Cosmovisión maya, plenitud de la vida

The book grew out of a report. In 2005 the UN Development Programme published a study of ethnic and cultural diversity in Guatemala and concluded that a framework of Maya values was missing. To write one, it brought together a group of Maya granddaughters and grandsons, among them María Faviana Cochoy Alva, Pedro Celestino Yac Noj, Isabel Yaxón and Santiago Tzapinel Cush. The credits page states that the knowledge in the book belongs to the Maya people, and that its writers only give it voice.

The introduction describes how they worked. Before writing, the group asked leave several times of the Creator and Former and of the grandmothers and grandfathers, in fire ceremonies and on visits to hills, rivers and ravines. It drew on oral tradition, ritual and the sacred calendar, and wrote by consensus, weaving everyone's words together.

The tone is that of a summons. Rigoberta Menchú's prologue speaks of a new b'aqtun, of going back to Mother Earth and of recovering the good life that ambition and materialism took away.

The first chapter tells the creation through the Popol Vuh, which the book calls the chief expression of Maya cosmogony, quoted in the versions of Adrián Recinos and Adrián Inés Chávez. Out of silence and still water, the creators talk and decide, and the world takes shape little by little: first the heavenly bodies, then the Earth, the plants, the animals and the people.

From this the book draws an ethics. If everything comes from one and the same starting point, everything shares the same dignity and the same right to exist. Creation happens once, but formation is a process, and every being is a moment in which that process comes to fruition.

The heart of the book is twenty principles, which the authors call grains of maize. The number comes from Maya mathematics: jun winaq, twenty, is also the whole, fulfilled person. And maize, Mother Maize, is the food that made the life of the people possible, from body to spirit.

Each grain has a title in a Mayan language and in Spanish, an epigraph from the Popol Vuh and a few pages of reflection. The themes run from the origin of life and the variety of life's paths to health, song and the love of life, to duality and complementarity, to a balance grounded in respect and, in the last grain, to openness and the worth of the spoken word.

Despite the number, the grains neither track the twenty days of the calendar nor describe who is born on each one. They form a code of conduct for the person, the family and the community.

The final chapter gathers the twenty principles into a single thread and singles out four as guides for the weave: respect, gratitude, care for Mother Nature and service, understood as attention to what another person needs.

Then the text turns to the world: wars, exploitation, consumption, nature treated as merchandise. The authors see in sustainable human development, the UN programme's banner, an alternative, and say the Maya outlook can widen it.

It is a first-hand Maya voice, written by people who practice. But it does not deal with what the Chart reads: it says nothing of the birth day, the thirteen numbers or the cross, and the twenty grains do not correspond to the twenty nawales.

What it confirms, and the reading takes into account, is the place of the calendar and of fire in Maya spiritual life today, and the idea that each person's life is fulfilled in relationship: with the family, the community and the land.

It is a text about values, with no description of practice. Anyone looking for how the calendar is counted or what each day says will not find it here.

Its language mixes tradition with modern spiritual vocabulary, of cosmic forces and a new age, and in many passages the book sounds more like a manifesto than an account.

Its rights are reserved, and we found no official copy to download. That is why only the summary is offered here. The book is in Spanish.