Maya sacred places

28th Nov 2022

Mexicolore contributor Brent K.S. Woodfill

We are sincerely grateful to Dr. Brent K.S. Woodfill, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina, for this evocative introduction to Maya sacred places. Author most recently of War in the Land of True Peace: The Fight for Maya Sacred Places (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), his research focuses on Maya ritual and religion, cave archaeology, economics, and conducting scientific investigations in service to descendant communities. To that end, much of the research discussed in this piece was conducted in collaboration with ADAWA, a Q’eqchi’ Maya association that serves as a platform for the nearly 3 dozen communities surrounding Salinas de los Nueve Cerros to develop themselves through building wells and sanitary latrines, providing educational scholarships and water filtration systems, and acquiring other goods and services to solve problems identified by the villagers themselves.

An Introductory Note
Words are messy, and even more so when translating between cultures in addition to languages. Take the English word god and its close Indo-European relatives (dios, Gott, dieu, etc.), which encompass several very different types of beings, from the Judeo-Christian YHWH, a singular being who is responsible for the creation of the entire universe and everything in it, to supernatural entities who personify different celestial bodies or natural forces (planets, lighting, the sea). When we find similar concepts in different cultures, we often treat them as one-to-one correlations, which can lead to significant misunderstandings. A Japanese friend of mine, for example, told me that her grandmother guilted her into mastering chop sticks at a young age by telling her that each grain of rice is home to 10,000 gods, each of whom is disrespected if left in the bowl. While certainly an effective message, the simple translation of the Shinto concept of kami as god stretches the limits of our comfortable English word so far as to be essentially meaningless, just as it plasters over all of the nuance of the original Japanese word.

I bring this up at the opening of this short piece because sacred place is a similarly complicated term to translate into English from the original Maya languages and worldview. Without belaboring the point too much, our Western understanding of sacred places tends to be built upon the following assumptions:
1) Regarding place, the world is fundamentally inert - the Earth is a giant ball of lifeless stone covered by similarly lifeless water, plants without consciousness, and animals which, while aware of their surroundings, are lacking the sophisticated mental acumen we humans possess. “Places,” therefore, are simply spaces that are given special meaning through human or divine intention, not through anything intrinsic to the location itself.
2) Regarding sacred, the Western concept is based on fears of contamination - there are certain rules and behaviors you have to follow for sacred objects and places, both religious and secular. Communion wafers and the American flag are two examples most readers will be familiar with, which have to be interacted with and disposed of in very specific ways. If they are not treated according to a set of specific rules, they are profaned and potentially irrevocably damaged, which is potentially hazardous both to the objects and to those who disrespect them.

Most Westerners who have discussed sacred places in Mesoamerica have, to varying extents, transposed these assumptions about what sacred places are onto their Mesoamerican counterparts. Unfortunately, that has led us to understand them on our own terms, not on theirs, causing to some real confusion and misunderstandings. I’d like to move past that here and try to explain a general understanding of sacred places by the Maya themselves (to the best of my ability as yet another Western scientist).

Personhood in the Maya World
In Western philosophy, science, and law, a person is a fully conscious individual with mental and physical autonomy. Typically, this designation is limited to living human beings, although as debates surrounding abortion and continued life support demonstrate, there is still some disagreement as to when full personhood begins and ends for individual humans. Beyond rare exceptions (a belief in divine beings and ghosts, angels, or demons; strong attachments to pets), personhood is not typically understood to extend beyond death or the human species.

Throughout the Americas, however, the Indigenous worldview tends to take a much broader view of personhood. Important animals can be full persons, like salmon in the Northwest Coast or jaguars in the Amazon. The spirits of the dead can continue to be present and affect the world, like deceased rulers and family matriarchs and patriarchs. And mountains, caves, springs, trees, rocks, rivers, and other places can also be living and fully conscious beings who own and control the surrounding environment. This last class of being is what Westerners have typically misunderstood as sacred places.
Fransico Ximénez (1930:19, translation by the author), an 18th century friar and historian of the Spanish colony of Guatemala, wrote about these beings as such. “The priests asked ‘to whom do you offer these sacrifices?’ [The Maya] responded: ‘to the very high and uneven mountains and ridges and the dangerous passes and the crossroads, and to the great rapids of the rivers,’ because they understood that these lived and multiplied and that from them all of their sustenance came and the things necessary for human life.”

