Pilgrim in the Palace of Words

by Glenn Dixon

  A gecko skittered over the stones, and in the underbrush butterflies floated through the thick air. I trudged down another trail, and more ruins appeared. When the jungle opened up, the sun overhead scorched me. Ahead I spotted the back of the first high temple. Circling it, I came into the central plaza of Tikal.

  I must have stood there for a while in jaw-dropping amazement. Two massive temples, about fourteen storeys high, faced each other across a grassy area the size of a football pitch. It was like Red Square in Moscow or the Temple Mount in Jerusalem — a grand plaza in the heart of the city, liberated once more from the vines and roots, a vast tumble of stairs and limestone palaces.

  To the east of the plaza was the Temple of the Giant Jaguar, a nine-stepped pyramid with a central staircase rising steeply up its front face. On the top platform a dark doorway led into the temple proper. Only the high priest and the king would have entered here, and deep in its shadows they would have performed the bloodlettings — horrendous self-mutilations.

  Blood was thought by the ancient Maya to be the source of life, the font of energy, which of course it is. But for them it was something even more. It possessed magical properties. It was liquid soul.

  The Temple of the Giant Jaguar was built around the year 700 A.D. at the very height of the golden age of the Maya. It looked over a plaza that was once paved with mortared white lime. Across from it is the Temple of the Masks, slightly blunter and not quite as high. The two temples, facing each other, their staircases swinging madly into the sky, presented a unique metaphor for the Maya. Bookending the broad plaza, they became the walls of a massive ritual ball court, while the vast open space between them served as the playing floor.

  At the height of its power Tikal often found itself at war with other Mayan city states. Captives from the hated cities to the east were brought up these high steps and ritually bound in hemp ropes. They were tied up tightly and rolled down the steep steps of the temples, crashing to their deaths. In this way the metaphor was pushed even further. The captives became human game balls, bouncing off the gigantic slanting walls of the ball court.

  Real or metaphoric, the ball court always represents the story of the Hero Twins and their victory over the gods of the underworld. It is, as Mario told me, one of the central themes of Mayan cosmology — understanding the cycles of creation and destruction in order to escape from them, to find a way to stave off the inevitable.

  I sat halfway up the temple steps and thought about everything. Gazing across the plaza, the door to the underworld, I wondered about the Mayan myths. Some of the elements seemed vaguely familiar — heroes resurrecting themselves from death, a deep and terrifying underworld, home of the gods of death. Is there an underlying grammar in myths? As in Noam Chomsky’s view of language, are there deep structures, fundamental configurations, in myth stories around the world?

  Luckily, the Maya wrote their stories down. The Mayan texts were there to decode in their original form. In bits and pieces they lay all around me.

  Tremendous strides have been made in the past couple of decades to decipher and understand the strange block glyphs of the Mayan writing system. The bulbous, twirling shapes are quite unlike any other writing method on the planet. However, the breaking of the code was made infinitely more difficult by a disastrous series of events in 1549. Bishop Diego de Landa, a conquistador/missionary, publicly burned hundreds, if not thousands, of Mayan books in the central plazas of the Yucatán. It’s said that the population watched and wept as the books, many of them bound in jaguar skins, curled in the flames.

  Only four of these books, or codices, survive. They’re made from fig bark pages covered in a thin layer of lime. The so-called Dresden Codex is in the best shape. It still has a full seventy-eight pages that can be read. Two of the other codices are more fragmentary. They’re kept in museums in Paris and Madrid. A fourth is housed in Mexico City, though its authenticity is doubted by some authorities.

  The Dresden Codex features an almanac of good and bad luck days, tables charting the orbits of Venus, predictions of solar eclipses, and even warnings about diseases. Ironically, much of what we do know was written down by the book burner Bishop de Landa. His own journals contain a complete account of Mayan ways at the beginning of the colonial period, a description of the workings of the calendar accompanied by recognizable pictures of the glyphs for kin, or “day,” and the names used for various days and months. These are the only clues, a sort of Rosetta stone, by which the strange glyphs could be decoded.

  De Landa, not surprisingly, got a lot wrong, haughtily supposing that the glyphs were based on an alphabetic system. In fact, the glyphs are more like Egyptian hieroglyphics or even Chinese characters. They’re based on logographic symbols, the oldest of which are actually pictographs of the things being referenced.

  This is only the beginning, though, because in Mayan glyphs, as in other logographic writing systems, the main feature usually has various affixes. In the Mayan block glyphs there are prefixes to the left or above the main character, and suffixes to the right or below. These generally alter the meaning in predictable ways not unlike how we negate a “thing” by adding the prefix no, as in nothing.

  To complicate matters further, the central glyphs in Mayan writing are often based on homonyms, similar-sounding syllables, almost like puns, so that a central glyph of a fish in Maya, while representing the large fish xoc, might under other circumstances stand for the homonym root xoc, which is used in the words for to count or to read. Similarly, ah kin, a bearded circle, represents the sun, though it can also refer to a day.

  At any rate, despite the burning of the books by Bishop de Landa, there are still thousands of glyphs carved into stone throughout the many Mayan sites. There are glyphs on walls and on staircases, and most important, on stelae, or standing stone markers, found all over the city and just waiting to be read and understood.

  Besides the famous four codices, another book exists — a copy made by an unknown Mayan priest, who transliterated the most important stories from the ancient glyphs into the new Latin script. This book was discovered in 1702 by the Spanish priest Francisco Ximénez, and rather than burning it, this cleric, unlike Bishop de Landa, treasured it and even had it translated into Spanish.

  This rare and fabulous fifth book contains the magnificent Popol Vuh epic — the creation and destruction myths of the Maya. Here we get our first full elaboration of the Mayan view of the world. It begins in a fantastic string of alliteration: “Are utzijoxik wa’e, k’ak atz’ininoq, k’akachamamoq, katz’inonik, k’akasilanik, k’akalolinik, katolona, puch upa kaj.” This translates roughly as: “This is the account of how all was suspended, all was calm, all in silence, all motionless under an empty sky. The surface of the Earth had not appeared; there were only the ripples and murmurs of the unending sea.”

  Beautiful! This is the story of how things started, and like many beginnings, it kicks off with the creation of the world. Before that there was nothing. The Mayan glyph for zero is a stylized seashell, and that makes sense here. Emptiness is the lack of land; there is only the emptiness of a vast and dark ocean.

  Much of the Popol Vuh text then goes on to deal with the creation of the first people. The gods initially attempted to construct creatures out of mud and earth, but they kept falling apart. They just wouldn’t stick together. So the gods tried again. According to the Popol Vuh, they wanted to create a being that would speak to them with respect, something that would worship them. They made their second creatures out of wood, but these stupid beasts ate and fought and shat and had no idea of the gods’ existence. So the gods destroyed these disrespectful creatures in a great flood. Sound familiar? It’s the flood myth again. The story goes on, however, to explain that the wood creatures who survived went into the trees and became monkeys.

  Lastly, the gods tried making men out of yellow and white corn, and this time they were successful. These beings were intelligent. In fact, they were too intelligent. They saw as the god
s themselves saw, they understood as the gods themselves understood, so they didn’t respect the gods and believed they were their equals.

  Here I can’t help but think once more of the Tower of Babel. “Behold,” said the God of the Bible, “they are one people and they have one language and this is only the beginning of what they will do. Nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.”

  Like God in the Old Testament, these Mayan deities also grew wrathful. Humans were much too clever and something had to be done. In the Popol Vuh there’s no talk of scattering their languages, for in the Mayan world there was only one common language. Instead the gods “took them apart just a little.” They blinded their intelligence as the reflection in a mirror is “blinded by a breath on the face of it.”

  That’s an astounding metaphor: clouding the mirror with the hot breath of the gods.

  Do you remember all that stuff I was saying about Creole languages? The real point is that the human brain is hardwired to produce language. Our brains churn out grammars, formulaic structures, and our words — whatever they might be — simply get slotted into their proper places. This was Noam Chomsky’s suggestion, and it puts him firmly in the camp of the structuralists.

  Structuralism is a field of sociological theory that looks for common elements in cultures and, ultimately, the universal structures of the human mind. Structuralists say that no matter how strange the customs of a place, no matter how bizarre the food, manners, and behaviours, there are always underlying structures, deep structures, that are components of basic human experience. We all eat, sleep, and need shelter. So when we look at the kinds of symbols found in creation myths, marriage rituals, or funerals, we see that some of the elements are the same. Or at least that’s the theory.

  The Popol Vuh as a creation myth is a pretty good example. It’s no coincidence there’s a flood myth in the Popol Vuh. The structuralists contend that these stories, these archetypes, are hardwired into us — well, not exactly the concept of a flood perhaps, but the idea of the gods being angry at us, the notion of being cleansed. I tend to be skeptical about structuralism, but still the evidence is there. We would be hard-pressed to find a civilization more untouched by Western ideas than that of the Maya, yet we still find an astonishing similarity in their myths and stories, if we’re willing to dig for them.

  It’s a fascinating idea. From Claude Lévi-Strauss to Margaret Mead, from Carl Jung to Noam Chomsky, these sorts of theories are found. Joseph Campbell, in his book The Power of Myth, says that all people seem to have wonderfully similar foundation stories. The differences are only in the surface appearances, and even these can be accounted for in predictable ways. For instance, Campbell noted that cultures that thrive in deserts, in the dry, barren places of the world, often develop religions with a single god. The religions of the jungle, meanwhile, where richness and fertility is a fact of everyday life, usually have a pantheon of gods — hundreds and sometimes thousands of spirits — that reside in all the abundance around them.

  Such structuralist theories rest on the idea that we’re all — underneath the cultural and linguistic baggage — essentially the same, that we, as humans, construct our understanding of the world in specific ways. And it’s true. We all have tales of destruction and resurrection. We all have stories of love and death, of heroes and gods and poor players on the mighty stage of life. And though they seem on the surface to be wildly divergent, their underpinnings really all fit into the same solid formulas. They’re all different expressions of the same essential human traits.

  Like, for example, fear.

  It was already getting late in the day and the sun was slanting at a precarious angle through the branches. I remembered something Mario had told me. He’d said that you could climb up something called the Cat Temple. You could scale to the top and from there watch the sun set, a great gob of fire dipping into the jungle canopy. “It’s amazing,” he’d told me.

  I didn’t really have any idea where the Cat Temple was, but I strode down a path that led away from the central acropolis into the jungle to the west and to the far-flung ruins that lay there. The air was heavy and silent in the heat of the dying afternoon. Only a narrow red dirt trail slithered through the thick foliage, and I knew that a couple of steps off the path would leave me completely lost in the foliage. Roots and vines dripped from the branches, forming organic stalagmites. Leaves the size of small cars blotted out the sky.

  Mario had made me a little hand-drawn map, but I couldn’t quite make it out. I passed by one set of ruins and then strayed into another maze of trails that seemed to go the right way. Except for my own breathing and the thump of my feet on the trail, it was as silent as it ever got in the jungle.

  Soon I was completely lost. The sun had sunk below the canopy, and the shadows were growing thickly. I stopped and heaved off my backpack. I didn’t have much — some water, a camera, and a guidebook to the region. I hoped the guidebook might have a better map, so I fished it out of the pack. The pages fell open in my hands to a section that spoke about jaguars.

  Now the Petén is a huge region that’s pretty much untouched rain forest. At dawn and at dusk the forest begins to swell with bird calls and the patter of tiny animals. I’d already seen a peccary waddle by near the first set of ruins, a sort of large rodent-like creature with a snout like a horse. There were armadillos and grey foxes, spider monkeys and anteaters. And apparently there were jaguars.

