Lacandon Maya

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Deep in the Selva Lacandona, the rainforest that drapes the eastern flank of Chiapas in southern Mexico, a few hundred people call themselves Hach Winik — the true people. They speak a Yucatecan form of Maya, plant maize and tobacco in forest clearings, and keep, in a thatched house set slightly apart from the dwellings, a row of squat clay vessels with modeled faces. Into those vessels they feed nuggets of copal resin, and over the rising smoke the elder who tends them speaks to gods whose names reach back past the conquest into the world of the stone cities. The Lacandon are not the builders of those cities, and they make no such claim. But of all the peoples descended from the Maya, they carried the old religious life — its pantheon, its offerings, its reckoning of the soul’s road after death — furthest into the present, in a forest remote enough that the friar and the missionary arrived late and, for a long while, departed empty-handed.

A small people in a large forest

The Lacandon are scattered across three principal settlements and a scatter of smaller hamlets in the rainforest east of the Usumacinta drainage. The northern communities cluster around the lakes of Naha and Mensabak; the southern community lives at Lacanja Chansayab, within walking distance of the ruined center of Bonampak and not far from Yaxchilan on the river. The total population is small — on the order of several hundred to perhaps a thousand, with the larger share at Lacanja and Naha and only a few dozen at Mensabak. The Lacandon language, a distinct variety within the Yucatecan branch, has a comparably small number of fluent speakers, and its survival, like the forest’s, is no longer something that can be taken for granted.

Their environment is itself part of the story. The Lacandon rainforest is one of the last large tracts of tropical forest in Mexico, and for most of the twentieth century it was also one of the most isolated. That isolation was never absolute and never permanent. Across the second half of the century, logging concessions opened roads, and waves of landless farmers and cattle ranchers pressed into the selva from the highlands, clearing forest the Lacandon had moved through for generations. The pressure reshaped settlement, drove the dispersed forest households into fixed villages, and brought sustained outside contact — schools, traders, churches, anthropologists — to a people who had lived, by Mesoamerican standards, remarkably apart.

Two peoples, one name

The name Lacandon carries a historical confusion that any account of them has to untangle. The Spanish first applied Lacandón to a Ch’olan-speaking Maya group who held out against the conquest from a fortified island town, Lakam Tun, in Lake Miramar. When that stronghold fell, the survivors withdrew deeper into the forest and refounded their capital as Sak Bahlan — Sac Balam, the white jaguar — around 1586. For more than a century these were the famously unconquered Maya of the Chiapas interior, until Spanish columns aided by allied Maya finally occupied Sac Balam in early 1695 and brought the resistance to an end. Those original Lacandon spoke Ch’olan, not Yucatec, and as a community they did not survive the colonial reduction.

The people who bear the name today are different. They are Yucatec speakers, and the scholarly consensus is that contemporary Lacandon identity coalesced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries out of Maya groups drifting south and west into the empty forest — Yucatec-speaking refugees from the petén lowlands, perhaps remnants of the Itza and their neighbors, after the fall of the last independent Maya kingdoms. The colonial record first clearly registers these Yucatec-speaking forest dwellers around the mid-seventeenth century. They inherited the Spanish label of the people they replaced in the same territory, and so a name forged for one unconquered Maya nation passed to another. The continuity that matters is not a single unbroken lineage from any one Classic city but a religious and cultural world — Maya in language, cosmology, and ritual — that the forest preserved when the open country could not. For the broad sweep behind that world, the entry on the Maya civilization holds the long account; the Lacandon are one of its late, living branches.

The pantheon and the god-house

What set the Lacandon apart, through the long centuries when nearly every other Maya community had been folded into Catholic or, later, Protestant Christianity, was that they went on addressing a polytheistic pantheon directly, in their own language, on their own terms. Their gods are arranged in two great companies — the celestial gods who dwell above and the earthly gods who dwell below — and the Lacandon situate themselves, as humans, in the middle layer, dependent on keeping both companies fed and well-disposed.

At the apex stands K’akoch, the remote first creator, who made the earth and the sun and the great flower, the bak nikte’ — the red plumeria — from whose blossom the other gods were born. K’akoch is distant; the Lacandon do not approach him directly so much as the gods themselves do. The deity who governs the human world is Hachakyum, whose name renders as our true lord, identified with the pre-conquest creator Itzamna and credited with shaping the forest, its animals, and, with his consort, the first men and women. His elder brother Sukunkyum was the first god to emerge from the bak nikte’; he rules the underworld and acts as the judge of the dead, and it is he who carries the sun through the lower world by night, feeding it and bearing it from the place of its setting back to the place of its rising. Beneath these are the mediating gods — Hachakyum’s son T’up, his son-in-law the priestly Ah K’in Chob — and, crucially, Mensabak, the rain-giver who darkens the sky and whose name a whole community carries; he stands in the line of the old Maya rain deity. Yum Kaax, lord of the woods, guards the plants and the wild creatures on which forest life depends.

