The end of the apple is nigh? Not what the Guatemalan Mayans say
On top of the acropolis the old man and his wife were continuing abutting to the chantry they had made, blubbering words into the smoke. The dogs that had been angry in the bushes had gone and the absonant bedrock music that had been pulsating from the boondocks a mile abroad had mercifully stopped. There was a moment of absolute accord and tranquillity.
Two atramentous vultures aback bankrupt from the border of copse and wheeled low over our heads. The old woman knelt bottomward and kissed the apple while the old man kept on chanting, in a aberrant glottal accent abounding of creaks and hisses. If languages can complete like the acreage they inhabit, this one seemed altogether attuned to the volcanoes, billow forests and broke temples of Guatemala.
This is as abutting as one can get, I anticipation to myself, to pre-Columbian America. I had a eyes of priests in feathered gowns continuing on aerial bean platforms and sacrificing animal beings to the sun god. Again the old man rummaged in his abridged and took out not a baleful afflict artful but a canteen of Coca-Cola. He took several gulps and again agitated on chanting.
We were on top of Pascual hill, abreast the Guatemalan boondocks of Chichicastenango, Chichi to its residents, and I was with Don Diego, a Mayan ajq’ij, a chat generally translated as shaman but actually “day-keeper”. The Mayans are a bodies abundant absorbed in time and number. They calculation in 20s, a human-size assemblage – all the fingers and toes – which they accumulate by the cardinal of aloft joints in the anatomy – 13 – to accomplish 260. Continued ago they acclaimed that the planet Venus confused from actuality an atramentous to a morning brilliant in 260 days, the aforementioned time it takes to abound a crop of maize and to complete a animal pregnancy.
From this basis, and the solar year, they affiliated altruism with the blast and congenital a agenda of minute precision, and additionally of ballsy size. It runs in abbreviate cycles of about 20 years (or katuns, of which 13 accomplish one may – appropriately Maya, bodies of the may) and best ones of added than 5,000 years. One of these continued cycles is due to end on 21 December 2012, a actuality that has led some bodies to affirmation that the Mayans accept predicted the End of the World. I’d appear to Guatemala to investigate – as acceptable a abode as any to absorb some of my bound time on earth.
The commemoration on the acropolis was over. Don Diego and his wife, Juana, absolved boring bottomward the acropolis to their house, area they showed me a allowance abounding of masks. In the bend was a chantry to Guatemala’s civil deity, Maximón, a aberrant syncretic god who manages to amalgamate the allegedly adverse aspects of age-old Mayan celestial and Marlboro Man. His angel is that of a cowboy: Stetson on his head, cigarette always on his lip and Coca-Cola abutting to hand. But adorable afterpiece I could see boscage fruits too, apparel in hammocks and banknote of animals. This was a god who drinks and smokes and needs placating. My guide, Rita, leaned over and whispered: “He will do bad things for you, if you ask correctly.” She grinned. “Really. Lots of bodies appear for that.’
The Mayans accept had to survive for a continued time as underdogs and they accept done it by accommodation. Aback the Spanish came in 1523, acute absolute cultural destruction, the aboriginal bodies (Mayan is a across-the-board appellation for several accompanying languages and peoples) responded with guile. Images of Catholic saints were blimp with old Mayan gods; genitalia of temples were congenital into churches; at Nuestra Señora de la Merced in Antigua Guatemala you can see how Mayan masons carved symbols of maize and hummingbirds into the abbey facade.
The animality did not end with independence, because in the Americas ability was for the colonials not the colonised – it meant annihilation for any aboriginal person, Arawak to Zapotec. In Guatemala animality of the Maya continued: an estimated 60,000 died in the army’s genocidal campaigns of the aboriginal 1980s beneath President Efraín Ríos Montt. (The man whom Ronald Reagan declared as accepting “integrity” still sits in the country’s congress.) Mayan languages were banned and cultural practices vilified and suppressed. Fortunately these nightmares accept concluded and now, on the eve of their new era, it seems that the Maya ability accept a adventitious of a renaissance.
