Lives of the Gods — Divinity in Maya Art

Ivan Klein
October 2023

The Maize God

An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art 11/21/22 – 4/2/23
— with some reflections on the Maya

“In ancient Mesoamerican thought, humans survived on not merely borrowed, but stolen time.”  Dictionary of Gods & Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya — Miller & Taube

Introduction —

Who were the Maya and how is it that that they hold such fascination for us? —  Something about the integration of animate belief into art, architecture, literature. — The elevated qualities of their civilization, its grace and beauty along with the grisly bloodletting undergirding it. — The sense that in Blake’s phrase “the doors of perception” had opened to them, and that when we enter into their world, something of their heightened and terrific consciousness touches us as well.

Even a superficial view of the Maya leaves us in awe of this people with their sophisticated and elegant system of mathematics, a fully articulated written language, prophetic and eerily accurate astronomical calendars. That there is a lower layer of public and private bloodletting reflects the order of the preternatural world, closely surrounding them and full of profound menace.

……

I think back on the film “Chac the Rain God” first seen at the old Waverly Theater on 6th Ave. in the Village, circa 1970. Fall right in with the scruffy irregular line filing in to see the story of 20th century Maya in a small Mexican village who, facing annihilating drought, pin their hopes on a holy man / magician dwelling in the mountains, to bring rain. — A film that impressed and bemused critics at the time.

Watched it again on DVD earlier this year. Barely a false note in this magical tale, just as I remembered. — On this viewing, the “hmeen” (man who understand things) shooting a toad with a blow gun and pocketing the creature, registers a bit more clearly. — A prelude to the extraction of the entheogenic substance bufotenine from the glands at the back of its head and its ingestion. He purifies himself with the drug, goes through the sweat bath, arrives at the classic Maya sacrifice of a heart, in this case his very own. — Removed from his body and offered up to the fearsome Chac, god of lightning and rain, on behalf of those afflicted villagers of his. People he had taken on a spiritual journey to the headwaters of their ancient religion. — The very same folk now pursuing him, convinced that he is a witch in need of execution. They rush up to his mountain hammock to see the truth of their great mistake in his disembodied heart resting on his chest, as the rain begins to fall. Perhaps in spite of himself and his intentions, he comes to embody something of Jesus’s sacrifice in the new faith. The museum show has a ceramic cup with the likeness of Chac, the god of lightning and lifegiving rain. The cup’s rollout is a dance macabre of mocking skeletons, demons, a jackal and a couple of half men/half beasts surrounding that rain god of theirs.

If this strangely gifted people who built a civilization that lasted a thousand years in the pre-Colombian Americas interests you, it might be useful to read the Popul Vuh, their extraordinary book of the dawn of life and the glories of gods and kings, — an epic story of man’s creation and emergence into the light and the lineages of the Quiché people of the Guatemalan highlands up until their historical encounter with the Spanish Conquistadors.

The mind-expanding properties of the toad, of magic mushrooms, to which the great cities of the Maya built early monuments, speak to the elevated consciousness they shared.

Entheogen — a term coined in 1979 by a group of “ethnobotanists”. — I read, stone cold hipsters.

Entheos — god within
Genic — to come into being.

(the above a much better descriptive term for these substances than the reductive “hallucinogen.”)

— Did the culture of the Maya come into communal being on a plane we have not yet approached or apprehended?

……

According to the Popul Vuh, the gods of the Maya tried three times before succeeding in making a human being for themselves. They had in mind something that would walk and talk, be capable of swiveling its hands, pay proper respect to them, especially in offerings of flesh and blood.

The original Popul Vuh was a divinatory book able “to see everything” as did the first four humans, until the gods imposed limits on their vision.

Representatives of the Catholic Church imposed certain limitations on the Maya as well, besides destroying a vast trove of their illustrated written books known as codexes. Mayan scribes, however, were later taught the Roman alphabet into which the Popul Vuh was transposed in the 1650’s.

A book of the beginning of life and the great-hearted battle to bring the light of day to mankind languishing in darkness. — The Council Book of the highland Quiché people of Guatemala.

“Xibalba” was the Mayan word for the underworld (place of fright) and also for the reigning king of darkness. The Popul Vuh casts it as the home of malevolent and deadly joker spirits. — The very twisted beings who subjected the ballplayer / quester One Hunaphu to severe trials in a series of infernal torture houses, laughed and blew cigar smoke in his face before lopping off his head.

Two of his sons, the hero twins, Hunaphu and Xiblanca, set about outwitting and beating those wise guy demons at their own ballgame, even though the ball originally put into play was made of dedicated knives meant to slay them. — Defeated them at their own games, redeeming their father and transforming him into the perennially dying and resurrecting Maize god of the Maya.

