¨ says the book.

But I can´t help but think there is a theme that is connected to this: no matter how you try to destroy the Hero Twins, they always bounce back. They always survive. And in the face of terrible violence and evil they always find a way to win through a combination of trickery and courage.

As I said, these are the stories of a people. Though the PV was specifically Quiche, I am pretty sure that the part of it that is the story of the Hero Twins is pretty universal to the Maya. And if one was forced to sum up a ¨message¨ from the book, it would be this: you can conquer us, you can massacre us, you can try to take our land and destroy our culture, but we will survive. We will come back.

The Mayans suffered under oppression from the Aztecs even before the Spanish came, then they suffered the horrors of colonial oppression. Their literature was burned by the Spanish monks in a crime against human knowledge equal to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. For the next few centuries they rose up repeatedly against Spanish and Ladino oppression, and were suppressed violently. Their land was taken to make coffee and sugar plantations, and they were forced to work under conditions little better than slavery. And in the civil war, villages like San Mateo de Ixtalan suffered much worse than better known villages like Santiago de Atitlan. Fernando said that during the 80s more than 3000 people were shot on the picturesque bridge that overlooks the valley below the house where we were staying.

But, in the words of Faulkner, the Mayan people endured. Just like the Hero Twins, they survived through a combination of courage and necessary deception. When the Spanish tried to destroy their beliefs and culture they hid them away while pretending they were doing what they were told. But when the Spanish and later Guatemalan military pushed them too far they would get together and stand for their rights, knowing that many of them would pay the price of their lives.

And now they are still here, with a culture that is as strong as it ever was. The culture they have now isn´t the culture they had 500 years ago; like everyone else they have developed new skills and ideas while adapting ideas from the outside as they were useful. But the culture they have now is distinctly their own.

Maximon, el Rey de Muerte and el Rey de Sol

I took the boat today across Lake Atitlan to the village of Santiago de Atitlan in search of the figure of Maximon, the cigar-chomping hard drinking wooden doll that is the subject of Nathaniel Tarn´s book A Scandal in the House of Birds. Maximon is a purely syncretist figure. He represents Judas, but he is also associated with the traditional Mayan Lords of Death. The Church made many efforts to eradicate him from Mayan worship, but obviously without success. In Tarn´s book the Mayans were rarely openly defiant about keeping Maximon. Rather, they would tell the Church not to worry, they were rid of him. Then Maximon would be leading the next parade.

The ride across Lago de Atitlan is stunning. There are enormous volcanoes stretching into the clouds all around, and little villages stuck to the side of the green hills that surround the lake. The vegetation is still mostly evergreen but mixed with some tropical plants like banana trees.

I thought Maximon would be hard to find, but he was not at all. I was trying to decide who to ask while I was busy shooing away the tuk-tuk drivers surrounding me trying to give me a ride. Then it occurred to me that one of the drivers might know. I was afraid I'd be taken for an expensive wild goose chase, but the driver I asked just gestured up the road. I wasn´t sure where he was pointing, but I started walking that way, and a man came and asked if I was looking for Maximon. His name was Alex, he was a cakchiquel man who looked about my age but was actually younger, as I found out later.

He walked me down a small street, then led me up a small alley. I already knew that Maximon moves around from house to house, so I followed him.


Maximon was up this alley.

Admittance was two quetzales. Maximon was in a dark room hung with colorful paper and illuminated only by candles. He is mostly a decorated mask with a cigar clothed in nothing but a bunch of silk ties. I wasn´t sure if I could get a picture, but Maximon is an entrepreneurial fellow, and you can take pictures of him for ten quetzales more. His hands hold trays where you put the money. In fact you´re supposed to also leave him cigarettes and liquor, but I wasn´t prepared that way.


Maximon

Off to the right of Maximon is a casket that represents Jesus. To the left is a statue of Jesus carrying the cross. That is the only two figures that they went out of their way to show me. But there is another figure on the left.