Against this company is set Kisin, the god of death and of earthquakes, who waits in the underworld below even Sukunkyum’s domain. When the dead come before Sukunkyum he weighs their conduct; the soul of the murderer, the thief, the liar, the one who broke the deepest prohibitions is handed down to Kisin, who torments it by turns in fire and in cold. The ordinary dead pass instead to a place of ease above the earth, a land of plenty without labor or want.

This pantheon is not a museum inventory. It is addressed, and it is addressed in a specific place: the god-house, a small open-sided thatched structure kept apart from family dwellings and entered by men in ritual contexts. Inside stand the god-pots — the incensarios, ceramic braziers each modeled with the face of a particular deity, so that to tend the row of pots is to stand before the assembled gods at once. The pots are not permanent idols in the European sense; they are periodically renewed, the old censers retired and new ones made and consecrated in renewal ceremonies that can run for days, timed above all to the agricultural year — the planting and the harvest of the maize on which everything depends. In their form and function these vessels descend recognizably from the elaborate effigy censers Maya communities used for some three thousand years; the Lacandon god-pot is a living instance of one of Mesoamerica’s oldest religious technologies. The continuities here run deep enough that the cosmological themes carried in the K’iche’ Maya council-book, the Popol Vuh — creation by divine craftsmen, the ordeal of the underworld, the centrality of maize and of the men formed from it — find recognizable kin in the Lacandon understanding of the gods and the dead, even though the Lacandon are a distinct Yucatec-speaking people with their own scripture-less oral tradition rather than heirs of the K’iche’ book.

Copal, smoke, and the offering

At the heart of every god-house rite is incense, and the incense is copal. The resin is tapped from forest trees of the genus that yields pom, the aromatic gum the Maya have burned at altars since deep antiquity; for the broader practice and its meaning across traditions, see incense. In the god-house the resin is fed into the modeled pots, and as it smolders the fragrant smoke is understood to rise to the gods as nourishment — the smoke is the food of the gods, the medium through which the offering ascends and the prayer travels. The hardened tarry residue that accumulates in the bowl of each pot is not waste but the visible record of feeding, the deity’s accumulated meal. To let a god-pot go cold and unfed is to neglect a divine relationship; to renew the pots and replenish the smoke is to keep the human and divine worlds in the balance on which rain, fertility, and health are thought to rest.

Alongside the copal stands balche, the ceremonial drink that gives the great rites their character. It is brewed from the soaked bark of the balche tree together with water and honey, fermented in a long hollowed canoe kept for the purpose, and shared among the men in the god-house. The logic of the balche feast is not intoxication for its own sake but participation: the gods themselves are understood to drink and to grow content, and the men in the ritual circle, by drinking in concert, enter into and mirror that divine good humor, drawing the gods into the benevolent mood from which rain, healthy crops, and recovery from sickness are believed to flow. The offering of smoke and the sharing of the drink are the two poles of Lacandon worship: the rising copal carries the human petition upward, and the balche brings the human company into accord with the gods it petitions.

Dreams, the dead, and the ancient cities

Beyond the god-house, the Lacandon read the world for signs, and the surviving accounts of their practice describe a developed attention to dreams as warnings. A dream is taken to disclose what is coming — and characteristically what is coming is danger, so that the larger share of recorded dream-omens are unfavorable, premonitions of sickness, accident, or death. The point of reading them is to act in time: a dream announces an event that may still be averted or softened by the right response, which places dream-interpretation within the wider Mesoamerican family of practices treated under divination. The dead, judged below and lodged above, remain part of the moral economy; conduct in life is weighed after death, and the prohibitions whose breach delivers a soul to Kisin are the same that order living conduct.

