“Picture a square bed sheet,” my informant instructed. “The four corners are the four cardinal points. Now picture four heavenly creatures holding each of the corners: The creature on the northern corner is white; the one on the east is red; the one on the south is yellow; the one holding the western corner is black.
“Now picture not one, but 13 sheets, one on top of the other, rising upward. These are the 13 layers of the Maya Upperworld. The sky-bearers, bacabs, are holding the corners of the 13 levels.
“The book of the Apocalypse in the Bible talks about four horsemen in heaven. Their horses are white, red, black, and yellow, like the bacabs. It talks about four angels holding the four corners of the earth. Isn’t that interesting?”
How would the ancient Maya come up with that, never having read the Bible? My interest began with an assignment to write a news report for Time magazine on an archaeological dig of Maya ruins and blossomed into a much more ambitious project: a novel set amid those ruins. I was to discover in my research for the book that there were many similarities between Maya and Christian cosmology.
The ancient Maya flourished as a civilization from a.d. 250 to 900 (though, as a people, they survived and number in the millions today). When the Spanish conquistadors appeared in the sixteenth century, with a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other, the Maya were already intimately familiar with many of the religious concepts the Spanish thought they were introducing to this “primitive” people: the religious use of the idea that seeds must fall into the ground to die in order to bring forth life; the need for blood to be spilt in order for there to be a relationship with the gods; and the concept of a sacrifice that does not end in death.
In my novel, a shadowy late-night visitor guides the protagonist through these mysteries. I turned instead to the counsel of William L. Fash, Harvard’s Bowditch Professor of Central American and Mexican Archaeology and Ethnology, and chair of Harvard’s anthropology department at the Peabody Museum. I met him nine years ago in Copán, where he, along with his wife, Barbara, and a gifted group of archaeologists, scholars, epigraphers, and artists, was digging up vessel offerings, hidden temples, and the bones of lost kings—like miracle workers raising the dead. Since 1978, Bill Fash has championed multidisciplinary research projects there, all lucidly explained and updated, even for the (resolute) lay reader, in his recently revised book Scribes, Warriors and Kings (Thames & Hudson, 2001).
Fash visited CopÁn the first time at the age of 16 and was “flabbergasted by the richness of the archaeological remains and the beauty of the natural environment.” I know what he means. When you step onto the grounds the first time, you feel like you’re entering a fantasy world carved out of green volcanic tuff. The three-dimensional upright carvings (called stelae), the altars, the ballcourt, the Hieroglyphic Stairway, and the complex of temple pyramids known as the Acropolis all arise like ghosts out of the verdant jungle. In the words of the nineteenth-century explorer John Lloyd Stephens, who rediscovered the Copán ruins in 1839: “All was mystery, dark, impenetrable mystery.”
Fash and his team have come a long way in penetrating those mysteries, though he’d tell you they’ve barely scratched the surface. Nine years ago he said, “We could work with two hundred workers for the next hundred years and never solve all the mysteries of the Maya.”
This much they now know: “The Maya have come to be recognized as the most literate of all the pre-Colum-bian civilizations of the New World. They developed a complete writing system that enabled them to express any thought in the Mayan language. We have more Mayan inscriptions and texts than we do for any other civilization, and they tend to be more expressive of larger religious and historical concepts.”
When these lost cities throughout southern Mexico and portions of Central America were rediscovered in the nineteenth century, “no one knew what to make of this distinguished civilization that had been engulfed by the jungle,” says Fash. “This was a great mystery, and nothing excites the human imagination like a mystery.”
Any number of wild speculations arose about the origins of the Maya. The most helpful account came in the form of a book published by a priest (later a bishop) of YucatÁn, Fray Diego de Landa. “He was sitting in jail waiting to meet the Inquisition, and prepared this very long treatise on Maya culture as a means of trying to defend his occasionally overzealous attempts at conversion,” says Fash. “Ironically, the Inquisition is the reason we have Landa’s fabulous text about Maya civilization.”
Landa had a Maya scribe write down the names of the numbers, days, and months of the Maya calendar, which, Fash says, became “a great primer for Maya scholars who wanted to decipher the stone inscriptions.” Landa also had the scribe write down phonetic signs for Spanish sounds using Maya symbols. “No one could make heads or tails of that,” says Fash, “but what everyone could agree on was how the calendar worked.
