Symbols in the Selva
Symbols in the Selva
Mexico #3: Into the Mayan hinterlands
On my final night in San Cristobal de las Casas I re-visited an 'intercambio' to chat in English and Spanish with locals and foreigners together, after I'd popped in to watch a new Mexican movie, with a few others, at a local bookshop, with a cup of chamomile tea. The movie was 'Totem'. On the surface an ordinary story of life and death and childhood in Mexico City, set around a family birthday, but as full of resonant symbols as the rest of Mexican life that I'd seen so far. Tonatiuh, the dying father figure in the movie, is given the name of the Aztec god of the fifth sun (since 2012 we are apparently entering the time of the sixth sun). His daughter is Sol. And a scorpion also features, that symbol of dramatic death and rebirth, alongside snails on oil canvases. Perhaps there was a lot more to Mexican telenovelas than I had previously appreciated.
I attended two museums while I was in San Cristobal that would give me tasters of what was still to come on my trip through Chiapas state. The first, just down the cobbled hill from my place, was Casa Na-Bolom. A pair of Europeans – Frans and Trudi Blom - had headed east into the rainforest a century ago, made contact with the fiercely independent Lacandon Mayan tribe there (who’d never been conquered) and were part of revealing the sacred temples and sites in the selva (the jungle) to the wider world. They'd set up base in an abandoned seminary: grand arches and corridors, perfect for showing off collections and holding events. I was impressed by the building, but more touched by two things: firstly, the level of detail in these historical folk artefacts, all fine faces and elegance. And second, how this had all kept its relevance, as the grounds were now used as an organic nursery and the forest was being replanted, after industrial ripping had damaged it. As in so many other places, partnerships with the traditional inhabitants of the landscape seemed to be a successful way to restore it.
The second museum I attended was rather more delicious; the private museum of cacao or Ka'kau. In case you're not aware, cacao is another of those vital Mesoamerican contributions to world food. Stories and myths from the Popol Vuh and other Mayan glyphs were presented along with implements for gathering and crushing the beans, and a little social history on its use as currency. I couldn't resist buying myself a dark bar of the stuff, from here close to the source. As well as a cold tazcalate drink made from cacao, maize, and red achiote, grainy and refreshing. Hearing of the maize god who brought all fruits and grains to humans, from deep under the earth; drinking cacao as a ritual remembering of the cycles of life and death that lead to new fecundity. It was all there to ponder.
Some mornings later, I woke from my surprisingly comfortable bus journey into the rainforest. Finally, heat, moisture, mosquitoes: the tropics I had been brought up to believe in. I put my things in a locker - too early to check in to my dorm room - and settled in to a poolside hammock to plan my next adventure. This morning I was going to have more experience of the ancient Mayans, in this case at the complex of Palenque, an extraordinary place twenty minutes walk up the road. I first read about this place probably twenty years ago, when I was devouring alternative archaeological speculative books, particularly some wonderful ones by Graham Hancock, but in this case mostly a rather more offbeat one by an author whose name I can’t recall. The speculation included reference to the 13 alien-origin crystal skulls that are said to have intense knowledge and power related to human destiny, one of which the founders of Palenque, and in particular Pakal (buried in the ‘Temple of the Inscriptions’) was in possession of. And it managed to somehow tie up Pakal, Tutankhamun and Jesus, so was at the very least a good yarn, as I recall. Powerful and strange crystal skulls like this do exist (whatever their origins), I have a good friend who came into contact with one once with odd results; but they’re not on display for the average Joe popping along to major tourist sites.
Along the way to the site - perhaps it was my pale features and my scraggly longish locks - a restaurant owner and several tour guides offered me 'hongos medicinales' - by which they meant psychedelic mushrooms, which I declined politely. I've got nothing in principle against people using entheogens in the right circumstances, but Palenque was quite trippy enough in its own right, and I instinctively felt I wanted to be present to her with my feet on the ground. I handed my ticket to the official, stepped into the jungle, took a breath and silently asked her for permission to visit the place. Birds and bats were enjoying the trees; the river's cascades poured turquoise over smooth terraces of rocks and roots. And I came through crumbling dwellings, over which trees had been growing for centuries, looping their way into the remnants of the Mayan past. Here some older versions of today's temazcal had been carried out (the Mayan version of a sweat lodge), cleansing individuals from the community, down the slopes amidst the sweet tree energy, below the main palace complex. Here too I would stand a couple of days later - which happened to be the northern winter solstice - and make my own offerings and wishes for life, in this dreamy location, where the rightness of those ancients and their beliefs in cycles was not something that needed to be questioned or justified. (More local cacao, if you must know, was an important aspect of my solstice day!)
