IV If the Lacandon culture is endangered by the evangelist missionary's attacks against its traditional social institutions, an even greater threat rises ominously from the provoked disorder of the ecology of the Lacandon jungle - the destruction of the environment to which the culture adjusted long ago and which it requires for its continued existence.
Since the time of the Spanish Conquest, the greatest defender of the Lacandones' ethnic unity has been their isolation, which resulted from two principal factors: the difficulty of transportation for the Occidental and the lack of material objects necessary for his accustomed way of life, and the unhealthful conditions of the tropical habitat. In the latter category, the terrible specter of malaria stood at the head of a host of illnesses and of physical discomforts that can wear a man down to a point where he is easy prey for even minor ailments.
In the 1940's, both of these obstacles were drastically reduced. The road-building technology is adequate to reach practically any part of the zone. What had been lacking was a motive, a means of making the road pay for itself. This came about with the rise in price of precious tropical hardwoods: mahogany, red and white cedar, bari, chicozapote (sapodilla), guayacan (a kind of lignum vitae) and others. After a campaign of several years, the Mexican Department of Health practically eradicated malaria from the zone. Then it became apparent that the Lacandones, a forest-dwelling people, had remained sole owners of their jungle habitat simply because no one else had wanted it. The eradication of malaria made the forest desirable to outsiders, and the lumber company's roads showed the way.
In innumerable dry, barren and impoverished regions of Mexico, one can find old men who still remember when the eroded and sterile hills of the region were rich oak or pine forests, teeming with game and wild fruits; the air was clear and the rains were generous. But now only hunger grows from the deforested and eroded earth. The peasant farmers' mass migration to deforest the remains of the Lacandon jungle, turning it into another dry and sterile desert, is one of the great tragedies of our time. It is rather difficult to blame people for fleeing from starvation even though starvation will overtake them in the next desert of their own making decades later.
Thousands upon thousands of agraristas - homesteaders in accordance with the laws dictated during the Mexican Revolution -descend upon the Lacandon jungle to practice a subsistence economy based on slash-and-burn agriculture. Each family will clear an area of several thousand square meters and burn a fortune in fine tropical hardwoods in order to plant and harvest a small crop of corn, beans, squash and chili peppers. Then after two years (or three at most) they will move on to clear and burn more virgin jungle, abandoning the cleared areas to grassland. The cattle barons follow them, overpasturing the land, which in a few years more erodes away to bare limestone.
No aspect of the Lacandon's existence seems entirely free of paradox. The Lacandon jungle, one of the world's richest rain forests, grows on some of the world's poorest soil, most of which consists of a few inches of topsoil over sterile, white Cretaceous limestone. This thin topsoil is covered by a few more inches of extremely rich leaf mold. Immediately after the huge trees are cleared away, the seeds of corn, beans and squash produce abundantly. but after a second year of cultivation the soil is already near exhaustion. At this point the Lacandones, who follow a seven-year rotation cycle, will abandon their tired milpas and allow them to grow back in weeds and second-growth jungle twice as high as a tall man's head; only then will they clear and plant again.
The Lacandon population, which in its natural state is self-limiting, could have survived indefinitely in its traditional manner, had our occidental culture left them enough of their ecologically balanced environment. But the invasion of thousands upon thousands of ograristas has changed all of that permanently.
In the mid-1960's, the heavy road machinery moved in from Chancala Chiapas to the Lake Mensabak (or Metzaboc) region, cutting the mahoganies and other tropical hardwoods. The neighboring Lacandones watched with mixed emotions. On the one hand, where each giant tree had fallen lay the splintered and tangled remains of the three or four smaller trees it had taken with it, and the corridors that had been cut through the forest so that the bulldozer could pull out the felled trees, quickly became a closed mass of second-growth jungle. This was composed mostly of thorns and vines that made traveling nearly impossible for the Lacandon hunter. It also provided cover for poisonous snakes, which reproduced out of proportion to the design of even the most vengeful of the Maya gods. But on the other hand, Joaquin Trujillo, the municipal president of Mensabak, opened a bank account in the nearest town. Even a tiny fraction of the total price of the fine hardwoods, which was paid as derecho de monte (forestry rights), constituted an unheard-of fortune for any Lacandon.
The roads and the logging enterprise continued toward Lacanja Chan Sayab, where Jose Pepe Chan Bol bought a gas stove with an oven for each of his two wives. Of course, the women were afraid to use them. They continued to make their tortillas on the traditional clay griddle set on three stones over a wood fire; but each wife had her gas stove and her oven, and the neighbors were impressed. Then the headmen began buying automobiles and trucks, in the name of the Lacandon community. When the brakes failed on the Volkswagen Safari, making it unsafe to drive, rather than have the brakes repaired, the vehicle was pushed into a ditch and abandoned.
