Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (64 page)

With the help of a magician, the twins willingly jump into a pit of fire and are resurrected five days later. They then begin to travel the land as magicians. Hearing of their wonderful magical skills, the lords of hell order a command performance, and the twins amaze them with a series of dismemberments and decapitations of animals and themselves—from which they are able to recover! Seeing this miracle, the lords of hell want to become part of the act and ask the twins to kill and then restore them. The heroes readily agree, but then don’t bring the lords of hell back to life. In this way, death is defeated, giving hope to mankind. For this great service, the twins are rewarded by being made the sun and the moon.

As the Popol Vuh, with its streams of blood and frequent decapitations, proves, Mayan myth wasn’t all games. Obsessed with images of death, Mayan religion included sacrifice. In their cities, built essentially for ceremonial purposes, the Mayas constructed limestone pyramids topped with small temples where priests performed the gory rituals. The gods, whose help was required to continue the cycles of nature and to ensure fertility, demanded nourishment. To obtain the help of the gods, the Mayas fasted, prayed, and offered sacrifical deer, dogs, and turkeys.

The Mayas frequently offered their own blood as well, and sometimes their blood sacrifice involved a priest or noble person piercing the tongue, penis, ears, lips, or other body parts, which they spattered on pieces of bark paper or collected in bowls. Some occasions called for the living heart of a victim to be cut out in sacrifices performed at the top of the pyramid. In a culture that believed the world had been created five times and destroyed four, and would be destroyed again, this was part of the balance. For most people, death meant Xibalba, or hell. Heaven was reserved for those who had died in childbirth or battle, or those who were hanged or were offered as sacrifice. The ideas of penitence, fasting, abstinence, a world-ending flood, and a tortured, dying god were all part of the Mayan traditions—which made them fertile ground for the Catholic religion.

WHO’S WHO OF MAYAN GODS

The Mayan pantheon was quite vast. These are among its most significant gods.

Ah Puch
Depicted with a skeleton’s exposed ribs and the face of death—or as a bloated corpse—Ah Puch is unmistakable. He is the “lord of death,” who visits the homes of the sick and dying to snatch them away to the kingdom of the dead. A later name for him is Cizin, “the flatulent one.” Ah Puch is apparently still feared today by modern descendants of the Mayas in Guatemala, who call him Yum Cimil.

Chac
Portrayed as a warrior whose tears brought rainwater to earth, Chac is a rain god, an agricultural and fertility deity, and one of the longest continuously worshipped gods of Mesoamerica. Responsible for bringing maize (corn) to the people by opening a stone in which the first maize plant was hidden, Chac is often worshipped as four separate but beneficial gods, one for each point of the compass. In the ritual that required the sacrifice of a human victim and the removal of his still-beating heart, the four men who assisted the priest were called
chacs
.

Hunab
The remote Creator deity, Hunab renews the earth three times after flooding it. Once he repopulates earth with dwarfs, the second time with an obscure race, and finally with the Mayas, who are destined to be overcome by a fourth flood. Hunab may also have been the father of the chief god Itzamna.

Itzamna
The greatest deity of the ancient Maya, Itzamna is lord of the heavens—the god of day, night, and moon, who brings writing, religious rituals, and civilization to the Mayas. Far from an awesome Zeus-like figure of power and glory, Itzamna is portrayed as a wizened, toothless old man. But don’t be misled. Itzamna is also lord of medicine, with healing powers that allow him to banish fatal illness and raise the dead.
According to some scholars, Itzamna is never responsible for anything bad—unlike his wife,
Ixche
l or Lady Rainbow, who is loathsome and frightening. Depicted as an angry old woman with great power, Ixchel is the goddess of pregnancy, midwifery, and childbirth, and can tell the future. But she is also the storm goddess, who creates disastrous rains and floods—presumably the connection to her Rainbow epithet. She is often depicted wearing a skirt decorated with crossed bones, and a snake on her head. This snake is the Sky Serpent, which contains all the waters of heaven in its belly. In most artistic renderings, Ixchel holds a water jug, the vessel of doom, from which she can pour a destructive torrent at any time.

Ixtab
An unusual goddess, Ixtab is often depicted hanging from a tree, partially decomposed, and is said to be the goddess of suicide, who takes the souls of those that die by hanging to eternal rest. The Mayas were preoccupied with death, especially violent death, and may have believed that suicide was an honorable way to enter the afterworld. Ixtab takes the souls of suicides, fallen warriors, sacrificial victims, and women who die in childbirth, to eternal rest.

Kinich-Ahau
The ancient Mayan sun god Kinich-Ahau takes different forms in much the way Egypt’s Re does. As Kinich-Ahau travels across the sky during the daytime, he appears old and young. During the nighttime, he is transformed into the jaguar god. The largest and most powerful Central American cat, the jaguar was feared and admired by the earliest people of Mexico and is one of the region’s oldest gods. Jaguar also rules the underworld and is a symbol of power, fertility, and kingship. In order to show that they possessed these qualities, Mayan priests typically wore jaguar skins.

Pauahtun
A god with four incarnations, Pauahtun stands at the four corners of the world holding up the sky. In spite of this very important job, he is thought of as a drunkard and the unpredictable god of thunder and wind.

