I’d flown into Belize City, a ramshackle shantytown on the edge of the ocean, and from there I’d taken a ferry to Ambergris Caye, one of the many islands sparkling across Belize’s barrier reef. Belize has the second biggest barrier reef in the world, after the Great Barrier Reef off Australia. This one extends from the Yucatán to the northern edges of South America.
Thousands of young British soldiers did their jungle training in Belize when the place was still a British colony, and some of them came back, remembering it, I suppose, as a place of ample space and beauty. One of them was Dave, whose dive shop, painted bright blue, sat between the beach and the main street.
Dave was a dive master, meaning he could certify people for scuba diving. He was also an ex–Royal Marine, tough as nails and sure to let everyone know it. Dave was the kind of guy who could kill with his left thumb blindfolded. He was short but was jacked up with muscles, most of which bore navy tattoos.
I recalled the tattoos of the Polynesian islanders, but Dave’s tattoos were different. They had no sacred connotations, though they marked a certain something. They indicated a brotherhood of the sea that said very distinctly, “Don’t fuck with me and don’t fuck with my mates.”
Scuba diving, too, isn’t to be taken lightly. If you mess up and get the bends, you’re in serious trouble. You’ll die a horrible, excruciatingly painful death. So I was okay with Dave barking dive tables at me. Tucking my head down, I frequently said, “Yes, sir” or “No, sir.” In the end, I learned what I needed to know.
I passed all my tests, and on our first real dive he took me down to a submerged wreck. For our second dive Dave extended his tattooed arms widely and told me we were headed for Shark-Ray Alley. That sounded ominous, and Dave explained, as we chugged through the water toward our destination, that it was a break in the reef where sharks came to feed.
“Say what?” I blurted. “Sharks?”
“Yeah, but they’re just big reef sharks. They won’t hurt ya.” He could have followed that with “You poncy big baby,” but he didn’t.
When we got to the dive site, there wasn’t much to see on the surface. A couple of other boats bobbed in the surf. Dave eyed me and said I was going in first. Fine, I thought, trying to appear brave. I sat on the edge of the boat and tipped off backward, just as he’d shown me. My tanks crashed into the water, and I was sucked in behind them.
As I splashed into the tropical waters, way out of my element, it took a moment for the bubbles to clear around me. Then, Holy Mother of God, I took a deep gulp of oxygen from my regulator and my heart missed a beat or two. Just below my feet were five or six really big sharks — most of them at least two metres long from teeth to tail. They circled slowly, not moving like fish at all. Fish flit and jerk through the water. Sharks look more like cruise missiles, slicing neatly through the water in deadly, unstoppable straight lines.
Underneath the sharks, a manta ray glided along the bottom. Its giant wings swept the water. It moved more like a bird than a fish, only centimetres off the sandy ocean floor. Manta rays aren’t as dangerous as sharks, of course, unless you have the misfortune to step on them. Then their whiplike tails can plunge razor-sharp barbs into you, leaving you paralyzed.
A snorkelling boat bobbed above me. The water wasn’t that deep, and a local guide from that vessel was already in the water. He had a handful of meat and was chumming the water to entice the sharks through the break in the coral. Now, I thought, is this really a wise idea? I mean, you’ve got to be kidding, right? Here was a man swimming not two metres from me with a bag of meat floating from a rope tied around his waist. I watched as the manta ray circled around him and, amazingly, took the chum from his hand as playfully as a dog would.
The sharks were different, though. They circled in as well, but when one veered toward the man, he let go of the soggy meat and jerked his hand away just in time so that the meat was left floating, slowly descending to the bottom. The shark arrowed in on it, and it was gone in one great unhinging of its jaw.
I swam a little way off while the other divers splashed into the water around the boats. Underneath me great fans of coral waved in the currents, and the brain coral, lumpy bits of underwater oatmeal, shimmered with tiny neon fish. My own silver bubbles percolated toward the surface, and the deep intake and exhalations of my regulator formed a Darth Vader soundtrack.
It was then that I noticed a shark coming at me. I tried to hold on to the thought that it was just a reef shark and not dangerous, but this one definitely had its eye on me. It was big and was bearing down on me. As the shark’s mouth, still closed thankfully, came within an arm’s reach of my face, a very curious thing happened. I placed my hand on top of the shark’s head and pushed down. I had no idea why I did this. I only remember that the feel of its skin was a lot like sandpaper. It wasn’t smooth or slimy like a fish’s skin. It was rough and hard.
I pushed, and the shark went down. I continued to press, applying a slight pressure downward, and the shark disappeared beneath me. It kept on going forward, shooting between my legs, and then off behind me into the murky depths.
I’m pretty sure now that it thought I was the one chumming the water with meat. Obviously, it didn’t realize I was mostly made of meat. In retrospect I think the shark might have been old … or sick. Perhaps it was slightly wonky with age. Whatever the case, the shark swam off and I kept all my limbs as well as the odd kinesthetic memory of the creature’s leathery skin on my hand.
