Articles > King of the Hill

In a patch of sunlight at the end of Chichicastenango’s cobbled main street a bus was spilling its colourful human cargo onto the pavement. It was a typical up-country Guatemalan bus: a canary-coloured hand-me-down from good ol’ Uncle Sam.

Sent as envoys to Guatemala dozens of these school buses have served out their last years shuttling Indians between the villages of the Quiché Mountains. This old ‘Bluebird’ was still emblazoned with a sun-bleached inscription; I thought how amazed the kids of ