  THE MAYAN  |
The creation is quite psychedelic with its weird style, emphasis on verbs, and lack of pronoun antecedents: "Now it still ripples, now it still murmurs, it still sighs, still hums..." (491). Creation is the joint project of the sky and water forces: Heart of Sky and Plumed Serpent -- once again, the mythological logic of it taking two to create. Naming is a magical act: "it was simply their word that brought it forth" (492).
The peopling of the earth is a dramatic tale.
They came into being, they multiplied, they had daughters, they had sons, these manikins, woodcarvings. But there was nothing in their hearts and nothing in their minds, no memory of their mason and builder. They just went and walked wherever they wanted. Now they did not remember Heart of Sky. And so they fell, just an experiment and just a cutout for humankind. They were talking at first but their faces were dry. They were not yet developed in the legs and arms. They had no blood, no lymph. They had no sweat, no fat. Their complexions were dry, their faces were crusty. They flailed their legs and arms, their bodies were deformed.So this mindless batch are wiped out by a flood. It's difficult to determine if the next part refers to a second experiment or if it's still the first batch being harassed. But it's vivid!
And so they accomplished nothing before the Maker, Modeler who gave them birth, gave them heart. (493)
Everything spoke: their water jars, their tortilla griddles, their plates, their cooking pots, their dogs, their grinding stones, each and every thing crushed their faces. Their dogs and turkeys told them: "You caused us pain, you ate us, but now it is you whom we shall eat." (493)The grinding stones, fed up with their lot in life, rebel and grind their owners' flesh. Even the tortilla griddles get into the act:
"Pain!" That's all you've done for us. Our mouths are sooty, out faces are sooty. By setting us on the fire all the time, you burn us. Since we felt no pain, you try it. We shall burn you," all their cooking pots said, crushing their faces. (494)So here's the question. One can easily understand the moral of part of the story: treating your dogs bad is a poor idea, and not taking care of your turkeys is not wise. But tortilla griddles? I'm offending the sensibilities of my cooking pots and tortilla griddles if I put them on the fire to make tortillas which is what they are for in the first place?! What to do about the tortilla griddles -- that's the big mythological question. The truth is that you should appreciate and care for even inanimate things in your possession. Cleaning your kitchen utensils is a way of honoring the Maker. Don't even try to tell me you don't have some inanimate object in your possession that you consider "sacred." For me, it's some prefab bookcases that I bought in grad school and lugged to my apartment and to everywhere I've lived ever since. They are practically worthless monetarily and in fact a burden now. I can easily get rid of these and already have superseded them with much more useful and glamorous bookcases. But THEY ARE SACRED so get your damn hands off my bookcases!
It's the same thing, or should be, for tortilla griddles.
The last line of this excerpt brings up another rather vast mythological theme:
So this is why monkeys look like people: they are a sign of a previous human work, human design -- mere manikins, mere woodcarvings. (494)It turns out that our predecessors and the race of creatures who functioned as the failed experiment were monkeys. Apes are a recurring mythological theme because they creep us out by blurring the categories between human and animal. We're assured in this myth and others that we are worthier than they, but the warning against accomplishing nothing before the Maker lingers.
The Maya Creation Story
People of all times and places have sought to understand how the universe came into being and how humanity developed. Each culture provides its own account, unique in detail but embodying universal themes. This similarity of thought among remote civilizations may indicate a form of archetypal intelligence available to any human being with the spiritual capacity to access it, as well as the existence of a very ancient worldwide civilization. The Popol Vuh records one branch of the ancient Central American heritage. Written shortly after the Spanish conquest by a Quiche Indian in his native language but using the Roman alphabet, it was transcribed and translated into Spanish by a Dominican priest in Guatemala at the end of the 17th century. His manuscript, housed in the library of the University of San Carlos, Guatemala City, was brought to the attention of European scholars in 1854, making Maya cosmogony and history available outside Central America. Today researchers can also draw on other documents, inscriptions, and the traditions kept alive by the Maya's descendants.
Considered from a theosophic perspective, the Maya story of creation reveals its kinship with the worldwide wisdom tradition. It begins with the emptiness of the primordial waters of space, in a darkness which contains no manifested thing. There Hunab Ku, the divine one, the first cause, eternal, unborn, undying, all that was, is, and will be, uncontained, boundless, absolute, awakened from the dreamless sleep of thirteen eternities and emanated out of his own will the Heart of Heaven. A one-dimensional emanation of Hunab Ku's own divinity, the Heart of Heaven was the recipient of all potentialities. Its only dimension, length, disappeared into the nonexistent breadth and height, and set in motion the process of cosmic evolution in planes of existence so spiritual that only the eye of the mystic could conceive it. Space was not, since there was nothing to contain it. Time was not, since there were no events to divide it. There was only the incomprehensible divinity of Hunab Ku, permeating the Heart of Heaven which slumbered for seven eternities. Then by the power of his word Hunab Ku thrilled the Heart of Heaven. Awakening from its dreamless sleep, Heart of Heaven emanated the God Seven, the cosmic Demiurgus, the creator, one in essence, seven in manifestation. This interpretation of the Maya story brings out its similarities with other ancient accounts, such as the Stanzas of Dzyan, the Kabbala, and the Biblical Genesis. The sacred numbers seven and thirteen relate to the Maya cycles of evolution and to their lunar calendar of 819 days (7 x 13 x 9).