Up in the main plaza, iguanas sat on more crumbling steps, sentinels guarding some mystery. I saw one later from my vantage point atop a pyramid, quietly ambling through the grasses on the side the humans and their photos were absent from. I followed the crowds and the guides, particularly close to the "queen's tomb", which could be entered, and Pakal's, which these days could not (travellers had told me of scaling the heights and looking down at his sarcophagus, on mushroom-fuelled party nights in the looser nineties). It seemed to me at the very least that the ancient ruler, or wizard, or spiritual guide, or whatever he actually was, had some pretty tuned in ideas about where to build a temple. The incredible human buildings, covered in complex images and stories and no doubt once as colourful as San Cristobal's craft market (or the stalls of the hawkers lining the paths between Palenque's pyramids), were always more than equalled by the incredible natural forest surrounding them, so they had an automatic humility alongside their creative statements. Many images apparently reflected people cooped up, decapitated, chained, bleeding. Archaeologists and tour guides who know how empires and kingdoms usually work, according to HisStory, can spin their stories of violent warfare and sacrifice, necessary deaths to permit the state to continue. Certainly that's the way those paragons of virtue, the Spanish conquistadors, painted the Aztecs, those late-on-the-Mesoamerican-scene northern warriors, and their bloodthirst has been retroactively assumed for those earlier cultures that the Aztecs had themselves conquered. But we don't really know much about these jungle Mayans, do we, who stopped living regularly in their temple complexes centuries before the Europeans arrived? Another version of what their murals mean could involve chopping off egos like Kali with her necklace of skulls; moving like a Buddhist through different levels of thought-prison on the path to truth; men engaging in a little sacrificial bleeding to try and emulate the princess's monthly menses, in a matriarchal society where the divinity of the fecund earth around you is written everywhere, as the vines wrap themselves lovingly around the trunks of the sacred ceiba trees. I’m certainly not the first to suggest this, and I tend to think that the more we tell ourselves empowering and loving stories of our ancestors, that also resonate with honesty, the closer we'll come to inspiring ourselves and our descendants. Jared Diamond in Collapse put the Mayan retreat from the temple cities down to evidence of deforestation and hierarchical power games, and perhaps he’s right, though it might be wise to chat to a Mayan shaman or two and find out what they think: more than one story could hold truth. But then of course I'm a poetic Romantic. As was Pakal, who even the most mainstream stories say was the longest reigning ruler in the world until Louis XIV, and with much better teeth, and who turns up again in spirit form counselling later rulers, apparently, on some of the murals (like Palenque’s Temple of the Sun). The famous image on his soaring tomb is definitely a guide to entering other realms after death, probably realms much more interesting than an astronaut would find (which he's been claimed to be - riding, if so, on a very obvious and very beautiful tree of life, rather than anything more spaceship-like). Not that I want to automatically discount all those alien sightings, which have almost all been in North America: but they might not be what they've been imagined to be. Ayahuasca adventurers, African shamans, and Celtic tale-tellers alike report otherworldly encounters with little green men. There are many forms of magic at work in the world. One clear message to me from the complexity of ancient Mayan headdresses (just for starters) is that people in Mexico have been inspired by the spirits to design seriously over the top creative stuff (and often put it on walls) for a very long time.
I went to the temples of Palenque twice, once to experience the layout, to follow the snapping camera-crocodiles and join them, to try and decipher the beautiful crazy complex images (like the oldest image of anyone smoking ceremonially, just in case you thought none of those jungle intoxicants were brought into the palace). And once just to listen to the land. It took a while, and I needed to step off the path at first to remember: needed to watch the line of leaf-carrying ants parade across the grass. In fact, it was stepping across the ball court that reminded me of this possibility, away from the chatter, and away from the irritating screeching of the ceramic whistles being sold. Most Mesoamerican complexes feature ball courts, where skilled players bounced the pelota off their padded joints, and played a version of the great game of duality: the lurid Aztec tale is that the losers were sacrificed, but that really doesn't make any sense. We all know you only get good at stuff by failing first.
Palenque apparently lies on a ley line that links it to Machu Picchu and elsewhere. I'm no expert on such things, but with a little breath it was possible to feel the vibrations. And part of the realization I took in, with the concentrated earth energy, was of how (given just how ridiculously, continuously creative the jungle is) humans had little choice but to be equally creative, in their own beautifully human ways, as long as they took a little time to listen. I'd reached, however briefly, the heart of the tree of life making Mexico (or at least Chiapas which was still all I'd seen of it) tick.
I was aware of many stories waiting to be told in the selva. One, that first night, was the howler monkeys I saw clambering around in the trees by the side of the road home. Their shrieks sound unlike any other primate: in fact, they were apparently recorded for Jurassic Park to create the 'dinosaur soundtrack'. Another were the red bursera trees, their shiny bark constantly tempting me to look at them, and I was consistently aware of having ignored other equally worthy brethren, alongside acknowledging the deep attraction of the red. Somewhere there were jaguars. I perused a book in the gift shop covered in Mayan animal gods. Totem poles are more famous (like many things) as part of native American culture in the USA. The link to rich Mayan textures though was increasingly unmistakable; the headdresses with elaborate memories of animals and their energies, piled one on top of another, visible on tall stele raised in stone, markers of points, earthly or celestial. I was apparently born under the Mayan sign of the bat, one of thirteen zodiac signs according to one system. (Though I've previously heard I'm a 'blue solar eagle' according to another Mayan system; the interlocking of the calendars is still an interesting game of numbers and meanings).
