01x05 - Central America: The Burden of Time

[bunniefuu]

in the jungles of Central America,

European explorers came up

on the ruins of a vanished civilization.

In the solemn stillness of the forest,

wrote one,

the monuments were like sacred things,

like divinities

mourning over a fallen people.

The builders of these pyramids,

the Maya,

had achieved astonishing feats

of astronomy, science and mathematics.

They had invented writing

independently of the Old World.

Such sites,

said their discoverer,

were like a newly found history,

proving that the ancient peoples

of the Americas

had not been savages,

but had equalled the finest monuments

of the ancient Egyptians.

So much about them seemed

totally original,

and yet they were also intriguing clues

from a deeper common past of all humanity.

{an8}Central America was unique

{an8}in that up till

{an8}the time of the Spanish conquest,

it had no contact at all

with the other civilizations

of the Old World.

And yet if we compare the Maya

with the ancient Chinese,

the similarities of belief

and practice and symbol suggest

that the peoples of the Americas

never quite lost that deep connection

with their prehistoric origins in Asia.

The Maya shared with the Chinese

the fundamental belief

that civilization and humankind

are not set apart from nature,

but part of a natural order

whose workings it is the human duty

and the human interest to understand.

And like the Chinese,

the Maya did this through divination,

shamanism,

and through intellectual and moral control.

At the core of the Mayan view

of civilization

was an all-consuming obsession with time.

Time measured in vast recurring cycles

of hundreds of millions of years,

longer indeed than the universe

is known to have existed.

The Greeks explored the cosmos

through geometry,

the Hindus through metaphysics,

the Maya

through the mathematics of eternity.

Mexico City,

the largest city on Earth.

Since the landing of Columbus in 1492,

two conceptions of civilization

have fought for the soul

of the peoples of the Americas.

The one foreign and recent,

that of the West,

the other ancient and native.

In the last 500 years,

despite genocide and forcible conversion,

the spiritual conquest

of the Native Americans

has never taken place.

For all this time,

they have tenaciously held on

to their old languages,

their old beliefs,

their old views of the cosmos and of time,

keeping faith,

as they would put it,

with their ancient future.

It's dawn in Chichicastanango,

Guatemala.

Chichy is one of the market towns

in the highlands of the Chiche Maya.

In Guatemala,

the majority of the people

are still Indian

and still speak the language of the ancient

pre-Columbian civilization here,

the Maya.

In front of the Church of St. Thomas,

travelers burn copal incense,

asking forgiveness

from the Mayan spirit guardians

at the dawn.

All around the market,

you can pick out the home regions

of the traders

by their woven jackets.

The bat is a symbol from the ancient

Mayan underworld,

worn by the last dynasty

of the Chicheal Maya.

Today, it's the emblem of the

township of Solola.

The designs on the women's clays

are the most elaborate,

carrying coded information

about family and lineage.

In such ways that people have preserved

part of the pattern

of the old Mayan universe.

Here in Chiche,

the traditional civic rituals

are kept up by the religious guilds,

the kofradias.

They hark back to pre-Columbian times,

organizing the festival days here,

both Christian and Maya.

In fact, it was through the kofradias here

in 1702

that Europeans were allowed

to see and copy

the only known manuscript

of the Mayan genesis,

the Popol Vuh.

Down the middle of their church

are Mayan altars

for the ancestors,

the shamans and the midwives.

The prayers of the kofradias

might stand as a text

for all the native peoples of the Americas.

These rituals of worship, they say,

were handed down

from our first ancestors,

and never lost

despite the Spanish conquest.

Don't expect us to give up these customs,

Father Christ.

For us,

only names and fortunes change.

In the hills above Mamostenango

is the house of a Mayan shaman,

Andrés Shiloch.

Andrés is a living link

with the pre-Spanish world.

A priest for nearly 50 years,

he's a chuchkaha,

a lineage head,

literally a mother-father.

He's also a daykeeper,

a guardian of the Mayan calendar.

Andrés uses sacred divination as a tool

to probe the ills of his patients,

to feel their past and future.

He lays out the coral tree

seeds and crystals,

according to the days of the

Mayan calendar,

a 260-day cycle based,

so the quiche believe,

on the gestation period of the human baby

within the womb.

Don't understand this by the way

in which the beams are,

the arrangement in which they lie.