Casket of Jesus

The statue on the left was recessed into the darkness. He had a metal mask and was dressed in a robe. There was a cigarette sticking between his toes. I asked who he was, and Alex said in a somewhat embarassed tone, ¨Ah, ese es El Rey de Muerte,¨ or the King of Death.

¨De Xibalba?¨ I asked, but no one answered.


El Rey de Muerte

Then Alex offered to give me a tour of the Church and the rest of the town for Q100. I agreed, because I was grateful to him for showing me Maximon and because he seemed to know his way around. I´m sure I could have haggled him down to Q50, but I am glad I didn´t, because of what I saw later.

The church, much like the one in San Mateo, is about 500 years old, and has a peaked roof instead of an arch in the Mayan style, but is much bigger. The walls are lined with statues of different saints. Alex insisted it was okay to take pictures in the church as well.




Some of the Milagros on the walls of the church

In the back of the church were several large triangular altars illustrated with statues of Jesus, Mary and more saints. In the lower-right hand corner was a seated figure with a brightly decorated face. Alex informed me that that was El Rey de Sol, the King of the Sun. On the side of the altar a man was climbing. Alex told me that he was going up to talk to the man at the top, El Rey de Ciel, or King of the Sky. I suppose if I´d pressed Alex he´d have told me El Rey de Ciel was the same as God, and maybe El Rey de Sol is as well. But the real answer probably isn´t so simple. Anyway, I didn´t press.

I wasn´t sure what else Alex would show me, but I was willing at this point to see whatever he had to show me. So he offered to take me to ¨El Parque de Paz,¨ or Peace Park.

What I saw at Parque de Paz was much deeper than anything I saw at El Maximon´s or the church. Enough that it needs another post.

As a matter of fact this is a tour guide, asshole.

I'm in tourist haven Panajachel, which is nice. But there are some real assholes here. I'm not talking about the Guatemalans, who are friendly everywhere I go. I'm talking about the foreigners, or as they prefer not to be called, the tourists.

I moved on for several reasons. Part was that I didn't want to wear out my welcome in San Mateo. Part was that I want to check out Lake Atitlan, and see if I can find the Maximon, a tobacco smoking, hard-drinking wooden icon who's half Judas and half dark Mayan diety. But honestly a big part is also I was ready for things to get a little easier.

And they did, eventually. Getting to Pana was the usual madhouse of jumping from brightly colored bus to minivan & back for hours on end & praying you don't go the wrong way or miss your stop. But as soon as I was here I had a motel room with laundry, private bath & shower and wifi for Q100/night. It's not even close to the top of the line, but after a week in San Mateo it feels like the Ritz.

After I came out of the shower I went by the kitchen and said "hi" to an American-looking couple in the kitchen. They responded with a cold "hola", and at first I was embarassed for assuming they were English-speakers. But then I heard them speaking English to each other with an American accent.

Then I went looking for a place to eat. I had out my guide book, glad to finally have a use for it.

I saw a man on a bicycle who looked friendly at first and waved to him, this time greeting him in Spanish instead.

"You got your little tour guide?" he said in English. "Which one is it?"

Sensing he was being contemptuous but not sure I told him it was a Lonely Planet.

"Oh, is it lonely?" he said with an eye roll, and pedaled off.

This is one of those situations where you think of what to say too late. Fortunately that's what blogs were invented for. So here's the correct answer to the question:

Yes, you self-righteous prick, I need my little tour guide to get around Pana because instead of spending my time in Guatemala hanging around here I've spent the last week nine hours into the Highlands over unpaved roads in a place that isn't even in most guidebooks, which you probably wouldn't go to if they paid you. And now I'm ready to just chill the fuck out and be a goddamned tourist for a couple days if you don't mind, like every other foreigner in Pana whether they have a little tour guide or not. And that includes you, even if you've been here since you fell off the Magic Bus on an acid trip in the 70s.

