How to make sure the stars don't go out ?

The church in San Juan Chamula.

In the church of San Juan Chamula photography is not allowed, which is a pity because the church inside is extraordinary. There are no benches, instead the whole floor is full of burning candles, thousands of them. There are figures of saints in glass cabinets all around the church, each saint in tidy clean clothes, before each cabinet a table with more lamps burning, hundreds of them. There are more than 40 saints in the church. The floor is covered with fresh green pine needles. In some places the needles have been cleared to make room for candles which the faithful light up to pray. Every prayer requires several rows of candles in various colours. Sometimes a row of hen eggs is added, or even a couple of hens with their heads cut off. Usually there is a group of people around the candles but only one person recites the prayer. The candles are lit up gradually, row after row. Sometimes a spirit is needed as well, one has to gulp a shot at the right moment of the prayer. Sometimes a shot is offered to a Gringo who stands aside watching.

Officially the church in Chamula is Roman Catholic, but... (it is quite a big but). The town is inhabited by Indians, namely the Tzotzil Maya, and the church belongs to them, not to the priest. The Indians have their own understanding of the Catholic faith. On Sundays a visiting priest celebrates a mass in the morning but for the Indians the saints are more important. A priest celebrates a mass but Sunday is not the day of rest here. Sunday is a market day. Market stand are set up on the square in from of the church, Indians dressed in the traditional manner spread their wares. Fruit and veg, earthenware, leather sandals, colourful local home-made fabrics. Of course factory made plastic stuff is there as well. If you are hungry you will find some food: hot tamales, tortillas, corn on the cob in various colours – white, black, purple, red. Indian ladies dressed in colourful blouses and black hairy skirts that seem to be in fashion here. Indian men in sombreros and hairy ponchos tied at the waist. Some men in white ponchos with yellow belts walk around the market, others in black ponchos and sombreros with red tassels sit on benches set in a semi-circle on the edge of the market. They look as if they are waiting for something.

The magistrates

The Chamula church is a very unusual tourist attraction. The fact that it attracts tourists at all is a side effect of the fact that the Indians treat their church very seriously. The tourists come and the Indians let them in but everyone is asked to contribute towards its maintenance. The contribution is not voluntary – an Indian stands at the door and sells a ticket to everyone who does not look like an Indian. Everyone is also informed about the picture ban. The Indian is friendly, one can talk to him and ask who the men in sombreros with red tassels are.

They are alcaldes, the authorities of the town. They are magistrates and councillors at the same time. On market days they sit there to judge in any disputes. The Mexican authorities recognise the autonomy of the Maya and let them judge in most of the matters affecting their own community. The alcaldes are elected in a traditional way. Only persons who earlier held other offices can be elected alcalde.

One of these other offices is a mayordomo. All saints from the church have their houses in the town and the role of the mayordomo is to make sure the house is properly looked after. Saints have houses in the town? I don't quite understand. The Indian at the door tries to explain something that seems obvious to him and incomprehensible to me. “If you want to see one of those houses”, he says, “you can go there, there is an arch of greenery over the gate, you'll find it easily”. I go there and indeed, I find it easily. The mayordomo sits in front of the house. He is quite talkative, shows me inside and explains what I see. I don't understand much, though. The saint has a separate house, not just an altar in the corner of a room. A separate house in a traditional Maya style with the interior undivided into rooms. This I understand but I don't understand the decoration of that interior. There is a kind of an altar in the middle of the room but it can hardly be seen as it is surrounded by a curtain of greenery hanging from the ceiling. The greenery cannot be just any old stuff, the mayordomo explains to me which plants should hang in which place. The floor is also covered in greenery, namely fresh pine needles. Both the hanging decoration and the pine needles are changed every 20 days, which is the length of a month in the traditional Maya calendar. In front of the later there is a table full of candle holders in the shape of little cows. Four times a day the candles on the backs of the cows are lit up and prayers are said. It is supposedly a Catholic saint but I hardly understand anything.

The market at Chamula.

At one point a group of tourists come and I eavesdrop on what the guide tells them. He says that a mayordomo is a man who undertakes the task of building a house for a saint and maintaining it for a year, making sure the decorations are changed regularly and the prayers are said on time. Who pays for all that? The mayordomo, of course. What does he get for that? The tourists – who come from a different world – can't understand that someone builds a house and maintains it for a year and gets nothing for that. He gets respect, yes, but does it have any monetary value?

