Reports on the Maya Indians of Yucatan Part 2

The customs, habits, and inclinations of all those Indians in general do not, with any certainty, evoke any hope for the improvement of their race and their subsequent utility and usefulness to the nation.

The task I have set for myself is a very delicate one, and there may exist a great many people who will attribute to lack of patriotism the frank statement of many defects in our population; but I observe that our nation is not moving toward its aggrandizement with the alacrity and speed which the progressives among the authorities wish to see.

Therefore I consider it necessary to study and point out the defects.

I do not wish it to appear as if the conceptions expressed in these lines were imputations of my own imagination, and I wish to state, therefore, that whatever is said in this report is extracted from official doc.u.ments in my possession.

The aborigines living in the towns and villages of the district of Jalpa, and the same may be said of the rest of the Indians of Tabasco, despite their docility, prefer the wild, uncivilized life of the mountains to the advantages of communal life, if by so doing they are able to evade all public responsibilities and duties. They come together only for their religious festivities, and on all such occasions they are given to drunkenness and gluttony to such a degree that they contract very serious diseases which in a great many cases hasten their demise. With very few exceptions they live in complete vagrancy, and they propagate without respecting any degree of blood relationship. They insist on curing their diseases with all sorts of roots and plants, which, however, mostly impair their health, causing great mortality, especially among children. This may be regarded as the princ.i.p.al cause why very few among their number reach the age of fifty years.

The aborigines who inhabit the borders to the river Usumacinta and its tributaries are for the greater part natives of Yucatan, and are like all the rest of their kind, very fond of drinking. The Indians of Tenosique, about forty years ago, were known as very honest and trustworthy, but their intercourse with the rebels and emigrants from Yucatan have demoralized them to a great extent.

These and other defects, with but a few honorable exceptions, are revealed in the doc.u.ments treating of the Indians of the district of Comitan, state of Chiapas, which, however, I am not going to enumerate, so as to avoid repet.i.tions, and by so doing make this article altogether too long.

All the above mentioned shows the decadence and general degeneration of the aborigines, as compared with the very scant elements of vitality and vigor that might help in the movement toward progress in our republic. The same customs, the same reserve and diffidence which characterized the Indian of colonial days is manifestly still his today under the so-called protective laws of the republic, which barely give him the t.i.tle of citizen. Yet, as I have stated before, I do not belong to those who despair of his ultimate civilization, and I believe that the most efficacious means of effecting this is by crossing his breed or race by way of colonization, introducing other nations and elements to come in contact with him.

That this efficacious means of stopping the infinite defects which r.e.t.a.r.d, if they do not hinder, the natural progress of our nation, has not been attained, to my idea, lies in the fact that so far no protective laws have existed which, founded on prevision, afford guaranties and procure work for colonists. There are no laws that fix the boundaries of the immense stretches of waste-land within our country, nor a careful study of climate, geology, and production.

There is not, to my knowledge, any report establishing the best methods of making all our territory productive either through sales or the renting of all lands that cannot be tilled by their original owners. Our own elements, as we have tried to demonstrate in this article, are either heterogeneous or too scarce and insufficient to accomplish the task of carrying the nation onward on the road of aggrandizement. Hence it is, according to my idea, colonization, and colonization alone, that may serve as the final remedy for our national ills.

If we had today laws such as I have had reference to, we would at this very moment see European colonists arrive continually, attracted by hopes of a splendid future which our fertile soil and our salubrious climate offer to the industrious and enterprising man. Our population would increase daily at the same pace with the United States of Brazil and Buenos Aires, where European immigration forms an element of prosperity.

It remains for our government to fix in the most decisive way the answer to this question in the interest of the future of our country.

ANTONIO GARCiA Y CUBAS.

Mexico, _May 1st, 1870_.

NOTES ON THE SUPERSt.i.tIONS OF THE INDIANS OF YUCATAN

INFORME CONTRA IDOLORVM CVLTORES DEL OBiSPADO DE YVCATAN.