Up the waterfall, down the cornfield

Yesterday Fernando and I did a hike up the waterfall. It was a steep fall littered with rocks, but I am from the mountains myself and I grew up climbing rocks like this. It was fun and challenging, but as we climbed we recognized it would be much more dangerous going back down, and we were a hell of a long way from an emergency room.

So we decided it would be safer going down the milpa beside the fall. A milpa is a cornfield, so how dangerous could that be?

Well, that´s what we were thinking.

The milpa we came out on was on a slope that was well more than 45 degrees. The corn had been burned away in the traditional slash-and-burn agricultural style. Every step I took sent loose black earth tumbling far down to a cliff to the waterfall below.

Fernando went around a corner, and I couldn´t see him. I called, but he didn´t answer. For all I knew he´d gone over a cliff on the other side.

Finally I came around; the milpa on the other side was just as steep but had more tree branches to catch yourself on. Fernando was a couple hundred feet below. So I slid down as carefully as I could on my ass, getting a load of tierra negra down my pants.

So if I ever do it again, I´ll take the rocks. I can´t think of anything crazier of climbing a slope that steep.

Okay, one thing: planting a farm on it.

A San Mateo field trip

So much has happened that I forgot to write about the trip I took with the students from the INHAT Seeds of Change school on Friday. It was a trip to get ¨tierra negra¨ or rich black earth, to replant a forest area near the farm. If you´re a teacher or school administrator used to high trip safety standards and you have a weak heart, I suggest you stop reading now.

I met Cara at the INHAT cyber-cafe with her students in the afternoon. We walked up the road toward the school and stopped where we were supposed to meet our ride. There were about 20 kids, so I thought there would be a bus, or at least a large truck with a cage. What arrived instead, after we´d waited about 20-30 minutes, was a mini-pickup with a cage around the bed.

The kids quickly jumped onto the cage. There was room in the middle of the bed, but the boys all preferred to hang off the side, while the girls sat on the wall around the bed, leaving the middle empty. I wanted to take a picture of this terrifying sight, but the truck was about to pull out without me. So I hung off the side as well.

I didn´t have a good grip or foothold, and the girl on the bed inside kept leaning against me as if to push me off the truck. Then the truck started climbing up the narrow, steep roads towards the bosque where we were going to get the tierra negra.

I will never be frightened of a roller coaster again. Most of the roads are just wide enough for the wheels of the truck to fit, and several times I found myself hanging over a drop of several hundred feet, which the children hanging off the truck didn´t even notice. The grade of the road in several places exceeded twenty degrees. Those who know something about road grades will assume I am being hyperbolic or making an uneducated guess. But on the way back when I was in a more secure position I measured with the level on my phone. For those who don´t know anything about road grades, in the United States a grade of six degrees will generate terrifying warnings about steep roads and runaway trucks. If you´ve ever seen those steep blocks in San Francisco where you have to put bricks under the wheels of your car to keep it from rolling away, those are about fifteen degrees. Twenty degree grades are normal around here.

Finally I chickened out and asked one of the girls to move aside so I could sit in the middle of the truck. There I talked to a boy who had spent several years in Tennessee, which has a community of Chuj Maya. I asked if he liked it better there or here, and he said he preferred the US.

We got there and started digging. The earth here is volcanic clay, rich, wet and black. I helped dig for awhile, and then I started carrying full feedbags of tierra negra to the truck bed. Cara said the plan was to get 48 feedbags of tierra negra; the bags were each between 25 and 50 pounds, depending how full they were. As I watched the bed fill with the bags I started doing the math in my head, and I started to worry about the suspension of the truck.

Fortunately the driver was also conscious about how much the truck could carry, and at some point said he couldn´t carry any more. Unfortunately, when he said he couldn´t carry any more that included the kids.

It occurred to me that this was the kind of thing you might plan ahead for if you´re making a trip to carry black earth and children from one place to another, but they hadn´t. So they left the kids in the middle of the forest; apparently they knew their way home. I was prepared to walk with the kids, but Cara said I could ride along if I was willing to unload the black earth by the farm. So that´s what I did.