These beings have multiple names, depending on the specific Maya language and time period. Typically, though, they include the word mountain (witz or tzuul). Among the Q’eqchi’ with whom I work, the beings are called tzuultaq’a (literally mountain-valley). In addition to their physical, geological form, they can appear in dreams and even in the mortal plane, often as elders and other important individuals. Today among the Q’eqchi’, they have been typically described to me as resembling the German coffee plantation owners who bought up much of their ancestral land in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The conquest-era Title of Sololá, written by neighboring Kaqchikel Maya to bolster their legal claim to their land, describes interactions their ancestors had with the Fuego volcano, who appeared as a ruler on the road as they traveled through his territory.
Preclassic and Classic Maya iconography is replete with trees, mountains, and caves with eyes and gaping, toothy maws, all of whom would have been considered literally alive.

The Importance of Sacred Places in Mesoamerica
As these beings own the surrounding land and all of the resources contained within, the Maya have always worked to maintain a reciprocal relationship with the tzuultaq’as living nearby. They perform ceremonies that include the feeding and giving of offerings to them, which can include incense, chocolate beans, flowers, blood, meat, and other precious objects, all with the goal of obtaining permission to work in or pass through their land.
In order to demonstrate the continuity between the past and present, here are three brief examples: one from this century, one from the 1600s, and one from the Late Classic period. Each of them takes place in or near the part of the Maya world where I focus my research, a narrow band of rivers, limestone hills and ridges, and caves at the base of the Guatemalan highlands called the Northern Transversal Strip.

A Modern Example
In 2011, while conducting fieldwork at the archaeological site of Salinas de los Nueve Cerros, I was fortunate to have been invited to a large, multi-village ceremony by local leaders. The goal of the ceremony was to obtain permission for families to plant in the land owned by arguably the most powerful tzuultaq’a in the region, a hill containing three separate caves named San Juan. The ceremony was divided into two parts - a public ritual in the Catholic church of the village hosting the ceremony and a “closed door” visit to the tzuultaq’a that was only open to elders and their invited guests. Although the public half of the ceremony was conducted in the Catholic church, no clergy were present. Instead, community elders placed all of the objects that were going to be used in the second half of the ceremony upon an altar in the sanctuary after sunset. The elders then prayed over them, smudged them with incense smoke, and smeared them with chicken blood, alcohol, and chocolate drink, all with the goal of sanctifying them so they were worthy of being offered. The objects were then paraded out of the church in a cloud of incense smoke. The elders stopped to burn a few of them in a small receptacle resembling a baptismal font at the church’s entrance so others in attendance could witness the offering and pray, and then we ate a magnificent turkey soup prepared in an adjacent building.

After the communal meal, the elders piled into my pick-up truck, and we drove out to San Juan, trailed by younger invitees. By the time we climbed up to his main cave, it was after midnight. We watched as the elders set up two altars piled with offerings, which were then set aflame. Wave after wave of offerings was thrown into the flames as the elders prayed, releasing sweet-smelling smoke, hissing, crackling, and causing shadows to dance around the different formations. At the same time, the young men who came along began to light candles and placed them throughout the cave, climbing as high as 3-4 meters to leave them in every available niche and knob. At about 3 AM, we left the cave and I caught one last glimpse of the constellation of lights emerging from its mouth.

A Colonial Example
In 1676, Friar Francisco Gallego was traveling with “recently baptized Indians” (Gallego 2000:172) to a village where multiple individuals had requested baptism in the southeastern Maya lowlands and encountered:
’…the God of the Hills, which is a quite high and beautiful hill….Our companions began to speak among themselves, and the little porters, as the closest to us, said “Fathers, if you want to pass and don’t want to die, we should burn a little incense to this hill; that is what is done by those who climb it”…. We found on the top of the hill a small plaza, seemingly swept clean, and in the middle of it a little fence of sticks, and within that a burning fire.
Telling them to rest, we spoke with the porters, who told us that due to the diligence of travelers, this fire was always burning here for no one would fail to offer worship to this hill.’ (Gallego 2000:172).

