WHITECROW BORDERLAND

Mayan Astronomy

Note 7: Being-in-Time. 4/10/99

Trying to write a concluding summary to a series of notes about Maya astronomy, a subject made complex by virtue of the vast difference in time and cultural heritage, if not philosophical point of view, between the people who invented it and the ones who might wish to comprehend its uniquely native characteristics, is a task and a problem that may ultimately be impossible given the limitations language itself imposes on anyone who attempts to communicate across such evident distances. Temporal philosophy itself, a metaphysical problem of considerable dimension when limited to a single cultural point of view, is doubly complex when one attempts to work two sides of an issue simultaneously. Most European discourse these days is either dialectical or differential which means that comprehension of basic ideology depends on knowing both terms of the difference between conflicting points of view. To say anything at all useful to a person who thinks dialectically or differentially one is forced to adopt a Eurocentric style of argument that is ill-suited to the articulation of a concept that has no essential dialectical or differential basis anywhere in its development.

Maya astronomers were never guided by distinctions between this and that, same and other, here and there, us and them, being and nothingness, and so on, but were instead looking for ways to express how things that seemed to possess opposite qualities were in fact similar, if not actually the same as one another. The point of spirit in native American consciousness, for instance, juxtaposes two things that are radically different from one another--human on one side and radically not-human on the other, so to speak. Such a distinction seems invariably to produce an active contradiction between two opposite and diametrically opposed entities that can never be reconciled. There would be, in European consciousness, a sense of constant war and conflict between these two opposing forces, a conflict expressed in the notion of the war between the flesh and the soul in Christian theology, for instance, that can only be resolved by the stringent denial of the flesh even to the point of death itself. The Christian view of punishing the flesh for its naturally sinful state has always been confused with the Maya practice, depicted on vase paintings and murals mostly, of native individuals engaged in self-inflicted pain and blood-letting rituals. Whether all Maya people engaged in these practices is open to question, since most depictions of the rituals seem to involve members of the so-called Maya "nobility." A problem with that characterization, of course, is that notions of hierarchy, which are always already necessary to draw distinctions between upper and lower classes of people, belong exclusively to people who valorize the existence of a supreme Creator who is over and above all created reality. That concept does not exist as such in native American consciousness prior to exposure to logocentric forms of discourse brought to the Western hemisphere by Europeans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Starting from ground zero, then, in native American philosophy, in a pre-Columbian context, the first point to take is that there was no innate sense of hierarchy in any traditionally European perception of that idea anywhere in the Western hemisphere. That perception may exist now among some native Americans but it has only been here as long as Europeans and Christianity have been here. While there is an obvious distinction between the spirit world and the world in which human beings live in native philosophy, that distinction does not differentiate between a higher and a lower state of being. People and spirits exist in separate worlds but one world is not considered to be better, more perfect, more desirable, than the other world. There is no compulsion in native belief to leave, or escape from, life in the real world because the afterlife promises a better, more perfect, more pleasant, more valuable living experience than the actual world of flesh and blood has to offer. That notion is wholly Christian and has no significant counterpart in native philosophy. In a very real sense it is proper to say that native Americans do not believe in an afterlife as such.

A problem with making that statement exists in the fact that European missionaries were always already fond of talking about the similarity between the Christian view of heaven and the native American concept of the "happy hunting ground," to which natives were said by the missionaries to go when they died. The problem here is the one that has always plagued anthro(a)pology: namely, the impossibility of separating what a native believes from what the foreign observer thinks the native has said about his/her belief. Since Europeans can only conceive of reality in a certain way, and generally have never made any effort to see the world through the other's eyes, European observers have always defined native belief in the terms of their own perceptions of reality. Whatever native informants may have told European missionaries about a concept of the afterlife, the missionaries heard what they wanted to hear and probably invented, or interpreted, what they were told into a story about a better place that natives went to when they died because those terms were the only ones Europeans had in their own philosophical and theological vocabularies with which to articulated whatever concepts their recent converts told them about the subject. The only report anyone in Europe has about native belief is the one that was passed along by a European. The first word was always already tainted and distorted by the Eurocentric discourse that translated it from a native tongue to a European articulation of an idea that other Europeans could comprehend. In other words, no native American perception of anything ever made it through that necessary filter of Eurocentric discourse without being fundamentally changed into something no native American ever said or believed.

