The Yucatec Maya

← Encyclopedia

The peninsula gives no rivers. Rain falls on the flat limestone shelf of the north and vanishes into the rock, and the water gathers instead in the cenotes — the open sinkholes where the stone roof has fallen in and the dark water stands far below the surface of the land. A people who farm this country live by the rain and by these wells, and so by the lord who sends the rain. To read the religion of the Yucatec Maya, one begins not with a temple but with a hole in the ground full of standing water, and with the long-nosed mask of the rain-bringer cut a hundred times into a palace wall.

These are the Maya of the dry shelf of the north: the speakers of Yucatec Maya, the people of the land the Spaniards came to call Yucatán, heirs of the great northern cities and keepers of books that no fire reached. They are not a vanished people. Close to a million of them speak the language today, and the rite that calls down the rain is among the longest unbroken ceremonies in the Americas. What follows is their inheritance — where it came from, what they set down in their own hand, and how it passed through a conquest that was never quite finished and a war that nearly undid the conquest altogether.

Genealogy: the people of the limestone shelf

The Yucatán is a peninsula of low porous limestone, almost without surface streams, thinly soiled, and crossed by no mountain range of consequence. It is the northern third of the lowlands that the Maya civilization built across, and the Yucatec Maya are the people who held its flat dry shelf. Their forebears raised the northern cities — the Puuc towns of the hill country, and later the great hybrid capital of Chichén Itzá with its sacred cenote, and Cobá at the hub of its web of raised limestone roads, the sacbeob, that ran straight across the bush. When the southern lowland courts fell silent in the eighth and ninth centuries — the long event scholars call the Classic collapse, whose causes remain argued over — the center of Maya life shifted north onto this shelf, and the northern cities had their season.

By the time Spanish sails appeared off the coast in the early sixteenth century, that season too had passed. The last great northern league, ruled from the city of Mayapán, had broken apart around the middle of the fifteenth century, and the peninsula had fractured into a patchwork of small provinces — sixteen or more of them by most counts — each with its own ruling lineage, each at odds with its neighbors. There was no single king to capture, no capital whose fall would end the matter. This fragmentation, which had been a weakness against any unified power, became against the Spaniards a strange durability.

The conquest of the north was therefore slow and bitter. Francisco de Montejo, granted the title of adelantado in 1526, set out the next year; he was thrown back, retreated, and tried again across nearly two decades. The first permanent Spanish town councils on the peninsula were founded at Campeche and Mérida only in 1541 and 1542, and even then whole provinces rose in revolt. The forest of the interior held out far longer. The Itza kingdom of Nojpetén, on its island in a lake deep in the Petén — the people treated in the Itza — was not taken until 1697, the last independent native kingdom in the Americas to fall. The Yucatec Maya, then, were not conquered in a campaign. They were absorbed in pieces, over generations, with the old order pushed under the surface rather than erased.

A page from the Dresden Codex, one of only a handful of surviving pre-conquest Maya bark-paper books; the surviving codices are Yucatec. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Teaching: the books that the fire missed, and the count that survived

Before the alphabet there were the painted books — folded screens of bark paper sized with lime, written in the hieroglyphic script and kept by the priests, holding the almanacs and the reckonings by which time was read and the gods served. Of the libraries of the Yucatec lords almost nothing remains. In July 1562, at the town of Maní, the Franciscan friar Diego de Landa held an auto-da-fé and burned the books — by his own account some twenty-seven of them, along with thousands of cult images — judging them full of what he called the falsehoods of the devil (on Landa and the auto-da-fé). The libraries of a literate people went into a single fire.