The guide has problems following the thought pattern of the tourists. He explains that the respect the mayordomo gains makes it possible for him to become an alcalde later. But the position on mayordomo is not at all less important. It is important for the whole community that the saints live among the people.

The saints have their houses in the town, their presence is real, you can almost touch them. For the Indians this is precious, they will look after their saints to make sure they don't run away. But the most important place is the church. The amazing church with thousands of candles burning in it.

“They are like the stars”, says the Indian who guards the door. “We have to keep all those candles burning to make sure the stars in the sky don't go out...”

(If you prefer reading on paper, you will find this story, and a few others, here:)

Ask a Globetrotter - the book

Is it safe to sleep in a hammock ?

Flores

Flores is a charming little town built on an island in the middle of a lake. The whole island is tightly built up with colonial Spanish architecture, narrow streets, a baroque church on the top of a hill. Shops with goods almost exclusively for tourists, who come here in great numbers. The main attraction is not Flores itself but ruins of the great Mayan city of Tikal hidden in the jungle not far away. The great city of Tikal was built over 2000 years ago but a few hundred years later it was deserted, the Maya moved elsewhere and the jungle grew over the temples. It was discovered by white explorers in the 19^th century, the jungle has been cleared from the temple plazas and now it looks very picturesque with the virgin forest background. Of course footpaths have been cut through the jungle for the benefit of tourists.

There are no Maya in Tikal, but does it matter? Few people are interested in living Maya The Maya live nowadays in other places on the shores of the lake Peten Itza, in the middle of which the town of Flores lies. Some 15 hundred years ago the plain of Peten had been deserted but a few hundred years later Itza Maya came from Yucatan and created a kingdom on the shores of Lake Peten Itza. Its capital was on the island occupied now by Flores and on the neighbouring Tayasal peninsula stood some temples. It was an independent kingdom until the very end of the 17^th century, when the Spaniards conquered it; this was the last Indian kingdom to fall. The colonial town of Flores was built on the island and the jungle grew over the temples of Tayasal. And what happened to the Maya? Well, they carried on cultivating maize on the shores of Lake Peten Itza, as they had done since times immemorial.

It is easy to reach Tayasal from Flores, it is only a few minutes journey in a boat. There are hills covered with jungle there. Some of those hills are really temples, abandoned and overgrown with thick vegetation. There are paths through the forest, one can climb the highest hill and look down on Flores. One can also see San Jose on the other side of the lake. The descendants of Maya live in that village today. San Jose is also a tourist attraction but only on one day of the year, the day of All Saints, when one of the skulls is taken out in procession and paraded around the village.

Tikal

Aren't these Maya aMayzing? They change the way they dress, they change the language they speak, they accept the Catholic religion but the old beliefs don't die out. Why should they die out? It's all true! In the church of Saint Joseph in San Jose there are three skulls and the villagers pray to those skulls for miracles. And the miracles happen, of course! The skulls have silver crosses painted on their foreheads. Nobody really knows whose skulls they are, some say they are skulls of the first missionaries who came to the village. The villagers pray to them, they ask for health or help in personal life and if the prayers are heeded they welcome the skull in their home on the day of All Saints. Each year one of the skulls leaves the church and visits homes of those who prayed. Sometimes the procession lasts the whole night and even the next day, the day of All Souls. The villagers welcome their skulls with honours, each house beautifully decorated, a prayer service is celebrated in reach.

I am told all this by Sandra who claims to be an atheist. Sandra is short like the Maya, her skin is brownish and her hair straight and black, she looks very much like other inhabitants of San Jose, and she says there are no Maya in the village. Nobody speaks the Itza language here any more. Some 50 years ago everybody spoke Itza but in the 1950ties there was a woman teacher here who did not know the language and when children at school chatted and laughed she thought they laugh at her. She had friends among the people working in the administration and as a result a law was introduced that forbade the children to use the language of their parents at school. If a child was caught speaking Itza – the parents had to pay a hefty fine. As a result the parents themselves told their children to speak Spanish at school and the Itza language came out of use within a generation. Nowadays only old people can speak it fluently, those over 50 can understand it but younger people don't know it at all. In recent years there is a trend to support the indigenous languages, they are even being taught at school, but in the case of Itza it means teaching children from scratch. There is a school of Itza language in San Jose, Sandra once even started a course, but she never finished it and cannot speak it.