The manifestations of God Seven — Itzamna Kauil, Tzacol, Bitol, Tepeu, Gucumatz, Alom, and Caholom — each had dominion over and were identified with a cosmic dimension, and later with a cardinal direction and color. The seven had the innate compulsion to create, so they took counsel and unanimously decided to say the word that would create the new dimension of breadth. Manifesting through the Heart of Heaven, breadth extended infinitely through the four quarters. Itzamna Kauil, Tepeu, and Gucumatz marked the cosmic center with three green stones. Tzacol sat on a black stone in the west quarter, Bitol on a red stone in the east. Alom sat on a white stone in the north, and Caholom sat on a yellow stone in the south. Each tried in vain to create progeny to help organize and administer his dominion. But not even the three in the center, acting together, could create, and after many independent attempts the seven still remained alone, floating like sparks of darkness in the homogenous chaos of the Heart of Heaven.
Taking counsel at the center, God Seven marveled that each had independently attempted to take the same course of action and failed. They agreed that creating progeny to populate their dominions was the right thing to do. Together they said the word once again: the blue-green light of differentiation filled the chaos and their progeny — the seeds of heaven, matter (earth), and the waters of the underworld — became manifest. All things were confounded within the two-dimensional universe, the Cha-Chan (low-down heavens), where generation after generation of denizens, the seeds of worlds-to-be, lived and had their being.
At that moment of creation, God Seven knew that any act of creation could be realized only if the seven were together with absolute concordance of all parts. This creative act of God Seven started cosmic evolution: the ethereal differentiated into substances, each attracted to and attracting its opposite, merging into each other and modifying its own essence into a duality that completely transformed its forces into something new which balanced its own innate characteristic. Each was akin to its own substance, the spiritual never changing its divinity, the ethereal becoming ether, the material becoming matter. The Cha-Chan was then a two-dimensional ethereal world. Generation after generation of denizens populated the intermingled two worlds whose opened portals linked them in a harmonious duality: at one end the spiritual world of the creators, and at the other the dark waters of Xibalba, the Underworld.
Human evolution in the Popol Vuh stems from the Regents Ixpiyacoc and Ixmucane, the Supreme Pair, grandparents of the Maya as well as of humanity as a whole. Ixmucane was the mother of the Ahpu twins, One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu, who were each one and seven: three male/female duads and one unity. Together the twins represented the highest qualities and aspirations of their world. They had all the knowledge accumulated by their race, but were devoid of malice and unaware of their own powers. Not knowing evil, their actions were completely innocent and their pleasure was to play ball, the ancient Maya Game. On one level the ball game is an allegory for the movements of the celestial bodies. Perhaps this is why they could play the game in any combination of seven, up to three on one side and four on the other, representing the five closest planets plus the sun and moon, depending on their position in the night sky.
Xibalba, the Underworld, was ruled by Lords who embodied very different knowledge and values. They were upset with the noise of the ball game, so they issued an invitation to the boys to play a game against them in the bowels of the Underworld, with the intention of killing them. The boys politely accepted. After an arduous trip to Xibalba, the twins were asked their names, which they politely gave the Lords. The Maya believe that once someone knows your name, he knows you and your thoughts. This allowed the Lords to victimize the boys with many trials and humiliations before the ball game itself which, of course, was rigged in favor of the Lords. After losing the game, the twins were decapitated and their bodies buried under the surface of the ball court, except for the head of One Hunahpu which was hung on a calabash tree at the entrance of Xibalba as a warning. The story of these first twins reveals the failure of purely spiritual beings to bring their evolution to more material levels. They would need a sphere full of desires and free will to continue their slow descent on the downward arc of evolution, as the next story in the Popol Vuh, concerning the hero twins Hunahpu and Ixbalamque, seems to indicate.
