Since the Spanish Conquest, most Maya
towns have been stamped with the grid of the European worldview—straight
streets, and churches and government buildings arranged around a square. But
Vogtie showed his students, Freidel among them, how the patterns intertwine
with the European overlay; how the metaphysical dimensions of the Maya world,
the boundaries of the four directions and the center, exist in relation to one
another. How the wild world of the forests, mountains, and ancestral abodes and
the tame world of homes, churches, and community are woven together in the
pilgrimages of the shamans, or the h'iloletik, as Zinacamtecos call them.
A few years after the experience
Freidel describes above, Vogtie committed his perceptions of the Zinacanteco
cosmos to paper in one of the clearest analyses of Maya reality ever written.
Tortillas for the Gods. There he explained how the center relates to the four
directions:
Houses and fields are small-scale
models of the quincuncial cosmogony. The universe was created by the VAXAK-MEN,
gods who support it at its corners and who designated its center, the
"navel of the world,' in Zina cantan Center. Houses have corresponding
corner posts; fields emphasize the same critical places, with cross shrines at
their comers and centers. These points are of primary ritual importance. (Vogt
1976:58)
We now know that the first act of
Creation was to center the world by placing the stones of the cosmic hearth.
The second was to raise the sky, establish the sides and the corners of the
cosmic house that is the sky. The Maya at places like Cerros, Yaxuna, and
Zinacantan have been centering the world and creating the four sides ever
since. The center could be grand both in scale and execution, or like the navel
of a human being, it could be a faint, vestigial marker of the remains of the
umbilicus that was once connected to an original source of creation and sustenance
could be created by ritual wherever the Maya needed one. Each household shrine
in the outlying hamlets of Zinacantan is central to the family that worships
there. Each water hole shared by families living together for generations is
central to their lives. Each of the great mountain homes of the Father-Mothers
is central when its crosses are adorned with pine tips and carnations, the
offerings are arranged, the portals are open, and devout descendants kneel
before them in prayer while partake of the offering meal. In fact, Vogtie told
us, the three peaks
Senior Large Mountain, the most important of these mountain shrines are called the three stones of the hearth. (David Freidel, Linda Schele, and Joy Parker, Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand years on the Shaman's Path [New York: William Morrow, 1993], 126-27)
Further Reading:
Margaret and Stephen Bunson on "Cardinal Points" in Ancient Mesoamerica