The funds which the logging company paid for forestry rights were subject to the strictest controls, and these assured (at least in theory) an honest and equitable payment to the concerned parties. The greater part of the money was put in a Lacandon community fund, which the duly elected representatives from north and south would direct toward things of real and lasting value for everyone: schools, clinics, workshops, power sources, pure drinking water systems, community transportation facilities, and so on. Unfortunately, there are radical differences between the theory and the practice of politics, and especially politics in Latin America. The Christianized and acculturated southern Lacandones were the first to learn the political realities of Mexico and to exploit them to their own advantage.
They began by electing themselves exclusive representatives of the entire Lacandon community, which put them in control of the bulk of the funds directed toward "things of real communal value" for "all the Lacandones" and made possible the potlatch spending at Lacanja. The northern Lacandones sensed and resented the fact that "something was wrong," but no clear objection or solution occurred to any one of them until most of the funds had been squandered. The southern Lacandones had proved to be the more adept at playing Occidental games.
While the younger Lacandones of Naha' were fascinated by Joaquin Trujillo's bank account and by the wealth of gadgets in vogue at Lacanja Chan Sayab, Old Chan K'in was concerned about the cost to the environment necessary for their traditional way of life. Several times he refused the offers of the lumber company, which were backed by the Mexican government. Then a formal notice arrived in the summer of 1977 notifying Senor Chan K'in de Naja' and his son Young Chan K'in that Jose Pepe Chan Bol, designated "Commissar of the Lacandon Zone," had given permission for an official count of the mahogany trees at Naha'. One year later, the local representatives of the Lacandon community at Naha' signed permission for the cutting of their mahogany. They had come to the conclusion that their trees were going to be cut one way or another, and decided to cooperate in order at least to receive payment for them.
In December of 1978 an advance crew from the lumber company arrived at Naha' and began felling the four hundred giant mahogany trees, some of which had been growing before Columbus discovered the New World. They worked with a speed and efficiency that are common in Mexico only among those who have good reason not to be caught at what they are doing. No doubt there were some among them who understood, however dimly, the vital importance of the mahogany for the stability of the rain forest and for the continuation of Lacandon culture. Not only are the dugouts Lacandon farmers use to reach their milpas across the lake made of mahogany, but so is most of their furniture and the ceremonial "canoe" in which they beat and ferment their ceremonial bark-liquor (balche). In rough terms, it may be said that the mahogany tree is as central to the Lacandones' existence as the bison was to the Plains Indians.
By February of 1979 the cutting was completed and the bulldozers had made an unsurfaced road which passed through Naha' and reached a point some fifteen or twenty kilometers beyond it. During clear weather it was a rutted but passable road. After a day or two of rain it turned into a stretch of muck that only the high and powerful logging trucks and the company's four-wheel-drive vehicles could grind and slosh their way over.
The road does have some undeniable short-term advantages. During a spell of benign weather, Young Chan K'in borrowed Joaquin Trujillo's three-ton Ford truck, and brought in 30,000 pesos' worth (about $1,350) of merchandise for his store. The cost of gasoline was 300 pesos, extraordinarily cheap when compared with the cost of several chartered flights (over a thousand pesos each) with a load limit of less than 400 kilograms. Moreover, thanks to the road, a person who was seriously ill could obtain transportation on one of the company's pickups or jeeps and be treated in the hospital at Palenque (a hundred kilometers away) within two and a half hours.
The long-term consequences are another matter, as the Lacandones have begun to discover. The same kind of road had reached Lake Mensabak several years before. A month or two after the last mahogany trunks there had been hauled out, the road was abandoned. After two rains, it became an ugly, muddy gash in the jungle, which the young vegetation of a single rainy season sealed over. Except for the parts of it that were kept cleared and open by the eternal Maya travelers on mule or afoot, the road was useless,
Young Chan K'in, as president of Naha', disregarded his father's respect for their isolation and repeatedly requested of the lumber company that they put down gravel surfacing, ditches and culverts. He asked that the cost be charged to the (Lacanja-controlled) "community fund," which would never reach Naha' anyway.
That spring I received a letter from K'ayum Ma'ax of Naha, Young Chan K'in's younger brother and next in line of succession to the position of t'o'ohil of Naha':
My friend Robert, of the Puma onen.The isolation of the northern Lacandones at Lake Mensabak and Lake Naha' has come to an end. The way is open to the tourist trade.
Now you are in Mexico [City],
hearing much noise in the great city.
I am here in the forest hearing only the noise of the bulldozers.
Now they are putting down gravel but first they put down stone at Mensabak.
later they will put it down at Naha'.
I would say that by the 25th of April they will have put down all the stone everywhere.
Now it does not rain.
Very dry is the way of the highway. ...
[Some jokes and general gossip]
Well, later we will converse.
The plane comes.
I have told you all, The sun is very hot now.