After the head of One Hunahpu was hung on the calabash tree, Blood Woman, the virgin daughter of one of the Lords of Xibalba, heard the story and was curious about the skull. One day she wandered around the tree and tried to touch the skull, which spat on her hand. Thus, without her knowledge, she became pregnant. As time went by, her pregnancy became obvious, so her father questioned her angrily, fearing dishonor for him and his family. She truthfully answered that she had been with no man and cried her innocence in vain. Maya social customs were very strict in regard to sexual conduct; her father ordered two of his servants to take her into the woods and bring back her heart in a container. The servants took her to the edge of Xibalba, but decided to let her go. They put a red fruit and red sap in the container and took it to their master instead.
Blood Woman now knew that One Hunahpu was the father of her children, and she went to his home and pleaded with his mother Ixmucane, explaining that she was carrying her grandchildren. Ixmucane did not believe her, but finally accepted her as the household servant, giving her the most miserable tasks to do until she bore male twins, Hunahpu and Ixbalamque. The grandmother rejoiced in the twins and tried to protect them as they grew into youngsters with exceptional powers. She hid the ballgame gear that had belonged to their father and uncle because she blamed the game for their early demise.
The hero twins, however, were not as innocent as their father. They had acquired some of the cunning qualities of the Underworld through their mother's line, while retaining their father's and uncle's power and knowledge, somewhat magnified by curiosity. Known for their intelligence and heroic virtues, they performed many acts for the benefit of the Cha-Chan, their imperfect world of chaos. For example, they separated the future humanity from the monkeys by sending their own half-brothers into the trees. They punished Itzam Ye (Venus), a boisterous bird with bright plumage who committed the sin of pride by boasting that he was the Sun. They killed Itzam Ye's two sons who were wreaking havoc in the world of matter by "moving and squashing mountains." They revived the 400 boys and set them in the sky as the Pleiades. Finally they discovered their father's ballgame gear and played noisily, moving celestial bodies to their proper places, the ball game being an allegory for these movements.
Hunahpu shoots Itzam-Yeh (from a Maya vase painting)The Lords of Xibalba were disturbed by the noise, as they had been before, and invited the hero twins to the Underworld for a game in which the winners would take all and the losers would lose their lives. But these were not the innocent creatures who had gone before them; they were successful in avoiding all the traps that the Xibalbans prepared for them before the game. During the game itself, after solving many schemes and enduring the Lords' bad calls, they seemed to give up. Convincing the Lords that the only way to kill them was by grinding their bones and throwing the powder into the river, they held hands and jumped into a fire. The Lords pulled out their bones, ground them up, and threw the fine grains into the river. From the powdered bone emerged a pair of catfish — perhaps a suggestion that all life on earth started in water. Following the path of evolution, eventually the catfish were transformed into two small boys who became performing magicians.
The Lords of Xibalba heard about the tricks performed by the youngsters and invited them to the Underworld for their entertainment. They urged the youngsters to perform their most difficult feats: after a house was burned with one of them inside, it suddenly appeared as if nothing had happened. Then the youngsters, seeming eager to please the Lords, did the following: one of them cut the other in pieces and threw the parts into the air, where they disappeared. After a long pause the twin materialized unharmed, to the amazement of the Lords. The principal Lord, wishing to show off his daring in front of his vassals, begged the twins to perform the trick on him. The twins agreed most willingly. After dismembering the Lord, they did the same with the other Lords, but none returned alive after their limbs and bodies were thrown into the air. After thus defeating them, the twins put several conditions on the return of the Lords, which were irrevocably accepted. The twins returned the Lords unharmed, and all agreed to many restrictions, such as no longer intentionally harming other beings, although they were allowed random acts such as storms, famine, and floods, but only impersonally and when absolutely necessary. The Lords also promised to live in the Underworld without ever stepping on the earth's surface.
The twins ordered the Lords to reveal the burial site of their father and uncle so that they could bring them back to life. The Lords revealed that they were buried under the floor of the ball court, which by extension represents the earth's surface. The boys exhumed the corpses and prepared a magic ritual that brought both of them back to life. At this point there is a significant event: the twins asked their father and uncle the names of various parts of the body, and they could not identify some of them. This passage seems to indicate that they were from a former race and that even their physical forms were different, perhaps lacking some of the physical or mental capacities that had evolved since their demise. At this point the hero twins decided that their ancestors were not fit to live in the current world, but being deities of their own race, they were reburied with great respect, and the twins built a temple so they could be properly worshipped.
As soon as the temple was completed on the floor of the ball court, the Tree of the World erupted from the bowels of Xibalba, breaking through the ball court floor, pushing Xibalba down with its roots, pushing the sky above the world of matter with its branches, and leaving the world of matter between the Underworld and the Heavens. Cha-Chan, the flat heavens, was no more, as the third dimension was born from that creation. Now there were different regions — spiritual, material, and underworld — connected only through the World Tree whose roots are in the Underworld, its branches in the world of matter, and its crown in the spiritual realm of the Heavens. The ancestral twin One Hunahpu ascended to become the Sun, while his brother Seven Hunahpu became the Moon.
