The Maya (Ancient Peoples & Places) 
by 

Michael D. Coe

 

Survival Through Tradition

Unlike most of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the Maya still exist as a large population. But while Mayans are survivors, their civilisation has not been. The development of their spectacular urban centres, their complex ritual practices, and their unique art came to an abrupt halt in the 9th century CE after a continuous run of cultural and political successes over the previous millennium. The Maya more or less disappeared as all but a linguistic/cultural entity. They weren’t invaded; they didn’t succumb to some novel disease (as they would en masse after the Spanish occupation seven hundred years later). They just stopped as an organised political, military, and economic force in the world.

One modern theoretical construct helps to explain why the Mayan civilisation disappeared, and, more important, what is necessary to preserve what remains of the Mayan culture. The fundamental principle of cybernetics is that when the complexity of the environment exceeds that of any natural or man-made system, the environment will ultimately destroy the system. This is called the Law of Requisite Variety and it identifies not an actual power but rather a potential for survival. The greater the number of possible responses to environmental change, the greater the chance of staying alive, not simply as individuals, but also as societies, cultures, and civilisations.

On their own, human beings - those frail, sensitive, weak creatures with persistent back problems - don’t have the requisite variety to exist very long in any environment at all. But they have a compensatory magic power. They talk incessantly. They gossip, chat, argue, brag, lie, sing, rumourmonger, and prattle. And through this incessant talk they create the key to their adaptive success: tradition, that is to say, the unquestioned lore of how things are done, the rules and regulations of how to live, routines about how to stay healthy, and, ultimately, how to survive. A set of interacting traditions is one reasonable definition of a culture. Robust cultures formulate new traditions from the existing cultural melange. Less robust cultures merely die.

By definition no one knows the source of any particular tradition. In reality tradition is nothing but inter-generational gossip. Nor does anyone really know why or how tradition ‘works’ to keep us alive. Tradition is not concerned with documented or scientific facts, but rather with shared experiences that are lost in time. And because tradition refers to a potential rather than a demonstrable ‘thing,’ it can’t be proven. Tradition works right up until the moment it doesn’t. It then ends its usefulness, usually catastrophically. The culture becomes fragile as the institutions that embody traditions falter.

Coe identifies a central tradition in the history of the Maya, one that can be easily overlooked because of its mundaneness. In Mayan this tradition is called nixtamal, the process by which maize is prepared for human consumption. Nixtamal involves mixing boiled maize with white lime before it is ground into flour. This process makes the vitamin B contained in the maize kernels available when it is consumed by human beings. A deficiency in vitamin B is known to cause numerous maladies from beri-beri to dementia. So for maize to become a staple in the Mayan diet, nixtamal is a critical tradition.

The obvious question is where did this tradition come from? The ancient Mayans presumably had no knowledge or scientific understanding of the human hormonal system. And the empirical connection between un-limed maize-eating and, say, early onset dementia is one that is unlikely to be determined by observation given the time lag, perhaps over decades, for the appearance of symptoms. Surely no preparer of maize in any ancient Mayan household ever knew the long term consequences of nixtamal; they just followed the routine. This tradition was firmly and universally established and was a contributing factor to the creation and continued existence of the Mayan civilisation.

The same kind of mystery of origin occurs with many other Mayan traditions. The cultivation of maize itself is one of them. Selective breeding of plants is not a natural process by definition. It requires great patience over very long periods to produce sustainable improvements without introducing defects (like susceptibility to disease or pests). Yet highly successful breeding of maize was accomplished over centuries by the Maya who transformed a lowland grass called teosinte into a viable food crop. The Maya did this with no knowledge of genetics and no written records (at least initially) of previous experience. Archaeological evidence based on the size of cobs shows that the process was more or less continuous throughout the Maya area. Once again tradition rules.

So too with so many other traditions. The slash and burn farming of maize required in the Yucatan, for example, demanded fallow periods of up to 20 years to recover soil fertility in burned over forest fields. This experience was somehow passed on with no ‘science’ or logs or other records behind it. Similarly, obsidian tools, the “iron of Mesoamerica,” were worked in exactly the same way over centuries and can be used to track the movements and trading patterns of individual Mayan groups as a matter of cultural routine. Even writing, the earliest of which is around 300 BCE, is a tradition, perhaps the ultimate tradition when it comes to increasing adaptive potential because it allows record keeping and documentation of other traditions.* Traditions were in a real sense the source of Mayan longevity and creativity as a civilisation. 

But tradition, as so many others aside from the Mayas have discovered, is fickle. It works until it doesn’t. Mayan tradition was grounded in maize. Maize underlay all other traditions. The incredibly long drought from 820 to 870 CE was an environmental change that the maize traditions were simply incapable of responding to. The routines learned by rote and passed on through generations broke down. New traditions were obviously required. The civilisation perished; but the culture remained active in a very specific sense, namely in the creation of new traditions which increased the potential to respond to environmental change.