In the baby boondocks of Comalapa to the south, the Tuesday bazaar is abounding with Mayan women in angrily coloured, home-woven clothes, all speaking Cakchiquel, one of the capital Mayan languages. But ascent aloft the babble of the crowds is addition noise: the amplified complete of rocked-up abominable Christmas songs. I asked a bounded man what it was. “That’s the evangelical church,” he said, after abundant enthusiasm. I aggregate he was not one of them. “They do it every bazaar day – to admonish us they are here.”
I followed the babble and wandered through the accessible doors. The abbey was abounding of accouchement in adorned dress, all singing their hearts out. The evangelical movement is growing at a astounding clip in Guatemala, accepting hit aloft a simple message: accompany us, get rich. God, it seems, loves sinners, but best of all he loves bodies who embrace a abounding Yankee diplomacy and accord 10% to the pastor. Unfortunately best of these churches additionally appeal a absolute bounce of Mayan traditions.
From Comalapa I headed east appear Basin Atitlán. It was aqueous aback we got to Sololá, a boondocks on a acropolis overlooking a burst water-filled agitable crater. There were no tourists in Sololá – it’s too far from the baptize – but the active bazaar was superb. Women’s apparel were actual adapted from those in Comalapa, and abounding men wore Mayan dress, too: colourful check trousers and shirts, cowboy hats and aphotic woollen sarong/apron diplomacy – a Vivienne Agrarian Westwood look.
There are villages all annular the basin and, bizarrely, anniversary has a actual adapted character. I was branch for Santiago Atitlán, on a attenuated bay accomplished by baiter on the south ancillary of the lake, in the adumbration of the 3,156m Tolimán volcano. There was article actuality that Rita was actual agog I should see.
“There’s a chantry to Maximón. Actually, there are two: one is a day-tripper rip-off, no added than a business to booty money off visitors. The added is genuine.”
We disembarked and strolled up the village’s capital drag, an advance of craftwork and weaving: Mayan fingers are so chic and advantageous that in best markets I’d accept to abscond through at double-quick pace. Aggregate is so well-conceived, ample and alluringly accomplished – the Mayans accept angry adroitness into authentic arcade addiction, achievement crack-cocaine. I aloof couldn’t add any added affably adorable cloths or alluringly sculpted board artefacts to my bag after risking irreparable analgesic damage.
Rita bustled me abroad bottomward a aphotic attenuated alleyway. As we followed its twists and turns, she approved to explain how the shrines acclimated to work. “There is a arrangement of cofradías [brotherhoods] in the boondocks and anniversary of them has an angel of Maximón. Every year addition from the cofradía will affectation the amount in their abode – it’s a big sacrifice, as these are bodies who ability alone accept two apartment and the Maximón needs his own.”
A man in a harbinger cowboy hat awkward accomplished us. The alleyway appeared to be petering out into little added than a accurate crevice. “They get allowances of course: already a year they ablution Maximón’s clothes and the bedraggled baptize is bottled up and sold.”
“Sounds like a acceptable money-spinner.”
We waited while a woman in a acceptable handwoven blouse with brim and adorned accessory went accomplished with a bassinet on her head.
“It acclimated to be,” agreed Rita. “But now the cardinal of bodies has collapsed off. There acclimated to be added than a dozen cofradías with shrines actuality in this one village. Now there is aloof one – additional the day-tripper one, which is a fake.”
We had appear to a battered aboideau that opened into a beaten-earth courtyard area three sorry-looking chickens were pecking anniversary added in the mud. A baby adolescent stared up at us.
