Prophecy And Belief
A prophecy is a message that comes from a deity, delivered to a person attuned to receive it. Typically, the message expresses the divine will regarding the future. Ancient cultures all had prophets who delivered prophecies. And people believed what they heard, were willing to kill and die to be true to it. Gods, after all, were to be trusted. Anthropologist Mircea Eliade noted that tribal societies believed that their stories, about the gods and sacred ancestors overcoming the forces of chaos, created a sacred cosmic and social order in which humans… Read More
Solar Observatory Or Performance Stage?
By 500 B.C. there were numerous large architectural assemblages throughout the central lowlands of Guatemala and Mexico. At first, they appeared to function solely as line-of-site markers of the sun’s solstice and equinox turning points. Archaeologists named them E-Group complexes. Although there was great diversity in these structures across time and place, what they had in common was a large rectangular, flat, paved plaza with a square four-sided pyramid aligned to the cardinal directions, situated west of a long narrow platform with small temples that ran north and south. The first to… Read More
War And Warriors
Rollout vase photos courtesy of Justin Kerr It was the custom among them to pledge what they possessed to each other; upon collection and payment they began to quarrel and attack each other. Diego de Landa They never had peace, especially when the cultivation (of milpas) was over, and their greatest desire was to seize important men to sacrifice, because the greater the quality of the victim, the more acceptable their service to the gods. Alfred Tozzer War was the way you got gifts for the gods and kept the universe running…. Read More
Ball Game
Ball Court: Copan, Honduras Scholars believe that in earlier Maya times, the contest was a ritual that represented the fight of the opposing and forces of the universe—life-death, Sun-Moon, day-night, light-darkness—in order to insure balance, continuity and fertility. Some say it was a metaphor for the movements of heavenly bodies, the ball representing the journey of the Sun god passing in and out of the underworld. Because some courts have stone rings on the walls for the ball to pass through, other say it was about the Earth swallowing the sun where… Read More
The Sacred Calendar and New Year Renewal
Calendar glyphs. Copan Stela N (Back) Sacred time is that in which the gods manifested themselves and created; so each time man wants to ensure a fortunate outcome for something, he re-actualizes the original sacred event—creation; what is actually sought is the regeneration of the human being. Sacred time is reversible, it’s a primordial mythical time made present. Mircea Eliade Many of the ideas put forth by professor Eliade in his groundbreaking book, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion applys to the ancient Maya. While reading his book,… Read More
Infancy And Childhood
Panajachel, Guatemala This information is taken from my conference notes. The paper, Being A Kid Again: A Cultural and Biological Examination of Childhood Identity, was given by anthropological archaeologist Dr. Amanda Harvey, professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. Gratefully, she provided consulting on the topic of health when I was writing The Path Of The Jaguar trilogy. While the information here mostly applies to the contemporary Maya across a variety of communities, it suggests patterns that have a deep history in the culture. Following Dr. Harvey, I use the present… Read More
Dowsing / Divination
Xunantunich, Belize Dowsing is a type of divination, used to locate ground water, buried metals, gemstones, oil and gravesites without the use of scientific instruments. It’s consider a pseudoscience and there is no scientific evidence that it is any more effective than random chance. The dowsing rod only moves due to accidental or involuntary movements of the person using it. As practiced today it probably originated in Germany in the 16th century. So says Wikipedia. I used to believe that its effectiveness was due to random change combined with the mental state… Read More
Dugout Canoes
Lake Peten Itza, Guatemala As early a 400 B.C., salt was being “shipped” by canoes from northern Yucatan to Tikal in the Guatemalan jungle by way of Cerros, Belize down the New River. In 1502, Ferdinand Colon, a member of Christopher Columbus’s fourth voyage, described an encounter with a large group of Maya—or Maya-related people—in a seagoing canoe around the Bay Islands off modern Honduras. By good fortune there arrived at that time a canoe long as a galley and eight feet wide, made of a single tree trunk like the other… Read More
Bloodletting
Photo courtesy of Justin Kerr The theme of the past three posts was initiation, specifically the trials an initiate goes through in order to become a “man of the community.” Following on that ceremony would have been another rite of passage for individuals who would enter the brotherhood of elites. Typically for the Maya this involved bloodletting. More than a ritual of endurance, the symbolism around blood was complex and powerful. It signified noble lineage and descent based on blood, which was perceived to be the rarified essence or “breath” of the… Read More