MADRID, 1639

BY PEDRO SANCHEZ DE AGUILAR

The abuses and superst.i.tions in which those Indians of Yucatan believe and the abuses which they cherish are mostly inherited from their forebears, and are as numerous as they are varied in kind. I am including in this report all I was able to investigate, so that they may enable the curates to disapprove them publicly, and in their sermons to reprimand the Indians on account of them.

They believe in dreams which they try to interpret to suit the occasion.

On hearing the cawing (or cackle) of a bird they call _kipxosi_, they interpret it to mean poor success to whatever enterprise they are engaged in at the time. They consider it as a bad omen or foreboding, as the Spaniards do with the female fox or the cuckoo.

If, while the Indian is traveling, he stumbles over a big stone among a pile which had been dug up to build or level a road, he venerates it by placing on the top of it a little twig, brushing his knees with another one in order not to get tired. This is a tradition of his forefathers.

If he happens to be traveling near sunset, and he fears that he will arrive late or even at night at the village he is bound for, he will drive a stone into the first tree he finds, believing that this will r.e.t.a.r.d the setting of the sun. Another superst.i.tion to the same effect is the pulling out of some of his eyelashes and blowing them toward the sun. These are superst.i.tions that came down to him by tradition from his forebears.

During lunar eclipses they still believe in the tradition of their forefathers to make their dogs howl or cry by pinching them either in the body or ears, or else they will beat on boards, benches, and doors. They say that the moon is dying, or that it is being bitten by a certain kind of ant which they call _xubab_. Once, while at the village of Yalcoba, I heard great noises during an eclipse of the moon which occurred that night, and in my sermon the next day I tried to make them understand the cause of the eclipse in their own language, according to the interpretation from the Philosopher: "The lunar eclipse is the interposing of the earth between the sun and the moon with the sun on top and the moon in the shadow." With an orange to represent the sphere of Sacrobosco, and two lit candles on either side, I explained to them plainly and at sight what an eclipse really was. They seemed astonished, and quite happy and smiling, cured of their ignorance and that of their forefathers. I gave orders to their chieftain (cacique) that he should punish in the future all those who made a noise on such occasions.

They also call certain old Indian shamans when a woman is in labor, and, with words of their former idolatry, he will enchant her and hear her confession. They do the same with some other patients. I could not find out all about this, for which I am very sorry.

There are some Indian medicine-men who, with similar enchantment, are supposed to cure the bites or stings of snakes, especially of the rattlesnakes, of which there are a great many here. The victims of such bites are sometimes delirious, and often the flesh around the wound will decay until they die. The remedy the wizards give them, according to what I heard, is to make them eat human excrement or drink the juice of lemons, or else they will take a domestic fowl and place its beak on the wound, and have it suck in this way the poison of the snakebite. The hen or chicken will of course die, and they immediately replace it by another live one, and repeat that until all the poison is absorbed.

When they build new houses, which occurs every ten or twelve years, they will not inhabit nor even enter them unless the old wizard has been brought even from a distance of one, two, or three leagues to bless it or consecrate it with his stupid enchantment. This, however, I have only heard, and I am now sorry never to have recorded it personally.

They are fortune-tellers, and they perform this feat with a heap of grained corn, counting always two and two grains, and if it comes out in even numbers, the fortune-teller will continue counting one, two, or three times over until it comes out uneven, bearing all the while in mind the main facts or reason for which he had been called on to tell the fortune, _vera gratia_. Once a girl ran away from home, and her mother, like any true Indian woman would have done in a similar case, immediately called one of those fortune-tellers, who drew lots on all the different roads until the fortune told of or pointed to a certain road the girl had taken and where she would be found. They sent out to look for her and found her in the village to which that road led. I punished that wizard, who was a native of a village at one league from Valladolid, and while I examined him with patience and slowly, I found that all the words he used in that so-called fortune-telling, while he counted the grains of corn, were no more than "Odd or even, odd or even" (_huylan nones, caylan pares_). He could not even tell me whether those words were meant as an invocation to Satan. In fact, he seemed not to know what they meant, for this particular wizard was a very great simpleton, almost imbecile.