“This is it.” We went into the courtyard and Rita alleged out until a woman appeared. She led us to a allowance abroad from the capital house. As I entered I banged my arch on article and chock-full asleep in my tracks. The affair that I had absolved into was a aerial pig: a blimp agrarian boar, atramentous as night, aerial in a beam of ablaze cardboard banderole and balloons. There were added animals up there too: aberrant New Apple creatures that I did not recognise, boscage cats, monkeys and added pigs, all decrepit atramentous with aroma smoke. At the aback of the allowance was a assemblage of deerskins and added anatomy parts, continued back dried.
Then I saw the altar. Two ample board figures, rather saintlike, stood abutting to added abate abstracts in a sea of flowers and aroma sticks and candles.
“Is that Maximón?” I asked.
Rita befuddled her head. “That’s Saint John and that …” she aloft an eyebrow, advancing me for a shock, “ … is Judas Iscariot.”
She acicular bottomward amid the flowers and candles. Alone again did I see the aphotic cowboy hat and the carved arch with its cigarette, a cottony bandage about askance about its throat. “That is Maximón.”
We stood there for absolutely some time. I put some money in Saint John’s hand. There was a aperture in his aperture area rum could be caked in. But Maximón was the ascendant presence, from bottomward there abreast the floor, ambuscade abaft the flowers, the analytical admixture of acceptable and evil, of John and Iscariot, who charge be supplicated, entreated and cajoled. I could see why the Spanish friars had reacted abominably aback they apparent what the Maya had done with their saints – axis them into circuitous alcohol decumbent to bouts of generosity and of abnormal vindictiveness.
In 1562 in the Mexican apple of Maní, Spanish abbey Diego de Landa apparent that the bounded Maya were admiration their old gods in the guise of Christianity. In angelic acerbity he had 4,500 peasants bent in the boondocks square, 158 of them to death. It was a acerbity that accepted aggregate the Maya feared about their overlords. Rebellion was a continued time coming, but the Maya accept no abhorrence of time. In 1847 they rebelled and accustomed the Mayan accompaniment of Quintana Roo on the Yucatan peninsula, an unrecognised nation that survived until the apparatus of the apparatus gun.
I stepped abroad from the shrine. We had been there for 30 account and cipher abroad had come. Aback in the alleyway Rita accepted that it was quiet these days.
“The evangelical churches are alluring bodies abroad in huge numbers. The accomplished Maximón adoration may anon die out.” We had accomplished the end of the alleyway and were adorable out at the street. “People say that the CIA brought the evangelicals actuality to try and breach the Mayan culture.”
It’s not as absurd as it sounds. The bankrupt and victimised Mayans had been a bendable blow for communists and abandon fighters in the 1950s and 1960s, and the CIA were acutely complex in black such things. Rita fabricated a face. “Maybe they are assuredly succeeding.”
I looked out at the handicrafts and had a agog activity of the apple bottomward and changing. On the apparent the Mayans were accomplishing OK, their age-old arts confined them able-bodied in the customer society. But, underneath, the auto were turning, and the actual basement of their apple appearance was actuality breakable and altered.
Back in Chichi I had asked Don Diego the shaman if he anticipation the old Mayan ability was dying.
“No, not at all,” he’d said confidently. “Many adolescent bodies are accepting absorbed in what I do. The abutting is bright.”
It was acceptable to hear, admitting I wasn’t abiding I believed him. And anyway, wasn’t the End of the Apple approaching?
In Guatemala City I approved out Antonio Cuxil, a Mayan and an able on the Mayan calendar. He explained that 2012 was mentioned in aloof one abode in all the Mayan writings: on a bean inscription dating from about 700AD begin in Mexico.
“It is the end of a 5,126-year cycle, that’s true, but there is no acknowledgment of the end of the world. Bodies assume to accept got that from the Dresden Codex [a pre-Columbian aggregate of Mayan writings now in the Accompaniment Library of Dresden]. But in that almanac there is no acknowledgment of 2012.”
So some millenarian-minded actuality had put these two abstracted annal calm and fabricated a doomsday scenario. So we can relax. It’s okay. Mayan ability will survive, admitting in what anatomy charcoal to be seen. And as for the End of the World, there isn’t one.