Over the last few years I've travelled

to many parts of the world,

and everywhere pretty much you see

destruction of the environment and

w*r and so on.

People are making an enemy of the earth.

How does Don Andrés view that

from the Mayan tradition?

If we make an enemy of the earth,

we make an enemy of our own body.

For the Maya, the earth

was a sacred being.

For them, nature was benign and beautiful,

yet frightening in its palm.

For theirs, after all, was a land of

wild extremes of heat and cold,

ringed with volcanoes

and plagued by frequent earthquakes.

The Mayan book of creation,

The Popul Vuh,

tells a story of how humans

first came into this violent paradise.

The earth will need nurturing.

It will need bearers of

respect for its divinity.

And so it was human beings

who were given memory

to count the days

and bear time's burden.

Human beings who were responsible

for maintaining the rituals,

bonding nature,

humanity and the heavens.

And if they ever ceased,

the whole universe

would cease to have meaning.

In that myth in the Popul Vuh,

perhaps there's a distant race memory

of the migration of the ancestors

of the peoples of the Americas

thousands of years ago from Asia.

Even today,

in the Guatemalan countryside,

you can see rituals and beliefs

shared with the people of China

and East Asia.

The use of jade in death rites,

the symbolism of tortoise and bat,

divination, and here

the burning of prayers.

Ideas which go back

even before language itself.

Back to some deep

common root of humanity.

Today's people of Central America

partake of two very different conceptions

of nature and civilization.

The indigenous and the Western.

But whatever their ancestry,

they all still draw

on that great past

which developed untouched

by the outside world till 1492.

The native past is still literally

ever present.

The great carved heads of gods or rulers

stare impassively at the modern world,

created by a culture which arosed

here around 1000 BC,

the Olmecs.

In the art of the Olmecs,

from nearly 3000 years ago,

we can already feel

the grave sensibility

of the Central American universe.

Stoical, but possessed

of an inner strength

which would enable its people

to bear any burden.

Even one as heavy as the last 500 years.

The first great flower of

Central American civilization

took place in the first millennium A.D.

in the Valley of Mexico.

This is Teotihuacan.

The place where men became gods.

Here, the early Mexicans

built a vast city,

center of a trading empire

which extended all over Central America.

And here, independently of the Old World,

they built huge pyramids

rivaling those of Egypt and Babylonia.

Testimony that though separated

so widely by time and space,

the human mind

still creates the same symbols.

The same dreams of bridging the gulf

between Earth and Heaven.

It was the first time in 1971
that anybody had been in here.

And now, an extraordinary discovery,

made under the heart of the

Pyramid of the Sun,

has confirmed

that an elaborate cosmic symbolism

underlies the layout of the city.

A narrow passage through the lava

leads to a seven pronged chamber,

dead under the center of the pyramid.

So, professor,

where exactly are we now,

in relation to the pyramid?

This was the original pilgrimage place,

which had dictated the sighting

of the pyramid above.

It was the place of emergence

of the first ancestors,

alluded to

in the later creation myth of the Maya,

the Popolvul.

Humankind has always searched

for an explanation of the phenomena

of nature in the cosmos,

says the excavator,

Professor Roberto Gallegos.

And here, they turned the earthly city

into a mirror image

of the heavenly order.

So Teotihuacan was

the first true urban civilization

in Central America.

And if we compare its origins

with those of the first cities

in ancient Iraq, or India,

or even better in Shang Dynasty China,

then a common picture begins to emerge,

at the heart of which

is the idea of the city

as an earthly pattern of the cosmic order.

You can see it here,

with these great ceremonial axes

intersecting in the four directions,

aligned to the surrounding mountains

and to the constellations,

with the subterranean world

represented by that primordial cave

deep beneath our feet,

under the very center of the pyramid,

whose innermost recesses were illuminated

by the sun every summer solstice.

It's a ritual theater

where humankind maintains

the order of the universe.

And here in Central America,

cities retained that function,

even though they might become

centers of commerce and trade and so on.

Ideology, then,

became one of the driving forces

in the development of civilization.

Religious, social, political,

call it what you will,

they're intermingled at that time.

And ideology is also the key

to understanding that fateful change

which came over humanity

with the beginning of civilization,

by which the few came

to dominate the many,

as is still the case

across much of the world today.