Belize is a fascinating mix of people and customs. It’s the only country in Central America where English is spoken as the official language. Historically, though, Belize was the land of the Maya, as interesting a people as one is ever likely to come across. There are a few left, mostly in the south. There’s also a large population of mestizos who are of mixed Spanish and Mayan descent. Then there’s the Garifuna, descendants of escaped slaves from Africa, and finally there’s the ever-growing contingent of expatriates from the British Isles.
The patter between the different groups is a lilting Creole. In linguistics this means much more than broken English. It’s true that when the first British arrived the local islanders picked up a few words of the new language in order to trade their goods. This is called a “pidgin” language and would have been merely a simplified, stilted version of English. The word pidgin is thought to be a Chinese bastardization of the English word business. And that’s exactly what it was used for: “You buy? Me be selling dis.”
Creole, however, is something else. We have to go back to Noam Chomsky to understand it. Language, he said, is hardwired into the brain, and Creole languages are as neat a proof of that as one is likely to find. In Belize an amazing thing occurred. When the first trading encounters took place, while the wouldbe merchants were struggling with their broken pidgin, the children at their feet picked up something more.
Languages emerge from children’s brains like butterflies from cocoons, and for the offspring of “pidgin” speakers something completely new developed quite naturally. It had all the grammatical finesse, all the embedded phrasing and past perfect tenses, all the conditionals and modal verbs, everything that exists in any proper language on the planet. Somehow their infant minds wired and spliced together a new language from stunted pidgin, and Creole was born. Today it’s no longer merely a broken approximation of English with a few Mayan or English words stuck into it; it’s a fully functioning language in its own right.
I took a creaky bus up to Orange Walk in the north of Belize and from there, one early morning, went down the crocodile-infested New River with a Mayan guide unaccountably named Mario. He was short, barely coming up to my shoulders, but he was stocky and laughed so deeply that his whole body shook. Mario took me in a dugout canoe up the lazy brown river, stopping every few hundred metres to point out something in the water, turning off the thumping little outboard engine he’d rigged to the rear of the boat, and gliding for a moment in perfect silence. He pointed out the Jesus Christ birds hopping between lily pads and appearing, I suppose, as if they were actually prancing on water. Mario showed me spider monkeys and cormorants, and orchids and trees with roots that dripped off branches like melted wax.
At one point in the rain forest canopy a great bird took off into the blue, and Mario whistled. “Jabiru,” he said.
“What?”
“A Jabiru stork. She’s the largest bird in the western hemisphere.” The stork had the wingspan of a small plane, and with a great whoompf it pulled itself above the treetops and was gone.
The trip upriver took much of the day, but in the late afternoon the dugout canoe pulled into a widening in the river. A wooden dock stuck out from the bank of trees ahead. This was Lamanai, the ruins of a Mayan settlement deep in the jungle. The name itself is an ancient word that means “Submerged Crocodile.” The muddy water swirled around the boat as we pulled into the dock, and I did indeed spot a small crocodile sunning itself on the opposite bank.
Lamanai is still a full-fledged archaeological site. In fact, I would be staying at the Lamanai Outpost Lodge with the very archaeologists working on the Mayan ruins here.
The golden age of the Maya was from about 300 A.D. to maybe 900 A.D., though there are Preclassic cities much older, and in the Yucatán there are later ruins, remnants of a final phase that petered out completely with the arrival of the Spanish. By all accounts, in their Classic phase, the Maya were the most advanced civilization in the western hemisphere. They developed the only clearly defined writing system in the New World and created a fairly complex set of mathematical charts. The charts were used to predict eclipses of the sun and the moon accurately. The Maya also calculated the exact orbit of Venus with an error of only fourteen seconds per year and knew the planet was alternatively the morning and evening “star.”
It’s believed that the Maya were the first society on the planet to employ the notion of zero in their mathematics, represented in their writing by the glyph of a seashell. That’s pretty good for a people who were basically still living in the Stone Age. The Maya never mined or used metals. Nor is there any indication they used the wheel for the transport of goods. Much of their writing and mathematical calculations were carved into solid rock. They were also unbelievably bloodthirsty, performing unspeakably cruel acts on prisoners they had captured from rival city states. So, I thought, here was an interesting culture. What kind of butterfly had emerged out of this cocoon? The Maya had absolutely no contact with the European world (or the Asian one, for that matter), yet they developed a highly sophisticated society with a writing system and a profound knowledge of mathematics. How did that happen? What exactly was their story?
Out of the shade, the sun was blistering. The air was thick and musty, filled with the scent of ever-growing vines and tendrils. Mario took me through the jungle, pointing out spice leaves and a particular berry burned by the Maya for incense. He crushed another leaf in his hand and held it up to me. It smelled exactly like root beer. Butterflies as big as my hand fluttered past us. Down one trail, Mario showed me a tall ceiba tree with smooth white bark. For the Maya the ceiba was sacred.