“A number of sophisticated mathematicians and engineers applied what Landa had recorded to the surviving books and stone monuments. This cracked the codes of the dates on the Maya monuments, the lunar reckonings, and the Venus tables, and recognized other time counts related to astronomy.”
The focus on time and the movement of the stars and planets sent scholarship spiraling off in the wrong direction for about 50 years, he says. “Since that was what we could decipher, everyone obsessed on the Maya’s understanding of the cycles of time, their fascination with the movement of the heavenly bodies, and the obsession to record this in vivid detail in their books and inscriptions. Taken to a logical extreme, people concluded that the Maya must have been a theocracy governed by astronomer priests whose only concern was the passage of the heavenly bodies through the heavens.”
Many years later, scholars disproved this fantasy by means of basic archaeology and deciphering the hieroglyphs. “The archaeologists found defensive ditches dug around cities and other evidence for invasions of cities, and abundant evidence for the mass production of projectile points and other weaponry,” he says. “Most stunningly, in 1949 they discovered the ruins of Bonampak, Mexico, where the murals portrayed a pitched battle between two Maya kingdoms.” Implements of war and murals with images of human sacrifice contradicted the notion that this was a band of peaceful astronomer priests.
Fash highlights the “brilliant work of deduction” of architect, artist, and epigrapher Tatiana Proskouriakoff. Decades ago she concluded that the repeated dates at the Maya city of Piedras Negras were tied to history more than to astronomy. “The dates recorded events in the life spans of named individuals, and the monuments existed to pay homage to these rulers and important events of their lifetimes,” Fash explains. In other words, record-keeping related to the heavenly bodies was background information for historical events, perhaps to explain why a date was chosen for the accession of a ruler or for a particular war against a neighboring kingdom. “The monuments were erected by the Maya not to record the move- ment of heavenly bodies, but to record Maya history,” he says.
Fash focused his research on the Acropolis, the “sacred mountain”—one of several commanding monuments people see when they visit “the CopÁn ruins.” For the Maya, the landscape and everything in it, animate or inanimate, was alive with sacred power. The buildings, then, were earthly pictures of the cosmic world. The temples of Acropolis, built sequentially by Copán’s 16 kings, often one structure on top of another, were more than seats of government. They were the portals to the Upperworld and the Underworld where the gods and ancestors dwelt.
The Acropolis stands at the heart of Copán’s sacred geography. This is why Bill Fash established the Copán Acropolis Archaeological Project (caap) in 1988 to excavate and consolidate deteriorating structures of the Acropolis and to reconstruct “form, decoration, and stratigraphic associations” of the architecture. He told me, “The Maya speak to us through their buildings, and every building has a different message. Our task as archaeologists is to discover what a building means. What is their message?”
In 1993 they found out. As a project of caap and under the direction of Robert Sharer (University of Pennsylvania), archaeologists discovered a tomb inside Temple 16, at the heart of the Acropolis, that some were calling the most incredible find of their careers. They believed they had discovered the human remains of Copán’s founding king, K’inich Yax Ku’k Mo’ (pronounced kee-nish yash kook moh).
Bill Fash no longer lives in Honduras, but he returns every summer with students for onsite fieldwork. I reconnected with him there this past summer. Standing in front of Temple 16, he ex-plained how they finally confirmed that the person buried in the Hunal tomb, as it is called, was indeed the founding king. Immediately before us was Altar Q, the monument that had offered the most tantalizing clues. A square carving about the size of the bed of a 4 by 4 pickup, Altar Q was commissioned by Copán’s sixteenth—and last—king, Yax Pasah, and features carved images of CopÁn’s 16 kings, four on each side in the four cardinal directions. The altar is set upon four squat stone pillars, like a funeral bier. On the west face, or the front, K’inich Yax Ku’k Mo’, whose reign began in a.d. 426, is handing the kingly scepter to Yax Pasah, the last king, who died in 820. It is a symbolic gesture, intended to legitimize the reign of the commissioning king (and all kings in between) by linking him to the founder.
According to the inscriptions on Altar Q, Yax Ku’k Mo’ received the insignia of office from somewhere in “the west,” traveled for 153 days, then “rested his legs” in Copán. At the time, Copán was growing and prosperous, strategically located by the CopÁn river, which made it a major player on the trade routes. The arch-aeologists speculate that around a.d. 400, feuding warlords dominated Copán. There is evidence of a ruler before Yax Ku’k Mo’, but evidently he didn’t amount to much and left no inscriptions.
