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The King, the Traitor, and the Cross: An Interpretation of a Highland Maya Religious Conflict

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 July 2024

E. Michael Mendelson
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Holy Wednesday, 1953, was a great day for Santiago, a village of the Highland Maya Indians in the Central American Republic of Guatemala. On the church porch, strung up on a post decorated with lush tropical leaves, hung a four-foot puppet clothed in Indian costume with a large sombrero and a wooden mask, into whose mouth a long cigar had been planted by his worshipers. This, I had learned, was Judas Iscariot—but a strange Judas it was, for, instead of being burned, stoned, or otherwise reviled and derided as is usually the case with village Judas figures, it was cared for by Indian priests constantly on guard, presented with gifts of fruit, candles, and incense, and altogether made far more fuss of than the saint whose fiesta this bright Eastern week should have been: Jesucristo, the Mayanized Christ. The thousand bananas and hundreds of cocoa beans and other tropical fruit, for instance, which the young Indian municipal officials had gathered in a three-day trek toward the Pacific coast, had been presented to the puppet before being hung up among the gilded wooden columns of the main altar inside the church.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 6 , Issue 21 , March 1958 , pp. 1 - 10
Copyright
Copyright © 1958 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1. A short, earlier version of this text was broadcast in 1957 by the B.B.C. Third Programme, the B.B.C. French Service, and the Servizio Nazionale di Roma.

2. For a trial summary of the whole history of politico-religious organization in the High lands see E. M. Mendelson, "Les Maya des Hautes Terres," Critique (Paris), No. 115, Decem ber, 1956.

3. See E. M. Mendelson, "Religion and World-View in a Guatemalan Village" ("Micro film Collection of Manuscripts on Middle American Cultural Anthropology," No. 52 [Chi cago : University of Chicago Libraries, 1957]), p. 477. A short version of this thesis is ready for publication.

4. See A. M. Tozzer, Landa's Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán ("Peabody Museum Publica tions," Vol. XVIII [Cambridge, Mass., 1941]), p. 139, n. 646.

5. See Mendelson, "Les Maya des Hautes Terres," op. cit., p. 1085.

6. See Guy Stresser-Pean, "Montagnes calcaires et sources vauclusiennes dans la religion des Indiens Haustècques de la région de Tampico," Revue de l'histoire des religions (Paris), Vol. CXLI, No. I (January-March, 1952).

7. See J. E. S. Thompson, Ethnology of the Mayas of Southern and Central British Honduras ("Anthropology Series,' Vol. XVII, No. 2 [Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 1930]), p. 60. Since then (Maya Hieroglyphic Writing [Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1950], p. 133) the author has changed his mind and accepted a connection. While we can, then, probably discount Highland-Lowland differences (see also Stresser-Pean. op. cit., pp. 88-89), the problem of why different myth fragments remain in different High land villages is worth pursuing. Has it anything to do with the low degree of communication between the villages mentioned earlier?

8. See Mendelson, "Religion and World-View in a Guatemalan Village," op. cit., pp. 472 and 478-81. Thompson (Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, p. 133) tells us that the Kekchi of Alta Verapaz, while no longer retaining their old calendar, now situate the five days in the Easter period and bury a Mam during those days. The Kekchi and Pokomchi Mam is said to live under the earth, where he lies bound. Santiago informants, however, rejected Lothrop's translation of the Maximon as "the great lord (or grandfather) who is bound" ("Further Notes on Indian Ceremonies in Guatemala," Indian Notes [New York: Heye Foundation], VI, No. I [1929], 20), giving instead Mam-Shimon (Simon). The word for "bound" is shmon.

9. See Robert Redfield, The Little Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), p. 68.

10. See Mendelson, "Religion and World-View …," op. cit., p. 460, for a Santiago story in which an angel who has overindulged in sex is punished, while climbing a tree for fruit, by a flying snake that tries to strangle him. A passing merchant kills both snake and angel with the latter's "angelic gun," whose shot is the original lightning and provokes a storm and flood. Is there here an echo of the Genesis tree? Stresser-Pean writes (op. cit., p. 86) of a Huasteca godling getting stuck in a split tree. Normally, the godling's weapon, a pre historic stone or metal tool, is found near a tree split by lightning.

11. See Sol Tax, "World-View and Social Relations in Guatemala," American Anthropolo gist, Vol. XLIII, No. I (New ser., 1941).