“This tree,” Mario said, “we call Yaxche, or the World Tree. It stands at the centre of all things. For us, you see, there are five directions.”
I paused for a moment because I could only think of four — north, south, east, and west. Mario was waiting for my question and chuckled even as I turned toward him in puzzlement. “And the fifth direction?” I asked.
Mario pointed at the tree above us. “The fifth direction is vertical. Up and down. You see, the roots reach deep into the earth, down into the underworld, and then the ceiba’s trunk rises through our world into the sky. Did you know that the blossoms on this tree come out only in the evening? Small white flowers like stars.”
“Really?”
“Yes, and the branches of the tree … well, do you know the Milky Way?”
“The Milky Way? The stars, you mean?”
“Yes, the branches of the World Tree form the Milky Way. The underworld is the realm of death, but the sky is the place of creation. And that’s the most important thing. We Maya think a lot about creation and destruction.”
I nodded. “I heard that the ancient Maya believed the world was created and destroyed four times.”
“The ancient Maya?” Mario slapped his paunch merrily. “We’re not gone, my friend. Look at this fat belly. We haven’t gone anywhere. I’m still here. We’re all still here.”
Trudging through the jungle trails, we eventually came into a clearing. In it sat a great stepped pyramid — typical of Mayan temple architecture. It was fronted with a steep stone staircase. To one side, over a stone carving, a thatch shelter had been set up by the archaeological team. The archaeologists weren’t working there at the moment, so we went in to look at the carving. Mario told me that it was a giant stone mask depicting Lord Smoking Shell, one of the ancient leaders of Lamanai. The Maya had great names like that, names the archaeologists have managed to transliterate from name glyphs. I glanced up at the huge stone face, noting the hooked nose, the arrogant sneer, but I couldn’t see any resemblance between it and Mario’s calm smile.
Back out into the hissing sun, we clambered up the stairs of the temple. The stones were pocked with holes and the steps were littered with loose pebbles. The steps were ferociously steep, so we stayed on all fours, moving almost crablike to the top platform where the priests would have enacted their rituals.
I gazed out over the jungle below. To the yellow south I spied the lagoon sparkling in the sun. It was too hot to stay up there long, so after breathing in the view for a while we climbed down to the shade of the jungle.
Alongside another temple, farther in, was a strange valley of stone ledges. Mario sat on one of these and patted the space beside him, indicating I should join him. “Do you know what this place is?” he asked.
I looked up at the slanting walls and narrow thoroughfare between them, then shook my head. It looked familiar, but I wasn’t quite sure.
“This,” he said, spreading his arms expansively, “is the ball court.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“This one is largely symbolic. It’s too small for an actual game. Under the centre stone the archaeologists found a large amount of mercury, like silver water. It told them this was an important place.”
“Is it true that the loser of a ball game was decapitated?”
“Yes, sometimes. That was a great honour. How can I explain it? The ball court is more than just a ball court.”
“It’s a metaphor?”
“Sort of. It’s the entrance to the underworld, you see. It’s like a glass-bottomed boat over Xibalba — that’s the name for the underworld. Listen, I’ll tell you a story … Once upon a time, just after the third destruction, two boys were playing ball on a court much like this one. With all their yelling and running around, they disturbed the gods of Xibalba. The gods there, you must understand, are the gods of death. They’re the scary ones. Anyway, these gods were angry at being disturbed and dragged the boys down into Xibalba.”
“Like Hell.”
“Yes, a little bit like that. There were nine levels in Xibalba, and the boys were taken to the very bottom. It’s a long story, but these two boys had many adventures getting back to the top again. They played riddles with the gods, outsmarted them, and gradually returned to the surface, taking with them all the warriors who had been previously killed. In the end, these two boys — the Hero Twins, we call them — were raised into the sky. One became the sun and the other became the moon, and the many warriors they resurrected became the stars.”
“But …” I paused, confused. “I thought the Maya understood astronomy. I mean —”
“That’s your science, not ours. It’s true we were able to understand the movements of the skies to a great degree, but it wasn’t science as you understand it. We were trying to work out the cycles of creation and destruction. That’s all. We were trying to work out the great clock of the universe.”
Mario and I plodded through more ruins. A dog followed us for a long time. It was friendly, though I wondered how it could bear the heat. On a stela, a standing stone marker, Mario showed me the number system. It was actually quite easy to read — a series of bars and dots.
“Mayan mathematics,” Mario explained, “is almost completely taken up with the measurement of time. You could say we were quite obsessed with it. Have you seen the Mayan calendars?”
I had. There were replicas in the shops in Belize City — fantastically complex charts, rows and rows of strange block glyphs.