Classical musicians often follow 3-fold sonata form in their compositions: a lengthy statement, the exposition; a swirling development where ideas are taken, mixed, chopped, sprayed and eloquently spat out; and a final recapitulation, returning to repeat the original ideas and seeing what's been transformed in them. My three days in the jungle had a similar rhythm. After that first day in Palenque, on the second day I took the ideas on board but headed deeper into the forest, in a tourist minibus to Bonampak. We travelled for hours, stopping for a cantine breakfast, and arrived in Lacandon-controlled territory. Another Mayan ruin, at Yaxchilan on the Guatemalan border, was totally off limits at the time: disputes over who had the rights, as well as that infamous narco-traffic and low level arguments with the national army. But Bonampak was very much available for those willing to make the three hour trek. As we entered the 'autonomous region,' serious Zapatista territory, the signs stopped being in printed government script and started being hand painted, but still said things like "don't throw rubbish". Later we had to switch colectivo, into one administered by Lacandon locals, who took the fees direct from the tour companies and took everybody through to Bonampak.
There in the mist, after a stroll under the canopy, was this site crafted onto a hill. Or, as so often in Mexico, crafted onto previous temples. The number usually thrown about was that reconstruction happened every 52 years, when the different Mayan cycles aligned; at Bonampak you can see older pyramids, different staircases excavated under the outer layer. Of course this means speculation about the age of sites could be almost infinitely extended. Who knows which people, when, were the first to recognize the power of a location? Perhaps someone in the time of the first sun, their constructions long-since absorbed into the landscape. At Bonampak you can visit three chambers, lined up next to each other, with colourful murals telling stories we can also only truly guess at. And below on the 'plaza' is where I saw my first real Mayan stela, an enormous standing stone, which would recall Stonehenge if it wasn't covered in a dramatic Mayan character wielding an elaborate wand-staff and daring us to guess what the hell he was up to. One spiritual teacher whose words I appreciate insists that he's actually the Magician character reminding us that much of what we're looking at is a filtered illusion - the whole story of war and conquest and tribute and sacrifice and yawn yawn. And that the three chambers are initiation sites, places to journey, vision, drop baggage and transform. On my own 3-fold sonata form jungle trip this made a lot of sense to me, especially as three days is often seen as the time needed for traditional initiations. Later that afternoon I saw a creature with less baggage than just about anyone: a bird able to flutter like a butterfly, her body size reduced to little more than a bumblebee's. The colibri was sucking nectar from a bougainvillea creeper near our lunch spot. A little gift moment of pure joy.
Before that, however, I set off with a party of Mexicans, squelching our way into the deep living jungle. I was initially a little terrified of getting bitten by something toxic, but I gradually relaxed into the power of the experience. Past enormous ceibas and other mother trees of the forest, over rickety bridges, past creepers and soft streams, and a tiny colibri nest, breathing in the natural magic. At one point our Lacandon guide led us to a wide stretch for swimming, but only he and I took the plunge, while the Mexican tourists looked on indulgently, probably waiting for us to be chomped by piranhas. The jungle water was gentle, fresh but not cold. The little green fish around me scattered as I splashed around. Maybe they were alien spies. On the far bank, a few of us ventured into a cave formed from roots, disturbing the sleeping bat gods there. Our fast-speaking local guide claimed jaguars hung out in the cave in the rainy season: jaguars have to do the symbolic work of lions and leopards put together in these parts, feline warrior/magician symbols and obviously just super cool. I returned feeling blessed, ready for a late lunch of cantine quesadillas and my magical colibri moment.
So my third day, my recapitulation back in the Palenque temple complex, was a time for digestion, for arriving; for witnessing, too, seeing things again with eyes washed by the jungle. A Mayan group arrived for the solstice and danced and drummed for hours, but my sentinel iguana friend stayed motionless on the old crumbled steps where I'd first seen her, while dragonflies and butterflies explored below and birds of prey soared over the canopy. In the evening I headed to the lively bush restaurant across the way from my poolside hammock, and the modern purplish horse-dragon-mermaid sculpture thing to the left of the stage seemed almost mundane. The band was about to start when I left and I considered bringing my trombone over, but actually, I just needed to absorb it all a little more. I set off into the jungle night and found that my dorm room (previously shared with a couple of young German women and some snoring old locals) was mine alone for my final dreams in the selva.