Maya Creation Myths

In eighteenth-century Yucatán a Maya scribe made a copy of a document called u kahlay cab tu kinil, a phrase that Timothy Knowlton translates as “the world history of the era” (p. 1). The scribe’s copy ran to about ten folios and is today preserved in the larger colonial-era manuscript known to us as The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel. This “world history” must once have been recorded in hieroglyphic script. But as a result of the destructive hostility of Spanish church officials toward such script, it was written down in alphabetic Yucatec Maya in the early colonial period (Knowlton persuasively argues that it was first done in the late seventeenth century). The subject of the document is the creation of the world, the origins of humanity, the gods, the calendar, and the rituals that must mark the passing of time and the world’s re-creation; in short, as Knowlton’s book is titled, Maya Creation Myths.To say that Knowlton’s book is a dissertation-based monograph on a ten-folio passage from an esoteric colonial Maya manuscript would be both accurate and misleading. For it is certainly that — in the course of two hundred pages he carefully presents and analyzes his own Maya transcriptions and English translations of the creation myth passage — but it is also much more than that. Every segment and subject of the document is placed within the relevant historical and literary contexts, Maya and Spanish. Two chapters explore the contexts of Maya cosmogony, primarily before contact, and the turmoil of colonial-era culture conflict. Four chapters explore well-focused aspects of the Chumayel mythography. For example, one chapter explains how a passage on “the birth of the uinal” (or the 20-day Maya week) is an elegant case of syncrisis (“the juxtaposition of various points of view on a single object,” p. 154), with the origins of the narrative attributed both to the Old Testament’s Melchizedek and to an enigmatic ancient Maya priest named Na Puc Tun. Within the “dialogized” language of the text, there is even an invented colonial Maya hieroglyph, a dialogized sign: the Western astronomical ideogram for “Sun” converted into a Maya logogram for “day.”Knowlton calls the Chilam Balam passages that are the book’s subject “colonial creation myths, neither precise replicas of pre-Hispanic belief nor confused compromises of European religion”; these myths, he argues, “constituted the genesis of a heteroglot colonial world of novel cultural categories and possibilities” (p. 6). His exploration of that world is rewarding and fascinating, articulated with erudition and precision, with jargon deployed carefully and judiciously.This book would pair profitably with other studies of cultural interaction in colonial Yucatán, ranging from Inga Clendinnen’s Ambivalent Conquests (1987), to Victoria Bricker and Helga-Maria Miram’s An Encounter of Two Worlds (2002), to William Hanks’s Converting Words (2010). Graduate seminar instructors and students could easily come up with more creative pairings too; the book lends itself well to such imaginings. It is obviously a book that is compulsory reading for all scholars of colonial Yucatán, of Maya literature, and of Maya history before and after the Spanish conquests. But it will also be of considerable interest to a wider group of specialists, including Mayanists of all stripes and scholars of colonial encounters throughout the Americas

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Colonialism · Decipherment · Humanity · Literature · Maya · Mythology · Subject (documents) · Theology · Classics · Computer Science · History · Latin American history and culture · Philosophy

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