by J; P Voelkel
HOWLER MONKEYS: With an extra-large voice box that makes them the loudest land animals on the planet, howlers can hear each other up to three miles away. Only the blue whale, whose whistle carries for hundreds of miles underwater, is louder.
HUUN IXIM (who knee shim): The reborn father of the HERO TWINS and the Maya god of maize. Huun Ixim has an elongated forehead that resembles an ear of corn. Maya nobility often molded babies’ skulls into this shape by binding the infants’ heads between wooden boards.
ITZAMNA (eats um gnaw): Ruler of the heavens, lord of knowledge, lord of day and night, and all-round good guy. Itzamna gave his people the gifts of culture, writing, art, books, chronology, and the use of calendars. As a patron of healing and science, he can bring the dead back to life. With IXCHEL, he fathered the BAKABS. Itzamna is usually depicted as a toothless but sprightly old man.
IXCHEL (each shell): Like most Maya deities, Lady Rainbow had multiple personalities. As the goddess of the old moon, she is depicted as an angry old woman with a coiled snake on her head, fingernails like claws, and a skirt decorated with human bones. In this guise, she vents her anger on mortals with floods and rainstorms. But as the goddess of the new moon, she is a beautiful young woman who reclines inside the crescent moon, holding her rabbit in her arms. IXCHEL was the patroness of childbirth, medicine, and weaving.
JAGUAR: Called bahlam by the ancient Maya who revered it for its hunting skills, the jaguar is the largest and most ferocious big cat in the Americas. Today, due to the fur trade and the destruction of its natural habitat, the jaguar is in danger of extinction.
JAGUAR STONES (bahlam tuuno’ob): A literary invention of the Jaguar Stones trilogy, along with the five sacred pyramids, these five fictional stone carvings embody the five pillars of ancient Maya society: agriculture, astronomy, creativity, military prowess, and kingship. As far as we know, no such stones ever existed—nor did the Maya ever relax their warlike ways enough to forge an equal alliance of five great cities.
JUNGLE/RAINFOREST: All tropical rainforests are jungles, but not all jungle is rainforest. A tropical rainforest receives at least eighty inches of rain per year. It is home to more kinds of trees than any other area of the world, most of them growing closely together. The tops of the tallest trees form a canopy of leaves about 100 to 150 feet above the ground, while the smaller trees form one or two lower canopies. Between them, these canopies block most of the light from reaching the ground. As a result, little grows on the forest floor, making it relatively easy to walk through a tropical rainforest. If the canopy is destroyed, by nature or by humans, a tangle of dense fast-growing greenery springs up in the sunlight. This is jungle. Its growth provides shade for the rainforest species to reseed and grow tall enough to block out the light once more. This cycle can take one hundred years to complete.
K’AWIIL (caw wheel): A god of lightning and patron of lineage, kingship, and aristocracy. He has a reptilian face, with a smoking mirror emerging from his forehead and a long snout bursting into flame.
K’INICH AHAW (keen each uh how): The great sun god. By day, he traces the path of the sun across the sky and by night he prowls through the underworld in the form of a jaguar, before emerging in the east each morning.
K’UK’ULKAN (coo cool con): The feathered serpent, a divine combination of serpent and bird, one of the great deities of MESOAMERICA.
DIEGO DE LANDA (1524–1579): The overzealous Franciscan friar who tried to wipe out Maya culture by burning their CODICES and thousands of religious artworks in the square at Mani on July 12, 1549. Even the conquistadores thought he’d gone too far and sent him back to Spain to stand trial. Ironically, the treatise he wrote in his defense, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán (1565), is now our best reference source on the ancient Maya. Landa was absolved by the Council of the Indies and returned to the New World as the bishop of Yucatán.
LORDS OF DEATH: In Maya mythology, the underworld (XIBALBA) is ruled by twelve Lords of Death: One Death, Seven Death, Scab Stripper, Blood Gatherer, Wing, Demon of Pus, Demon of Jaundice, Bone Scepter, Skull Scepter, Demon of Filth, Demon of Woe, and Packstrap. The Lords of Death delight in human suffering. It’s their job to inflict sickness, pain, starvation, fear, and death on the citizens of MIDDLEWORLD. Fortunately, they’re usually far too busy gambling and playing childish pranks on each other to get much work done.