In this city of Merida it is publicly known that there exist several Indian sorceresses (witches), who by using certain words can open a rosebud before it is time for its opening, which is given to the one they wish to attract to their lascivious desire. They let him smell of it, or they place it under his pillow; but should the person who gives it to him smell its perfume, she is said invariably to lose her mind for a long while, calling to the one she expected to inhale it, and in whose name the rose was opened by the witch--a worthy matter which serves as medicine as well as punishment, especially if it hits the double mark. It has also been a.s.sured that the Indian women of this city are wont to throw a certain enchantment into the chocolate which is ready for their husbands to drink, and by it they become bewildered. This I only heard however, and I could not vouchsafe its truth.

I will also note here what I saw as a child, and that is that they used to drown in a hole young puppies of a breed of dogs they raise as pets as well as for food. These are a kind of dogs, with but little or no hair at all, which they call _tzomes_.[14] It is an old Jewish dogma of _cosher_. See the Apostle, _ut abstineant se a suffocatis_, etc.--that they abstain from the food of animals dying by smothering or any kind of natural death.

OF THE RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OF THE INDIANS OF YUCATAN IN 1545

REPORT OF FRANCISCO HERNANDEZ

When our people discovered the kingdom of Yucatan they found crosses there, and one cross in particular which was made of stone and mortar, of a height of ten palms, and was erected in the center of a court or enclosure, very prominent and fair, and crowned with battlements; it stands alongside of a sumptuous temple and is very much frequented by a great number of people. This is on the island of Cozumel, which lies near the mainland of Yucatan. It is said that this cross was really adored as the G.o.d of Water or Rain; as often as there was a drought they went to sacrifice quail before it, as will be told later. When asked whence or through whom they had first heard of that sign, they replied that a very handsome man had once pa.s.sed through their country and that he left it with them, that they might always remember him by it. Others, it is said, answered that it was because a man more resplendent than the sun had died on that cross. This is referred to by Peter Martyr in chapter I of his Fourth Decade.

I shall refer to another tale or report which is very unusual and new regarding the Indies, and which until now has not been found in any other part of them. As this kingdom, on account of its close proximity to it, comes within the jurisdiction of my bishopric of Chiapa, on one of my visits I disembarked and remained at a very healthy port. I met there a clergyman, good, so it seemed, of mature age and honest, and [one] who knew the language of the natives from having lived there several years. As it was necessary for me to return to my episcopal residence, I nominated him as my vicar, and ordered and entreated him to travel inland and visit the Indians there and preach to them in a certain way in which I instructed him. After a certain number of months (I even believe it was one year), he wrote to me that on his trip he had met a princ.i.p.al lord or chief, and that on inquiring of him concerning his faith and the ancient belief all over his realm, he answered him that they knew and believed in G.o.d who was in heaven; that that G.o.d was the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. That the Father is called by them _Icona_,[15] and that he had created man and all things. The Son's name was _Bacab_,[16] who was born from a maiden who had ever remained a virgin, whose name was _Chibirias_,[17] and who is in heaven with G.o.d.