After we´d unloaded the earth and walked back into town we ran into the kids who had walked back from the forest; they didn´t seem bothered or surprised by the walk. Nothing about this trip was outside the normal bounds of safety here. Among other things I´ve seen recently are children playing blind-man´s bluff with one kid stumbling around blindfolded next to a drop of more than 100 feet, and a 3-4 year old child running down a mountain road with a homemade kite in one hand and a 2-foot machete in the other. I´ve also seen the results: there are kids who are missing fingers, arms and hands. Child mortality due to accidents is no doubt very high.

I don´t want to give the impression that the Maya don´t care about their kids. But I think the people here just accept they live in a much more dangerous place. The men who work the milpas have to harvest corn on slopes that are so steep that if you slip you´ll just slide all the way down and go over a cliff. Kids need to learn to use machetes, because they´re used here for everything from harvesting to cutting wood for the stove to keeping away the hungry wild dogs that occasionally gang up and attack people at night.

It´s easy for us to judge someone else´s lifestyle. But I have also thought that I wish American kids (including my own) would get half as much exercise as the kids do here. Childhood obesity -- or adult obesity, for that matter -- is pretty much unheard of. I have not seen an overweight Chuj Mayan. I imagine diabetes would be equally rare.

I won´t say that one way or the other is better. But I do know that the next time I have to fill out fifteen different safety forms for a field trip and some administrator freaks out because a kid stands up in the bus I´m going to laugh inside.

The church and the altar

The Catholic church in San Mateo is about 5 centuries old by a conservative estimate. It is two stories high, painted a bright white and orange with a steepled facade featuring images of various saints and holy figures in recesses along the walls. The figures of the saints barely resemble whatever shape they must have originally had, because every year the church is plastered over with a new layer of limestone, rounding and blurring off any sharp edges. Inside it is like most Catholic churches I´ve ever been in, with two rows of pews and a stand of candles to light, with an A-shaped ceiling rather than an arch. Right now the beams in the ceiling are hung with purple cloth in preparation for Semana Santa, or Easter week.

The church has a Catholic school attached on one side, and in front of the Catholic school was a basketball court. Basketball is fairly popular here, almost as much as football, which is good news for me since basketball is going to be central to the next two books in my Popul Vuh trilogy.

Directly in front of the church, however, is a structure that I have never seen connected to a Catholic church before. ¨The altar¨ is a simple open limestone structure with metal roof above it. There is a fire constantly burning in it, and it is solid black from the smoke. Sitting around the altar are many older women in traditional Mayan dress, burning hundreds of long candles connected in bundles by the wicks. There are simple crosses about six feet high made of wood 4x4s nailed together stacked around the altar.

Angie showed me the church and the altar. The tradition of the monks that came through Latin America was to build their church near to where people already prayed. Always practical, the evangelizers didn't want to make it any more difficult than possible for their charges to come over to Christianity. With the Mayans they had plenty to work with; even before the first Christian came the Mayans already considered the cross a holy symbol, the shape of the world-tree, with each of the four points representing a different sacred direction.

If what Angie says is true, and I have every reason to believe it is, then the altar is something much older than the church. Which doesn´t mean the women around it aren´t good Christians. They light their candles in the church first.

But the altar might represent something more, as well. More than I can understand right now, if ever. I´ll have pictures tomorrow.

Pictures from the farm

The farm from a distance:



The path to the farm -- a typical Highlands commute:




The ¨milpa¨ or field at the farm:




The fishpond at the farm:




I helped dig this ditch!

More image from Las Ruinas

Ceremonial stones at Las Ruinas:




Some piglets having a snack at Las Ruinas:




A ceremonial window or recess in Las Ruinas. Notice the prayer candles in the lower left corner. Most candles were by crosses, but there were no crosses here.