The impetus of civilization now

spread across Central America,

from the Valley of Mexico

to the rainforests of Guatemala

and the Maya.

At the time of Europe's dark age,

splendid city-states arose here.

The most intriguing

is Copán in Honduras.

Copán was ruled by a talented dynasty

from the 5th to the 9th century AD.

Its public plazas,

pyramids and ball courts,

features shared by all Mayan cities,

were here adorned with wonderful sculpture.

Here, the Mayan artist

demonstrated a prolific imagination

and a creative freedom which at times

approaches a Western naturalism.

The recent decipherment of Mayan writing

enables us to do now

what would have been impossible

only a few years ago,

enter into the lives

and even the feelings

of the rulers commemorated here.

Especially extraordinary

is a series of portraits of

a king we know by his hieroglyph sign

as Eighteen Rabbit.

Here's the fierce countenance of a man

in his prime, his mid-forties,

dated 11th October 721.

Is it just our imagination,

or is this not a softer expression,

mellowed with age and experience?

Late in July 736,

this crude portrait,

strangely sardonic, perturbed even.

Two years after this image was dedicated,

Eighteen Rabbit was captured

by a rival king and beheaded

on the 3rd of May, 738.

He would have been in his early sixties.

Writing was invented here

independently as it had been

in the Old World,

yet another clue to the common patterns

in human development.

And the greatest monument

to Mayan literacy

is the hieroglyphic stairway of Kopan.

It was literally a hill of signs,

a huge stepped ramp 50 feet wide,



with well over 1200 glyphs

telling the mythic and dynastic

chronology of Kopan

down to 755 AD,

when it was dedicated

by King's Smoke Shell.

It's the longest single written inscription

in pre-Columbian America.

A monument to writing

and to time.

The last known king of Kopan,

Yashpak, died in the winter of 820.

The carving of the last date here

was left unfinished

on the 10th of February, 822.

With that, the dynasty vanished

and the city returned to jungle.

A few peasants continued to farm here,

but the land never again supported a city.

Around the same time,

Tikal too was deserted.

Soon all the classic Mayan cities

had gone.

The Mayan collapse

is still a great mystery.

The land may have become exhausted.

The environment destroyed.

Perhaps the civilization

simply lost its nerve.

But the legacy carried on

in the hearts and minds

of the common people.

And when the Europeans

first stumbled on these ruins

in 1848,

the Indians living in the forest

could still give their ancient name.

Tikal.

The place where the Count of Days was kept.

Where the ancestors had borne

the burden of time.

With the collapse of the classic Maya,

the focus of Central American civilization

shifts back to its old heartland,

the Valley of Mexico.

Here, ringed by mountains,

was a wide plain and a great lake

with islands and fertile shores.

Today, it's all covered by Mexico City.

Here, in the 14th century,

a warlike tribe settled,

who called themselves Mexica.

The city they founded here,

Tenochtitlan, was the precursor

of the largest city on earth.

Beneath today's streets,

in the crypt of the cathedral itself,

we can still tap the power of the culture

which rose here in the 15th century.

In one of the most dramatic episodes

in human history.

The Aztecs.

The art of the Aztecs

still holds a fearful fascination.

An art of tremendous spirituality,

but a spirituality of a kind

unlike anything we recognize

from our own civilization.

This statue of the earth goddess

Coatliquoe,

found here in 1790,

was hastily reburied.

Fearing it might be seen

by the youth of Mexico.

Fearing they might be exposed

to its still dark and potent magic.

The present center of Mexico City,

around the cathedral,

was also the ritual center

of the Aztec city.

Excavation here since the 70s

has uncovered the foundations of the

great pyramid of the Aztec w*r god.

This is where the Spanish under Cortes,

when they sacked the city in 1521,

saw horrific scenes of human sacrifice.

The Aztecs believed

that the gods needed blood

and the hearts of human victims

to nourish them in the struggle

with the forces of darkness.

Without them, the sun would cease to rise.

And by the time of the Spanish conquest,

thousands could die on this spot

in a single ceremony.

All round the site,

the archaeologists found

grim evidence of their devotions.

These are stone representations

of the skull racks

on which the victims'

heads were mounted.

This is one of those places on earth

whose terrible associations

still seem to linger.

How was it then that a civilization

of such brilliance in the arts,

in sculpture, in textiles, in poetry

could have been so committed

to mass bloodletting

and human sacrifice?