People change the language they use and the way they dress (nobody in San Jose wears the traditional dress) but they don't change their beliefs so easily. Why should they change them? It is all true what the old people say. In November a skull of a saint is paraded around the village, in May the skull of a pig is taken to the fields. Why? To make sure the rains come again. In winter and spring it doesn't rain at all here, but May is the time of planting maize. The ritual with the pig's skull is celebrated by a local shaman whose presence in the village is indispensable. He is needed because maize would not grow without rain.

The church where the skulls are kept.

Sandra says she is an atheist but she does keep the taboos connected with the seasons because she doesn't want to risk breaking them. As is well known during lent one cannot swim in the lake. Her father once ignored this taboo and had a terrifying experience. He liked to dive and catch fish with a harpoon and was very good at that. Often he would bring a big fat fish for dinner. One he went fishing on Good Friday, dived and saw this huge fish staring at him. It was enormous and stared at him with piercing eyes. Sandra's father got scared, jumped out of the water and has never dived since. He says it wasn't an ordinary fish, it was the guardian of fishes.

“Don't you know who the guardian of fishes is? All things have their guardians this is what the old people say. The trees in the forest have their guardian. In the old days when people wanted to cut some timber they had to pay the guardian. They killed a black hen, buried it in the woods, only then they could cut any trees. Nowadays they forget about this and look what the results are. Just an example – my father was a hunter and a very good shot. Once he went to the mountains with his brother-in-law. They saw a huge buck, the biggest they had ever seen, who wouldn't run away. The brother-in-law said they should better leave this one alone but my father said 'don't worry' , aim and missed, but the buck still wouldn't run. It was strange because my father was a perfect shot, he never missed but this time he shot five times and nothing happened. The buck actually grew bigger, looked at them with its red eyes and didn't move. Suddenly it started towards the hunters who at this point ran as fast as they could. This was the guardian of the animals in the forest. My father never went hunting again.

The Itza Maya of Guatemala speak basically the same language as the Maya of Yucatan, where I was a week earlier. All the Indians in Yucatan sleep in hammocks, “they are born and die in hammocks”, as I was told. I ask if in San Jose they sleep in hammocks, too. Sandra says that they don't, she says it's too dangerous (this is not quite true – a day earlier Pabla told me that most people in the village use hammocks).

“Dangerous? Why?”

“Because the spirits have easier access to you. When I was little girl I slept in a hammock and once in the middle of the night I felt somebody rocking me. My parents were fast asleep but I saw a silhouette of a person moving around me. I screamed, my mum came and took me to bed and I never slept in a hammock again. Still better the husband of Pabla, he was once pulled out from his hammock by the waterman, the guardian of the lake. Because, you know, all things have their guardians. Pabla's husband when he was a child slept once in a hammock on the verandah of his house. The waterman came out of the lake at night, grabbed the boy by his legs and dragged him along the street. The boy screamed, people came to help and the waterman ran away. The next night the boy's father waited on the verandah and saw somebody getting out of the water and approaching the verandah, he asked what he was looking for and the waterman ran away. Pabla's father-in-law says it was the guardian of the lake. Because – you know – all things have their guardians.

Is it safe?

And what about Ixtabai who lives in guaya trees? Four years ago a group of children playing next to the football field behind the village saw Ixtabai. They played there and saw a woman dressed all in white. Several children were there, they didn't take any notice of her but when she came closer they all ran away screaming. All came one by one to the same house and all immediately fainted. When they woke up they all said the same thing – the woman dressed in white had the head of a horse and the horse hooves. They all said the same thing so they didn't make it up. There used to grow a big guaya tree next to that field but after that event the men of the village decided to cut it down.”

Sandra claims to be an atheist and does not believe in dogmas of the Church but all these events actually took place. These are facts. You don't choose to believe in facts, you just accept them for what they are.

Sandra definitely thinks sleeping in a hammock is too dangerous.