Maya Creation Myths: Words and Worlds of the Chilam Balam

5: Theogony, Cosmology, and Language in the Ritual of the Angels

85 Munro Edmonson wrote in the introduction to his translation of the Book of Chilam Balam of Tizimín (1982:xiv): Students of the Books of Chilam Balam will have noted the really extraordinary discrepancies between one translator and the next. . . . I cannot but agree with Barrera that these are texts of quite unusual difficulty . The Popol Vuh is a model of explicitness and clarity by comparison . All scholars who wrestle with colonial texts in the Indian languages of Middle America must cope with archaism and homonymy— multiplied by textual, orthographic, and lexicographic inadequacies. But these texts are purposely obscure. They are not intended to make sense to outsiders—and they don’t. Perhaps the single best example of what Edmonson observed is the text he dubbed the Sevenfold Creation (Edmonson 1986) and that Ralph Roys (1967) had earlier called the Ritual of the Angels. Perhaps no myth in the Classical Yucatecan corpus is so filled with contradictions, contradictions born of the colonial situation of the Maya scribes who engendered it. The Maya language of the text is in high form, composed of Theogony, Cosmology, and Language in the Ritual of the Angels C h a p t e R f i V e Theogony, Cosmology, and Language in the Ritual of the Angels 86 frequent parallelisms, couplets, and triplets, but is at the same time full of opaque references and perhaps intentionally incomprehensible lines mixing Maya, Spanish, Latin, Nahuatl, and “nonsense” language that Roys (1967:108) refers to as “abracadabra.” The supernatural beings who populate its cosmology range from entities known from Classic period Maya hieroglyphic texts of the first millennium AD to the angels and celestials disseminated through the Christian Mass, Maya-language doctrinal texts, and the Greco-Roman-inspired astrological lore of Spanish popular almanacs introduced since the sixteenth century. Cosmic in scope and arcane in language, the myth’s topic, the apotheosis of Divine Maize, addressed the regular concern of every Maya, commoner and noble, whose life was tied to the life of the fields. While elaborating on a version of the earthcentered Ptolemaic-Christian cosmos imposed by the institutions of the invading Europeans, the historical scope of the myth concludes in a prophetic voice critiquing the inhumane treatment of the indigenous nobility following their Christianization. In this chapter, I do not pretend to provide a comprehensive interpretation of such a complex work. What I wish to accomplish here is to first contextualize the myth known as the Ritual of the Angels by noting its self-identified genre and determining its possible performative context. Next, I illuminate prominent mythological characters within the text’s cosmic mélange by taking what is left implicit for its original audience and making these elements explicit through highlighting intertextual connections . Finally, I reflect on one aspect of the internal organization of the myth, the reported speech attributed to a Divine Maize being. By focusing on divine reported speech, I am able to foreground how the relationship between language and cosmology in this myth is in some ways similar and in other ways distinct from other known examples of creation mythology in both Maya and Judeo-Christian traditions. Synopsis of the Ritual of the Angels The text Roys called the Ritual of the Angels begins with a prologue (48.9– 48.16) establishing the narrative scene as ti minan caan y luum ‘when there was no heaven and earth.’ The initial geography of the events occurs in the midst of the homlah cabil ‘submerged earth,’ presumably submerged after a great flood like that related in the Katun 11 Ahau myth. The “Three Cornered Stone,” perhaps related to both the “First Three Stone Place” of pre-Hispanic Maya cosmogonies (Looper 1995) and the European iconography of the Trinity, is associated by the myth-teller with the Christian concept of “grace” and emerges as the instrument “forming” (Yucatec: pat) Theogony, Cosmology, and Language in the Ritual of the Angels 87 the “divinity of the Sovereign.” (This double-voiced usage of Christian doctrinal terminology will be discussed in what follows.) Rather than the precise cycles of the calendrical-astronomical tables contained in preHispanic Maya codices, time in this myth is organized into “seven tuns, seven katuns,” an uncharacteristic imprecision that suggests a succession of seven vaguely defined epochs prior to the creation, more akin to the Judeo-Christian yom ‘days’ than Maya mythological timekeeping. The deity sums these epochs (ms. page 48...