STARS, BONES, BLOOD AND BEER

article

by Janice Van Cleve

In every culture and every age, humans have devised practices that they believed would enable them to learn things beyond the dimension of sensory experience and rational thought. Sometimes, these practices entailed reading a supernatural interpretation into an otherwise ordinarily observed phenomenon. Other times, these practices entailed altering the observer's state of consciousness. It is not surprising to find such practices among the ancient Maya peoples of Mesoamerica.

The Maya civilization extended from the highlands of Mexico's current state of Chiapas, through the Yucatan, Guatemala, Belize and El Salvador, to western Honduras. The Maya civilization rose to its classic expression between 250 and 900 CE (Current Era). Maya temples and writing, however, existed before the classic period, and Maya city states were still engaged in civil wars in the northern Yucatan when the Spanish arrived in 1524 CE. Even today, over four million people in this region trace their ancestry to the Maya and still speak Mayan dialects. Some still worship at the ancient sites and still practice the arts of divination that have been handed down over generations.

Perhaps the most widely known divination method of the Maya is associated with their achievements in astronomy and calendrics. Most cultures have attributed some auspices to the stars. From the Stonehenge solar calculator to the workings of the Magi of Babylon to the various European and Chinese zodiacs, tools have allowed people to "see things" in the stars to which they imputed supernatural meaning. In the Americas, recent analysis of the famous Nazca lines in Peru indicate that these were astral observation tools and representations of stellar constellations.

The Maya, however, took astronomy to heights (pardon the pun!) surpassing even the Arabs of their day. In particular, they observed the passage of the planet Venus, for them symbolizing the war god. Its first appearance in the night sky was regarded as a favorable sign for initiating combat. Lunar phases were measured to an accuracy within 23 seconds of that of our modern atomic clocks. The positions of Venus, Orion and the Milky Way were important enough to good fortune that they were recorded on stone monuments marking the katuns, or 20-year cycles. The katun was considered the heartbeat of the universe; between katuns, human intervention was required to generate the next beat. Therefore, an accurate calendar was absolutely necessary, not to inform the farmers when to plant, but to trigger the rituals that would continue the universe.

The Maya long-count calendar starts at August 11, 3114 BCE (Before Current Era), and measures 5000 years to its last day on December 23, 2012 CE. Contrary to the belief of some modern writers, the Maya projected no eschatological significance to the last date. For them, it simply means the resetting of the counter to begin the next 5000 year span, not the end of the world.

In addition to the long count, the Maya used a 260-day almanac or "count of days," which determined the pattern of ceremonial life and provided a basis of prophecy. Each day was associated with certain friendly and hostile deities who must be appeased or appealed to during a person's life. Presentday shamans in the Maya region still use the almanac to predict futures.

Likewise, diviners still cast the sacred red beans today to make forecasts. An odd number indicates a negative answer; an even number indicates positive. Cutting bones may also have been a good-luck rite. Eighteen Rabbit, ruler of Copan, records doing just such a ritual on a monument at Copan on December 2, 730. Although the Maya sacrificed many animals and humans, reading entrails does not seem to have been part of their divinatory repertoire.

Besides interpreting external phenomena like stars, beans and bones, the Maya engaged in several consciousness-altering exercises to communicate with the gods and peer into the future. Principal among these was bloodletting. "Blood was the mortar of ancient Maya life," Linda Schele writes in The Blood of Kings. Schele is a major translator of Mayan hieroglyphics. Blood was a valuable commodity to the Maya. According to their view, the gods created humans to sustain and nourish them through the sacrificial offering of blood. Animals such as jaguars were ritually sacrificed on occasion, but most often human captives were the source of divine nutrition.

The victim - man, woman or child - was stripped, painted blue and crowned with a peaked headdress. The victim was then led to an altar that was also smeared with blue coloring and bent over it backwards with a costumed assistant holding each arm and leg. Bishop Diego de Landa, who ordered Mayan books burnt, wrote in 1566 of his observation of what happened next: "At this time came the executioner, the nacom, with a knife of stone, and with much skill and cruelty struck him (the sacrificial victim) with the knife between the ribs of his left side under the nipple, and at once plunged his hand in there and seized the heart like a raging tiger, tearing it out alive, and having placed it on a plate, he gave it to the priest, who went quickly and anointed the face of the idols with that fresh blood." The body would then be skinned, and the priest would wear it while dancing with the spectators.

For divination, however, only the ruler's blood and that of his wife would do. Carvings of rulers show them with the sacrificial implements - an obsidian knife and a pouch full of sting ray spines. The male would extend his penis and slice or pierce it to allow a massive flow of blood (see picture #1). The female would pierce her tongue and draw a thorn-studded cord through it. The blood was collected in a bowl full of paper scraps which would then be burnt. The gods liked their offerings in smoke form.

These blood-lettings were often preceded by fasting and accompanied by elaborate ritual and the burning of great quantities of copal incense. The combination of food deprivation, ritual, smoke, pain and blood loss produced a shock effect that transported the blood-letter into a trance state. The direct correlation between blood-letting and seeing a vision is graphically depicted in Mayan art (see pictures #4 and #5). The smoke from the burning blood-soaked papers was imaged as a vision serpent, out of whose mouth a god or ancestor would appear to give advice. It was not for nothing that the rulers of Maya cities were called "blood lords." It was their duty, particularly on important occasions such as a new katun, to offer their blood to the gods for their people.

The gods appreciated blood, but both upper- and lower-class people made frequent use of other means to induce visions. Psychotropic substances such as narcotics, hallucinogens and alcohol were used frequently by the Maya to alter consciousness. In the highlands of Guatemala, several varieties of hallucinogenic mushrooms grow. One was called xibalhaj okox or "underworld mushroom"; another was called kaizalah okox or "lost judgment mushroom," clearly referring to their intended use.

A strong beer was produced in Mesoamerica made of fermented maize and agave. Another drink was made from fermented honey and the bark of the balche tree. Bishop Landa recorded that alcoholic beverages were drunk at every ritual occasion, and early paintings and figurines by Maya artisans show drinking activities. Leaves from the wild tobacco plant were also used to create hallucinatory effects. Stronger than modern domestic tobaccos, these leaves were rolled into cigars and smoked for pleasure and for divination (see picture #6).

During the classic period, these substances were not always administered orally. Several painted pottery vessels graphically depict the use of an enema apparatus in apparently ritual settings. The direct introduction of alcoholic or hallucinogenic substances into the colon would result in an immediate absorption by the body, thereby hastening the effect.

It is as instructive to note the divinatory methods the Maya apparently did not use - such as examining entrails, scrying, dice, meditation and exhaustive dancing - as it is to note the methods for which they leave evidence. By whatever means, they sought connection to the gods for answers to the mysteries that surrounded them. Their objectives were not unlike peoples' in many other cultures, transcending the ordinary dimension of the senses and the mind, to reach other dimensions of reality.

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