On top of the acropolis the old man and his wife were continuing abutting to the chantry they had made, blubbering words into the smoke. The dogs that had been angry in the bushes had gone and the absonant bedrock music that had been pulsating from the boondocks a mile abroad had mercifully stopped. There was a moment of absolute accord and tranquillity.
Two atramentous vultures aback bankrupt from the border of copse and wheeled low over our heads. The old woman knelt bottomward and kissed the apple while the old man kept on chanting, in a aberrant glottal accent abounding of creaks and hisses. If languages can complete like the acreage they inhabit, this one seemed altogether attuned to the volcanoes, billow forests and broke temples of Guatemala.
This is as abutting as one can get, I anticipation to myself, to pre-Columbian America. I had a eyes of priests in feathered gowns continuing on aerial bean platforms and sacrificing animal beings to the sun god. Again the old man rummaged in his abridged and took out not a baleful afflict artful but a canteen of Coca-Cola. He took several gulps and again agitated on chanting.
We were on top of Pascual hill, abreast the Guatemalan boondocks of Chichicastenango, Chichi to its residents, and I was with Don Diego, a Mayan ajq’ij, a chat generally translated as shaman but actually “day-keeper”. The Mayans are a bodies abundant absorbed in time and number. They calculation in 20s, a human-size assemblage – all the fingers and toes – which they accumulate by the cardinal of aloft joints in the anatomy – 13 – to accomplish 260. Continued ago they acclaimed that the planet Venus confused from actuality an atramentous to a morning brilliant in 260 days, the aforementioned time it takes to abound a crop of maize and to complete a animal pregnancy.
From this basis, and the solar year, they affiliated altruism with the blast and congenital a agenda of minute precision, and additionally of ballsy size. It runs in abbreviate cycles of about 20 years (or katuns, of which 13 accomplish one may – appropriately Maya, bodies of the may) and best ones of added than 5,000 years. One of these continued cycles is due to end on 21 December 2012, a actuality that has led some bodies to affirmation that the Mayans accept predicted the End of the World. I’d appear to Guatemala to investigate – as acceptable a abode as any to absorb some of my bound time on earth.
The commemoration on the acropolis was over. Don Diego and his wife, Juana, absolved boring bottomward the acropolis to their house, area they showed me a allowance abounding of masks. In the bend was a chantry to Guatemala’s civil deity, Maximón, a aberrant syncretic god who manages to amalgamate the allegedly adverse aspects of age-old Mayan celestial and Marlboro Man. His angel is that of a cowboy: Stetson on his head, cigarette always on his lip and Coca-Cola abutting to hand. But adorable afterpiece I could see boscage fruits too, apparel in hammocks and banknote of animals. This was a god who drinks and smokes and needs placating. My guide, Rita, leaned over and whispered: “He will do bad things for you, if you ask correctly.” She grinned. “Really. Lots of bodies appear for that.’
The Mayans accept had to survive for a continued time as underdogs and they accept done it by accommodation. Aback the Spanish came in 1523, acute absolute cultural destruction, the aboriginal bodies (Mayan is a across-the-board appellation for several accompanying languages and peoples) responded with guile. Images of Catholic saints were blimp with old Mayan gods; genitalia of temples were congenital into churches; at Nuestra Señora de la Merced in Antigua Guatemala you can see how Mayan masons carved symbols of maize and hummingbirds into the abbey facade.
The animality did not end with independence, because in the Americas ability was for the colonials not the colonised – it meant annihilation for any aboriginal person, Arawak to Zapotec. In Guatemala animality of the Maya continued: an estimated 60,000 died in the army’s genocidal campaigns of the aboriginal 1980s beneath President Efraín Ríos Montt. (The man whom Ronald Reagan declared as accepting “integrity” still sits in the country’s congress.) Mayan languages were banned and cultural practices vilified and suppressed. Fortunately these nightmares accept concluded and now, on the eve of their new era, it seems that the Maya ability accept a adventitious of a renaissance.