The Maya traveling with them pleaded with the friars to burn an offering there, but they declined, saying that they needed the incense for the village ceremony but promised to leave an offering on the return trip. The friars kept their promise, albeit in an underhanded manner. They requested that the porters first build and erect a cross in front of the flames, then burnt incense at the altar while praying to Jesus Christ. They left the cross standing, satisfied that all future visitors to the hilltop would leave offerings to the Christian god instead of the hill itself.

A Classic Example
The Candelaria Caves is the second-largest cave system in Central America, with over 80 km of tunnels under the last foothills of the Guatemalan highlands. In the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., it was one of the most heavily visited sacred places in the Maya world due to its position as a sentinel guarding access to the mountainous regions behind them. Merchants and other travelers would go out of their way to travel to the eastern entrance of Verónica cave, which is where the Candelaria River first emerges from the earth. There, they would set a small fire and burn offerings - human blood, fine ceramics, incense, and other precious things - in order to request permission to pass through its territory and be protected in the high mountain passes behind it.

Today, there is a carpet of offerings dating to this time measuring several hundred square meters and up to 30 cm thick on a wide ledge above the river. Unlike temple-pyramids and other cave entrances used for public rituals, however, these ceremonies were conducted in dimly lit locations between massive boulders and fallen formations which would have made it impossible for a human audience to gather and observe them. And unlike the dark, restricted interior chambers where commoners left simple offerings before planting or harvesting, these offerings were elaborate and expensive. As a result, archaeologists can conclude that these ceremonies were performed by important individuals without an accompanying human audience, meaning that the only individual they were trying to impress and ingratiate themselves to was the cave itself.

Final Thoughts
Maya sacred places are, fundamentally, living beings, and their human neighbors depended on their continued goodwill for nearly every activity they engaged in. Community members and their leaders regularly performed rituals to request their permission to plant in, harvest from, build on, pass through, or extract resources from their land. As a result, the rituals they conducted were not only important for understanding Maya religion, but other social institutions as well. Rulers, patriarchs, matriarchs, and elders gained (and continue to gain) political power through public ceremonies to give them the offerings they require. Economic activities had an additional cost, a sort of tax or tribute that is often misconstrued as “ritual offerings.” Travel between places included multiple additional stops and supplies in order to pay tolls to both human and non-human owners of the land the Maya traverse.

The recognition that particular landscape features participated in the social fabric of the ancient Maya world forces a drastically different understanding of our place in the universe. The living landscape, populated by myriad types of person, was a foundational aspect of the Maya cosmos, affecting everything and everyone in it. The result is a more populous planet, one in which multiple kinds of persons affect what we can do, where we can go, and how we can live.

Suggested Guide to Further Reading
• Bassie-Sweet, Karen 2008 Maya Sacred Geography and the Creator Deities. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman
• Gallego, Francisco 2000 The Rediscovery of the Manché Chol, 1676. In Lost Shores, Forgotten Peoples: Spanish Explorations of the South East Maya Lowlands, edited and translated by Lawrence H. Feldman, pp. 170-80. Duke University Press, Durham
• Otzoy, Simón (trans.) 1999 Memorial de Solol. Comisión Interuniversitaria Guatemalteca de Conmemoración del Quinto Centenario del Descubrimiento de América, Guatemala City
• Woodfill, Brent K.S. 2019 War in the Land of True Peace: The Fight for Maya Sacred Places. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman
• Ximénez, Francisco 1930 Historia de la provincia de San Vicente de Chiapas y Guatemala de la orden de los predicadores. Tomo II. Biblioteca “Goathemala” de la Sociedad de Geografía e Historia, Guatemala City.