Royal visions; art of the Maya courts

Art in America, Dec, 2004 by Anna Blume

of Lady Xok in these three masterful lintels, more central and potent than that of her husband, that is truly unparalleled in Maya courtly art.

Much of what we know about the very complex Maya religion comes from the Popol Vuh, a text secretly written down in the 16th century in the Roman alphabet the Maya had been taught by Spanish priests. Ancient bark codices that likely recorded mythology, literature and other kinds of texts were systematically burned and otherwise destroyed by the Spanish, who wished to eradicate the extensive beliefs of their newly colonized subjects. (Other codices met their end during the unearthing of tombs, dissolving on the instant of their contact with the air.) Just four of these texts (not included in the exhibition) survived the colonial period, leaving the more terse inscriptions to do the work of reconstructing Maya customs and beliefs.

In the section titled "The Divine Models of Courtly Culture," we find that Maya deities or supernatural beings "were not discrete, separate entities in the way we think of Greek or Roman gods. Certain supernatural characters had affinities that caused them to merge with one another in ways that seem fluid and unbound." (3) Such entities (called way) were often incorporated into elaborate scenes, especially on the ceramic pots that the Maya slip-painted, fired and buried with their owners.

On one cylinder vessel with companion spirits, of unknown provenance, the artist has subtly woven into the composition the Maya belief in three realms--sky, earth and underworld. A kind of conversation occurs between natural and supernatural beings, traversing and connecting the realms. Three dancing human figures wearing masks and pelts, prominently placed in the middle (earth) realm, gesture to figures above and below them. In the upper register (the sky), a celestial bird swoops in and opens its mouth as if speaking, and an elegant screeching serpent is coiled about its neck. Two seated human figures also float in the sky realm, one peering into a pot. The other gazes, as if in a mirror, at a disembodied head.

In the lower area (the underworld), a skeleton brandishes a knife, while a jaguar, with the curled mark of a water lily on its head, writhes in pain within a rectangular field framing its curved and spotted body. Its pose is the distinctive one of a sacrificial victim. The jaguar appears a second time, mouth open wide as if responding to the shrieking serpent above, but it appears to be half-morphed into an abstract, circular form.

Though hundreds of Maya books were burned, we do have their visual art and their hieroglyphic inscriptions to partially reveal a poetics we are only beginning to understand. Western alphabetic writing lacks the Maya's demonstrative, visual figuration with words. When we say "the leg of the table," we no longer see the animal leg and hoof that may have been the origin of this figure of speech, or rather the figure in the speech. When we look at the Maya through the words and images they have left behind, we best do so by way of poetry, and specifically of metaphor. One thing stands in for another, making two meanings: one present, the other evoked, like a textile in which weft and warp threads of green and red cross to form a phantom, flickering third color.