Death and Life in a Mayan Town Part 1

DEATH
Today they are burying Don Gabriel. The procession begins at a funeral home near the center of town; cars and trucks will slow to a crawl as the mourners walk down the main street, solemnly and with an air of silent determination. I don’t know how many times I have seen the madcap progress of a chicken bus come to a grinding halt when it encounters such funeral processions. The Maya walk with a slow, shuffling trudge and are typically accompanied by a brass band which marches along to the same shuffle, playing sad, wildly out-of-tune music. One can be forgiven for plunging momentarily into a kind of time-and-space warp and imagining oneself in New Orleans rather than Momostenango.

Today is 12 Kan, at least in K’iche’; it would be 12 Chicchan in the more familiar Yucatec. This should not be confused with the preceding day-sign, called Kan in Yucatec but K’at in K’iche’. I agree that it really is a bit confusing. Don Gabriel, however, would have suffered from no such confusion, for the pure and simple reason that he didn’t speak a word of Yucatec, only K’iche’ and Spanish.

Instead, Don Gabriel was confused by the essence of the matter. He was never quite certain where he stood in matters of spirituality. His parents were at least nominally Catholic, but this fact never prevented his mother from making offerings of candles and frankincense at the graves of her own parents every time a 9 day rolled around. She spoke some prayers which had been taught to her by her brother, Don Elizario, a traditional sacerdote Maya or Mayan priest. Don Gabriel had always been fond of his uncle Elizario, whose theology often made more sense to him than that of the catecistas. Santiago is the patron saint of Momostenango, and there are always a number of Catholic festivities that take place in front of the church on Santiago’s feast day. And it was upon this day that Elizario, up until the end of his long life, took perverse delight in conducting traditional ceremonies at the Altar of the Earth Mother which lies directly across the plaza from the town church, and thus right in front of the eyes of the Catholic priests.

Don Gabriel never got the chance to follow in Don Elizario’s footsteps because his wife Dona Maria took a very dim view of such practices, being herself a staunch Catholic. And in fact Don Gabriel, if left to his own devices, would probably not have chosen to be interred on 12 Kan, since it is a “forceful” day on account of its high number as well as being a day somewhat connected with the darker side of magic. But of course Don Gabriel, being dead, had nothing to say about it, and his wife planned the funeral in consort with the priest, paying no heed to the ancient Calendar. It was a Saturday, and more people could attend.

This mixture of religious influences in Don Gabriel’s life explains why the mourners are carrying two different types of crosses. The Catholics carry crosses with the horizontal arms somewhat higher than the center of the vertical. The Mayan traditionalists carry crosses with all four arms of equal length. Some of these crosses are entwined with sprigs of evergreen; to the ancient Maya, the cross represented the World Tree. This idea is still very much alive; the crucified Christ in the church at Santiago Atitlan is blossoming with flowers rather than with spouts of blood.

Now the procession is passing the Ramirez home, one of the town’s largest and most prosperous houses. But since the Ramirez family is Seventh Day Adventist, no one is at home. They are all at church, with the exception of Adelina, who lives with the Ramirez family but cannot leave the house because she is caring for an elderly bed-ridden relative. As a Seventh Day Adventist herself, she ought to have no patience with these traditional burial rites, but K’iche’ was her mother tongue, and she was raised as a traditionalist before converting to the evangelista path in adulthood, and it must be admitted that the shuffling mourners and tuneless brass band do in fact create a kind of resonance in her soul which she finds it difficult to deny.

Because there are so many rooms in the Ramirez house, the family takes in lodgers. Typically there are (naturally) a few Seventh Day Adventist missionaries staying there. But the family also plays host to any number of well-known anthropologists and even a few unregenerate pagans who have come to Momostenango to study the Calendar, like the American woman named Jill and (occasionally) me. Somehow this unlikely assemblage of human beings manages to co-exist as a rather companionable unit.

The Seventh Day Adventists are the most successful of the various evangelistas who have come here with the express purpose of wooing the Momostecans away from their remarkably stubborn adherence to that ancient pagan relic called the Mayan Calendar. But the most noticeable are the Mormons. They would stand out from the crowd simply because of their short-sleeved white shirts and monochromatic neckties; the crew-cut blond hair makes them look even more like cultural anomalies. The way they speak Spanish is a painful indication of the fact that they have been shipped here directly after completing a three-week language immersion course in Provo or Salt Lake.

All the same, their doctrine regarding the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel is enormously popular here in Momostenango. The Maya have always felt a deep kinship with Hebrew mythology. Their own creation epic, the Pop Wuj, states that the K’iche’ people migrated to their present location from a place called Tula which was “somewhere in the east.” Many local folks theorize that this was, in fact, what we now call the Holy Land. Still others would prefer to place Tula in Atlantis or even the Pleiades. It is also commonly said that Tula lay “somewhere round about Copan and Esquipulas,” which is what the archaeologists think too.

But let us leave the days of mythic migrations and return to the present, for Don Gabriel’s funeral procession is now entering the cemetery.

If we have forgiven ourselves for imagining that we have been in the midst of a New Orleans funeral march, we must now forgive ourselves for imagining that we are in Haiti. While there are a few standard graves with crosses, the rows of burial places more often consist of small family mausoleums. These crypts may be anywhere from five to seven feet tall, and about six or seven feet in depth and in width. The Maya are a small people; you can fit about four coffins in one of these family crypts. They are made up to look precisely like real houses, complete with gabled roofs, front doors, windows, and perhaps a bit of a garden. The “windows” of these “houses” are little glass niches in which photographs of the deceased are often placed, along with perhaps a candle. All in all, it is intended to give the impression that one’s departed relatives are still all living together in the family home, even sitting next to a friendly candle and gazing out their window just as they did when they were alive.

One can easily identify the mausoleums of traditionalist families. Somewhere near the “front door” may be found a small stone shrine, blackened by smoke, at which offerings are made to the ancestors. These rituals typically take place on days numbered 9 in the Sacred Calendar, for this is the day of the ancestors. The day-sign Ajpu (Ahau) is also associated with the ancestors. On 9 Ajpu, the cemetery comes alive with what looks like a slightly smaller version of the Days of the Dead. (Actually, the Days of the Dead are celebrated very colorfully in Momos, thus giving traditionalists the chance to throw an “ancestor party” twice a year, once on 9 Ajpu and once in early November.)

But there will be no offerings made for Don Gabriel today in deference to Dona Maria’s strict Catholicism. However, Dona Maria knows perfectly well how to count the days of the Mayan Calendar, just like everyone else in Momostenango. (Even Mormons and Seventh Day Adventists know how to count the days. And yes, I am perfectly serious.) If Dona Maria is smart (and she is), she will avoid visiting her late husband’s grave on 9 days, when more traditionally minded members of his family will pay their respects after their own fashion.