So that in a four-day festival,



up the steps of the great temple here

to have their hearts ripped out

to the place of swimming in blood

and reeking to the heavens.

When the Spanish saw scenes like this,

they thought that it must be literally

the work of the devil,

it was so wholly other.

And yet, the Aztecs were only unique

in the scale of their k*lling,

for every human civilization

has used sacrifice,

especially in relation to religion.

The theologian and the executioner

have been intimates throughout history.

The problem of the Aztecs, then,

is a problem for all of us.

To speculate,

it would seem that the idea of

the shedding of blood being necessary

for the continuing of life

became deeply rooted in our psyche

during the thousands of generations

we spent as hunter -gatherers

in prehistory,

so deeply rooted that

bloodshed as a symbol

is still the most powerful symbol

of sacrifice today,

and can still erupt with

atavistic
power and v*olence.

The seans of frenzied k*lling which

Cortes and his followers saw here,

with their captured friends being dragged

up the steps to their death,

were, in a sense,

proof of the Aztecs' piety.

As Las Casas rightly saw,

for uniquely among

the great civilizations of the world,

they raised solidarity with the universe

above everything,

including human life.

In that, they couldn't be more different

from the humanistic values of the

great Old World civilizations.

To us, it may appear irrational,

murderous in his brutality.

And yet, it is a mirror

held up to our humanity,

which we ignore at our cost.

By a 52 to 1 chance,

Cortes had arrived

in the Aztec Year 1 read,

when their ancient prophecies

said the god Quetzalcoatl

would return from exile in the east.

For the Aztecs, the coincidence

drained away their will to resist.

They immediately understood

that these mysterious outside powers

would be fatal to their own universe.

On the terrible final night

when Tenochtitlan fell,

an omen appeared to the Aztecs,

which for them symbolized

the breakup of their mythic and

cosmological order.

That night,

it began to rain,

but more like a heavy dew than rain.

Then suddenly the omen appeared,

burning like fire in the sky.

It wheeled in spirals like a whirlwind,

giving off light in showers of sparks

like red-hot embers.

It made noises,

rumbling and hissing

like metal on fire.

It circled the walls near the lake shore.

It hovered over the temple.

And then it moved out

into the middle of the lake,

where it vanished.

No one cried out

When the omen came into view.

The people knew what it meant,

and they watched in silence.

After the conquest of Guatemala,

the Spanish built their new capital,

Antigua, in the shadow of the

ancient sacred volcanoes.

It was intended as a showcase

of the ideals of European civilization.

But the reality behind this

humanistic facade

was the greatest genocide in history.

It's estimated as many as 90%

of the native population of the Americas

died of disease or v*olence

in the first century of the conquest.

As many as 50 million people.

Among the Europeans,

who were horrified by what they saw,

was Jose de Acosta.

The Spaniards must bear

absolute responsibility

for what is happening here,

he wrote.

We have betrayed in our deeds

what we professed in our words.

We have exploited and plundered

these poor people, with no attempt

to protect their human rights.

We have not given them
Christianity and sincerity,

but under compulsion,

fraud and v*olence.

The papacy itself urged

on the enslavement of the natives

in the name of Christ.

But it was among the Catholic clergy

that the European conscience grew.

The greatest of these
early liberation theologians

was Bartolomeo de las Casas,

Bishop here in Cobain.

A passionate defender of Indian rights,

las Casas' memory is still revered here.

This is one of the few churches
in Guatemala,

where even today the services are

sung not in Spanish,

but in Maya.

Las Casas would take his case

right up to the king and queen of Spain

themselves,

urging on them justice for the Indians.

And gradually he came to realize that

his arguments against the enslavement
of the Indians

applied with equal force

to the black slaves from Africa

and all the oppressed peoples of the world.

There's an extraordinary sequel

to this story of Las Casas.

An incident which lights up

the history of the 16th century

like a flash of lightning

and continues to illuminate us

even today.

In 1550, in Valladolid in Spain,

there took place a public debate

between Las Casas

and the top Aristotelian philosopher,

Sepulveda.

The questions at stake

go right to the heart of the
world's problems even today.

In essence, what right

does the first world have

to dominate, enslave or exploit

the third world?