Three pre-conquest screenfold books of undisputed authenticity escaped, and all three are Yucatec in character: the codex now in Dresden, the one in Madrid, and the one in Paris, named for the cities that hold them. The Dresden Codex is the finest — an astronomical and divinatory manual whose tables track the cycles of Venus and predict eclipses with a precision that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries took decades to credit (on the Dresden codex and its deciphering). These few books, and the fired clay and carved stone the archaeologists recovered, would be nearly the whole record of the old religion were it not for a paradox that sits at the center of the field. The man who burned the libraries, Landa, also wrote the single most detailed colonial account of Maya rite, calendar, and belief — the Relación de las cosas de Yucatán. The mayanist William Gates put the irony at its sharpest: Landa, he wrote, “burned ninety-nine times as much knowledge of Maya history and sciences as he has given us.” Much of what is known of the Yucatec gods is known through the eyes of the priest who destroyed their books. The source-distance is built into the record, and a careful reader keeps it in view.

But the deepest survival was not in the friar’s pages. It was in the people’s own. Through the colonial centuries, in towns across the peninsula, Yucatec Maya scribes kept manuscripts in their own language, now written in the Latin alphabet the friars had taught them — the Books of Chilam Balam (on the books and their contents). Nine survive, named for the towns that preserved them: Chumayel, Tizimín, Maní, Kaua, and others. The name is itself a memory: chilam is the priest who speaks the gods’ words, the mouthpiece of prophecy, and Balam, “jaguar,” was both a lineage name and the name of a famous prophet said to have foretold, before the ships came, the arrival of a new faith from the east (on the prophet Chilam Balam).

These books are miscellanies in the truest sense — chronicles of the lineages and their migrations, herbal and medical recipes, ritual riddles in a deliberately obscure “language of Zuyua” by which a true lord proved his right to rule, astronomical notes, fragments of Christian liturgy folded in beside the old material. At their heart, though, lies the thing the alphabet could not change: the prophecy of the k’atun. A k’atun is a period of twenty tuns of 360 days each — close to twenty of our years — and the Maya read history as a wheel of thirteen named k’atuns turning in fixed succession. Because the same k’atun returns, what happened under a past K’atun 4 Ahau is also a foretelling of what the next K’atun 4 Ahau will bring. To record the past in this scheme is already to prophesy the future. The Christian alphabet had been turned to carry the oldest Maya idea of all — that time is not a line but a returning order, and that to keep the count is to know what is coming. The day-keeper’s reckoning, the 260-day Tzolk’in count of named and numbered days that governs ritual and divination, runs beneath the Christian calendar in the villages still.

The façade of the Codz Poop at Kabah, set with rows of stone masks of the long-nosed rain god Chaac. Photo by Erika Porras, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

And beneath the imposed faith the lord of the rain kept his place. Chaac, the long-nosed bringer of the storms, is the god a maize people on a waterless shelf cannot do without, and the rite that summons him — the Ch’a-Cháak, “to fetch the rain” — is performed in Yucatec villages to this day. A four-cornered altar is raised to the quarters of the world; offerings are set at each; boys crouch at the corners as frogs, whose calls announce the coming wet. The structure of the rite — the four directions, the directional offerings, the frog-children — appears scarcely changed from the pre-conquest pattern, having outlasted the conquest, the forced baptisms, and five centuries since. The water that gathers in the cenotes was Chaac’s, and into the great sinkhole at Chichén Itzá the old Maya let down offerings, and bodies, to the lord who held the rain — the costliest gift a people could make for the world’s continuance, rendered as grave reciprocity and not as spectacle.

A cenote in the Yucatán — an open sinkhole where the limestone roof has collapsed to the water table. The peninsula holds thousands; they were the wells of the land and the dwelling of the rain. Photo by Laredawg, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Reception: the Caste War, the speaking cross, and a living people

For three centuries after Mérida was founded the colonial order held the peninsula — the encomienda, the church, the debt that bound the Maya farmer to the estates of the descendants of the conquerors. Then, in 1847, it nearly ended. The rising the Maya of the peninsula carried out is remembered, in the language of the side that survived it, as the Guerra de Castas, the Caste War — though its roots were less caste than land, taxation, and the seizure of village fields. It was the most successful indigenous uprising in the history of the Americas, and for a season it came close to total (on the Caste War).

