Rewriting Maya Religion

Domingo de Vico, K’iche’ Maya Intellectuals, and the Theologia Indorum

Garry G. Sparks

• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781607329701
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Rewriting Maya Religion Garry Sparks examines the earliest religious documents composed by missionaries and native authors in the Americas, including a reconstruction of the first original, explicit Christian theology written in the Americas—the nearly 900-page Theologia Indorum ( Theology for [or of ] the Indians ), initially written in Mayan languages by Friar Domingo de Vico by 1554. Sparks traces how the first Dominican missionaries to the Maya repurposed native religious ideas, myths, and rhetoric in their efforts to translate a Christianity and how, in this wake, K'iche' Maya elites began to write their own religious texts, like the Popol Vuh. This ethnohistory of religion critically reexamines the role and value of indigenous authority during the early decades of first contact between a Native American people and Christian missionaries.
 
Centered on the specific work of Dominicans among the Highland Maya of Guatemala in the decades prior to the arrival of the Catholic Reformation in the late sixteenth century, the book focuses on the various understandings of religious analyses—Hispano-Catholic and Maya—and their strategic exchanges, reconfigurations, and resistance through competing efforts of religious translation. Sparks historically contextualizes Vico's theological treatise within both the wider set of early literature in K'iche'an languages and the intellectual shifts between late medieval thought and early modernity, especially the competing theories of language, ethnography, and semiotics in the humanism of Spain and Mesoamerica at the time.
 
Thorough and original, Rewriting Maya Religion serves as an ethnohistorical frame for continued studies on Highland Maya religious symbols, discourse, practices, and logic dating back to the earliest documented evidence. It will be of great significance to scholars of religion, ethnohistory, linguistics, anthropology, and Latin American history.
 

Part 1

Historical Contexts of the Old Worlds

1

Mesoamericans Shape a New World

K’iche’ Maya 101

DOI: 10.5876/9781607329701.c001

They [the Hero Twins] descended into Xib’alb’a,

quickly they descended the face of a stepped cliff.

They passed then

into the changing of the rivers

and canyons.

Just through the birds they passed by,

the ones called throng birds.

They passed over then along Pus River

and along Blood River,

intended as traps for them by those of Xib’alb’a.

But they were not bothered,

and just on their blowguns they passed over them.

They went on to then arrive

at the four-way crossroads,

but [unlike their father and uncle] they knew then about the roads of Xib’alb’a:

the Black Road,

the White Road,

the Red Road, and

the Green Road

[and, thus, were not defeated like those before them].1

Xeqej chi Xib’alb’a,

lib’aj chi’ xeqaj chuwa kumuk

Xe’ik’ow chiwi k’ut

chi upam jal ja’

siwan.

Xa chuxo’l tz’ikin xe’ik’ow wi,

are ri tz’ikin molay kib’i’.

Xe’ik’ow chi k’ut pa Puj Ya’

pa Kik’ Ya’;

ch’akb’al ta ke chi kik’u’x Xib’alb’a.

Mawi xikiyikow,

xa chi rij wub’ xe’ik’ow wi.

Xe’el chi k’u apanoq

pa kajib’ xalq’at b’e,

xa xketa’m wi k’ut kib’e Xib’alb’a:

Q’eqab’e,

Saqib’e,

Kaqab’e,

Raxab’e.

Production of Theology at a Crossroads, a Xalq’at B’e

Cosmogonic narratives of indigenous peoples of the Americas typically address the origins, structures, and dynamics of the cosmos and all the worlds and other phenomena within it. A common narrative involves a set of twins as culture heroes who finish setting in place the “proper” cosmological order in preparation for humanity. As told in its oldest and most extant form by any indigenous American group, the Popol Wuj, or “Book of the Council,” by the K’iche’ Maya and quoted above, tells of the Hero Twins’ journey into the otherworld, Xib’alb’a, and of their arrival at a four-way crossroads, a kajib’ xalq’at b’e. Previous travelers, such as their own father and uncle—Jun Junajpu and Wuqub’ Junajpu, respectively—had also traveled to Xib’alb’a but chose the wrong path and were thus defeated. Like them, the Hero Twins—Jun Ajpu and Xb’alanke—had to choose a “correct” way at the crossroads.2 Since the choice of their father and uncle, for example, had introduced corporeal death into the cosmos, the Hero Twins’ choice at the crossroads likewise involved great risk.3

Similar to the predicament of the Hero Twins, the Highland Maya of Guatemala and Mexico, like other indigenous peoples of the Americas, have often found themselves at a set of crossroads as they have negotiated, and continue to negotiate, the intersections between their indigenous cultural or religious practices and those inherited or adopted from a Christianity, an intersectionality that involves risks theologically, politically, socially, and economically. Variants of a Christianity have been present throughout modern Maya history, beginning with Hispano-Catholicism after the turn of the sixteenth century, and later with various strands of Protestantism, including later charismatic Christianity, by the turn of the twentieth century.