Are not these people,

as Las Casas, rational,

feeling human beings with a soul

just like the rest of us entitled to

equality of treatment?

And Las Casas goes on to bring

fascinating arguments

from his study of Greek
and Roman civilization

to show that the city-states
of Central America

conformed in most respects

to the Greek view

of what an ideal state should be.

Rational political entities entitled to

respect, patience, persuasion

and, again, kindness.

No doubt Las Casas won the moral debate.

But as the whole of
subsequent history shows,

the rulers of the West,

the people with power and money,

continued to view

the indigenous peoples of the world.

From the Indians of Central America

to the blacks of Africa,

as what the Greeks, to their discredit,

had termed natural slaves.

The West's progress to civilization

has been long and painful.

It would be a hundred and fifty years

after the conquest

that the last Mayan stronghold fell.

In the remote jungles of northern Guatemala

stood the island fortress of Flores

in Maya Tayasal.

The prophetic books of the Yucatan Maya

foretold that catastrophe
would revisit them

every cycle of thirteen cattunes,

two hundred and fifty-six or seven years.

The next cycle was due to begin in 1697.

Armed with that knowledge,

the Spanish att*cked

on the 13th of March.

In the middle of Lake Petén,

they overcame the Mayan boats,

obsidian-tipped arrows

useless against Spanish
armour and musket fire.

Amid abandoned w*r canoes,

they landed where only the previous year,

King Can Ek had greeted a Spanish embassy

with flowers and music

from drums and flutes.

The last chapter

in the long and dramatic history

of the independent Maya

was about to end.

The defenders fled

and the Spaniards marched uphill

to the top of the island,

to the great temple of Tayasal.

It took the Spaniards a single day

to destroy the twelve temples
here on the island,

to smash their thousands of idols

and to conclude in the evening

by celebrating mass

here on the highest point amid

the ruins of the great temple of Tayasal

where the church now stands.

The last independent

kingdom of the Maya had gone down.

The locals here seem to have accepted

this almost fatalistically

as an inescapable result

of their view of the repeating

cycles of time.

For three times since the tenth century,

the cycle of 256 or seven years

had brought them catastrophe.

That, in Maya's eyes,

was the true burden of time.

Today, the old count still continues.

The greatest catastrophe of

modern Guatemalan history,

the US-backed coup which overthrew

their democracy in 1954,

happened exactly 257 years

after the fall of Tayasal.

Today, the Maya,

the majority of the population,

still live dominated by European elite.

The recent guerilla w*r left



It is hoped that in the 1990s,

with a new democracy,

their history will take a different course.

The Mayan strategy for survival

remains stubbornly collective.

In great festivals like this at Zunil,

they celebrate the saints as guardians

of the community,

not as Christian deities.

For them, identity still resides

in the collective values

represented by ancestors

and community.

The European elites,

who have ruled Central America for so long,

had other views of past and future.

One of Guatemala's modern dictators,

Estrada Cabrera,

expressed his faith

in the values of European civilization,

by constructing concrete parthenons

all over the land.

Monuments to colonial progress,

to the triumph of Greeks over barbarians.

In the capital, Guatemala City,

as all over Central America,

the native culture has been swamped

by the consumer values

of the great neighbor to the north,

Uncle Sam.

In the city, the Indians are submerged,

strangers in their own land,

widows of the civil w*r,

begging in the shadows.

There's no going back in history.

But who can contemplate such

visions of future and past

without a pang of loss?

Here, where, as the creation myth

that Popol Vuh said,

human beings had held the balance

between the spirits of the ancestors

and the spirits of earth and sky.

In the Mayan calendar,

today is the holiest of all days.

Washakhip Bats ate monkey.

And this morning,

seemingly out of nowhere,

thousands of ordinary Guatemalan Indians

are converging in response

to a call

from a secret world of the spirit.

For on this day of the year,

the daykeepers will initiate

new shamans who will carry on

bearing the burden of time.

In the 500 years since Columbus,

these people have lived outwardly

in Western time

and Western history.

And yet, all the while,

they have patiently tended

a secret universe.

At times, it may have seemed

that their obstinate, faithful care

of the burden of time

would be their downfall.

But perhaps, after all,

it has been their salvation.

For it was the means by which

they preserved identity itself.

Down to a new age of

tolerance and pluralism,

when Native Americans may again live

in their own history,

in their own time.