1 of 7
"Picture a square bed sheet," my informant instructed. "The four corners are the four cardinal points. Now picture four heavenly creatures holding each of the corners: The creature on the northern corner is white; the one on the east is red; the one on the south is yellow; the one holding the western corner is black.
"Now picture not one, but 13 sheets, one on top of the other, rising upward. These are the 13 layers of the Maya Upperworld. The sky-bearers, bacabs, are holding the corners of the 13 levels.
"The book of the Apocalypse in the Bible talks about four horsemen in heaven. Their horses are white, red, black, and yellow, like the bacabs. It talks about four angels holding the four corners of the earth. Isn't that interesting?"
How would the ancient Maya come up with that, never having read the Bible? My interest began with an assignment to write a news report for Time magazine on an archaeological dig of Maya ruins and blossomed into a much more ambitious project: a novel set amid those ruins. I was to discover in my research for the book that there were many similarities between Maya and Christian cosmology.
The ancient Maya flourished as a civilization from a.d. 250 to 900 (though, as a people, they survived and number in the millions today). When the Spanish conquistadors appeared in the sixteenth century, with a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other, the Maya were already intimately familiar with many of the religious concepts the Spanish thought they were introducing to this "primitive" people: the religious use of the idea that seeds must fall into the ground to die in order to bring forth life; the need for blood to be spilt in order for there to be a relationship with the gods; and the concept of a sacrifice that does not end in death.
In my novel, a shadowy late-night visitor guides the protagonist through these mysteries. I turned instead to the counsel of William L. Fash, Harvard's Bowditch Professor of Central American and Mexican Archaeology and Ethnology, and chair of Harvard's anthropology department at the Peabody Museum. I met him nine years ago in Copán, where he, along with his wife, Barbara, and a gifted group of archaeologists, scholars, epigraphers, and artists, was digging up vessel offerings, hidden temples, and the bones of lost kings—like miracle workers raising the dead. Since 1978, Bill Fash has championed multidisciplinary research projects there, all lucidly explained and updated, even for the (resolute) lay reader, in his recently revised book Scribes, Warriors and Kings (Thames & Hudson, 2001).
Fash visited CopÁn the first time at the age of 16 and was "flabbergasted by the richness of the archaeological remains and the beauty of the natural environment." I know what he means. When you step onto the grounds the first time, you feel like you're entering a fantasy world carved out of green volcanic tuff. The three-dimensional upright carvings (called stelae), the altars, the ballcourt, the Hieroglyphic Stairway, and the complex of temple pyramids known as the Acropolis all arise like ghosts out of the verdant jungle. In the words of the nineteenth-century explorer John Lloyd Stephens, who rediscovered the Copán ruins in 1839: "All was mystery, dark, impenetrable mystery."
Fash and his team have come a long way in penetrating those mysteries, though he'd tell you they've barely scratched the surface. Nine years ago he said, "We could work with two hundred workers for the next hundred years and never solve all the mysteries of the Maya."
This much they now know: "The Maya have come to be recognized as the most literate of all the pre-Colum-bian civilizations of the New World. They developed a complete writing system that enabled them to express any thought in the Mayan language. We have more Mayan inscriptions and texts than we do for any other civilization, and they tend to be more expressive of larger religious and historical concepts."
share this page
RSS Feed
