Art and Myth of the Ancient Maya

Abstract

In Art and Myth of the Ancient Maya, Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos identifies the central narratives of ancient Maya mythology and explores their various permutations across centuries. Extrapolating outward from the Classic Maya ceramic vessel record, Chinchilla connects Maya mythic traditions to parallel myths throughout Mesoamerica. With careful attention also paid to local variants and points of divergence, he bridges the boundaries between cultural groups and their distinct worldviews. Chinchilla advocates for Maya myths to be analyzed not in isolation but rather as part of wider Mesoamerican mythic traditions, which share similar roots in deep antiquity (4–5, 48).The scope of the monograph spans centuries, connecting later Maya myths back to their ancient origins. To demonstrate the complexity and multiplicity of the extant Maya mythological record, Chinchilla weaves together disparate bases of evidence. In addition to reading the ancient Maya visual record iconographically, he compares various textual sources, ranging from deciphered hieroglyphic inscriptions (notably, the Cross Group Tablets from Palenque that feature prominently in chapter 3) to works composed (or at least transcribed) at a historical remove. Few mythical scenes in the ancient Maya art corpus are accompanied by lengthy descriptive text, but other evidentiary bodies provide useful comparison points between mythical narratives that are recorded centuries apart. Thus, Chinchilla’s discussion primarily revolves around the Popol Vuh, a K’iche’ Maya narrative from sixteenth-century highland Guatemala. The singularity of this document, as Chinchilla notes, is in its historical situating: it is one of few surviving manuscripts that detail Maya worldviews, but it is from a specific time and place. At times, scholarship has treated the Popol Vuh as an absolute, seamlessly applying the document to illuminate practices of the ancient past. However, Chinchilla analyzes the Popol Vuh not as a “static, authoritative source on Maya myths” but as one of many tools with which to identify and relate similar narratives from the Mesoamerican visual, material, and textual record (4). In so doing, the core mythological characters and chronicles that define the backbone of Maya cosmologies comes further into focus. Ultimately, Chinchilla advocates for a persisting relationship between mythological scenes in the ancient Maya art corpus that relate to the text of the Popol Vuh, but he is rightfully careful to not suggest a one-to-one correlation, considering the centuries of separation between the sources and limitations of its application.The book is divided into nine chapters. The first three outline the methodological stakes of the project, ranging from historiographic discussions on the application of colonial texts to ancient images, to a consideration of the ways Maya sources structure the concept of Mesoamerican creation. Throughout, Chinchilla pays careful attention to how these various sources craft cross-temporal notions of Mesoamerica cosmogony. The remaining six chapters are each devoted to one of what Chinchilla identifies as “nodal subjects” within Maya mythology: the Maiden, the Grandmother, the Sun’s Opponents, the Sun, the Perfect Youth, and the Father. The identifications of these “nodal subjects”—tropes that structure variations of the same mythic narrative—are derived from Alfredo López Austin’s late twentieth-century scholarship on Mesoamerican mythology (4, 24, 26). In brief, Chinchilla identifies the nodal subjects of Maya (and Mesoamerican) myths by analyzing different versions of similar mythic scenes and texts. Despite the diversity of myths, the repetitiveness of mythic structure as well as similar protagonists across time and space reveal the basic tenets of Mesoamerican myth history.Lavishly illustrated and full of novel insights, Art and Myth of the Ancient Maya presents fresh ways to understand how core principles of ancient Maya myths persevered and evolved over time, from painted vessel scenes to sixteenth-century texts to modern oral narratives.