Despite that long religious juxtaposition, studies among the Maya have only recently begun to reveal the risks that Maya have made at such crossroads between Christianity and their indigenous worldview, which since the 1990s is increasingly referred to as Maya Spirituality (kojb’al in K’iche’).4 Furthermore, studies of religious, political, and wider cultural movements by contemporary Maya, while quick to make connections from the prehispanic Maya or to upstream ethnographic data back through the colonial era, often fail to develop a fuller context of the decades of first contact based on the surviving records. Indigenous agency and reasoning is often portrayed as either ending or at least permanently corrupted by the early 1500s—a degradation catalyzed in large part by Christian missionaries. Indeed, non-Christian Maya religiosity like kojb’al has been denigrated since the sixteenth century by Hispano-Catholic and later Protestant missionaries as “idolatry,” “paganism,” or “sorcery.”

As survivors of ethnocide since the 1520s and of genocide in the 1970s and 1980s, the Maya of Guatemala, including Maya Christians, have often questioned the adequacy of Christian resources for and responses to those two violent bookends of modern Maya history.5 Since the arrival of Europeans, Maya have interpreted such events and made their claims in part from the conceptual and symbolic resources of what may now be referred to as kojb’al. In the past few decades, Highland Maya intellectuals have advocated for an affirming and constructive construal of kojb’al as the distinct religious conventions identified by Highland Maya that continue to serve as a reservoir of Maya thought in general and as the core of an indigenous social movement. Maya “spirituality” and its notions of space, time, purpose, authority, agency, language, and culture continue to operate among present-day Highland Maya. Yet the Maya assert that they do not have a “religion” but rather a “spirituality” because they do not yet have a “theology,” conceived as metadiscourse on “the religious,” broadly identified but still more narrowly as the formal, highly systemic (e.g., doctrinal or dogmatic), apologetic, or confessional thought in the advocacy of a particular religion. Ironically, even those present-day non-Christian Maya intellectuals and their non-Maya allies active in the Maya Movement often implicitly understand religious terms like “theology” as distinctively Christian categories.

In fact, it may simply be impossible to study any Native American religion as unengaged with a postcontact Christianity. With rare exception—as in some of the archaeological records and precontact writings that survived the bonfires and time—all Native American religious texts (written and verbal), symbols, and practices are postcontact. They and their interpretations are affected and infused—for good and for ill, enriched and corrupted, by indigenous practitioners and nonnative scholars—with at least Christianity if not also strands of Islam, Judaism, native west African, or Asian Pacific religions. And even those ancient precontact records can only be read and heard—again, by indigenous practitioners and nonnative scholars alike—through postcontact eyes loaded with one’s own implied presuppositions of what qualifies as a “god” versus a “spirit”; or an animism or shamanism versus a kind of monotheism or a polytheistic pantheon; or informed by childhood catechism or Sunday School lessons if not the cultural dominance of Christianty; or post-Renaissance knowledge of Greco-Roman myths; or anti-Spanish imperial “black legend” histories; or even contemporary social science theories, such the latent trinitarianism in the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. Critical study of religion of indigenous peoples in the Americas requires critical understanding of the development of Christianities, and study of Christianities in the Americas requires appreciative and detailed understanding of the worlds of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Yet, until recently, continuities or discontinuities between present-day, distinctively non-Christian Maya ceremonial practices and discourse often regarded as “traditional” have received mostly sociocultural and ethnographic study but little historiographic study, except for some analyses that relate current Maya traditionalism to a limited sample of precolumbian and early colonial texts, such as the Popol Wuj. Even less study is devoted to the lengthy, complex, and often mutual engagement between Maya traditionalism and Christianities. Furthermore, often when the history of engagement between a Christianity, such as a Catholicism, and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Note on Orthography and Pronunciation
• Introduction: (Re)Reading a First Coauthored Paper Trail
• Part 1. Historical Contexts of the Old Worlds
• Part 2. Recovering Vico’s K’iche’an Theology
• Part 3. Tracing Vico in K’iche’ Religious Texts
• Appendix A: Comparison of the Structures between Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, Late Medieval Liturgical Year Readings, and Vico’s Theologia Indorum
• Appendix B: Comparison between the Content and Themes found in the Coplas in Q’eqchi’ (Ayer Ms 1536) and in K’iche’ (Kislak Ms 1015) and the Theologia Indorum
• Notes
• References
• Index