Maya Creation Myths: Words and Worlds of the Chilam Balam

3: Clandestine Compilations and the Colonial Dialogue

33 Pages 42 to 63 of the Classical Yucatecan Maya–language manuscript known as the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel is a collection of Maya creation myths dating to years following the Spanish invasion of the Americas. Although individual creation narratives and related accounts written in the Classical Yucatecan Maya language appear elsewhere in the corpus of colonial Maya documents, the Chumayel is perhaps unique in its compilation of numerous cosmogonies. This mythography (collection of myths) is composed of some texts clearly redacted from earlier written sources, with others that were perhaps recorded concurrently from oral tradition or perhaps original compositions. The extant version of this Chumayel mythography was incorporated into a larger corpus of material that became the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel in 1782, when it was compiled by Juan José Hoil of the Maya town (cah)ofChumayel,Yucatán(Gordon1993[1913]:viii).Itisunknownwhether Hoil himself was the anonymous compiler of these cosmogonic traditions and the one who penned the introductory preface to the mythography. If Hoil was indeed the compiler, then the Chumayel mythography would be Clandestine Compilations and the Colonial Dialogue c h a p T e r T h r e e Clandestine Compilations and the Colonial Dialogue 34 a collection of Maya creation myths compiled on the eve of the Spanish Crown’s late eighteenth-century Bourbon reforms. However, there is little internal evidence in support of such a late eighteenth-­century date. Rather than the late eighteenth century, a brief look at the sociohistorical context suggests the compilation of the numerous cosmogonies into the Chumayel mythography might already have occurred by the late seventeenth century in colonial Yucatán. First of all, the preservation of cosmogonies in alphabetic form would have been necessary by that point, as confiscation or destruction of cosmogonic accounts written in Maya hieroglyphic script by Catholic clergy would have been under way for more than a century at that time. The approach treating all Maya hieroglyphic documents as necessarily “idolatrous” began with the activities of Diego de Landa and like-minded missionaries, and by 1571 the prosecution of Indian idolatría was placed under the jurisdiction of the Provisorato de los Indios (Greenleaf 1965). Historian John Chuchiak has uncovered ecclesiastical documentation of the seizure of hieroglyphic texts under the jurisdiction of the Provisorato in the Yucatán peninsula occurring as late as the early eighteenth century (Chuchiak 2004). One example of Colonial era seizures is the 1610 report of Fr. Pedro Gonzalez de Molina in Champoton, in which the friar states: We have taken from these witches [bruxos] a book of their antiquities written in characters that when interpreted we believe describes another creation of the world . . . and it is their bible which we are now translating with the aid of several older Indians in order to finish understanding what it contains. (AGN Inq. vol. 290, exp. 2, folio 71; Chuchiak 2004:175) When not destroyed outright, confiscated hieroglyphic texts occasionally were employed for the ultimate purpose of converting the Maya to Christianity. The production of hieroglyphic texts appears to have been finally disrupted with suppression of the calligraphic tradition’s preHispanicpatrons ,theautochthonouspriesthood,andanindependentindigenous nobility (Landa 1978 [ca. 1566]:12–13). This protracted process that began in the sixteenth century culminated in 1697 with the conquest of the last independent polity on the peninsula, that of the Peten Itzá (Avendaño y Loyola 1997 [1696]; Jones 1998). In the decades just prior to that final conquest, another Franciscan, Diego López de Cogolludo, lamented in the chapter on pre-Hispanic religion from his Historia de Yucathan (published in 1688): The religious [friars] of this province, in whose care was delivered the conversion of these Indians to our Holy Catholic Faith, with the Clandestine Compilations and the Colonial Dialogue 35 zeal that they had diligently advanced this, not only demolished and burned all the images that were worshiped, but also all the writings in the mode [the Indians] had by which they could record their histories [memorias], and all that [the friars] presumed could contain some superstition or pagan rites. For this reason, one cannot discover a single thing from these writings, but even the knowledge of these histories is lost to posterity, because as soon as all of these were discovered, they were put to the flame without taking note of the diversity of the materials. I neither agree with this judgment, nor do I...