The sun nears its greatest heat.
Very well, until later.
We will converse.
Take care of yourself.
K'ayum Ma'ax. [of the Monkey onen].(Perhaps the only omission of Occidental tradition in K'ayum's letter was the date, which - judging from the postmark - should have been about the beginning of April 1979.)
* Old Chan K'in and Old Mateo often go up to sit at the edge of the road-where it passes nearest to the center of the community-to watch the passing of an occasional pickup or jeep. When a bulldozer comes growling its way up the road, they will often comment: "The tractor is very strong. I have seen one pull a log that, in the old days, it would have taken twenty yoke of oxen to move."
Old Chan K'in plans to move his house from its present location to one about a kilometer back from the shores of the lake: to high ground just above the head of the new airstrip. The hilltop he has chosen also overlooks the new road. Most of the community will move with him. Young K'ayum and his father-in-law, Antonio, have almost finished building their houses at the new location.
Chan K'in's new god-house could well be described as the nucleus of the community at Naha. Its construction should be a great ceremonial event. The god-house will be a traditional, open-sided, palm-thatched structure with rounded ends, some thirty feet long and more than half as wide. The god-pots (incense burners) will sit an a hanging shelf of even poles. They will face east, looking across the god-house and the small patio where the sacred canoes for making balche - hollowed-out mahogany logs of about twenty-gallon capacity - sit on their stands. In a loft at the east side of the god-house will be kept gourds and bundles containing the greater part of the objects used in the rituals. Beside the smooth sandstone for sharpening ceremonial tools will sit a clay bowl of water in which one must rinse one's hands before entering the god-house.
Periodically, and especially after an eclipse of the sun or some large natural (or unnatural) calamity, the Lacandones make a new set of incense burners and abandon the old ones at some forest shrine. The incense-burner renewal ceremony is the longest and most complex of those realized within the present-day Lacandon religion, and for the month or two of its duration, all of the participants are subjected to ritual seclusion, and no nonparticipant may witness any of the ritual activity. The ceremony involves prolonged periods of abstinence and dietary fasts, the preparation of many special foods and other offerings, the decoration of tunics with the red achiote (annatto) dye, symbolic of sacrificial blood, and the consumption of large quantities of balche. Lacandon men can take such long periods of time from their milpas only when the yearly cycle on which their way of life is based permits it: from the latter part of June through July and August, "when the crops are laid by," as an Oklahoma farmer would put it; or from November through December and January, after the long harvest and before the next clearing and burning. This is something which has not changed (just as the milpa system of subsistence has not changed) since pre-Columbian times.
During the renewal of the incense burners, the participating Lacandon men and boys live in a strange world belonging to ancient Maya ritual. In some respects, they are as human and earthbound as ever, but the unusual and unique characteristics of their life in ritual seclusion - the physiological stresses, including intense concentration on things not of this world, lack of sleep and dietary limitations - eventually build up to form the experience of a strange dualism. On the one hand, the Lacandon continues in the same reality as ever, with the same natural laws and forces functioning and with everything in its proper, natural order; but on the other, he has the sense of participating in another, simultaneous reality, in which the same things are not as they had always appeared to be. It is in this mental condition that the men discard their old god-pots, perform the exacting ceremonies day and night, and finally create the now clay effigy incense burners which function as the gods of the community for the next eight years, five cycles of Venus, or in the Classic Maya times, four Uaxactun, composed of eleven Tzolkins.
In 1970 I was allowed to participate in the incense-burner renewal ceremony in Naha', which lasted forty-five days and consisted of the most complex and conservative body of ancient Maya ritual surviving today. To the best of my knowledge, I am the only person besides the Lacandones ever to witness the ceremony from start to finish.
During the ceremony all of the Lacandon men taking part slept isolated from the other members of the community. All benches, hammocks, clothing and other personal effects that were not made new for this period of ritual isolation, were conscientiously washed, scrubbed or refinished, and no nonparticipant could use or even touch them. The women of the community continued to prepare our food, but without chili pepper, and the receptacles of food were brought and left for us at some neutral ground between the ceremonial and the mundane territories.
We slept in the open-sided temple. It was not nearly so comfortable as the ordinary Lacandon house, as we were far more exposed to changes of temperature and to the abundant biting insects. In fact, sleeping was so uncomfortable and ritual duties so intense - day and night - that for the forty-five days we slept, I calculated, an average of two or three hours - never more than four - out of every twenty-four. What most surprised me, and appeared to contradict my understanding of natural and physiological laws, was that not only did no participant suffer the slightest physical ailment - not a cold or neuralgia, nor the slightest infection from the occasional minor cuts and abrasions that occurred during the ritual labors - but we all experienced an enhancement of consciousness and perception.
