JOURNEY TO XIBALBA

 

From the mists of time, deep in the primeval Guatemalan jungles, comes a document known as the Popol Vuh, a fragmentary chronicle of the allegories, beliefs and attitudes of the ancient Maya. An epic poem of great lyric beauty and haunting melancholy, the Popol Vuh is also a record of the peregrinations of a people caught in life’s struggle for survival, identity and cultural self-affirmation.

The Maya feared death more than any of life’s ordeals and only exceptional individuals, they claimed, could find their way to the heavenly gates. The unworthy were hastily dispatched to Xibalba, the Mayan hell, the “House of Gloom,” the “World of Ghosts,” the “Mansion of the Damned” -- an icy abyss teeming with monsters that inflicted unspeakable torments.

If the Maya took great pains to elude the dreaded chasm -- self-mutilation and orgiastic human sacrifices, they believed, could forestall the inevitable -- they had no illusion that life “on the surface” was apt to be as hideous as in Xibalba’s entrails. Ego, greed, cruelty, deception, vengeance, all prevailed, acted out with an incontinence bordering on lunacy. Blood-lettings, wars, decapitations, amputations, in short, senseless carnage, were as likely to envenom their mortal existence as the “lower regions” to which their souls would eventually be consigned.

Longing for redemption, their governors engaged in an endless consecration of grandiose ideals. Fearing night, awaiting the advent of dawn but not the passage of greater events, they yearned for a spiritual reawakening that would never be. They pandered to unfeeling gods and offered sacrifices to atone inexpiable sins while the masses were fated to a life of submission and servitude in the shadow of despotic and degenerate elites. Busy erecting flamboyant pantheons, obsessed with their own place in posterity, the nihilistic demigods the people idolized were no kinder than the bloodthirsty Lords of Xibalba. They knew that they were false of heart, promoters of evil and tormentors of men, and that their extravagance and folly would lead to civil strife, social disintegration, economic exhaustion and, in due course, apocalypse.

Eventually, the debauchery, the drug-induced stupor, the bombastic mystique of their masters’ esoteric pursuits began to wear thin in the eyes of the overburdened populace. “Of what practical value to us, illiterate peons,” they pondered, “are such abstractions as systems of reckoning dates, stargazing and arcane hieroglyphics, when this knowledge is the exclusive domain of our rulers?”

Too long had the people been forced into a state of servitude; too exacting was the endless labor to erect temples, sacrificial altars and ball courts. They were tired of tending the fields of the princely castes and paying exorbitant tributes to corrupt and insensitive monarchs. For centuries the multitudes had surrendered to the ruling aristocracy and soon the sting of despotism, the ignominy of persecution would lead to open revolt.

Along with a sharp increase in the dominance of the elite and the unfettered opulence and ostentation their lifestyle demanded, the number of underlings required to cater to their whims grew to colossal proportions. This imposed additional burdens for food and other goods needed to sustain the hierarchy. It is likely that these burdens triggered ever-widening divisions and fed mounting hostilities between the lower classes and their masters.

There is evidence in the Late Classic era, the period foreshadowing the “fall,” of a population explosion that led to the growth in the number and size of urban clusters. All these pressures -- overpopulation, soaring demand for goods and services, diminishing resources and widening rifts between social strata -- had a profound and everlasting impact on the Maya: It left them teetering on the brink. Mortally wounded, nudged by an irresistible momentum, the once great, the magnificent Mayan civilization quivered, froze and dipped over the edge.

The exact dynamics that led to the Maya’s sudden and staggering collapse is not well understood. What is known is that famine -- brought on by deforestation, over-cultivation, climatic changes, droughts, floods, outbreaks of infectious diseases, rising infant mortality, declining life expectancy and widespread discontent with an increasingly remote and self-absorbed plutocracy -- led to chaos, fragmentation and dispersal.

Mel Gibson’s haunting 2006 film, Apocalypto, which focuses on a few days in the dizzying tug-of-war between life and death in early 16^th century Mesoamerica, hints at the sudden collapse of a once-glorious empire. Savage, hypnotic, this troubling epic telegraphs a larger message: It warns that a system of governance rigged to benefit the few eventually invites anarchy.

For the surviving full-blooded Maya -- some four million live in Belize, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico -- only two paths of survival remain: serfdom and assimilation, or alternating states of neglect and violent repression by the interlopers who now occupy their domain. Like their tribal brothers and sisters in the region, they remain suspended between two contrasting and incongruous worlds: ancient (intimate and familiar) and modern (alien and menacing).

In Central America, where waste and want coexist in shameless intimacy, Xibalba is a familiar signpost on the well-traveled road to nowhere. Sadly, for indigenous communities in the Isthmus, there is no exit ramp. New dynasties of rich and powerful overlords are hell-bent on keeping them idling on the road to nowhere.

Mr. Gibson is a gifted actor and moviemaker. Will he have the moral courage to crown Apocalypto with a sequel that picks up where half-naked, bronze-skinned “savages” glance toward the sea, speechless, terrified and uncomprehending, as tall ships drop anchor in pristine bays, and helmeted hirsute men wielding swords and crosses steer their long boats ashore?

Could future Gibson blockbusters cast an honest cinematic eye at the horrors of the Crusades, which preceded the rape of the “New World,” and the “Holy” Inquisition which was already underway? Can the internecine savagery of the ancient Maya ever be compared with the depraved barbarism of their “civilized” conquerors?