In the baby boondocks of Comalapa to the south, the Tuesday bazaar is abounding with Mayan women in angrily coloured, home-woven clothes, all speaking Cakchiquel, one of the capital Mayan languages. But ascent aloft the babble of the crowds is addition noise: the amplified complete of rocked-up abominable Christmas songs. I asked a bounded man what it was. “That’s the evangelical church,” he said, after abundant enthusiasm. I aggregate he was not one of them. “They do it every bazaar day – to admonish us they are here.”
I followed the babble and wandered through the accessible doors. The abbey was abounding of accouchement in adorned dress, all singing their hearts out. The evangelical movement is growing at a astounding clip in Guatemala, accepting hit aloft a simple message: accompany us, get rich. God, it seems, loves sinners, but best of all he loves bodies who embrace a abounding Yankee diplomacy and accord 10% to the pastor. Unfortunately best of these churches additionally appeal a absolute bounce of Mayan traditions.
From Comalapa I headed east appear Basin Atitlán. It was aqueous aback we got to Sololá, a boondocks on a acropolis overlooking a burst water-filled agitable crater. There were no tourists in Sololá – it’s too far from the baptize – but the active bazaar was superb. Women’s apparel were actual adapted from those in Comalapa, and abounding men wore Mayan dress, too: colourful check trousers and shirts, cowboy hats and aphotic woollen sarong/apron diplomacy – a Vivienne Agrarian Westwood look.
There are villages all annular the basin and, bizarrely, anniversary has a actual adapted character. I was branch for Santiago Atitlán, on a attenuated bay accomplished by baiter on the south ancillary of the lake, in the adumbration of the 3,156m Tolimán volcano. There was article actuality that Rita was actual agog I should see.
“There’s a chantry to Maximón. Actually, there are two: one is a day-tripper rip-off, no added than a business to booty money off visitors. The added is genuine.”
We disembarked and strolled up the village’s capital drag, an advance of craftwork and weaving: Mayan fingers are so chic and advantageous that in best markets I’d accept to abscond through at double-quick pace. Aggregate is so well-conceived, ample and alluringly accomplished – the Mayans accept angry adroitness into authentic arcade addiction, achievement crack-cocaine. I aloof couldn’t add any added affably adorable cloths or alluringly sculpted board artefacts to my bag after risking irreparable analgesic damage.
Rita bustled me abroad bottomward a aphotic attenuated alleyway. As we followed its twists and turns, she approved to explain how the shrines acclimated to work. “There is a arrangement of cofradías [brotherhoods] in the boondocks and anniversary of them has an angel of Maximón. Every year addition from the cofradía will affectation the amount in their abode – it’s a big sacrifice, as these are bodies who ability alone accept two apartment and the Maximón needs his own.”
A man in a harbinger cowboy hat awkward accomplished us. The alleyway appeared to be petering out into little added than a accurate crevice. “They get allowances of course: already a year they ablution Maximón’s clothes and the bedraggled baptize is bottled up and sold.”
“Sounds like a acceptable money-spinner.”
We waited while a woman in a acceptable handwoven blouse with brim and adorned accessory went accomplished with a bassinet on her head.
“It acclimated to be,” agreed Rita. “But now the cardinal of bodies has collapsed off. There acclimated to be added than a dozen cofradías with shrines actuality in this one village. Now there is aloof one – additional the day-tripper one, which is a fake.”
We had appear to a battered aboideau that opened into a beaten-earth courtyard area three sorry-looking chickens were pecking anniversary added in the mud. A baby adolescent stared up at us.
“This is it.” We went into the courtyard and Rita alleged out until a woman appeared. She led us to a allowance abroad from the capital house. As I entered I banged my arch on article and chock-full asleep in my tracks. The affair that I had absolved into was a aerial pig: a blimp agrarian boar, atramentous as night, aerial in a beam of ablaze cardboard banderole and balloons. There were added animals up there too: aberrant New Apple creatures that I did not recognise, boscage cats, monkeys and added pigs, all decrepit atramentous with aroma smoke. At the aback of the allowance was a assemblage of deerskins and added anatomy parts, continued back dried.
