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2. Religious Sodalities of Momostenango The Communal Cult Institutions saints and sodalities In the midwestern highlands communal ceremonies are, with few exceptions, under the care of the civil religious organization. The communal rites are basically Catholic in origin with no appreciable pagan content. —Tax and Hinshaw, 1969 How would the missionary priests and Maya catechists organizing Catholic Action in the western highlands in the 1970s have reacted to this statement? The main preoccupation of the cofradı́as in Chichicastenango was the propitiation of their ancestors and the cofrades who had come before them (Bunzel 1952: 249; Schultze Jena 1954: 38), hardly a Catholic emphasis in the cult of a saint. In Santiago Atitlán some saints’ images are the embodiments of ancestral protective spirits called naguales—community founders, lightning men, mist men, rain men, earthquake men—who retreated to the mountains leaving the images and sacred bundles behind (O’Brien 1975: 42–43). Maximon is a very peculiar ‘‘saint’’ with no Christian counterpart of any kind left to the village by its late-nineteenth-century prophet Francisco Sojuel (Mendelson 1959). Most of the Momostecan saints originated in Spain, but what is Spain? Spain is a distant city from which ultimate authority and its local symbols, the saints and the ancient land titles, emanated. Spain is the Tulan of post-conquest mythology. Water from Spain gushes from a rock face in Momostenango even in the dry season. This is where Santiago watered his horse; one of his altars marks the spot. Santiago is the Morning Star. The Baby San Antonio, a Momostecan saint who, like Maximon, does not exist in Catholic hagiography, is a fertility god whose miraculous image was found in a cave. Unlike the other saints, San Antonio is a Santo del Mundo (Saint of the [Holy] World). Jesucristo was a trickster whose pursuit by enemies established the world order. From Wednesday through Saturday of Holy Week, while Jesucristo lies powerless on a table in the calvario and his altars are closed, foul-mouthed lascivious contraries, the Tzulab, dance in the streets. San Simón, the Momostecan version of Maximon and an archetypal Ladino patron in his Momostecan incarnation, is seated at his paymaster’s table in front of the church. This is not the outline of a Catholic complex. It is the telling of a Maya story, revised and revised again in response to five centuries of Catholic evangelism and oppression under colonial and neocolonial regimes. This chapter describes the ceremonial cycle, focusing on the saints and Jesucristo, and investigates the social organization and histories of the cofradı́as and dance teams, the sodalities that perform the cycle.1 The remainder of the work explores the symbolism and meanings of some key ritual complexes and the stories they enact. the sodalities and ritual complexes Cofradı́a and dance team performances are conjoined in several major complexes articulated to the Christian calendar and performed in honor of specific sacred images. The Easter festival in the town center (cabecera) marks the beginning of the rainy season and planting time, and honors the two Cristos kept in the cemetery chapel (calvario) as well as San Simón. Santiago, the patron saint, and his secretary, San Felipe, are honored in late July when the roasting ears are ripe and there is a heightened danger of damaging storms. At Christmas, which comes just after the harvest as the dry season sets in, Marı́a Concepción, San José, and the Niño Jesús are honored. A fourth major complex, associated with a Momostecan saint called Niño San Antonio, occurs in August , the mating period for the sheep, and involves two fiestas in a distant aldea and many visits to private houses for paraje-level festivals. In similar ‘‘traveling saint’’ complexes, Santiago and San Felipe also leave the cabecera each November to visit the rural cantón Pueblo Viejo, in the aldea Tunayac, as well as the aldea San Vicente Buenabaj. All of these major festivals include the coordinated performances of cofradı́as and dance teams. A ‘‘complex’’ refers here to a bundle of institutions associated with a specific named sacred image (a saint) or set of related images that occur together as part of a public event, like Holy Week. An institution is an organized system of activities that fulfill a defined and legitimized purpose, its charter. It utilizes concrete capital and is staffed by personnel whose roles are governed by ideal norms or rules (Malinowski 1944...

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