Yax Ku’k Mo’ arrived with the emblems of office after a sacred pilgrimage in 426, though, according to Fash, he had been “kicking around” for at least ten years prior to that. Archaeologists and epigraphers have deduced he had been commissioned in TeotihuacÁn, Mexico, then the most powerful city in Mesoamerica, “with its tentacles everywhere,” says Fash. The iconography of later rulers depicts Yax Ku’k Mo’ wearing goggles, which is a clue to his origins. Goggled eyes are Tlaloc imagery from TeotihuacÁn adopted by the Maya. The archaeologists also found pots in the tomb that clearly came from TeotihuacÁn. “But, then again,” says Fash, “you can’t go by the pots. There are pots from almost all of Mesoamerica in the tomb.”
The founding king created a regal ritual center, erecting a complex of buildings that included a new Acropolis and the city’s first ballcourt. He was also the first ruler to record inscriptions in stone. “The cosmological imagery he had carved on the ballcourt,” Fash says, “the recording of inscriptions, the stucco decoration, and the architecture styles all demonstrate that he intended to take CopÁn from a rural, backwater kind of place to a larger cosmopolitan center. It was his way of signaling that CopÁn was now going to be one of the great kingdoms of the Maya world.”
CopÁn did not become one of the larger city-states. At its peak in the eighth century the population hovered around 20,000 to 25,000. But “it was a gateway city on the edge of the classic Maya realm,” says Fash, and as such became the channel through which neighboring non-Maya peoples funneled their goods, their art, and their ideas into the Maya lowlands. “Conversely, these non-Maya groups could partake of the tremendous achievements and artistic prowess of Maya civilization through this window of opportunity in CopÁn. CopÁn played an important role in integrating the Maya realm with its non-Maya neighbors to the east and south,” he says.
He quotes his colleague, the late Linda Schele, who used to say that CopÁn (and other borderland cities) compensated for being on the edges by becoming “Super Maya.” Rather than asserting their prowess through political muscle and geographic expansion, the Maya at CopÁn became masters of artistic and literary expression, “creating more abundant and stunning works of art than anything that one could find elsewhere in the Maya world. The quality of the pictorial sculpture of the stelae, their portraits of rulers, the maize gods, birds, and other creatures adorning the late-classic buildings is vastly superior to that of any other Maya city.”
We are circling Altar Q. “The hieroglyphic inscription on the top says that this is the stone of K’inich Yax Ku’k Mo’. Those four stones underneath”—Fash points them out to me—”mean it is imitating the burial place of the person buried in the Acropolis. The burial slab in the tomb has four cylinders supporting it the same way.” Since Altar Q is placed directly in front of Temple 16, since it mimics a burial slab, and since it indicates it is the stone of Yax Ku’k Mo’, there was good reason for Fash and his colleagues to suppose that Temple 16 was the funerary temple of the founder.
“We tunneled into the Acropolis with the hope of uncovering these early remains. Lo and behold, we found a number of inscriptions and many different buildings in stratified sequences with associated dates going back to the time of the founding of the dynasty.”
Altar Q offered other clues. Yax Ku’k Mo’s image on the west face shows him wearing a single jade bar across his chest, called a pectoral. It also shows him holding a shield with his right arm, suggesting he was a left-handed warrior, drawing his weapon with his left hand and warding off blows with the shield held in his right arm. When the researchers examined the remains in the tomb, they noticed a series of combat-style fractures; most notably, the bone of the right forearm had suffered a serious break that hadn’t healed properly. A fractured right forearm is consistent with a parrying injury of a left-handed warrior. They also found in the remains a single jade bar like the one Yax Ku’k Mo’ is shown wearing on Altar Q.
Establishing the historicity of the founding king was a pivotal finding. First, says Fash, “it corroborated every later record we could find in early classic texts. It shows that there is a historical basis to the claims made by later kings about the life and times of their founding ancestor. To demonstrate that there is archaeological evidence to support the existence of this man and the claims made by later rulers of his role in setting up this distinguished Maya kingdom is terribly important, not just for the study of Copán and Honduran history but for the larger discipline of anthropology in the New World.”