MAYA: Most historians agree that Maya civilization began on the Yucatán peninsula sometime before 1500 BCE. It entered its Classic Period around 250 CE, when the Maya adopted a hierarchical system of government and established a series of kingdoms across what is now Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador. Each of these kingdoms was an independent city-state, with its own ceremonial center, urban areas, and farming community. Building on the accomplishments of earlier civilizations such as the Olmec, the Maya developed astronomy, calendrical systems, and hieroglyphic writing. Although most famous for their soaring pyramids and palaces (built without metal tools, wheels, or beasts of burden) they were also skilled farmers, weavers, and potters, and they established extensive trade networks. The Maya saw no boundaries between heaven and earth, life and death, sleep and wakefulness. They believed that human blood was the oil that kept the wheels of the cosmos turning. Many of their rituals involved bloodletting or human sacrifice, but never on the scale practiced by the Aztecs. Wracked by overpopulation, drought, and soil erosion, Maya power began to decline around 800 CE, when the southern cities were abandoned. By the time the Spanish arrived, only a few kingdoms still thrived, and most Maya had gone back to farming their family plots. Today, there are still six million Maya living in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador.
MAYAN: The family of thirty-one different languages spoken by Maya groups in Central America.
MESOAMERICA: Literally meaning “between the Americas,” Mesoamerica is the name archaeologists and anthropologists use to describe a region that extends south and east from central Mexico to include parts of Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and Nicaragua. It was home to various pre-Columbian civilizations, including the Maya (from 1500 BCE), the Olmec (1200–400 BCE), and the Aztecs (1250–1521). (The Incas of Peru in South America date from 1200 to 1533.)
MIDDLEWORLD: Like the Vikings, the Egyptians, and other ancient cultures, the Maya believed that humankind inhabited a middle world between heaven and hell. The Maya middleworld (yok’ol kab) was sandwiched between the nine dark and watery layers of XIBALBA and the thirteen leafy layers of the heavens (ka’anal naah).
MOON RABBIT: The shadows that look like a man in the moon to people in northern climes are viewed sideways in Central America, where they look like a leaping rabbit. The moon rabbit was the companion of the young moon goddess, IXCHEL. Due to the different vantage point, the moon appears to wax and wane vertically in the tropics, which is why Ixchel is often depicted holding her pet as she reclines on the crescent moon.
OBSIDIAN: This black volcanic glass was the closest thing the ancient Maya had to metal. An obsidian blade can be one hundred times sharper than a stainless steel scalpel, but it is extremely brittle.
PITZ: The Maya ball game was the first team sport in recorded history. It had elements of soccer, basketball, and volleyball, but was more difficult than any of them. Using only their hips, knees, or elbows, the players tried to knock the heavy rubber ball through a stone hoop high on the side wall of the ball court. The game had great religious significance, and the losers were frequently sacrificed.
POPOL VUH (poe pole voo): The Maya Book of the Dawn of Life, the sacred book of the K’iché (kee-chay) Maya who lived (and still live) in the highlands of Guatemala. The title literally means “Book of the Mat” but is usually translated as “Council Book.” The Popol Vuh tells the Maya creation story and explains how the HERO TWINS rescued their father from XIBALBA.
QUETZAL (ket sahl): The Maya prized the iridescent blue-green tail feathers of the Replendent quetzal bird for decorating royal headdresses. After the feathers wer
e plucked, the birds would be set free to grow new ones. In Maya times, the penalty for killing a quetzal was death. Today, without such protection, the quetzal is almost extinct.
RAINFOREST: See JUNGLE.
SAN XAVIER: The setting of the Jaguar Stones books, this is a fictional country based on modern-day Belize.
VISION SERPENT: When Maya kings wished to communicate with their ancestors or with the gods, they would hold a bloodletting ceremony to summon the Vision Serpent. The ritual required members of the royal family to pierce themselves and drip their blood onto strips of bark paper. The paper would then be burned and the Vision Serpent was supposed to appear out of the smoke, with the desired ancestor or god emerging from its mouth.