THE MYTHS OF THE AZTECS

The name “Aztec” is widely but somewhat inaccurately applied to the people who settled in the Valley of Mexico sometime in the 1200s and founded the city of Tenochtitlán, on the site of present-day Mexico City, in 1325, according to Aztec traditions. A huge, oval basin about 7,500 feet (2,300 meters) above sea level, the valley is in the tropics but has a mild climate because of its altitude. Technically, all of the people speaking a language called “Nahuatl” in the Valley of Mexico are “Aztec,” while the tribe that came to dominate the area was a group called the Tenochca, a division of the larger group called Mexica, a word the Spanish transformed into “Mexico.” According to Aztec legend, the ancestors of the people who founded Tenochtitlán came to the Valley of Mexico from a place in the north called Aztlan, from which the name “Aztec” derives. By the early 1400s, they had come to dominate the region.

What sets Mesoamerican myth apart?

There is little question that what sets Mesoamerican myth apart from many others is its preoccupation with human sacrifice. Other civilizations throughout history clearly used human sacrifice, but nowhere else does it seem to occur quite on the scale it did in Mesoamerica. And nowhere in Mesoamerica was it more pronounced than among the Aztecs, a group originally known as the Tenochca.

In their foundation myth, the Tenochca were commanded by their god Huitzilopochtli to journey from their home base in the north to the Valley of Mexico. At first, they lived in the town of Culhuacan. But after they sacrificed a daughter of Culhuacan’s king, the Tenochca were forced to move and start their own city, Tenochtitlán, on an island in the middle of Lake Texcoco. Becoming more powerful and skilled as warriors, they often served as mercenaries in the ongoing conflicts among other people in the area. By the mid-1400s, the Tenochca built a causeway that linked their island city to the mainland, and began to conquer the Valley of Mexico, emerging as a powerful city-state that controlled the region. Under Moctezuma I (also known as Montezuma), who ruled from 1440 to 1469, the Tenochcas conquered large areas to the east and south, and the name Aztec now commonly refers to this larger group who made up this empire. Moctezuma’s successors expanded the empire until it reached what is now Guatemala, to the south, and the state of San Luis Potosí, about 225 miles north of Mexico City.

As they did, the Aztecs assimilated many of the gods, beliefs, and practices of the surrounding area into their own religion and myths, including the ancient gods of the mysterious ancient city of Teotihuacán, which they named “the place where men became gods,” and the remnants of Toltecs, another warrior tribe that had conquered much of the Mayan territory in Yucatán. When Moctezuma II became emperor in 1502, the Aztec empire was at the height of its power, and hundreds of nearby conquered towns paid heavy taxes to the empire. By the time the Spanish arrived in the 1500s, Tenochtitlán may have had a population of 200,000 to 300,000, larger than any Spanish city of that time. But the Aztec rulers also had made plenty of enemies among the people they taxed and fought with so relentlessly. The Spanish were able to use that local antagonism to make allies among some of the natives eager to see Moctezuma brought down.

A highly militarized society with the kind of sharp class distinctions found in European feudalism, the Aztecs were divided into nobles, commoners, serfs, and slaves. While an emperor presided over all, a council of nobles commanded military units stationed in key locations throughout the empire. The military class included a hierarchy of knights and other ranks, whose main objective was to fight in what were called the “flowery wars” (
la guerra florida
). Don’t let the name deceive you. These wars had nothing to do with gardening. The “flowery wars” resulted from an agreement between the Aztecs and other tribes to essentially hold mock battles in order to secure live prisoners for the sacrifices. On these set dates, the young members of the warrior class fought in order to prove themselves, and prisoners for sacrifice could be taken.

To the Aztecs, warfare was a religious duty aimed at taking prisoners to offer to the gods, and providing blood for the gods was a sacred duty. As a result, Aztec methods of combat were designed to capture prisoners rather than kill them. The chief Aztec weapon, a wooden club edged with sharp pieces of obsidian, was effective for disabling an opponent without finishing him off. For protection, warriors carried wooden shields and wore padded cotton armor. Clearly, these weapons and armor did not serve them very well against the steel swords, metal armor, firearms, and cannons of the Spanish. The Aztec and other native warriors, accustomed to taking prisoners in battle, were also unprepared at first to fight battles in which killing was the point.

The fruit of the flowery wars—the blood flowing from a wound was described as the “flower of war”—was offered up at great ceremonies, during which human hearts were proffered to Huitzilopochtli and the other major divinities. Believing that the world had already been destroyed four times, the Aztecs thought that this feeding of the gods would forestall the end of the universe. The grim “open heart surgery” was performed by priests who slashed open the chest of a living victim and tore out the heart. Like the Mayas, the Aztecs believed that the gods needed human hearts and blood to remain strong. Before their deaths, sacrificial victims, who symbolically represented the gods, were dressed in rich clothing, given servants, and treated with honor. Once dead, their souls flew immediately to Tonatiuhichan—the House of the Sun. This was the highest paradise, where dead warriors spent their eternal lives—and lived forever in happiness. By some accounts—not universally accepted—priests or worshippers sometimes ate portions of a victim’s body, believing that the dead person’s strength and bravery passed to anyone who ate the flesh. While most victims were prisoners of war, the Aztecs also sacrificed children to the god Tlaloc.