“It takes fifty-two years to run through a complete cycle,” Mario said. “The day you were born on, according to these calendars, is very important. It determines your life. Say you were born on seven Ahau.”
“Seven Ahau?”
“Yes, that’s the name for one of the days, one day in the fifty-two-year cycle. So, say you were born on that day. It determines everything about you — the name you receive, the day you’re married, everything. And these fifty-two-year cycles keep rotating over and over. This we call the Long Count.”
“I’ve heard of that.”
“You can read our calendars and, still to this day, you can work it out. The start of the Long Count, in your calendar system, would be August 11, 3114 B.C.”
“That’s pretty exact.”
“We’re an exact people.”
“Do you know the end of the Long Count?” I asked.
“I do, yes.”
“And?”
“The Long Count will end in the year 2012.”
“But that’s only a few years away.” I must have looked worried.
“Yes, I know.” Mario became thoughtful. “It was all worked out more than a thousand years ago by the priests here. The priests were the mathematicians, the astronomers if you like. In your year 2012 there will be a planetary alignment and then … that’s it. That’s the end of the Long Count.”
“So that’s the end of the world?”
“That I don’t know,” Mario said, beginning to rise. “That I don’t know.”
I flew out of Belize in a four-seater Cessna, a propeller plane that mosquitoed into the light blue sky and headed west into Guatemala. A world of unbroken greenery rolled beneath us. The Petén is a vast area, almost completely undeveloped, at the centre of the peninsula that squiggles between North and South America. This endless canopy of leaves and vines once held the very heart of the Mayan world. Deep in the jungle was the great city of Tikal.
We landed on the shores of Lake Petén, and I was mobbed by taxi drivers. I ended up paying one of them an exorbitant $20 to take me to Tikal. The trip took about an hour on a thin road that sliced into the jungle deeper and deeper until we finally arrived at the lodge where I was staying. I dropped my bags in one of the lodge’s rooms, a cavernous concrete cube with mosquito netting over a cot and a solitary flickering light bulb hanging from the ceiling, then set off to explore.
A dirt path led from the lodge into the jungle. A little wooden shack stood beside the path. In it was a guard who was supposed to check that I had a pass for the archaeological site at Tikal. The guard was fast asleep, his chair leaning against the side of the shack. For all the many times I passed by, this guy was always sitting there, head lolling on his chest, gently snoozing.
Just past his shack the jungle took over, and pathways led into the green tunnels of intense vegetation. I scrambled down one trail, wondering where it would take me. Through the deep foliage, here and there, I could just make out a collapsed wall, a line of stone in the tangle of vines and leaves. At a little clearing there was a structure not much bigger than a modern house. A tree had wrapped itself around the crumbling walls, its thick branches caressing and holding the stones. The doorway was a triangular archway, a corbelled vault, and I knew I was on the edge of Tikal.
Tikal, more than a thousand years ago, was one of the most important Mayan city states, a sort of New World Rome or Paris. At least five major temple pyramids stand in the city centre. Spreading out from them are hundreds, if not thousands, of other buildings. Only something like 5 percent of Tikal has been excavated, and in the dense jungle, radiating for hundreds of kilometres in every direction, are mounds and crumbles still waiting to yield their stories.
Sixty thousand people once lived here, which was hard to imagine now in the silence on the sun-dappled paths. The name Tikal comes from the Mayan word ti ak’al, or “at the water hole,” and it’s true that these people constructed great water reservoirs between the palaces and temples. No river flows through Tikal, so all the water in the reservoirs had to be supplied by rain. But that wouldn’t have lasted long. In no time the water would have burned off under the treacherous sun or bled into the porous limestone. The bedrock here is riddled with caves and wormholes. It’s the land of spirits, of Xibalba, the dark underworld.
A gecko skittered over the stones, and in the underbrush butterflies floated through the thick air. I trudged down another trail, and more ruins appeared. When the jungle opened up, the sun overhead scorched me. Ahead I spotted the back of the first high temple. Circling it, I came into the central plaza of Tikal.
I must have stood there for a while in jaw-dropping amazement. Two massive temples, about fourteen storeys high, faced each other across a grassy area the size of a football pitch. It was like Red Square in Moscow or the Temple Mount in Jerusalem — a grand plaza in the heart of the city, liberated once more from the vines and roots, a vast tumble of stairs and limestone palaces.
To the east of the plaza was the Temple of the Giant Jaguar, a nine-stepped pyramid with a central staircase rising steeply up its front face. On the top platform a dark doorway led into the temple proper. Only the high priest and the king would have entered here, and deep in its shadows they would have performed the bloodlettings — horrendous self-mutilations.
Blood was thought by the ancient Maya to be the source of life, the font of energy, which of course it is. But for them it was something even more. It possessed magical properties. It was liquid soul.