XIBALBA (she ball buh): The K’iché Maya name for the underworld, meaning “well of fear.” Only kings and those who died a violent death (battle, sacrifice, or suicide) or women who died in childbirth could look forward to the leafy shade of heaven. All other souls, good or bad, were headed across rivers of scorpions, blood, and pus to Xibalba. Unlike the Christian hell with its fire and brimstone, the Maya underworld was cold and damp, and its inhabitants were condemned to an eternity of bone-chilling misery and hunger.
MAYA COSMOS
What did Max, Lola, and Hermanjilio see in the Temple of Itzamna?
This illustration (based on a painted plate from the Late Classic Period) depicts the three realms of the Maya cosmos: the heavens above, Middleworld (the world of humans), and the waters of Xibalba, the underworld. In the heavens, the two-headed Cosmic Monster (or Cosmic Crocodile, as Lola called it) contains the sun, Venus, and the Milky Way. In the middle of it all is the World Tree, which was brought into being by the king during bloodletting rituals. With its upper branches in the heavens and its roots in Xibalba, the World Tree was the doorway to the otherworlds of gods and ancestors. Communication with these spirits took place through the mysterious Vision Serpent. At the top of the World Tree sits Lord Itzamna as the bird of heaven.
THE MAYA CALENDAR
The Maya were fascinated by the passage of time and they developed a variety of astonishingly accurate calendars to track the movements of the sun and the stars. The Maya kings and priests used their advanced knowledge of astronomy to plan their rituals, wage their wars, and manage their agricultural cycles.
The Long Count
The Long Count counts the days (kin) since the beginning of this creation. (The Maya believed there were three creations. The first two, when humans were made out of mud and wood respectively, were failures. The third creation, this one, when men were made out of corn, was deemed a success.) According to the Long Count, this third creation began, in our terms, on August 11, 3114 BCE. In the Long Count, the Maya year (tun) was 360 days long. Just as our 10-based counting system marks the decade (10 years) and the century (10 × 10 = 100 years), the Maya’s 20-based counting system marks the katun (20 tuns) and the baktun (20 × 20 = 400 tuns). Some say that the third creation lasts 13 baktuns, giving us an end date of December 21, 2012. There is no archaeological evidence for this claim and Mayan inscriptions indicate that the world will continue far beyond 2012.
The Haab
The Haab is the Maya calendar closest to our own. It tracks the solar year and is made up of 18 months, each consisting of 20 days, plus a 5-day period called the Wayeb to make a total of 365 days. The Wayeb was thought to be a time of uncertainty and bad luck, when the doors between the mortal realm and the underworld were opened and demons roamed the earth.
The Tzolk’in
The Tzolk’in was the sacred calendar, used to predict the characteristics of each day and determine the days for rituals, like a daily horoscope. It is made up of 20 day names and 13 numbers, and takes 260 days to go through the full cycle of name-and-number combinations. Each day name has a quality, some good, some bad. For example, Imix (“Crocodile”) is full of complications and problems, and thus bad for journeys or business deals. The number (1–13) determines how strong the characteristic would be. So on 13-Imix, you might want to stay home.
The Calendar Round
The Calendar Round brings together the Haab and Tzolk’in calendars. It takes 18,980 days (about 52 years) to work through the 260 Tzolk’in days and the 365 Haab days. The Calendar Round is usually depicted as a series of interlocking cogs and wheels—which, in Jaguar Stones: Middleworld, was the inspiration for the “time machine” in the Temple of Itzamna.
EASY CHICKEN TAMALES
Everyone in Central America has their own recipe for tamales. Even Max Murphy would like this one.
Ingredients
1 bag of corn husks
1 roast chicken, off the bone and shredded
1 jar of salsa verde or tomatillo sauce
6 cups of Maseca corn masa mix for tamales
1 cup of corn oil
6 cups of chicken stock or broth
2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cumin
1 green chili, seeds removed, finely chopped
1 clove garlic, crushed and finely chopped
Method
1. Soften the corn husks by soaking in warm water for at least 3 hours. You’ll need to put something heavy on them to keep them under the water.
2. Marinate the shredded chicken in the salsa verde.
3. In a mixer combine the masa mix, oil, chicken stock, salt, baking powder, cumin, chili, and garlic. Mix until you have a soft dough. Add more chicken stock if needed.
