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Chapter 4. Cosmogonic Tree Raisings and Sunrises
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4. Cosmogonic Tree Raisings and Sunrises At least three distinctive cosmogonies are enacted in the communalistic rituals of the sodalities. Two are presented in this chapter. In one, featured in the Monkeys Dance, a central tree is raised and a four-cornered world is laid out around it. In another, the world is transformed by conflict between liminal beings of an earlier creation and an emerging sun. This chapter explores the sunrise cosmogony enacted in the Conquest Dance. A different manifestation of the sunrise cosmogony, expressed in the Jesucristo mythos, is presented in chapter 5. The third cosmogony, also part of the Jesucristo mythos, ritually depicts the life cycles and intergenerational succession of sun and maize personifiers in major rites of renewal. It is presented in chapter 5. The world tree also appears in the symbolism of this cosmogony, where its flowering and burning are as important as its erection. world trees and momostecan cosmogony On Good Friday in 1976, the cofrades of Santa Bárbara showed me that San Simón was a flowering cross. I wondered if the Momostecan Holy Week might offer a key to the interpretation of the iconography of Palenque with its foliated cross icon and its depiction of God L as a cigarsmoking old man, almost as if the artists at Palenque had seen San Simón (Cook 1981: 602). Recently, epigraphy and archaeoastronomy have opened up the meaning of the Palenque complex and its flowering crosses.1 The central panel in the temple of the cross at the northern apex of the group of the cross at Palenque depicts the world tree. From the temple’s south-facing portal, the dazzling Milky Way can be observed when, shortly after the solstices, it crosses the center of the sky from south to north. Then it embodies the Wakan-Chah arrangement, the Classic Maya celestial manifestation of the world tree, its base on the southern horizon rising from the constellation Scorpio, and its apex reaching to the eight-partitioned ‘‘house of the north,’’ the celestial dome. In Classic iconography this ‘‘tree’’ stood for first father, and for the Maya kings, whose chests were crossed by a double-headed serpent bar. In the celestial prototype, this was the ecliptic crossing the Milky Way. Creation at Palenque was understood to involve the raising of this axis mundi, the primordial Wakan-Chah, to separate the earth and sky, and the ‘‘seating’’ of three stones. The axis mundi remains an important Mayan icon. For example, in Santiago Atitlán a world tree figures in creation mythology and one is carved in the altarpiece (Carlsen and Prechtel 1991: 33–35, Christenson 1998: 99–103). In highland Maya village cultures, the ritual of constructingahouse— of erecting the vertical posts and establishing the three-stoned hearth— is a sacred undertaking and embodies a humble version of the symbolism of the Palenque creation account, which is possibly itself derived from Formative or proto-Classic house-raising rituals. The prominent place of tree-climbing motifs in Momostecan myths,2 the erection and climbing of a greased pole by the Tzulab dancers at noon on Good Friday, and the ‘‘foliating’’ of the large cross in the cemetery during Lent represent living cosmic tree symbolism in Momostecan expressive culture. The Tree in the Monkeys Dance The most impressive Momostecan axis mundi is a twenty-meter-tall pine tree trunk. Trimmed and stripped of bark, it is erected in the plaza just outside the church doorway in a ceremony that takes place every other year during Santiago’s fiesta as a central element in the Monkeys Dance (C’oyab; lit., ‘‘Spider Monkeys’’). The dance begins with an old couple enacting a deer hunt. At the conclusion of the successful hunt, jaguar, lion, and monkey impersonators, possessed by spirits of animals that have been called from the Mundo (Holy World) through a sacred boulder, cross a tightrope from east to west from the roof of the church to the pole and then descend to the west along a slanted guy line onto the dance ground on the plaza. Santiago’s festival comes during the canı́cula, a hot and dry period when the green corn ripens at the very end of July. Freidel, Schele, and 108 The Ritual Symbols and Their Meanings [3.90.33.254] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:16 GMT) Parker (1993: 116) note that the Chorti call the Milky Way the road of Santiago, and that on July 25 the Milky...