Thursday, February 23, 2023

Freidel, Schele, and Parker on Mesoamerican peoples symbolically centering themselves in a universe that existed inside the four directions

  

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:


Brant Gardner on Helaman 3:8


Margaret and Stephen Bunson on "Cardinal Points" in Ancient Mesoamerica

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