The Temple of the Giant Jaguar was built around the year 700 A.D. at the very height of the golden age of the Maya. It looked over a plaza that was once paved with mortared white lime. Across from it is the Temple of the Masks, slightly blunter and not quite as high. The two temples, facing each other, their staircases swinging madly into the sky, presented a unique metaphor for the Maya. Bookending the broad plaza, they became the walls of a massive ritual ball court, while the vast open space between them served as the playing floor.
At the height of its power Tikal often found itself at war with other Mayan city states. Captives from the hated cities to the east were brought up these high steps and ritually bound in hemp ropes. They were tied up tightly and rolled down the steep steps of the temples, crashing to their deaths. In this way the metaphor was pushed even further. The captives became human game balls, bouncing off the gigantic slanting walls of the ball court.
Real or metaphoric, the ball court always represents the story of the Hero Twins and their victory over the gods of the underworld. It is, as Mario told me, one of the central themes of Mayan cosmology — understanding the cycles of creation and destruction in order to escape from them, to find a way to stave off the inevitable.
I sat halfway up the temple steps and thought about everything. Gazing across the plaza, the door to the underworld, I wondered about the Mayan myths. Some of the elements seemed vaguely familiar — heroes resurrecting themselves from death, a deep and terrifying underworld, home of the gods of death. Is there an underlying grammar in myths? As in Noam Chomsky’s view of language, are there deep structures, fundamental configurations, in myth stories around the world?
Luckily, the Maya wrote their stories down. The Mayan texts were there to decode in their original form. In bits and pieces they lay all around me.
Tremendous strides have been made in the past couple of decades to decipher and understand the strange block glyphs of the Mayan writing system. The bulbous, twirling shapes are quite unlike any other writing method on the planet. However, the breaking of the code was made infinitely more difficult by a disastrous series of events in 1549. Bishop Diego de Landa, a conquistador/missionary, publicly burned hundreds, if not thousands, of Mayan books in the central plazas of the Yucatán. It’s said that the population watched and wept as the books, many of them bound in jaguar skins, curled in the flames.
Only four of these books, or codices, survive. They’re made from fig bark pages covered in a thin layer of lime. The so-called Dresden Codex is in the best shape. It still has a full seventy-eight pages that can be read. Two of the other codices are more fragmentary. They’re kept in museums in Paris and Madrid. A fourth is housed in Mexico City, though its authenticity is doubted by some authorities.
The Dresden Codex features an almanac of good and bad luck days, tables charting the orbits of Venus, predictions of solar eclipses, and even warnings about diseases. Ironically, much of what we do know was written down by the book burner Bishop de Landa. His own journals contain a complete account of Mayan ways at the beginning of the colonial period, a description of the workings of the calendar accompanied by recognizable pictures of the glyphs for kin, or “day,” and the names used for various days and months. These are the only clues, a sort of Rosetta stone, by which the strange glyphs could be decoded.
De Landa, not surprisingly, got a lot wrong, haughtily supposing that the glyphs were based on an alphabetic system. In fact, the glyphs are more like Egyptian hieroglyphics or even Chinese characters. They’re based on logographic symbols, the oldest of which are actually pictographs of the things being referenced.
This is only the beginning, though, because in Mayan glyphs, as in other logographic writing systems, the main feature usually has various affixes. In the Mayan block glyphs there are prefixes to the left or above the main character, and suffixes to the right or below. These generally alter the meaning in predictable ways not unlike how we negate a “thing” by adding the prefix no, as in nothing.
To complicate matters further, the central glyphs in Mayan writing are often based on homonyms, similar-sounding syllables, almost like puns, so that a central glyph of a fish in Maya, while representing the large fish xoc, might under other circumstances stand for the homonym root xoc, which is used in the words for to count or to read. Similarly, ah kin, a bearded circle, represents the sun, though it can also refer to a day.
At any rate, despite the burning of the books by Bishop de Landa, there are still thousands of glyphs carved into stone throughout the many Mayan sites. There are glyphs on walls and on staircases, and most important, on stelae, or standing stone markers, found all over the city and just waiting to be read and understood.
Besides the famous four codices, another book exists — a copy made by an unknown Mayan priest, who transliterated the most important stories from the ancient glyphs into the new Latin script. This book was discovered in 1702 by the Spanish priest Francisco Ximénez, and rather than burning it, this cleric, unlike Bishop de Landa, treasured it and even had it translated into Spanish.
This rare and fabulous fifth book contains the magnificent Popol Vuh epic — the creation and destruction myths of the Maya. Here we get our first full elaboration of the Mayan view of the world. It begins in a fantastic string of alliteration: “Are utzijoxik wa’e, k’ak atz’ininoq, k’akachamamoq, katz’inonik, k’akasilanik, k’akalolinik, katolona, puch upa kaj.” This translates roughly as: “This is the account of how all was suspended, all was calm, all in silence, all motionless under an empty sky. The surface of the Earth had not appeared; there were only the ripples and murmurs of the unending sea.”