Afterlife, then, in native philosophy does not exist as such. When a native American dies, he/she becomes a spirit. That happens because the flesh which encompasses the spirit ceases to function as a living object. The spirit animates the object of the flesh. When the spirit leaves the flesh, when death occurs, the spirit does not cease to exist but it also does not go on into a time beyond the strictest limits of the piece of time which was occupied by the flesh and spirit together of the individual who has died. The spirit of the individual is "forever" bound to the object in which it dwelled. What this means is that the spirit is connected to the physical reality of the flesh and bone in which it existed for a certain period of time. That connection is unbreakable and lasts as long as any part of the flesh and bone of the individual lasts in real space and real time. "Forever," then, means only as long as some part of the original physical person exists. When the body of the dead person has been completely consumed by the natural processes of physical decay, the spirit is freed from its bond to that particular individual. The reason native Americans object to archeology, Eurocentric digging in their sacred burial grounds, is because that disrespect destroys the natural processes of the spirit becoming free of its earthly connection to the flesh and bone of the individual it animated during that person's life and time.

When the spirit is freed from its connection to the person it animated, it enters a process of return and regeneration to the world of the living. This happens in a number of different ways depending on the particular tribe in question. The journey back to life can take the route of ascent to the top of the world mountain or to the top of the world tree, it can traverse the world river from mouth to source, it can swim to the deepest part of the world ocean or lake from which it originally sprang, it can make a journey through the world cave, from the mouth to the deepest recess the cave has in the center of the earth, and so on. When it reaches that highest or deepest place, the spirit enters the world nest where it resides until called upon to enter a second incarnation and begin the process over again. The Maya concept of Xibalba, the dark subterranean nightmare world (to European perceptions at least) is the telling of the journey of the spirit to the world nest from which it is reborn. That transformation from old habit to new form is complete and absolute and the so-called monsters that inhabit Xibalba do not torment the souls of dead people but rather strip the spirit of its first incarnation so that it can return wholly and completely new to the world it left behind when its host died. The world is underground because the Mayas apparently perceived the rebirth in the context of the world cave, although there are depictions of the world tree in that context in some places (Palenque, for instance, in the tomb of Pacal under the Temple of the Inscriptions). The roots of the world tree, through which spirits enter it, of course, are also underground.

Getting back to the point of departure, which concerns the difference between European practices of punishing the flesh because it is evil and the fact that Mayas have left pictures of what appear to be similar activities, I can now say that the Maya ritual of self-inflicted pain was centered on the notion of binding the spirit of the individual more thoroughly and more completely to the time in which he/she lived. Making the experience of life as intense as possible, through self-inflicted pain for instance, was thought to create an inseparable link between the spirit of the person living that moment in time and the circle of time itself that defined that individual's life. The more intense the pain, the longer that memory would exist in time after the person died. In this way, the Mayas, and most other native Americans, usually to a lesser degree, sought ways to bind themselves to the "small piece of time," the one mentioned by Rigoberta Menchu-Tum, during which they lived. The stronger the bond to that piece of time, the longer that person's spirit would be able to make the journey back and forth across the bridge (time itself of course) that separated the spirit world from the real world of living human reality. Because time is repetitious in the context of the Calendar Round, each person's life is relived in each subsequent cycle of days in which they originally existed, if, and only as long as, that person is able to hold the connections he/she managed to create while actually alive. The spirit of each calendrical day-name in the Maya calendar is populated, as it were, by the ancestral spirits that connected to a particular day-name during their actual lived existence on the face of the earth. Time, as past, still exists; and with it so do the people who lived it in the past.

To put this in proper context: spirits do not move from place to place; they only move from time to time. Take an example: when I saw the old man in the desert of west Texas, I saw him there because during his lifetime he walked that same path. During our confrontation, we were both in the same place but we were not in the same time. That is the essence of the bridge. He can only be where he has been before during his actual life. He can be in those places, however, on all the recurrent day-names of his original being-there-in-time that happened during his actual life. That is the purpose of finding ways to bind your spirit to a particular day-name during your life. If you are able to do it, you will always be able to be there in subsequent occurrences of that day's name, once every fifty-two years, as it were.

The question that begs, of course, is how do you go about binding your spirit to a day in the Maya calendar short of pulling a knotted piece of rope through a hole cut in your tongue by the spine of a stingray? Another time, another place, I'll try finding words to explain that.

To reach [Note 1]; [Note 2]; [Note 3]; [Note 4]; [Note 5]; [Note 6]; [Note 8]; [Note 9]; [Note 9a] [Note 10]; [Note 11]; [Note 12]; [Note 13]; [Note 14]; [Note 15]; [Note 16]; [Note 17]; [Note 18] in this series of thoughts.

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