It is their cultural strength that has allowed the Mayan to adapt to the new civilisations in which they find themselves, sometimes in surprisingly innovative ways. The maize preparation traditions are still relevant, of course, but other traditions are necessary to provide the requisite variety for survival. So, for example, to avoid the humiliation of the Spanish caste system, many Mayans simply avoided it entirely in remote enclaves, thus preserving both language and culture within an oppressive regime. Many Mayans reacted to intense missionary activities from the Catholic Church by accepting the new religion but integrating it with their traditional divine pantheon into a creative syncretism. This seems almost inevitable as the Mayan and Christian scriptures agree on many key points, including the divine displeasure with the ‘proto-type’ humans and their annihilation by flood.

More recently, Faced with systematic persecution - the Guatemalan Civil War lasted 36 years in the latter half of the 20th century and was directed primarily against the Mayan population by the government - many Mayans moved across international borders. From Guatemala to Mexico, as they had done earlier from Mexico to Belize to avoid enslavement - and then back again as the situation demanded. These may seem somewhat extreme adaptations but are actually what the ancient Maya did as well - so not really a new but rather a renewed tradition.

So, while the civilisation disappeared much of the culture did not. ‘Mayanism,’ if such a term is allowed, adapted and survived. Many if not most of the major Mayan languages are still alive. Even the complex Mayan calendar and number system is in use by some groups (as an aside the Mayans place the creation of the world at 3114 BCE, not far off the Christian 17th century Christian estimate by Bishop Ussher of 4004 BCE, which was slightly earlier than that of Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton). 

Despite the efforts of the Spanish and the Church to destroy Mayan texts, a sufficient number survived - in scrolls as well as monumental inscriptions - in order to decipher and translate important documents. Among these is the Popal Vuh, the Mayan account of creation and the divine presence, with its interesting parallels and alternatives to Judaic sacred scriptures. In a way, through translation and global publication, the Popal Vuh has become an incipient world tradition. Perhaps it contains some hints about how to avoid worldwide environmental catastrophe.

The Mayan uprising in the Mexican state of Chiapas in 1993 was perhaps a part of yet another tradition of Mayan resistance, also associated with the long Civil War in Guatemala. In many ways these conflicts are a continuation of the half-century Caste War in the 19th century which was fought by the Yucatan Mayas against the domineering white population. It appears that, like the Kurds, some of the peoples of the Caucuses mountains, and in the Kashmir, the Mayas are developing a routine of violent disobedience to governments, a recovery, perhaps, of the tradition of the ancient Maya warrior-kings. And this recovered tradition shows at least some signs of adaptive possibility. In May of 2021, for example, the Mexican President made an unprecedented statement to the Mayan people: 

"We apologize to the Mayan people for the terrible abuses committed by individuals and national and foreign powers during the Conquest, the three centuries of colonial rule and the two centuries of independent Mexico," 

What such an apology means in practice is another matter of course. But the statement means at minimum that the Mayan culture is finally recognised as a valid political issue.

Yet another tradition, unwelcome by many, is the ancient wisdom of entheogenics. The Mayans have several thousand years experience of hallucinogenic, psychedelic, and narcotic drug use (not to mention tobacco, which was first cultivated by the Maya, or the alcoholic drinks called pulque and balaché), all typically associated with religious ritual. There is even a god of drugs, Xochipilli, the Corn Flower Prince, whose magnificent statue sits in the National Museum of Mexico draped in a variety of calming and invigorating plants and mushrooms. While there is no publicised drug problem among the Maya themselves, they nevertheless have a serious and growing issue that may be the ultimate challenge for their cultural adaptability.

The so-called Mayan Riviera around the modern Mexican resort area of Cancun, and the sparsely populated ‘Mayan Biosphere Reserve’ in Guatemala are reputed to now be controlled by the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel - the first area for sales, the latter as safe transit sites for aircraft which are packed with cocaine. The threat to the Maya comes not from the drugs directly but from the traffickers who burn large swathes of forest and import cattle to keep vegetation down on runways. It would seem merely a matter of time before the Cancun drug ‘colony’ spreads to the local population. Unless the United States stops it’s farcical war on drugs, Mayans may not have the requisite variety to survive in the modern world.

* Or perhaps the Mayan number system can be considered the ultimate tradition. Like other ancient number systems, it is base-20. But it also incorporates a sort of silent zero which allows the very efficient expression of even very large numbers through multiplication and easy addition. Such a system is obviously far superior to that of Roman numerals which are a mathematical nightmare. It also has advantages over base-10 Arabic numerals in that the symbolism is binary - a dot and a dash.