Beautiful! This is the story of how things started, and like many beginnings, it kicks off with the creation of the world. Before that there was nothing. The Mayan glyph for zero is a stylized seashell, and that makes sense here. Emptiness is the lack of land; there is only the emptiness of a vast and dark ocean.
Much of the Popol Vuh text then goes on to deal with the creation of the first people. The gods initially attempted to construct creatures out of mud and earth, but they kept falling apart. They just wouldn’t stick together. So the gods tried again. According to the Popol Vuh, they wanted to create a being that would speak to them with respect, something that would worship them. They made their second creatures out of wood, but these stupid beasts ate and fought and shat and had no idea of the gods’ existence. So the gods destroyed these disrespectful creatures in a great flood. Sound familiar? It’s the flood myth again. The story goes on, however, to explain that the wood creatures who survived went into the trees and became monkeys.
Lastly, the gods tried making men out of yellow and white corn, and this time they were successful. These beings were intelligent. In fact, they were too intelligent. They saw as the gods themselves saw, they understood as the gods themselves understood, so they didn’t respect the gods and believed they were their equals.
Here I can’t help but think once more of the Tower of Babel. “Behold,” said the God of the Bible, “they are one people and they have one language and this is only the beginning of what they will do. Nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.”
Like God in the Old Testament, these Mayan deities also grew wrathful. Humans were much too clever and something had to be done. In the Popol Vuh there’s no talk of scattering their languages, for in the Mayan world there was only one common language. Instead the gods “took them apart just a little.” They blinded their intelligence as the reflection in a mirror is “blinded by a breath on the face of it.”
That’s an astounding metaphor: clouding the mirror with the hot breath of the gods.
Do you remember all that stuff I was saying about Creole languages? The real point is that the human brain is hardwired to produce language. Our brains churn out grammars, formulaic structures, and our words — whatever they might be — simply get slotted into their proper places. This was Noam Chomsky’s suggestion, and it puts him firmly in the camp of the structuralists.
Structuralism is a field of sociological theory that looks for common elements in cultures and, ultimately, the universal structures of the human mind. Structuralists say that no matter how strange the customs of a place, no matter how bizarre the food, manners, and behaviours, there are always underlying structures, deep structures, that are components of basic human experience. We all eat, sleep, and need shelter. So when we look at the kinds of symbols found in creation myths, marriage rituals, or funerals, we see that some of the elements are the same. Or at least that’s the theory.
The Popol Vuh as a creation myth is a pretty good example. It’s no coincidence there’s a flood myth in the Popol Vuh. The structuralists contend that these stories, these archetypes, are hardwired into us — well, not exactly the concept of a flood perhaps, but the idea of the gods being angry at us, the notion of being cleansed. I tend to be skeptical about structuralism, but still the evidence is there. We would be hard-pressed to find a civilization more untouched by Western ideas than that of the Maya, yet we still find an astonishing similarity in their myths and stories, if we’re willing to dig for them.
It’s a fascinating idea. From Claude Lévi-Strauss to Margaret Mead, from Carl Jung to Noam Chomsky, these sorts of theories are found. Joseph Campbell, in his book The Power of Myth, says that all people seem to have wonderfully similar foundation stories. The differences are only in the surface appearances, and even these can be accounted for in predictable ways. For instance, Campbell noted that cultures that thrive in deserts, in the dry, barren places of the world, often develop religions with a single god. The religions of the jungle, meanwhile, where richness and fertility is a fact of everyday life, usually have a pantheon of gods — hundreds and sometimes thousands of spirits — that reside in all the abundance around them.
Such structuralist theories rest on the idea that we’re all — underneath the cultural and linguistic baggage — essentially the same, that we, as humans, construct our understanding of the world in specific ways. And it’s true. We all have tales of destruction and resurrection. We all have stories of love and death, of heroes and gods and poor players on the mighty stage of life. And though they seem on the surface to be wildly divergent, their underpinnings really all fit into the same solid formulas. They’re all different expressions of the same essential human traits.
Like, for example, fear.
It was already getting late in the day and the sun was slanting at a precarious angle through the branches. I remembered something Mario had told me. He’d said that you could climb up something called the Cat Temple. You could scale to the top and from there watch the sun set, a great gob of fire dipping into the jungle canopy. “It’s amazing,” he’d told me.
I didn’t really have any idea where the Cat Temple was, but I strode down a path that led away from the central acropolis into the jungle to the west and to the far-flung ruins that lay there. The air was heavy and silent in the heat of the dying afternoon. Only a narrow red dirt trail slithered through the thick foliage, and I knew that a couple of steps off the path would leave me completely lost in the foliage. Roots and vines dripped from the branches, forming organic stalagmites. Leaves the size of small cars blotted out the sky.