It would be all too easy for anyone who has not lived the experience to question this unique state, this awareness of other dimensions of one's accustomed physical reality, by saying that physiological stresses such as celibacy, lack of sleep and vitamin deficiency over such an extended period of time could produce hallucinogenic effects. While the mental state achieved by the Lacandon participants might be computable to some drug experiences, there is one very significant difference: perception of the physical realities one has known all one's life in "normal" conditions remains throughout - but it is sharpened and intensified. Nothing from the accustomed reality is lost, except the comforts that must be left behind when entering the ritual domain of the ancient Maya gods.
Words become charged and loaded with meaning, as with "Acapulco gold" (a high-grade marijuana or cannabis), but without the accompanying slowness of thought and thickness of tongue, The colors of life suggest the effects of peyote, but without any nausea or depression. Sometimes one's awareness suggests hallucinogenic mushrooms, although one never feels that tightened-scalp vertigo that sometimes comes from the "ninos." The only ingested stimulant is an occasional offering of balche, but the hangover is either minimal or totally absent. None of the feelings are excessive, and all that one is clearly aware of is that every experience, and indeed reality itself, seems expanded and extended.
Normally one is aware that a word, like k'ulel, has quite distinct and different meanings: k'ulel is "whirlwind"; it is also "male spider monkey," which is an emblem of the solar deities; and Ali K'ulel (the Whirlwind) is one of the assistant solar deities at the service of the Creator, Hachtikyum. Ali K'ulel is also called the Sweeper of Our Lord's House, probably the same Maya god referred to in Pre-Conquest Yucatan as Mistic Ahau, which means (among other things) Sweeping Lord. During the state of consciousness achieved in the ceremony, one is as aware as ever of the different meanings or usages, but he is also aware that the word k'ulel is a single reality, like a gemstone whose different facets may reflect red, blue, white, green or yellow light, according to the angle from which one looks at it. Differences in meaning are but the reflection of different perspectives, and the perspective does not alter, or even touch, much less subdivide, the phenomenon.
Old Chan K'in told us, on the morning that the new god-pots were fired, that K'ulel comes and takes the ashes to our Lord Hachakyum, just as he does when the milpas are burned. Right on schedule, we all saw the leaves rising to outline the invisible presence of the whirlwind moving across the low brush of the open clearing. It swerved some twenty-five meters out of its path to hover for a moment directly over the pyre of the open kiln. It (or "He") suddenly became a visible being, a dark form of ashes, smoke and flashing sparks, before moving on and disappearing into the forest on the eastern side of the clearing. No Lacandon would object to a description of what happened in terms of natural, physical phenomena. But it is more likely that he would speak in terms of the supernatural persons who incorporate these "natural phenomena."
None of us had any doubt that, had any participant broken his ritual abstinence - Let us say, by secretly eating a chili pepper or sleeping with a woman - K'ulel would have sucked the flames from the roaring fire and set the guilty man's clothing on fire. But this did not in fact happen because no one had committed an infraction.
The god-pots at Naha' were last renewed in 1970. As of 1979, the most frequently evoked of the god-pots contained huge heaps of cinders, the residue of incense rose high above the rim of the bowl, and the effigy faces were caked with the smoke-blackened residue of food and drink offerings. It was well past the time for another incense-renewal ceremony.
Old Chan K'in did not state clearly whether the delay beyond the eight-year period (which he formerly said was the longest that should elapse between renewal ceremonies) was to coincide with the instatement of the new temple, or if he was hopefully waiting for the logging activity to run its course, for the road to be abandoned, and for visitors to arrive at less frequent intervals, as before. Or, is the cult to the ancient Maya gods weakening, even at Naha’?
* The daily arrival of tourists during this period would have been bad enough, but there were even greater foreseeable distractions. Officials of the Mexican government could drive up at any moment to demand the immediate attention of the head of the community, with little regard for some kind of ceremony that is going on: 'This will only take a minute.' The interruption could break the long and painstakingly achieved continuum of abstinences, restraints and concentration that eventually enables the men to act as intermediaries between their people and their gods. And the road, or either of the two airstrips, could at any moment bring Jose Pepe Chan Bol or another southern Lacandon instrument of the American missionaries to intrude on the most critical rituals, criticizing and ridiculing them.
The Lacandones of Naha' are the heirs of the ancient Maya theocrats of Palenque, who, in turn, were either the first disciples of the Olmecs or simply a direct evolution of the Olmecs themselves. The Lacandones' may therefore be the oldest unbroken religious and cultural tradition on earth today. But when the last incense burner is extinguished, it will have died forever. Tourists will walk through the ancient ruins and look at the ancient sculptures and inscriptions, and wonder what they may have meant, The archaeologists will be able to cite enough technical data to confuse or silence their critics, but they won't really know, either.
The flame that was kindled over three millennia ago still burns in the temple of Naha', but it burns low, and flickers.
Part V
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