The Book of Chilam Balam of Na: Facsimile, Translation, and Edited Text (review)

The Book of Chilam Balam of Na: Facsimile, Translation, and Edited Text. Edited by Ruth Gubler and David Bolles. (Lancaster, ca: Labyrinthos, 2000. 310 pp., introduction, facsimile, glossary, bibliography. $27.00 paper.)

The Books of Chilam Balam (bcb) are some of the most enigmatic manuscripts ever to have been written in the Roman script, and this Book of Chilam Balam of Na meets these expectations. The Books of Chilam Balam, written in the Yucatec Maya language anywhere from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, are a genre unique to post-Conquest Yucatán. They have been named for the pre-Hispanic chilam balam, the Jaguar Prophet, who made prophesies based on historical knowledge and a cyclical view of time. The manuscripts are compilations of history, myth, prognostication, farmers' almanacs, medical diagnoses, and herbal recipes. Each manuscript appears to be a compilation of passages copied from other texts—meaning that the date, author, and location of the original drafting of specific passages cannot be fixed with any exactitude and that we cannot know which passages might have been original creations. The manuscripts are syncretism embodied, combining ancient Maya and Spanish Christian gods and saints, Maya and Christian calendars, and indigenous and Spanish diseases and herbal concoctions.

This edition of the Book of Chilam Balam of Na is the first facsimile and English translation to be published. The editors note that the bcbs actually fall into two separate groups distinguishable by content and the date provided by the copyist. The first group (including the Chumayel, Tizimin, and Kaua manuscripts) generally carry an eighteenth-century date, record history and myth, and make reference to Maya gods. The second group (including the Tekax, Chan Kah, and Na) generally carry a nineteenth-century date and include prognostications and medical recipes. The compilation of the bcb of Na was completed in three stages: in 1857, in 1873, and final notes were made through about 1896.

This book's most important contribution is the extensive (200 or so items) glossary of plant and animal names, complete with scientific nomenclature, which will be of use to ethnographers, ethnohistorians, and archaeologists alike. The introduction and the footnotes are not as extensive as many might hope for. In particular, although the section on herbal remedies takes up the bulk of the manuscript, the editors do not put forth an analysis of Maya conceptions of the body, health, and healing.

The editors, like many other commentators on the Books of Chilam Balam, consider the manuscripts as cultural survivals, as bits of ancient Maya knowledge that survived the impact of colonialism. Even while they acknowledge that such elements as the calendars of saints' days, Spanish herbal remedies, and the gradual disappearance of references to history, myth, and pre-Hispanic gods all fly in the face of cultural continuity, they consider the manuscripts on the whole as evidence of the "tenacity" with which post-Conquest specialists held onto "the rich tradition of the Maya people" (12). Indeed, the very label of Book of Chilam Balam given to these texts perpetuates the notion that they represent the knowledge held by the jaguar priests at the time of the Spanish invasion, even while it is not clear that that title was ascribed by the copyist (and in fact the first few folios of the Na manuscript, including any title page, are missing).

The editors note that while "there are indications that [the texts] were compiled from much earlier sources," "none of the Maya medical texts that have come down to us are any earlier than the eighteenth century" (10). Nonetheless, they conclude that "from the sixteenth century. . . curing did not change to any great extent in the centuries that followed" (11). We do know that there was a tradition of herbal medicine at the time of the Spanish invasion, but we do not know that it was largely unchanged over the next two centuries. In fact, a wide...