The relationship between the living Lacandon and the abandoned stone cities in their forest is more delicate than romance allows. The southern Lacandon live almost in sight of Bonampak; Yaxchilan stands on the river; the great western city of Palenque lies within the wider region, its rulers once lords of this corner of the Maya world. Reports going back to early ethnographers describe Lacandon visits to such ruins — offerings left, censers placed before old monuments — and it has often been claimed that the Lacandon made deliberate pilgrimages to the Classic centers as living shrines. The claim is genuinely contested in the scholarship: some such visits are well attested, while the picture of a continuous, structured pilgrimage cult linking the modern Lacandon to the specific dynasties who raised those cities is harder to sustain. What is not in doubt is that the Lacandon inhabited a landscape thick with the ancestral Maya past and understood that past, in their own idiom, as the work and dwelling of gods — Hachakyum, in their telling, made the ruined cities. The deep timekeeping that organized those cities, the place-value count surveyed under the Maya Long Count calendar, is not preserved in Lacandon practice in its monumental Classic form, but the orientation it expressed — human life lived inside vast divine cycles, ritual timed to keep those cycles turning — is recognizably the same world the Lacandon kept alive in miniature.

Conversion, conservation, and Chan K’in

The twentieth century pressed hard on the Lacandon religious world, and it did not press evenly. Protestant missionaries, working through the Summer Institute of Linguistics, reduced the Lacandon language to writing and translated the New Testament and portions of the Old; in the southern community at Lacanja, this effort, together with the disruptions of logging and resettlement, led to the effective abandonment of the old pantheon and the conversion of the southern Lacandon to Christianity across the 1950s and 1960s. The god-houses there fell silent. In the north, around Naha and Mensabak, the outcome was different, and the difference turned substantially on one man.

Chan K’in Viejo, the t’o’ohil — the elder responsible for the community’s myth, ritual, and history — held Naha to the traditional gods through the decades when conversion swept the south. He was a figure of unusual authority and presence, and the missionaries who succeeded elsewhere could not dislodge his prestige or break the prayers he led in the god-house; respect for him bought his community the time to weigh, rather than simply absorb, the changes overtaking them. When the gods of the foreigners arrived, the Lacandon characteristically did not reject them so much as situate them: the pantheon already held Akyantho’, the pale, hat-wearing god of trade, metal tools, and disease, and his son was reckoned to be Hesuklistos, the god of the outsiders — Christ given a genealogy inside the Maya cosmos rather than set over it. This capacity to absorb new powers into an old frame, the dynamic studied under syncretism, is part of how the tradition survived contact at all; it is also why the Lacandon religious world cannot be read as a sealed pre-conquest relic.

Chan K’in Viejo died at Naha on the twenty-third of December, 1996, very old — the reports of his exact age vary widely — and with him passed an extraordinary store of the prayers, songs, and lore that no text held. His death was felt, rightly, as a watershed. Yet the forest religion he tended is not a closed chapter. Its gods are named in mythology collected and studied, its god-pots stand in homes and museums, and at Naha the practice of feeding the gods with copal smoke did not end with the man who had defended it longest. The Lacandon remain a living people, neither the last survivors of a vanished race nor a curiosity preserved out of time, but a present community making its own decisions about what to keep, in a forest under pressure and a country fully aware of them. Their endurance is the reason that a way of addressing the Maya gods — directly, in Maya, over rising copal — outlasted the cities that first raised those gods in stone, and goes on being spoken in the selva that sheltered it.

Scholarship and sources

The Lacandon entered the modern ethnographic record early. Alfred M. Tozzer’s A Comparative Study of the Mayas and the Lacandones (1907), based on fieldwork in the forest and published by the Archaeological Institute of America, set the Lacandon beside the wider Maya and remains a foundational document; it is freely available as a digitized public-domain volume. The mid-century French Americanist Jacques Soustelle and, above all, Robert D. Bruce, who recorded and translated a large body of Lacandon oral narrative and dream-lore from Chan K’in Viejo and others, deepened the documentation of the northern tradition. The most sustained modern ethnography of religion is R. Jon McGee’s Life, Ritual, and Religion among the Lacandon Maya (1990) and his later studies of ceremony, including a detailed treatment of the balché ritual in Estudios de Cultura Maya (2013). Didier Boremanse has published extensively on Lacandon kinship, ritual, and oral literature; James D. Nations on the people’s forest ecology and agriculture; the German ethnographer Christian Rätsch on balche and its botany; and the archaeologist Joel W. Palka on the material history of the unconquered and post-conquest Lacandon. Cultural Survival’s account of the death of Chan K’in registers what his passing meant for the northern tradition. The documentary record on the Lacandon is unusually rich for so small a people, in part because their persistence in addressing the old gods drew observers across more than a century — a record that, read with the people’s own present-tense voice in mind, describes a religion still in use rather than one merely recovered.

→ Related: Maya Civilization · Popol Vuh · Maya Long Count Calendar · Palenque · Incense · Syncretism · Mythology · Divination