Mario had made me a little hand-drawn map, but I couldn’t quite make it out. I passed by one set of ruins and then strayed into another maze of trails that seemed to go the right way. Except for my own breathing and the thump of my feet on the trail, it was as silent as it ever got in the jungle.
Soon I was completely lost. The sun had sunk below the canopy, and the shadows were growing thickly. I stopped and heaved off my backpack. I didn’t have much — some water, a camera, and a guidebook to the region. I hoped the guidebook might have a better map, so I fished it out of the pack. The pages fell open in my hands to a section that spoke about jaguars.
Now the Petén is a huge region that’s pretty much untouched rain forest. At dawn and at dusk the forest begins to swell with bird calls and the patter of tiny animals. I’d already seen a peccary waddle by near the first set of ruins, a sort of large rodent-like creature with a snout like a horse. There were armadillos and grey foxes, spider monkeys and anteaters. And apparently there were jaguars.
Jaguars are spotted and are almost the same size as the tigers of Asia. The difference is that, in adapting to the jungle where running at full speed is unnecessary, indeed impossible, they lope along a little lower to the ground. They’ve developed massive forearms that look something like the biceps of a heavyweight boxer, and they can jump. Boy, can they jump.
So I was down on one knee reading the excerpt on jaguars and it said that, though jaguars are reasonably plentiful in the jungle, there’s no need to panic. Jaguars only come out at night. They’re fully nocturnal.
I glanced up. The sky was definitely growing dark.
Furthermore, the guide said, in the extremely unlikely event of coming across a jaguar, you shouldn’t move. You should stay calm and not make any sudden movements.
At that precise moment, overhead, a low growl rumbled through the foliage. It began as almost a purring, but soon erupted into a throaty roar.
I turned and ran for all I was worth, careening down the jungle trail, sweat almost obliterating my field of vision, while all around me the jungle shadows got deeper and deeper.
I must have run a kilometre or two, and somehow, through sheer luck, I came out at the little booth where the guard was still snoozing. His head bobbed once as I raced by, but I only stopped when I got to the safety of my concrete cubicle in the jungle lodge. I stood there and shook for a while, then the generator shut down and the single buzzing light bulb snapped off. I crawled in under the mosquito netting over the bed and gradually fell into a dreamless sleep.
I was awakened at dawn, as I was every morning, by a terrific symphony of bird calls. Hurriedly, I pulled on my clothes and walked down the path and into the forest. Up above in the trees, literally hundreds of parrots squawked and shrilled. The air was electric with sound. A tapir ambled in front of me, looking much like a pig except that it had a snout almost like a stunted elephant trunk. It passed across the trail in front of me, unconcerned, and disappeared into the forest. Wild turkeys scurried in and out of the underbrush, their tail feathers shot through with luminescent and neon hues. The place was thick with life.
Up in another tree I heard the same low rumbling of the previous night. It wasn’t a jaguar at all, of course. It was a howler monkey. These creatures, much bigger than spider monkeys, have adopted the strategy of mimicking large predators, and failing that, they sneer at you and piss, carefully aimed I might add, so that many explorers have had unwelcome showers.
I found the Cat Temple later that day. Stupid me. It wasn’t cat at all but cuatro. Spanish for four. I guess I was still thinking of jaguars. At any rate, Temple Four stands ninety metres above the forest floor and is probably the tallest Pre-Columbian structure in the western hemisphere.
Temple Four is a wild crumble of stone now, draped in its lower quarters by vines and branches that enable you to climb it as you might scale a tree. Here and there steps lead up a little way and then break off into ruins again, forcing a climber to find another way up. In places some kind souls have left ropes or bits of ladders. Halfway up I came level with a family of howler monkeys skittering and barking in the trees. I barked right back at them, and they were silent for a moment. Through the branches once I caught sight of a toucan with its multicoloured beak. That was the cartoon bird I recalled from my youth — the bird on a Froot Loops cereal box.
Then, finally, at the top I came out onto the temple terrace. I was above the trees now, and the jungle canopy was a green felt carpet stretching on all sides to the farthest horizon. To the east I could see the roof combs of the Temple of the Giant Jaguar poking above the greenery. Here was a shot employed by George Lucas in Star Wars. He used this place as his rebel base, and though it was certainly otherworldly, that no longer seemed right.
Watching the sun set over the deep jungle, I heard the monkeys below me and felt the trees swell and ripple with life in the purple twilight. I stayed until the first star appeared in the skies over the canopy and then knew I had to go.
The last stone marker, or stela, was erected in Tikal in 909 A.D. Then there was a great collapse. No one quite knows what happened. And it wasn’t just Tikal. The entire Mayan world throughout Central America completely disintegrated.
It’s bizarre, really. It seems the Maya, whose every particle of being was consumed with the measurement of time, whose astronomical calculations were single-mindedly focused on predicting the cycles of birth and destruction, had — in one of the many great ironies of history — completely miscalculated their own collapse.