But second, finding the bones of Yax Ku’k Mo’ put many other pieces of the puzzle in place, clarifying the purpose and function of subsequent temples, built on that spot, which, in turn, pointed to Maya cosmology. Fash writes in his book, “Structure 16 and all its predecessors were sequent versions of the funerary temple—or sacred mountain, in the Maya view—of K’inich Yax Ku’k Mo’.” Implements of ritual worship were found buried inside these later temples and deified images of the founding king adorn their facades. Yax Ku’k Mo’ was the historical fulcrum of CopÁn and more—the conduit to the Upperworld and the focal point of Maya worship, as the subsequent temples built there attest. In other words, history and cosmology at Copán intersect in the tomb of Yax Ku’k Mo’.
Inscriptions ceased in 822, two years after the death of the sixteenth king. As a political and religious cohesive entity, the Copán followed the pattern of the other Maya city-states in the region at the time and, more or less abruptly, collapsed.
Finding the tomb of the founder and understanding the religious function of subsequent temples built over his tomb brought to light much about Maya cosmology. “Yax Ku’ Mo’ had a clear vision for the supernatural divine role of the king,” says Fash. For the Maya, the king was the sacred conduit of supernatural power. He accessed this power through blood rituals, of which there were two principal forms: auto-sacrifice and ritual human sacrifice, usually (though not exclusively) practiced in the context of warfare.
To invoke the power of the gods and communicate with the ancestors, including Yax Ku’k Mo’ (who had become a god), the Maya kings entered their sacred temples and underwent a flesh-piercing ritual called “letting blood.” After days of fasting and spiritual preparation, the king pierced his genitalia and let the blood drip onto bark paper, which would be burned in an incense burner. The ancestors, as gods, appeared in a vision in the smoke. Through blood-letting, the king touched and embodied the power of the gods and transmitted its benefits to his mortal constituents—which, it’s worth noting, didn’t hurt his staying power.
Yax Ku’k Mo’ was a warrior king. Warrior kings indeed fought for geographic expansion. But like everything else in the Maya cosmos, warfare carried metaphysical significance and was also viewed as a ritual. “The Maya, like other peoples around the world,” Fash says, “occasionally performed rituals that involved the use of human blood. In many cases, they performed the auto-sacrificial flesh-piercing ritual. But in other cases it was quite clear that the captives taken in battle were soon to be dispatched for sacrifice.”
The model of warrior kingship was upheld by his successors and showcased in the great Hieroglyphic Stairway, a historical text of stone inscriptions built (albeit shabbily), by Ruler 15 as an “ode to the CopÁn dynasty and the great acts of the early kings.” As Fash writes in his book, “The portraits of the rulers [on the Stairway] serve to identify the distinguished sovereigns whose accomplishments are heralded in the lengthy inscription. The portraits. … stress the roles of the royal ancestors as great warriors, for virtually all of them bear shields.”
The blood proffered by the warrior kings was “the most sacred of sacrifices,” says Fash. Its internal logic was strikingly similar to Jesus’ words: “unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds” (John 12:24). “Quite simply,” says Fash, “they recognized that for there to be new life on earth there must first be death. Their metaphor for this was the maize plant. For there to be maize, an ear of corn must be plucked and the kernels of corn buried in the ground. From this would sprout new life and the whole cycle would renew again. All of the cultures of Mesoamerica believed their creator fashioned humankind from maize dough. Ritual sacrifice was viewed the same way. The bones were buried and from them would come new life. For there to be life, there had to be death. It was deemed necessary for the continual cycling of the world.”
The king, as conduit to the Upperworld and possessing divine attributes himself, saw it as his duty, through ritual sacrifice, to repay the gods for the blood debt incurred at creation and to keep the rhythms of life in motion—the rising and setting of the sun, the movement of the planets, the seasons. “The ancient Mesoamerican believed that the gods sacrificed themselves and were burned to ashes so there could be a sun, so the sun could move across the sky, so there could be humankind, and so humankind could have maize to eat. The sacred context in which these things took place recognized that the most precious thing that they knew, their own blood, needed to be given to repay the blood debt they owed the gods and to contribute to the renewal of the world,” says Fash. “That’s not to say you don’t lament the loss of life. But it does inform how one understands why they considered this to be a vital part of life on planet earth.”
