Maya Religion in the Colonial Sources

Hallamosles grande numero de libros destas sus letras, y porque no tenian cosa en que no uviesse supersticion y falsedades del demonio se les quemamos todos, lo qual a maravilla sentian, y les dava pena.

We found a great number of books in these letters of theirs, and because they had nothing in which there was not superstition and the devil’s falsehoods, we burned them all, which they felt deeply and which grieved them.

The next sentence begins: “De sus letras porne aqui un a, b, c”, of their letters I will set down an a, b, c. Two pages later Landa writes Ma in kati, “I don’t want to”, in Maya signs. The man who burned the books left the key that, four centuries later, let them be read again.

Much of what is known of Maya religion at the conquest comes this way, from the people who set out to end it. Landa, the dean of Mérida Pedro Sánchez de Aguilar, and the friars who compiled the great Yucatec dictionaries had to name what they were suppressing. Beside them sit books the Maya wrote for themselves: the Ritual of the Bacabs, the books of Chilam Balam, wills, land titles, and the letters of the Caste War.

The gods

Entre la muchedumbre de dioses que esta gente adorava, adoravan quatro llamados Bacab cada uno dellos. Estos dezian eran quatro hermanos a los quales puso Dios quando crio el mundo a las quatro partes del, sustentando el cielo no se cayesse. Dezian tambien destos Bacabes que escaparon quando el mundo fue del diluvio destruido.

Among the multitude of gods this people worshipped, they worshipped four, each called Bacab. These, they said, were four brothers whom God placed at the four parts of the world when he made it, holding up the sky so that it should not fall. They also said that these Bacabs escaped when the world was destroyed by the flood.

Each Bacab was tied to a direction, a colour and one of the four days that could begin a year, Kan, Muluc, Ix and Cauac. In the Ritual of the Bacabs the same fourfold order runs through the gods themselves: the incantations call on a red, a white, a black and a yellow Ix Chel, and a white and a black Itzamna, and the curer brings to birth a rattlesnake in each of the four colours (pp. 124, 142, 220).

Of death, Landa writes that those who hanged themselves went to rest carried by “la diosa de la horca que llamavan Ixtab”, the goddess of the gallows (p. 202). Sánchez de Aguilar says the Maya “hablavan con el demonio, a quien llamavan Xibilba, que quiere dezir el que se desaparece, o desvanece”, spoke with the devil, whom they called Xibilba, the one who vanishes (p. 198). Two centuries on, a book of sermons printed in Mérida in 1846 calls the serpent of Eden uchben x kukican, the old feathered serpent (p. 25).

The count of days

Landa gives the 365-day year as eighteen months of twenty days, with twenty signs for the days, “dexando de poner nombre a los demas cinco, porque los tenian por aciagos y malos”, leaving the last five without names, because they held them to be unlucky and bad (p. 204). The Maya scribe of the Chilam Balam of Kaua writes the same days in his own language: “hopel chich aban kin ti ma kaba kin”, five days without names (p. 73). Sánchez de Aguilar, copying the months from a confiscated book, counts six, “Vayeab, por otro nombre Vtuç Kin Vlobol Kin” (p. 196).

llegando estos lustros a cinco, que hazen veinte años, llamavan Katun, y ponian vna piedra labrada sobre otra piedra labrada fixada con cal y arena en las paredes de sus templos

When these spans of four years reached five, which make twenty years, they called it a katun, and set one carved stone upon another carved stone, fixed with lime and sand, in the walls of their temples.

The stones, he says, could still be seen in the old walls on which the friars built their cells in the convent of Mérida. The count lived on in speech: to say “I am sixty” was oxppeluabil, “tres piedras”, three stones; the town of Tixualahtun was “the place where one carved stone is set upon another”, which he compared to the royal archive at Simancas (p. 199). Landa adds that each katun had its idol in the temple, set up ten years before its turn and honoured for twenty: “veneravan a estos sus katunes xx años” (p. 316).

por vno destos libros que quitè a vnos Idolatras, vi y supe, que a vna peste llamaron Mayacimil, y a otra Ocna Kuchil, que quiere dezir muertes repentinas, y tiempos en que los cuerbos se entraron a comer los cadaueres en las casas. Y la inundacion, o huracan llamaron Hunyecil, anegacion de arboles.

From one of these books that I took from some idolaters I saw and learned that they called one plague Mayacimil, and another Ocna Kuchil, which means sudden deaths, and times when the crows came into the houses to eat the dead; and the flood or hurricane they called Hunyecil, the drowning of the trees.