  Jaguars are spotted and are almost the same size as the tigers of Asia. The difference is that, in adapting to the jungle where running at full speed is unnecessary, indeed impossible, they lope along a little lower to the ground. They’ve developed massive forearms that look something like the biceps of a heavyweight boxer, and they can jump. Boy, can they jump.

  So I was down on one knee reading the excerpt on jaguars and it said that, though jaguars are reasonably plentiful in the jungle, there’s no need to panic. Jaguars only come out at night. They’re fully nocturnal.

  I glanced up. The sky was definitely growing dark.

  Furthermore, the guide said, in the extremely unlikely event of coming across a jaguar, you shouldn’t move. You should stay calm and not make any sudden movements.

  At that precise moment, overhead, a low growl rumbled through the foliage. It began as almost a purring, but soon erupted into a throaty roar.

  I turned and ran for all I was worth, careening down the jungle trail, sweat almost obliterating my field of vision, while all around me the jungle shadows got deeper and deeper.

  I must have run a kilometre or two, and somehow, through sheer luck, I came out at the little booth where the guard was still snoozing. His head bobbed once as I raced by, but I only stopped when I got to the safety of my concrete cubicle in the jungle lodge. I stood there and shook for a while, then the generator shut down and the single buzzing light bulb snapped off. I crawled in under the mosquito netting over the bed and gradually fell into a dreamless sleep.

  I was awakened at dawn, as I was every morning, by a terrific symphony of bird calls. Hurriedly, I pulled on my clothes and walked down the path and into the forest. Up above in the trees, literally hundreds of parrots squawked and shrilled. The air was electric with sound. A tapir ambled in front of me, looking much like a pig except that it had a snout almost like a stunted elephant trunk. It passed across the trail in front of me, unconcerned, and disappeared into the forest. Wild turkeys scurried in and out of the underbrush, their tail feathers shot through with luminescent and neon hues. The place was thick with life.

  Up in another tree I heard the same low rumbling of the previous night. It wasn’t a jaguar at all, of course. It was a howler monkey. These creatures, much bigger than spider monkeys, have adopted the strategy of mimicking large predators, and failing that, they sneer at you and piss, carefully aimed I might add, so that many explorers have had unwelcome showers.

  I found the Cat Temple later that day. Stupid me. It wasn’t cat at all but cuatro. Sp
anish for four. I guess I was still thinking of jaguars. At any rate, Temple Four stands ninety metres above the forest floor and is probably the tallest Pre-Columbian structure in the western hemisphere.

  Temple Four is a wild crumble of stone now, draped in its lower quarters by vines and branches that enable you to climb it as you might scale a tree. Here and there steps lead up a little way and then break off into ruins again, forcing a climber to find another way up. In places some kind souls have left ropes or bits of ladders. Halfway up I came level with a family of howler monkeys skittering and barking in the trees. I barked right back at them, and they were silent for a moment. Through the branches once I caught sight of a toucan with its multicoloured beak. That was the cartoon bird I recalled from my youth — the bird on a Froot Loops cereal box.

  Then, finally, at the top I came out onto the temple terrace. I was above the trees now, and the jungle canopy was a green felt carpet stretching on all sides to the farthest horizon. To the east I could see the roof combs of the Temple of the Giant Jaguar poking above the greenery. Here was a shot employed by George Lucas in Star Wars. He used this place as his rebel base, and though it was certainly otherworldly, that no longer seemed right.

  Watching the sun set over the deep jungle, I heard the monkeys below me and felt the trees swell and ripple with life in the purple twilight. I stayed until the first star appeared in the skies over the canopy and then knew I had to go.

  The last stone marker, or stela, was erected in Tikal in 909 A.D. Then there was a great collapse. No one quite knows what happened. And it wasn’t just Tikal. The entire Mayan world throughout Central America completely disintegrated.