Une histoire de la religion des Mayas: Du pantheisme au pantheon (review)

A vexing problem in Mesoamerican studies is the nature of divinity. Were "gods" a late development, devised out of "the inner spirits of natural forces," to quote Joyce Marcus (1992: 270), a prominent proponent of antitheism? Was the organization of supernatural beings into a "pantheon" simply a Spanish imposition? Those who have questioned the presence of gods in earlier Mesoamerica, namely, in the periods before the Aztecs and other Postclassic peoples, have tended to channel the spirit of that committed Quaker Edward Tylor, for whom humans initially perceived a world of spirit force (not coincidentally, a Quaker concept too) and, then, through a process of personification, populated that world with beings of human form and social organization. The twist, however, is that, in Mesoamerica, scholars from Tatiana Proskouriakoff to Joyce Marcus, and now Claude-François Baudez, view that personification as a late development, possibly even post-Spanish conquest. For them, earlier periods of thought in Mesoamerica focused more on the worshipful contemplation of a vital, partly sentient Nature in which most things, be they of stone, wood or flesh, were animate. In this world, a few beings took shape, but as ancestors or embodiments of terrestrial and celestial phenomena.

The theory of late or tardy theism in Mesoamerica has a certain superficial appeal: it suggests that religion can change, an idea with which few would disagree; and it proposes that Mesoamerican belief has to be understood in its own terms, well away from Greco-Roman pantheons and Christian eschatology. What is wrong with it—disastrously so—is evident in this book by Baudez, a respected archaeologist who has written this volume for a francophone audience. He admits that "many of my analyses and interpretations differ from those of my colleagues" (11). Too true! The proud indifference to other views is exacerbated by an unwillingness to consider recent scholarship—Baudez seldom cites sources past the early 1990s. He also claims, generously, that his is but one history out of many, a nod to rive gauche postmodernism that begs the question of whether some views are better than others. There is much to suggest that Baudez's ideas are flawed. Showing why helps explain why some approaches work and others do not.

In the first place, Baudez is not a believer in the value of hieroglyphic texts or in those who study them. He does not employ or recommend the use of inscriptions from the time and people he studies, the pre-Conquest Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula. A revealing footnote says that many modern interpretations of glyphs are "hazardous, if not to say of little seriousness (fantaisistes) and occasionally varying from author to author" (22). On no evidence that I can see, he declares such work "lacking in rigorous method" and unable to "consider alternatives," presumably those asserted by Baudez himself. When he mentions the way, or "co-essence," a crucial concept in Maya notions of the soul, Baudez says that, based on his understanding of the accompanying iconography, "the reading of the glyph in question is erroneous" (261). His methodological point seems to be that, in matters of religion, texts are suspect, best adapted to "communicating events, chronology, history" (37). Only visual imagery will do in questions of religious interpretation. This is rather like insisting that beliefs in classical Greece can be understood only by examining sculptures of kouroi rather than textual evidence from that time; by the same token, students of Flemish religious iconography must bypass the Bible. Readers may wonder whether Baudez has a point, but his understanding of Maya decipherment is painfully misguided. For example, he argues that syllabic and logographic approaches are incompatible, as though the script did not consist of both elements, much as our own alphabet deploys vowels and consonants. This is a necessary argument for Baudez. It...