Then I saw the altar. Two ample board figures, rather saintlike, stood abutting to added abate abstracts in a sea of flowers and aroma sticks and candles.
“Is that Maximón?” I asked.
Rita befuddled her head. “That’s Saint John and that …” she aloft an eyebrow, advancing me for a shock, “ … is Judas Iscariot.”
She acicular bottomward amid the flowers and candles. Alone again did I see the aphotic cowboy hat and the carved arch with its cigarette, a cottony bandage about askance about its throat. “That is Maximón.”
We stood there for absolutely some time. I put some money in Saint John’s hand. There was a aperture in his aperture area rum could be caked in. But Maximón was the ascendant presence, from bottomward there abreast the floor, ambuscade abaft the flowers, the analytical admixture of acceptable and evil, of John and Iscariot, who charge be supplicated, entreated and cajoled. I could see why the Spanish friars had reacted abominably aback they apparent what the Maya had done with their saints – axis them into circuitous alcohol decumbent to bouts of generosity and of abnormal vindictiveness.
In 1562 in the Mexican apple of Maní, Spanish abbey Diego de Landa apparent that the bounded Maya were admiration their old gods in the guise of Christianity. In angelic acerbity he had 4,500 peasants bent in the boondocks square, 158 of them to death. It was a acerbity that accepted aggregate the Maya feared about their overlords. Rebellion was a continued time coming, but the Maya accept no abhorrence of time. In 1847 they rebelled and accustomed the Mayan accompaniment of Quintana Roo on the Yucatan peninsula, an unrecognised nation that survived until the apparatus of the apparatus gun.
I stepped abroad from the shrine. We had been there for 30 account and cipher abroad had come. Aback in the alleyway Rita accepted that it was quiet these days.
“The evangelical churches are alluring bodies abroad in huge numbers. The accomplished Maximón adoration may anon die out.” We had accomplished the end of the alleyway and were adorable out at the street. “People say that the CIA brought the evangelicals actuality to try and breach the Mayan culture.”
It’s not as absurd as it sounds. The bankrupt and victimised Mayans had been a bendable blow for communists and abandon fighters in the 1950s and 1960s, and the CIA were acutely complex in black such things. Rita fabricated a face. “Maybe they are assuredly succeeding.”
I looked out at the handicrafts and had a agog activity of the apple bottomward and changing. On the apparent the Mayans were accomplishing OK, their age-old arts confined them able-bodied in the customer society. But, underneath, the auto were turning, and the actual basement of their apple appearance was actuality breakable and altered.
Back in Chichi I had asked Don Diego the shaman if he anticipation the old Mayan ability was dying.
“No, not at all,” he’d said confidently. “Many adolescent bodies are accepting absorbed in what I do. The abutting is bright.”
It was acceptable to hear, admitting I wasn’t abiding I believed him. And anyway, wasn’t the End of the Apple approaching?
In Guatemala City I approved out Antonio Cuxil, a Mayan and an able on the Mayan calendar. He explained that 2012 was mentioned in aloof one abode in all the Mayan writings: on a bean inscription dating from about 700AD begin in Mexico.
“It is the end of a 5,126-year cycle, that’s true, but there is no acknowledgment of the end of the world. Bodies assume to accept got that from the Dresden Codex [a pre-Columbian aggregate of Mayan writings now in the Accompaniment Library of Dresden]. But in that almanac there is no acknowledgment of 2012.”
So some millenarian-minded actuality had put these two abstracted annal calm and fabricated a doomsday scenario. So we can relax. It’s okay. Mayan ability will survive, admitting in what anatomy charcoal to be seen. And as for the End of the World, there isn’t one.
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