By the spring of 1848 the Maya rebels held nearly the whole peninsula. The colonists were pinned in Mérida and Campeche, and a relief was being prepared to take them off by sea — the descendants of the conquest stood on the edge of being driven into the water. Then the rebel armies broke off the siege and went home. The accounts agree on the timing and dispute the reason: the flying ants had swarmed after the first rains, the sign that the maize must go into the ground, and the farmer-soldiers left the front to plant. Whether this was famine, the calendar of the field, or a fatal lapse, the moment passed, and the Mexican state recovered the open country.

But the war did not end. The Maya who would not submit withdrew into the forests of the east, and there, around 1850, the war became a religion. In a clearing by a cenote in the eastern bush, a cross was found — and the cross spoke. Through interpreters who relayed its words, the Talking Cross, la Cruz Parlante, gave the rebels their orders, their courage, and their account of why they fought: it was God’s own will that the Maya should be free. Those who followed it called themselves the Cruzob, the people of the cross. Their capital grew up around the shrine and took its name: Chan Santa Cruz, “little holy cross.” Here was a thing the conquest had been built to make impossible — an independent Maya country, ruled from a sanctuary, defended by a theocratic command, holding the eastern half of the peninsula as its own.

It held for half a century. The Cruzob state traded chicle and timber across the southern border into British Honduras and bought arms in return; the British dealt with it as a neighbor in fact if not in law, until that traffic was closed off in the 1890s. Only then could the Mexican army press into the forest. General Ignacio Bravo took Chan Santa Cruz in 1901 and telegraphed that the war was over on the fifth of May. It was not, quite — the shrine-villages of the cross kept their independence in the deep bush for years more, and the festivals of the Talking Cross are still kept in a handful of Maya towns of Quintana Roo. But the rebel country, after more than fifty years, was gone.

What was not gone was the people. The Yucatec Maya are no relic. Their language is the most widely spoken Mayan tongue in Mexico, with on the order of eight hundred thousand to nearly a million speakers across Yucatán, Campeche, and Quintana Roo. The Tzolk’in count is still kept by day-keepers; the Ch’a-Cháak is still danced for the rain; the lord with the long nose is still asked for water. The decipherment of the glyphs in the later twentieth century — the breakthrough of Yuri Knorozov, who showed the script recorded the spoken Yucatec syllable by syllable, and the work of the scholars who followed — recovered the voice of the ancestors who built the cities, and confirmed what the Books of Chilam Balam had quietly carried all along: that this was a literate civilization with a history of its own, written down, and never wholly burned. The Dresden Codex sits at the root of that recovery; the towns of the limestone shelf still hold its language on their tongues. The Yucatec material has thus served the field twice over — as the surviving codices that gave the script its first foothold, and as a living spoken tongue against which the decipherers could test what they thought a glyph might say. The shared traditions of the wider Maya world reach the Yucatec from the south as well: the maize-creation and the journey of the Hero Twins through the underworld of Xibalba, set down in the K’iche’ Popol Vuh of the highlands, belong to a common store of story the Yucatec knew in their own forms, and the same arithmetic of cyclical time underwrites both the Maya Long Count calendar and the k’atun-wheel of Chilam Balam.

It is worth marking one modern distortion against this record. The turning of the thirteenth b’ak’tun of the Long Count, on the twenty-first of December 2012, drew a wave of foreign talk of a Maya prophecy of the world’s end. The Maya foretold no such thing. The date was the closing of a long cycle and the opening of the next, and the inscriptions themselves project dates thousands of years beyond it. The end the count describes is not an end but a return — which is, in the deepest sense, the same thing the prophets of the jaguar were saying in their towns when they kept the wheel of the k’atuns turning under a borrowed alphabet, waiting to read in the past what the next turn of time would bring.

→ Related: Chaac · Coba · The Quiche · The Itza · Maya Civilization · Popol Vuh · Maya Long Count Calendar · Chichen Itza · Palenque · Tikal · Kukulkan · Itzamna · Ix Chel · Kinich Ahau · Yaxchilan · Bonampak · Caracol · Divination · Reincarnation · Soul