4. Spread a heaped tablespoon of the masa mixture into the center of a corn husk (smooth side up, with the wide end of the husk toward you) to make a 3-inch square. Put 2 teaspoons of the marinated chicken and salsa verde on top of the masa. Fold first the left side of the corn husk over the filling, and then overlap with the right. Fold the pointed end toward you. Fold up the wide end over the tip of the pointed end. Tie with a strip of corn husk or kitchen string to make a little package. Continue until all the masa and chicken are used up.
5. Place tamales in a large steamer and steam for about 40 minutes. You’ll know the tamales are cooked when they easily separate from the corn husks.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In the course of researching this book, we met a Maya shaman who explained the importance of being bound to others in a tangle of obligations and favors that can never be unraveled or repaid. Certainly words don’t seem enough to thank Daniel Lazar, our agent, and Stephen Barr. Thank you also to our wise and witty editor Elizabeth Law and to Mary Albi, Saint Nico Medina, Doug Pocock, Alison Weiss, Rob Guzman, and everyone at Egmont USA for their brilliant ideas, their enthusiasm, their patience, and their commitment to protecting the world’s remaining rainforests by using only sustainable paper stocks. Huge, humble, heartfelt thanks to our own personal superhero, Dr. Marc Zender of the Peabody Museum at Harvard, for sharing his immense knowledge so generously and with such good humor. Thanks to Patsy Holden at the University of Central Florida for her thoughts on the Maya worldview, Mark Van Stone at Southwestern College for his insights on 2012, Kathryn Hinds for her eagle-eyed copyediting, and Jordan Brown for letting us use his line. Thank you to Dustin Schaber for fortitude and showmanship above and beyond the call of duty. Also to Alan, Christy, Andrea, Max, Nicole, Heather, Jack, and Mary Anne for their extraordinary help and support in so many ways for so many reasons at so many times and always at such short notice. Thank you to Geraldo Garcia, Karina Martinez, Franklin Choco, and Hugh Daly in Belize; Jesus Antonio Madrid and Jose Cordoba in Guatemala; Oscar Vera Gallegos, Vicente, and Chan Kin in Mexico; Cee Greene, Paul Verbinnen, and Big Guy in New York. Thank you to all the booksellers who’ve been rooting for us, especially Penny McConnel and Liza Bernard at the Norwich Bookstore, Jill Moore at Square Books Junior in Oxford, Mississippi, Lisa Sharp at Nightbird Books in Lafayette, Arkansas, and Jennifer Stark at Barnes & Noble, Lincoln Center. Thank you to Lucinda Walker and Beth Reynolds at the Norwich Public Library. Thank you to all the teachers and schools who’ve supported and encouraged us
, especially Wakefield Middle School in Tucson, Canarelli Middle School in Las Vegas, Edmonds Middle School in Burlington, and the Marion Cross School in Norwich. Thank you also to Donald Kreis, Jessica Carvalho, Trina Boyd, Peter and Hetty, Graham Sharp, James Bowen, the SBJ Book Club, Erik Roush, Andy the chef, Peter Kraus, and Emilio Ortiz. And did we mention Dan Lazar?
YUM BO’OTIK TE’EX!
EGMONT
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First published in the United States of America by Smith and Sons, Inc., 2007
This revised edition published by Egmont USA, 2010
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Copyright © J&P Voelkel, 2005, 2010
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www.jaguarstones.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Voelkel, Jon.
Middleworld / J. & P. Voelkel. — Rev. ed.
p. cm. – (The Jaguar Stones ; bk. 1)
Summary: When his archaeologist parents go missing in Central America, fourteen-year-old Max embarks on a wild adventure through the Mayan underworld in search of the legendary Jaguar Stones, which enabled ancient Mayan kings to wield the powers of living gods.
eISBN: 978-1-60684-179-2
[1. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 2. Missing persons—Fiction. 3. Kidnapping—Fiction. 4. Supernatural—Fiction. 5. Mayas—Fiction. 6. Indians of Central America—Fiction.]
I. Voelkel, Pamela. II. Title.
PZ7.V861Mi 2010
[Fic]—dc22
2009040906
CPSIA tracking label information
Random House Production • 1745 Broadway • New York, NY 10019