The Kaua scribe copied a European eclipse table into Maya and kept the Maya way of saying it: “chibil uen”, “chibil uich kin”, the moon bitten, the face of the sun bitten (p. 121). The same book sets the twenty day names beside the saints of the Church calendar, and gives the katun prophecies in which kinich Kakmo, the fire macaw, is the omen of 8 Ahau at Chichén Itzá (p. 11, p. 168). Landa says the Maya told the hour at night “por el luzero y las cabrillas”, by Venus and the Pleiades (p. 202).

Rites

Sangrandose en la lengua, y orejas, y ofreciendo en sus patenas de tablillas su sangre, y la de sus hijos, como lo auerigue muchas vezes en sus confessiones judiciales; y de sus ofrendas, y tortas reparten a todos, y a sus enfermos, y consortes por via de comunion.

Drawing blood from the tongue and the ears, and offering their blood, and their children’s, on little wooden plates, as I established many times in their judicial confessions; and they share their offerings and cakes with everyone, with their sick and their companions, by way of communion.

Fishermen on the coast toward Río Lagartos, before fishing, left “candelas, reales de plata, y cuzcas, que son sus esmeraldas”, candles, silver coins and greenstones, at shrines on the sea inlets and salt lagoons; Sánchez had them torn down in 1607 (p. 231). Landa describes a rite he could only call baptism, “caput zihil quiere dezir nacer de nuevo”, to be born again (p. 144).

Christianity was absorbed as well as resisted. Around 1600 two men, Alonso Chablé and Francisco Canul, proclaimed themselves Pope and Bishop among the Maya, said Mass at night before idols on the altar, ordained priests for the idols by anointing their hands with oil and chrism, wore mitre and staff, and poured their balché to the idols. The margin of the report says: “Nunca tal se ha visto en la Nueva-España”, nothing like it has been seen in New Spain (p. 214).

Healers, diviners, conjurers

The incantations of the Ritual of the Bacabs master a disease by naming its birth and its parents. Against a fire-sickness: “petan kin ayum te ti cane, yx pic ʒab ana te ti cane”, the round sun is your father in the sky, Ix Pic Tzab, the Pleiades, is your mother in the sky (p. 252). The spells call their own words uoh, which Pío Pérez defines as “Letra. Escribir”, a written character, to write (p. 382).

A diviner cast lots with a handful of maize, counting by twos. When a girl ran away from home her mother called one, who “echò suertes sobre los caminos”, cast lots over the roads, and she was found in the town at the end of the road the lot chose. Sánchez punished him, and recorded the only words he said over the maize: “Huylan nones: Caylan pares”, away the odd, stay the even (p. 171).

The Motul dictionary names the specialists: ah kinyah, who casts lots; ah cunal can, ceh, balam, “encantador, o hechizero, que encanta culebras, venados”, who charms snakes, deer and jaguars (f. 12); and the conjurings themselves, “Conjurar nublados: tzac”, “Conjuro de venados: cunal ceh”, “Conjuros de aues: u cunal chich” (Spanish–Maya volume). Pío Pérez prints tzac twice in a row: “un pececillo así llamado”, a small fish, and “conjurar temporales”, to conjure storms (Pío Pérez), the pairing behind the fish-in-hand sign read tzak, to conjure, in Classic inscriptions. Under the Church the word turned: tzacomtah, “conjurar, maldecir, excomulgar, anatematizar” (p. 360).

Women after childbirth went into the sweatbath: “baño caliente de parida: pib” (Motul). At Palenque the inner sanctuaries of the Cross Group name themselves pib naah, sweatbath houses, places of the gods’ birth.

Dream and transformation

Epigraphers read the Classic way glyph as a person’s co-essence, the animal or being into which one could transform. The colonial dictionaries give uay the same field. The Motul: “Visiones ver como entre sueños: uay”, to see visions as in dreams (f. 234). Pío Pérez, on one page: uayak, “sueño, ensueño ó vision”; uayinah, “transfigurarse ó tomar figura por hechicería”; uaytal, “desaparecerse por encanto, volverse brujo”; uaytan, “brujo, que se transforma” (p. 375).

The people who kept it

In 1719 Ygnacio Canul of Temax left his heirs forest land “actun Jonot Quen Balam”, at the cave and cenote of Quen Balam, so that no one should take it from them; in 1821 the Canul family sold it for forty pesos (p. 11, p. 13). In January 1850, in the middle of the Caste War, the rebel leader Venancio Pec protested the hanging of a commander’s wife: what fault has a poor woman, “xchup na cubatel”, a woman who stays at home (p. 56). The same bundle of letters holds a message sent in the name of the Cross, signed Juan de la Cruz (p. 43).

Related: Preserved by Their Enemies, Maya, Decoding the Maya Script