By Vincent James Stanzione, illustrated by Angelika
Bauer. Book review by Dwight Wayne Coop
On the eve of my honeymoon to Turkey, I bought my fiancée
a book on Hellenic myths. That way, when we visited the Temple of Artemis in
Ephesus and other once-sacred sites, she would know about the fanciful deities
honored at them. Honeymooners and others who come to Guatemala with an interest
in Mayan lore now have a similar book they can buy.
The Mayans waxed as creative as the Greeks in their minting
of gods. Theirs were less anthropomorphic, in part because all had animal counterparts
(nahuals) who revealed themselves as divine manifestations. Animals in general
were experienced more as aspects of a god(dess) than perceived as deities in
their own right.
Many Guatemalans still follow the Mayanist/Catholic syncretism
called the Custom, centered on Santiago Atitlán. Monotheism — in
which people believe God made them — is pushing the Custom aside, but
the ancient (and extant) Mayan pantheon operates under a reverse causality in
which men made gods. Ek’ Chuah (“Black Scorpion”), for instance,
was made god of cocoa because those who controlled cocoa production and trade
were assured of great wealth and high status — good enough reasons to
create a god for its protection.
Ek’ Chuah and 18 other Maya deities are profiled in
Vincent Stanzione’s large-print Mayan Gods and Goddesses. It
teaches us, among others things, that Mayan gods depended not only on humans
(some were apparently human themselves, being priests and gods), but on each
other. No deity could “do it all on his or her own; they needed one another
to perform those divine acts that brought order and chaos to the … Earth.”
Accordingly, Stanzione elucidates these relationships.
Angelika Bauer’s glyph-like art looks so authentic that
it could have been impressed directly on the paper by lead stelae. But what
I liked most was the book’s balance of the scholarly with the popular.
If you are inclined to scholarship, the profiles orient you by identifying the
deities according to the famous (among archeologists) Shellhas categorization.
But they also help if you only want to return to Toledo — Spain or Ohio
— and impress everyone with what your trip taught you about Mayan theology.
Now you can do this without digging at sites or in libraries. •
