Flame, icons and healing: a colonial Maya ontology

Abstract

The Ritual of the Bacabs is an eighteenth-century Yucatec Maya language manuscript containing over forty healing chants and numerous remedies for a variety of illnesses. In this paper, I reconstruct features of colonial Maya ontology through an analysis of those healing chants accompanying treatments involving fire and heat. In particular, I demonstrate that the manipulation of fire and heat in autochthonous healing was a means of managing kinam, a ‘force’ which Maya past and present discern as a relative quality of things and people. Managing kinam occurs as the healer acts upon the material ‘icons’ (uayasba) of beings involved in the rite, including indigenous deities, medicines, and parts of the healer's own body. Furthermore, in contrast with Western semiotics, I argue that these chants exhibit a colonial Maya ontology in which uayasba signifiers are considered co-substances rather than substitutions.