In the World of the Sun: A Cognitive Model of Mayan Cosmology

Abstract

Linguistic data from Mam, a contemporary Mayan language spoken in western Guatemala, is used to construct a cognitive model of Mayan cosmology. Terms for the directions, verb paradigms and the demarcation of time periods reveal a conception of space and time in which directionality, motion and time are inextricably linked to the movement of the sun. In Mam terms, direction does not exist independently of motion. Cardinal directions are defined as vectors rather than as fixed points in space. East and west become moments of reversal in the sun's diurnal oscillation between the horizons, and up and down are the only other, non-invertible spatial directions. Also modelled on the passage of the sun through the heavens, time is embodied as this movement between the eastern and western horizons. Comparison of this cognitive model with ethnographic as well as archaeological evidence suggests that a similar structure underlies all Mayan cosmologies. Miguel Leon-Portilla has called a passion for time 'the soul of Maya culture' (1973: I I2). Yet the precise nature of that time and the structure of the physical space through which it passes remains largely unexplored on a comparative level. Most comparative studies of Mayan cosmology have been attempts to reconstruct Classic Maya cosmology based on ethnographic and ethnohistorical sources treated as fortuitously preserved remnants of that cosmology (cf. Villa Rojas I973; Girard I962; LaFarge & Byers I93I). A notable exception to these piecemeal studies is Hunt's work on Mesoamerican symbolism. Taking a structuralist approach, her analysis reveals a Mesoamerican symbolic deep structure based on a 'quadripartite, yearly, agrarian, solar calendric cycle' (Hunt I977: 248). She carefully stresses, however, that this deep structure, or armature, arises not from the universal characteristics of the human mind but from a 'root paradigm of ecology, agrarian schedules and invariant astronomical events' (I977: 249). The purpose of this article is to further such systematic comparison by clarifying a relationship between cognition and symbolisation that remains crucial, but often implicit, in the structuralist approach. I do this by outlining a cognitive model of Mayan cosmology based on an analysis of the concepts of space and time in Mam, a modern Mayan language spoken in the western highlands of Guatemala. Here I define 'Mayan' as the past and present Indian peoples speaking genetically related languages and occupying the geographical region extending from the Yucatan Peninsula in the north to the western regions of El Salvador and Honduras in the south (fig. i). By cosmology I mean the formal categorisation of space and time. What is intentionally lost ethno