And when the sun finally came up on them after a terrible struggle, the Popul Vuh speaks beautifully to the moment: “There were countless peoples, but there was just one dawn for all tribes.” — The preceding doesn’t quite signify equality and inclusion. The tribes antagonistic to the Quiché quickly “lost their lustre” and had their hearts ripped out and sacrificed to their very demanding gods.

……

Down in Xibalba, those zany twins put down Killer Seven Macau and his sons Zapacna and Earthquake, who had engaged in “self-magnification and deformed the earth,” as well as having offed the boys’ father.

The boys’ older brothers, One Monkey and One Artisan, great flautists and singers, comment on the twins’ various ordeals: “It had cost them suffering to become great knowers.” — And in that observation, we can discern the underlying existent wisdom of a people.

……

It’s the deeply serious business of the Quiché Council to recall and recapitulate their cultural inheritance, even up to the time of the Spanish conquerors, the burning of their books and the torture and killing of their leaders, Three Deer and Nine Dog, in the public square of the town of Santa Cruz.

Professor Dennis Tedlock, the translator of the standard English edition of the Popul Vuh, commented that it was the torture of their leaders that impressed itself upon the Quiché. — An excess of cruelty that led them to certain firm conclusions as to the civilizing, proselytizing presumptions of their conquerors.

Reckoning with the catastrophe of conquest, a 16th century prophetic book from the Yucatan, the Chilam Balam (Jaguar Book), that had accurately predicted the coming of the Spanish, warned of what would become of the Maya: that “They would believe little and not even that.”

The Popul Vuh, in large part, tells the story of the extraordinary effort of the Maya to achieve the light of day and constitute themselves as a lustrous (triumphant) people.

In the narrative of all the virtues of the first great lineages who lived in peace and harmony, I’m partial to “Their splendor was modest: they caused no amazement, nor had they grown great.”

……

There’s a late classical period wall painting from Bonampak, MX of a king and his servants. The servant on one side of the seated king adjusts a jade bracelet, while attendant on the other side waits his turn of service. A whole waterfall of rare quetzal feathers trails down the royal back. — This Beau Jack is being readied, according to the accompanying hieroglyphs, to participate in an upcoming imperial bash.

A millennium and change later, looking at the illustration of the mural in Coe and Houston’s The Maya, I don’t much care for the vicious turn of the king’s mouth or for his splendid costume set against the near nakedness of his abject slaves. — A foreshadowing of the decadent end of things in a blaze of manufactured glory. — Plain enough from this most vivid Bonampak mural that time would be on the side of the enveloping jungle.

……

In the descriptions next to the pieces in the Metropolitan exhibit, the Popul Vuh is referred to several times as “colonial” literature. — To a layman this sounds a bit dismissive of the version of the ancient story brought forth by the collective memory of the Quiché Council. The concealment of an original hieroglyphic manuscript from the 
Spanish religious authorities, from which they may have drawn on, also a real possibility.

……

Escape from museum speak on to the street and contemplation of those expansive minds that caused monuments to be built in their cities to the mushroom, to the toad. — Tellingly, a sculpture has been preserved of a Mayan king as a baby in the mouth of a giant toad.

Phenomena, phantasmagoria of the juiced mind. — On their cups, plates, stairways, ball hoops. A collective experience realized, both dream and nightmare, in New World technicolor.

The Maize God

Represented at the various stations of his journey to rebirth through the medium of water.

Visions of the Maize god and his aides — he is young and comely as he emerges from the shell of the world turtle. His circuit from death to life of the very greatest concern to the Maya. — The miracle of resurrection and its mystic causation provoked vibrant art and sculpture from their cities, which stretched over parts of six countries of central America and Mexico.

The Maize god goes missing and is presumed dead. He must be brought back to life again for the Maya to sustain themselves and their posterity. If this god, along with the other Maya gods, were to stay dead on the glib terms of western philosophy, it would be the end of them, as they understood it.

……

The extreme cultural animation of cups, plates, carvings of the Maya, trapped in glass cases like caged curiosities at the universal circus. — Only our living apprehension can free them from this museum stasis.

The Maize God Comes Home

I’m given the gift of a small statue of the Maize god, crafted by a contemporary Guatemalan artisan. A replica made from marble dust of the original on display at the British Museum. — That being an object of veneration commissioned by the thirteenth king of the ancient Mayan city of Copan, to celebrate twenty years on the throne. Before me is a brownish-gold colored miniature bust of the god, maybe six inches high, with the palm of his right hand held upward and his left palm down.

— An elaborate headdress studded with emblems and a necklace on which hangs the framed image of another god, likely the rain god Chac, to whom the Maize god is both companion and dependent.

The Maize god as he is before me, in his avatar of mature contemplation and tranquility.

The Maya have given us profuse depictions of his journey from death back to life and his splendid early blooming.