Mayan mythology speaks of four cycles before them, of four destructions. They were fanatical about trying to predict the fifth, and sure enough the fifth did come upon them. After 900, in the space of a generation or two, the great cities imploded. The people left and disappeared without a trace, and the jungle took over once more.
There are many theories, of course. Most centre on the idea of ecological collapse. The thin forest soil could no longer sustain the agriculture it took to feed the cities. The plots of corn became barren, and in addition, all those vast temples and plazas had been coated with thick layers of lime plaster. It took young trees, green wood, to burn a fire hot enough to melt the limestone into plaster, and for this literally millions of trees were cut down and burned.
Added to the ecological collapse was the fact that the city states were seemingly in an almost constant state of war with one another. Furthermore, the kings and astronomer priests grew rich while the peasants, overwhelmed by a harshening environment, grew poorer and more desperate. The final events are unknown. Did the underclasses rise and slaughter their masters? Did hunger, disease, or war sweep across the continent like a forest fire? Perhaps we’ll never know for sure.
Scattered along the beaches of the Yucatán in southern Mexico, there are Post-Classic Mayan ruins, and it seems that at least a dribble of the civilization was still around when the Spanish landed in 1511. There’s a famous story that says when the first Europeans finally arrived and saw the stone temples shining in the sun already falling into ruins, they asked the Maya what the place was.
The people answered by saying, “Malatina’at kat’an.” As nearly as I can figure it out, the prefix ma’ is the negation not, and the root na’at means “to understand.” T’an in the second word means “language” so that what the Maya were actually saying was something like: “Sorry, but we can’t understand a damn thing you’re trying to say to us.” The Spanish thought they we’re hearing the name of the place and jotted it down quickly, writing it as Yucatán, and the name has stuck.
At a place named Xcaret, on what is now called the Mayan Riviera, there’s a sort of Mayan theme park built directly over the ruins of a few beachside temples. I don’t know what to think of that. The place is like a giant wax museum, like a ride at Disneyland — Maya World. It’s all a bit unsettling. On the other hand, I snorkelled through an underground river there, through caverns and passages that reminded me of the stories of Xibalba, the underworld, and that at least wiped away some of the place’s tourist facade.
In the centre of the theme park a reconstructed Mayan village dredges in sightseers. A young Maya sat in front of a thatch house, carving masks out of wood, and I struck up a conversation with him. I asked him to teach me a few words in Maya. There is, surprisingly, really no single word that directly translates as hello. Instead the Maya greet one another with ba’ax ka wa’alik, literally meaning “What do you say?” Nor is there a word for yes. In Maya you merely rephrase what’s been said positively: “Are you from Canada?” “I am from Canada.”
I asked the Maya if he could go back to the Classic age of his people, would he be able to talk to them. “I would be able to talk to them,” he said, reforming the positive. “Of course, there would be some differences. If we want to say yes now, we all use the Spanish sí. It is common. But I think I would understand most of the old words they spoke. A turtle is still ’áak, and a snake is still ’kung. Even your English word jaguar comes from our old language. We call the jaguar, chac war. You see? You have borrowed this word from us.”
He held up the small face he was carving and told me to look at the moon later that night. It would be full, he said, and he told me that just as we say there’s a man in the moon, the Maya say there’s a tu’ul up there — a rabbit.
That night, when I gazed at the full moon, I clearly saw in the shadows and craters the two long ears and wiggling snout of a rabbit. I don’t know why no one in our culture has noticed it before. It’s really quite obvious.
One thing is certain. The various peoples of the world construct their symbols and languages according to specific internal logics. There are always reasons for their semiotic choices. And whether or not they actually form the bedrock of some sort of universal human consciousness, they’re the fundamental building blocks of our cultures, the foundation of our many world views.
When I consider the Maya, I think mostly of their calendars and endless rounds of ritual — like that of the ball court. I wonder what those stepped temples with stone buttresses rising against time really tell us about the culture of the people — not the kings and high priests — but the stonemasons and the corn farmers.
A thousand years from now, after our own Long Count, what will visitors make of the shells of our modern skyscrapers? Surely, the suburbs will be gone, all the carefully manicured lawns, the strip malls, and gas stations. But what will the towering steel scaffolds of office buildings and shopping malls really tell future archaeologists about our time on Earth?
I suppose shrewd observers will know they’re monuments to finance, to the wild market economy we live under, and if they do, they’ll have nailed down something true about us. Certainly, it’s plausible to suggest that we’re obsessed with money, with the acquisition of wealth and material things.
In the same way, Mayan temples, markers of their obsession with time, really do illuminate something essential about the Mayan view of the world. The Mayan calendar, all fifty-two spinning years of it, was marked by an almost continual round of ceremonies, each day having its own special meaning. That makes me think, in my very best Joseph Campbell imagination, that maybe we aren’t really so different from them at all.