The Maya calendar consists of several cycles or counts of different lengths. The 260-day count is known to scholars as the Tzolkin, or Tzolk'in.The Tzolkin was combined with a 365-day vague solar year known as the Haab' to form a synchronized cycle lasting for 52 Haab', called the Calendar Round. The Calendar Round is still in use by many groups in the Guatemalan highlands.
A different calendar was used to track longer periods of time, and for the inscription of calendar dates (i.e., identifying when one event occurred in relation to others). This is the Long Count. It is a count of days since a mythological starting-point. According to the correlation between the Long Count and Western calendars accepted by the great majority of Maya researchers (known as the Goodman-Martinez-Thompson, or GMT, correlation), this starting-point is equivalent to August 11, 3114 BCE in the proleptic Gregorian calendar or 6 September in the Julian calendar (−3113 astronomical). The GMT correlation was chosen by John Eric Sydney Thompson in 1935 on the basis of earlier correlations by Joseph Goodman in 1905 (August 11), Juan Martínez Hernández in 1926 (August 12), and Thompson himself in 1927 (August 13).[8] By its linear nature, the Long Count was capable of being extended to refer to any date far into the past or future. This calendar involved the use of a positional notation system, in which each position signified an increasing multiple of the number of days. The Maya numeral system was essentially vigesimal (i.e., base-20), and each unit of a given position represented 20 times the unit of the position which preceded it. An important exception was made for the second-order place value, which instead represented 18 × 20, or 360 days, more closely approximating the solar year than would 20 × 20 = 400 days. It should be noted however that the cycles of the Long Count are independent of the solar year.
Many Maya Long Count inscriptions contain a supplementary series, which provides information on the lunar phase, number of the current lunation in a series of six and which of the nine Lords of the Night rules.
A 584-day Venus cycle was also maintained, which tracked the heliacal risings of Venus as the morning and evening stars. Many events in this cycle were seen as being astrologically inauspicious and baleful, and occasionally warfare was astrologically timed to coincide with stages in this cycle.
Less-prevalent or poorly understood cycles, combinations and calendar progressions were also tracked. An 819-day Count is attested in a few inscriptions. Repeating sets of 9 days (see below "Nine lords of the night") associated with different groups of deities, animals, and other significant concepts are also known.
Maya concepts of time
With the development of the place-notational Long Count calendar (believed to have been inherited from other Mesoamerican cultures), the Maya had an elegant system with which events could be recorded in a linear relationship to one another, and also with respect to the calendar ("linear time") itself. In theory, this system could readily be extended to delineate any length of time desired, by simply adding to the number of higher-order place markers used (and thereby generating an ever-increasing sequence of day-multiples, each day in the sequence uniquely identified by its Long Count number). In practice, most Maya Long Count inscriptions confine themselves to noting only the first five coefficients in this system (a b'ak'tun-count), since this was more than adequate to express any historical or current date (20 b'ak'tuns cover 7,885 solar years). Even so, example inscriptions exist which noted or implied lengthier sequences, indicating that the Maya well understood a linear (past-present-future) conception of time.
However, and in common with other Mesoamerican societies, the repetition of the various calendric cycles, the natural cycles of observable phenomena, and the recurrence and renewal of death-rebirth imagery in their mythological traditions were important influences upon Maya societies. This conceptual view, in which the "cyclical nature" of time is highlighted, was a pre-eminent one, and many rituals were concerned with the completion and re-occurrences of various cycles. As the particular calendric configurations were once again repeated, so too were the "supernatural" influences with which they were associated. Thus it was held that particular calendar configurations had a specific "character" to them, which would influence events on days exhibiting that configuration. Divinations could then be made from the auguries associated with a certain configuration, since events taking place on some future date would be subject to the same influences as its corresponding previous cycle dates. Events and ceremonies would be timed to coincide with auspicious dates, and avoid inauspicious ones.
The completion of significant calendar cycles ("period endings"), such as a k'atun-cycle, were often marked by the erection and dedication of specific monuments (mostly stela inscriptions, but sometimes twin-pyramid complexes such as those in Tikal and Yaxha), commemorating the completion, accompanied by dedicatory ceremonies.
A cyclical interpretation is also noted in Maya creation accounts, in which the present world and the humans in it were preceded by other worlds (one to five others, depending on the tradition) which were fashioned in various forms by the gods, but subsequently destroyed. The present world also had a tenuous existence, requiring the supplication and offerings of periodic sacrifice to maintain the balance of continuing existence. Similar themes are found in the creation accounts of other Mesoamerican societies.
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