A vibrancy in the reconstituted Maize god fashioned by the autochthonous artisan Roxana de Papadopolo. A dark life of its own running through it.

The fact of the maize that sustains life.

The fact of the carved and shaped maize idol before me.

A thousand years of life infused with high culture and, although I have taken the equivalent of some of the chemical agents that at least partially shaped them, there is still a mystery at their core that eludes me.

……

Human Sacrifice

Looming over all their proceedings is the matter of human sacrifice, common to Mesoamerican societies and so repugnant to the Spanish when they witnessed it practiced on industrial scale by the Aztecs.

— Take Rembrandt’s brilliant “The Sacrifice of Isaac.” — The brutal left hand of the slightly blurry Abraham, entirely exposing the throat of the bound Isaac. — The staying of his right hand by a loving Semitic-looking female angel and the definitive dropping of his chillingly businesslike slaughtering knife.

What reason for the obscene sacrifice of Abraham’s son but anxiety for the future, for the inevitability of his very own death?

That terrible god of the Maya, Tohil (Thunderer), impelled his followers to sacrifice captured warriors and others whom they wished to make a nullity. — No angelic intervention to their grim practice.

Tohil, the fire giver, the patron of the Quiché. — To be “suckled” by him, at least up to the Spanish conquest, was to have your heart ripped out.

The Metropolitan’s catalogue contains a reproduction of Diego Rivera’s “Human Sacrifice Before Tohil,” a 1931 painting done for an edition of the Popul Vuh. There is pictured a grey/black bat-like man-beast of a creature hovering over the proceedings while a fearsome “Tohil spirting blood, runs the business of ritual slaughter.

The poor fellows bound to a rock are about to get it, and the creeped-out joint is crawling with supplicants headed for the same fate.

Human Sacrifice Before Tohil, 1931, Diego Rivera

It is as if the great painter had taken a deep dive into the darkest depths of the archetypal consciousness of his native land to create this particularized nightmare.

Institutionalized human sacrifice in Mesoamerica, some of which might be explained by the general belief in the blood debt owed to the gods, also had a trembling inner fear attached to it. The last Aztec king, Montezuma, was supposed to have been seized with a most terrible anxiety lest the enormous number of hearts he offered to the Sun god would prove insufficient inducement for him to ever come up again.

Perhaps a more organic connection between the bloody religious practices of Mesoamerica and what we rather primly refer to as modern warfare. — A much closer link than we have the capacity to acknowledge.

……

Endnote

At some point in the 10th century, the Maya began to drift away from what had become dying cities, characterized by the grandeur and waste of their squabbling kings. — Turned their backs on the so-called protectors, summoners and intermediaries of the gods. — When they did so, what was left for them?

They continued to have the rising sun, the blessed daylight, and their sustaining corn. These gifts of nature were anciently won from the powers of darkness. Their souls, which were now beyond royal sway, would strive to propitiate their gods and the new God and Son given to them during a millennium of tribulations.

……

Dresden Codex

Bishop Diego de Landa in the 1650s: “We found a large number of books in their characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.”

Anonymous Editor of the Bluebalam edition of the text known as the  Dresden Codex:

“This reproduction in your hands is Mayan ancient knowledge that has transcended time and survived extermination.” — The oldest known book produced in the Americas. — A graphic holy book / almanac / astronomical and astrological guide. — Going through it without real knowledge of the glyphs, I see that the long green demon on p.31 in their system, with writhing snakes at his front and back, is also surrounded by both hieroglyphs and numbers. — I make out Chac and the Maize god and probably Xibalba, the chief demon of the freighted underworld. — The pages of this fantastic accordion-shaped book almost overflowing with life and death.

……

Read the 2023 novel, the Country of Toó by the noted Guatemalan author Rodrigo Rey Rosa who, for the book he was writing, integrated into the Mayan community of Toó, in the Guatemalan highlands. The land, he finds, continues to be held in common, and maize is cultivated in individual plots as of old.

Spiritually, these villagers seem to exist in an uneasy synchronicity between Christianity and their traditional beliefs. Politically and economically, Rey Rosa reports that these Maya have been thoroughly fucked over by the government and the mining companies. As he depicts the residents of Toó, they continue to resist, to be themselves, to endure.

The pure roots of life

around which the bicephalous

world snake of power

and greed winds itself

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Ivan Klein’s most recent collection is The Hat and Other Poems and Prose from Sixth Floor Press in 2021. His other books include Toward Melville (New Feral Press) and Alternatives to Silence (Starfire Press). You can also find his writing in Leviathan, Long Shot, Flying Fish, The Jewish Literary Journal, The Forward, and in the great weather for MEDIA anthology Paper Teller Diorama. He lives and writes in downtown Manhattan.