The Holy Ghost they called _Echuac_.[18] They say that _Icona_ means the great Father. _Bacab_, who is the son, they say killed _Eopuco_,[19] and flagellated him, crowning him with a crown of thorns, and placed him with arms extended on a pole, not meaning that he should be nailed to it, but tied (and in order to show him how, the chief extended his own arms), where he finally died. He was dead for three days, but on the third day he returned to life and went up to heaven, and he is there with his Father. After this immediately came _Echuac_, which is the Holy Ghost, and he filled the earth with all it needs. When asked what _Bacab_ or _Bacabab_ meant, he said it meant the son of the great Father, and that _Echuac_ meant merchant. And very good merchandise did the Holy Ghost bring to this earth, for he filled men with all their faculties, and divine and abundant graces. _Chibirias_ means mother of the Son of the great Father. He added, furthermore, that at a certain time all men would have to die, but he did not seem to know anything of the resurrection of the flesh. When asked how they came to know all these things, the chief replied that the lords taught their sons, and in this manner it descended from one age to another. They also a.s.sert that in olden times, long ago, there came to the land twenty men (he gave the names of fifteen of them), but because they were very poorly written, and furthermore as they do not have great importance for this report, I do not copy them. Of the five others the vicar says he could not obtain their names. The princ.i.p.al one was called _Cocolcan_,[20] and they called this one the G.o.d of all kinds of fevers. Two of the others are the G.o.ds of fish, still another two the G.o.ds of farms and homesteads [landed properties], still another was the G.o.d of Lightning, etc. They all wore long gowns or mantles, and sandals for their feet. They had long beards, and wore nothing to cover their heads. These men ordained that the people should go to confession and should fast, and some people fasted on Fridays because on that day _Bacab_ had died. The name of this day (Friday) is _Himis_,[21] and they honor it in their devotion on account of the death of _Bacab_. The chiefs (caciques) know all the particulars of those things, but the common people believe only in the three persons, _Icona_ and _Bacab_ and _Echuac_, and in _Chibirias_, the mother of _Bacab_, and also [in] the mother of _Chibirias_ called _Hischen_,[22] whom we consider to have been Saint Ann. All this above stated is from information I have received in a letter from that reverend father whose name is Francisco Hernandez, and I still have his letter among my papers. He also stated that he took the said chief to a Franciscan friar who lived near there, and that the cacique repeated all he said before the friar, and they remained both greatly surprised at it. If all those things just stated are true, it would seem that that part of the land had been (long ago) informed about our Holy Faith, for in no other part of the Indies have we ever found such news. It is true that in Brazil, which belongs to the Portuguese, it was stated that traces of the wanderings of Saint Thomas the Apostle had been discovered, but such news could not very well fly over through the air, and furthermore it is quite certain that the country and kingdom of Yucatan give us more special and singular cases to ponder over, and of far greater antiquity, if we think of the great, exquisite, and admirable way the most ancient buildings are constructed, also of a certain lettering in queer characters which are not found anywhere else.

Finally these are the secrets which only G.o.d knows.

GLOSSARY

_Alux_, _h'lox_, or more fully _h'loxkatob_. According to Brinton the meaning is "the strong clay images." He writes in his paper, The Folk-lore of Yucatan, that "the derivation of this word is from _kat_, which, in the Diccionario Maya-Espanol del Convento de Motul (MS. of about 1580), is defined as 'la tierra y barro de las olleras,' but which Perez in his modern Maya dictionary translates 'ollas o figuras de barro'; _ob_ is the plural termination; _lox_ is strong, or the strength of anything; _h'_ or _ah_, as it is often written, is the rough breathing which in Maya indicates the masculine gender."

_Atole._ Nahuan _atolli_, or _atlaolli_. Corn-meal gruel.

_Balam._ Tiger or mountain-lion. The word was applied also to a cla.s.s of priests and to kings as a t.i.tle of distinction.

_Balche._ A fermented liquor made from wild honey and the bark of a tree.

_Buhul_, _buuhul_. A section of a stick of wood split lengthwise in the middle.

_Bulihuah._ Tortillas made of corn-meal and beans. From _bul_ or _buul_, beans; _uah_, tortilla.

_Cacique._ Antillean word meaning a lord or chief.

_Camote._ Nahuan _camotl_, a kind of sweet-potato.

_Canlahuntaz._ Large loaves of native bread. From _canlahun_, fourteen; _taz_, tiers, or layers.

_Comal._ Nahuan _comalli_, clay griddle.