Abstract
Ancient Maya mythology may perplex the modern student. As recorded in inscriptions, mythological episodes are cryptically short, speak of obscure places and entities, and leave much to the reader who, if Maya, would have been so intimately familiar with the story that the details we find lacking were already deeply imprinted on their psyche. Nevertheless, from these esoteric textual fragments and associated imagery we may redact a rich mythological world whose symbolism owes much to the agricultural practices and foodways surrounding maize, still the staple crop of Mesoamerican peoples (Staller et al. 2006; see Anderson and Tuxill, this volume).
This chapter adds to scholarship on Maya cosmology by proposing that maize agriculture and the activities that transformed this grain into a foodstuff played a major role in the formation of Maya and Mesoamerican mythology. I suggest that like other ancient societies an elaborate tradition arose around the cultivation, preparation, and lifecycle of this crop. In essence, like rice in Asia (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993) or bread in the West (Camporesi 1996), maize and the foods made from it were sacred. The quotidian activities surrounding its cultivation and preparation took on grander proportions within myth than the original domestic act. Nevertheless, it was through myth’s clear reference to domestic activities that the metaphors expressed therein had the potential to speak to a wide segment of society and became a useful medium for political and religious propaganda and, more importantly, an explanatory model for life’s mysteries.
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Notes
- 1.
There are several words for hearth in Maya languages of which k’ob’ and its family of cognates are the most common (see K’ekchi’kúb, tenamaste; K’iche x-kúb’; Ch’orti’ ch’ujb’en; and YUC k’óob’en, hearth (Bricker et al. 1998), TZO ch’ob’, torch, falling star, and St. Elmo’s fire (Laughlin 1975:137). On the basis of Tzotzil ch’ob’ as numerical classifier for torches and Ch’orti’ ch’ujb, “to ignite,” hearth in both Ch’orti’ and Yucatec seems to be a derived noun from a verb that possibly means to “ignite,” perhaps specifically with a torch.
- 2.
The “touching of the earth” collocation perhaps suggests birth as Lounsbury (1980:112–113) originally proposed, but as this passage is coupled with hul (to arrive) the nuance of this term in this case is shifted from birth to the arrival of GI to Matwiil.
- 3.
The so-called “three-stone-place” continues to defy phonetic decipherment though the meaning of hearth has attained general acceptance for obvious reasons. The interpretation presented here for either a sim or perhaps sam reading, depending on which spelling conventions are correct, is merely a suggestion supported by phonetic complementation found on Step 3 of the Hieroglyphic Stairway at Seibal where the “three-stones” logogram is suffixed by a mi syllabogram (Grube and Nahm 1990) and by the likeness this glyph bears to a hearth. There are several words for hearth in the relevant Mayan languages: terms built around the root k’ob’, with synonyms in the words siimtun (Yucatec), and oxyoket in Tzotzil and Tzeltal. I present the alternative of sim or saam because this reading accounts for the presence of the mi suffix. There are some problems, however, that prevent me from endorsing this interpretation whole-heartedly. First, the full reading for the collocation would seem to be something like ux sim tuun nal for “three-heated-stone-place.” We are never given details that would allow us to read the stone sign used in this glyph as tuun, that is, they are never to my knowledge suffixed with a ni syllabogram. Second, the etymology of the word sim is a bit difficult to determine. The simtun or si’im of Yucatec, or in other languages sam, all meaning comal, seem to be built around the root si’ ‘fire wood’ and a participial ending -m. However, Mixe sham (Lipp 1991:224) and sham ∼ sam in pMZ (Wichmann 1995) meaning “hot” suggests that at least in the case of sam we might be dealing with a different root entirely, which was perhaps borrowed into Mayan.
- 4.
In Colonial Central Mexican mythology a council of Gods assembled before a hearth that served as the location at which Nanahuatzin and Tecuciztecatl were transformed into the Sun and Moon respectively. Eventually all the gods must immolate themselves to set the heavens in motion (Sahagún 1950–1982 [1590]:7.4, Bierhorst 1992:147–149).
- 5.
This and all subsequent K numbers refer to Justin Kerr’s (n.d.) Maya Vase Database. An Archive of Rollout Photographs, avaible online at :http://famsi.famsi.org:9500/dataSpark/maya.
- 6.
The interpretation of the –iiy suffix is a matter of some controversy at the moment. Wald (1999, 2004) sees it as a deictic enclitic that references previous points in the narrative. On the other side of the debate Robertson et al. (2004) see the –iiy as marking the past tense in narratives that are otherwise in the historical present. Here I have followed Wald’s interpretation, as I also believe that tense and aspect are not represented morphologically in the EpM verbal complex. A temporal frame is constructed rather through adverbs of time, as is the case for a number of world languages, such as Classical Chinese and modern Mayan languages like Ch’orti’.
- 7.
- 8.
Recently, Marc Zender and David Stuart have questioned the reading of naw as “to adorn”. Zender suggests that that Ch’olti’ nau was really intended to represent nab, “to paint, adorn” and not the word naw. Stuart sees this glyphic term as possibly coming from the root na “to know” (cited in Guenter 2007:21). While it is possible that a new gloss for naw could emerge the Classic period root is naw and not na’. Therefore, while I find the criticism compelling, I am skeptical of the gloss “to know”.
- 9.
Similar to the imagery of the Popol Vuh cited above, Eve Hunt mentions that among the Cuicatec the three skulls of the Goddesses of sustenance symbolize the hearthstones (1977:158). Cuicatecan mythology here perhaps coordinates with Karen Bassie’s idea that the bones of the Bone Woman of the Popol Vuh are the source for the first maize used for the formation of true humans (Bassie 2002). Outside the Maya area Chevalier and Bain (2003:27) have also observed that: “The Gulf Nahuas and Popolucas perceive fundamental similarities between humans and the plants that grow and go through repeated cycles of life and death in order to feed those who reproduce them”.
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Acknowledgements
I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Kerry M. Hull (Reitaku Daigaku), John Staller (Field Museum of Natural History), and Brian Stross (University of Texas-Austin) for reading versions of this chapter and my dissertation co-chairs, Julia Guernsey (Univeristy of Texas-Austin), David S. Stuart (University of Texas-Austin), as well as Nikolai Grube (Universität Bonn) for earlier advice on the portions of my disseration from which much of this chapter was derived. I would especially like to thank Karen Bassie for inviting me to present at the Chacmool Conference at the University of Calgary over the years and for many discussions about Maya mythology. Valuable editorial suggestions were made by Laura Lee and the following graduate students in my seminar on graduate writing: Elizabeth Woodward, Kathleen McCampbell, Mary Lescher, Myriah Harper, Matthew Whistler, Stephanie Bender, Shaun Wright, Samantha Ogden, Traci Matthews. Needless to say, all interpretations are my own and any errors should not reflect in any way on the fine scholars mentioned above.
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Carrasco, M.D. (2010). From Field to Hearth: An Earthly Interpretation of Maya and Other Mesoamerican Creation Myths. In: Staller, J., Carrasco, M. (eds) Pre-Columbian Foodways. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0471-3_25
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