SOME MAYAN NOTES

WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED ABOUT THE MAYA

The ancient Maya were pretty warlike and fought between each other for supremacy.  They were ruled at times from headquarters in Mexico Teotihuacan, and orders and trade passed between there and Palenque and Calakmul, then on to Tikal and through various little sites like. Yaxha and Cancuen to Copan in Honduras - it is amazing to think how they traded across this great expanse of difficult terrain in those days - the rivers and the sea were vital in their trading as well as their paved pathways between the cities.

At one time the great leader of Copan was probably a heavy from one of the northern settlements.  Their culture is dominated by the need to pacify angry gods - whether it be the God of the earth for their crops, of the weather for their protection against hurricanes and of course the God of the volcano - the great Kukulkan- 

Everything was painted red -(made from cinnabar which is liquid Mercury and very toxic) red of the earth , volcanic lava and you can see how this would translate to the need for red blood - hence the role of the royal family to bleed themselves regularly by using the sacred stingray barb - spilling blood from the tongue for women and fingers, tongue, ear lobes and male genitals of course - as you do.  This was also a way of showing the subjects how brave the ruling class were and the priest and Royal elite kept the secrets of how the calendar worked from understanding the moon and stars - so they kept the natives ignorant and they blindly followed any mumbojumbo - predicting the next eclipse helped them to keep their subjects in awe of their power and communion With the gods of the natural world.

The blood from the blood letting was collected on tree bark and then burned and the smoke was offered up to pacify the Gods.  Hence I suppose names of kings such as Smoke Rabbit or Smoke Jaguar.  Not so clear is the rather cute name of 18 Rabbit!  

Only the elite could be sacrificed to the gods to pacify them and bring fertility to the soil and they went willingly to their deaths because they believed their personal sacrifice meant they did not go into the underworld and have to work their way up the levels but went straight to heaven - the opposite of the Christian idea of suicide being damned and unsanctified to wander in purgatory - the Mayan belief reminded us of the current jihadist idea of self sacrifice for riches in the hereafter.

When you died you were buried in your house and the family built a new house on top of the  of the old - so you live on top of layers of your old ancestors.  Every so many years it was custom to break all the old pots and make new ones or destroy old houses or temples and build new ones - which makes it harder to find out things through archeology.  They are finding monuments under or within monuments when they tunnel under these days.

The importance of the large ball courts to play the pelota game - the game was obviously very important as part of life and seemed to have substituted for battles in that the rivals would play the game and the winners got to be decapitated as an honour and route to heaven.

The Mayan calendars are important as there is an auspicious time to do everything and they seem to have listened to shamanic advisors who could very accurately read the calendars and predict the best time to plant the corn - though they can't have been all that good at it because they think places like Tikal failed due to overpopulation and lack of food for the population - deforestation to grow crops in the forest.  Roxy explained this as the fact the later Mayans of the Classic period kept the pre classic traditions up of doing things according to alignments with the sun and stars - but they had not had the knowledge passed on of why this was true (the power of knowledge kept a secret from the masses) and believed it as jumbo jumbo stuff - so when the crops failed a couple of times, they blamed the position of the alignments and moved the position of the temple arbitrarily which basically destroyed the mathematical accuracy of the buildings.  

The great Mayan calendar started at zero at something like 3416 when all the planets were in alignment with the sun.  This happened around 2012 and the gravity of this caused the earth to wobble enough to move the earth's axis 2 degrees or 9 metres which then upsets every calculation from the old system - so now the alignments on the temples no longer work.  Every 20 years they built a new temple and made stelae to show the plebs how good the rulers were - problem was the elite spent too many resources building temples and did not focus on the effect of deforestation caused by needing wood to burn the lime for the mortar and stucco plaster - so this impoverished the soil and led to poor crops and eventually starvation - leading to the plebs losing confidence in the leaders.  This led to one city fighting against another to steal their resources and ultimately led to cannibalism.  At one time one city attacked another - as in Cancuen and they beheaded all the elite and through them in the reservoir - thus ensuring no future claims to the throne.  It took many generations for the locals to get trust in each other - hence all the different languages and suspicion between the current tribes in Guatemala.  In the Rigoberta book you feel the suspicion of the Maya for any outsider and the need to keep safe the secrets of the community - this was further sealed during the civil war when nobody could trust anybody.

The Holy Books of the Maya: the myths were collected by a clever priest in Chichicastenango who realised that in order to bring the Maya into the Catholic Church, the church had to bring their own beliefs into the church with them - so the Popol Vuh and the Chilam Balam were Mayan collected stories which are revered today and versions of them have ended up in places like France and Germany and studied in detail.  For instance, one of the great writers of Guatemala - Miguel Angel Asturias - studied his own history in Guatemala City and in France and was greatly influenced in his writing by these creation myths as told by his own family members - which he used in his Nobel prize writings of Hombres de Maiz and El Presidente - which are rich in description and a mixture of reality and magic which was to become the magical realism of later writers like Marquez.  Asturias was Guatemalan ambassador in various countries including France.

Also I Rigoberta by Rigoberta Menchu gives a simple and clear account of Mayan life before and during the terrible civil war in which her parents and many of her family died fighting for the rights of the indigenous Maya.

Alcohol, hallucinogenic mushrooms and wild tobacco were used to commune with the gods.

Indigenous Mayans live by subsistence agriculture - growing maize, beans and chillies and squash in their little milpas or fields which were in the forest, in harmony with the natural world.

When you see the soil in the jungle around the sites you can see how thin the soil is and how you soon hit solid limestone - so careless deforestation would easily lead to ruining the land for future generations.