Understanding the religious motivations behind rituals of human sacrifice gives us a window into how the Maya understood their world. But having a religious motivation certainly does not justify evil acts. If it did, what would that suggest about the World Trade Center attack? Fash says that the Maya understood the world in dualistic terms. “From the point of view of Mesoamerican civilizations, there will always be the light and the dark, hot and cold, night and day. Duality was the way the world was, and there was no disputing or changing that. From their point of view, these opposing forces had to exist for there to have been a world. The constant conflict and interplay of good and evil, light and dark, night and day, was a given and not something to try to resist. It was the nature of the universe.”
In my research I have found one exception to this. It is the Maya myth of the Hero Twins, recorded in a sixteenth-century sacred book of the Quiché Maya called the Popol Vuh. In the myth, the Hero Twins descend to the Underworld, a wet, smelly place filled with disease and decay from which few had hope of escape. There they engage in an epic battle against the lords of the Underworld in the form of a game on the ballcourt. The lords quickly trick the twins, throw them into an oven where they are consumed, grind their bones, and toss the remains into the river of hell. But the twins, being clever, had anticipated the trick and concocted a means of escape. They emerge from the river five days later, their visage changed, as the sacrifice that did not end in death. They then wander the Underworld, performing other sacrifices that did not end in death, like setting houses on fire that would not be consumed and sacrificing people who did not die.
The lords of the Underworld have never seen such miracles. Not to be outdone, they challenge the miracle workers (who they’ve failed to recognize in their new guise) to another ball game. The twins, through a series of miracles too convoluted to delineate, defeat them. Victorious in the arena of testing, the twins rise to the Upperworld reborn as heavenly creatures: the sun and the evening star, Venus. In his book, Fash describes this conclusion as a “a staggering defeat over the masters of hell.”
The myth holds out hope for the Maya that humans from the Middleworld could enter the arena of confrontation, the Underworld, pass the test, and be reborn as new creatures, like the Hero Twins, reaching one of the 13 levels of the Upperworld. That is why ballcourts were so important to the ancient Maya and why every regal ritual center had one (sometimes more than one). Fash writes, “It is believed that on important ceremonial occasions, Maya rulers took on the role of the Hero Twins, and their opponents took on the role of the Lords of the Underworld. If the ruler won the game, he symbolically defeated the forces of death, darkness, disease, and famine, giving his people cause to rejoice.”
The blood that must be shed; “seeds” dying in the ground; the ballcourt rituals where good battles evil and wins; the promises of a sacrifice that does not end in death: where did the Maya come up with such notions? I don’t have a clue. Perhaps there is a hint from the writer of Ecclesiastes, who says that God has “planted eternity in the human heart” (3:11).
In a sermon, Fredrick Buechner recounts a conversation with a junior officer on the bridge of a British freighter in the middle of the Atlantic late one evening. The officer had been looking to see if he could spot the lights of other ships on the horizon. “The way to see lights on the horizon,” he told Buechner, “is not to look at the horizon but to look at the sky just above it.” Maybe in the world of Maya, it is better not to look straight at the practices and rituals—the blood, the bones—but up a little, beyond them, to see what they point to. Their cosmology is like a sketch, an outline, not the entire picture (inevitably, it got messy) but the edges. It reminds me in a way of Luther’s theology of the Cross. That event was brutal and bloody, too, and through it, he says, we see the “rearward parts of God”—posteriora Dei—as Moses did in Exodus 33:22-33: “As my glorious presence passes by, I will put you in the cleft of the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed. Then I will remove my hand and you will see me from behind. But my face will not be seen.”
Here is how I work it out in my novel: “The Maya understood the need for blood, especially the blood. They have shown us there isn’t enough human blood in all the world to satisfy the gods. They are telling us the power of the sacrifice cannot be found in the blood of humans sacrificed by human hands. When the warfare increased toward the end of the dynasty, and the Maya all over the lowlands fought their civil wars and took captives, did they send them to the fields to work? No. They cut off their heads and carried them on sticks. For what? What did all that blood avail the ancient Maya? The gods were not satisfied. Yax Pasah built Altar Q. The sixteen kings took their place. The first king handed the staff to the last. That was it. The conquistadors were not good Catholics, my friend. But that does not revoke the power of the blood of God spilled by God himself. It was the only sacrifice that did not end in death, like the legend of the Hero Twins.”
Wendy Murray Zoba is the author of Day of Reckoning: Columbine and the Search for America’s Soul (Brazos) and Sacred Journeys (available in May from Tyndale).
Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
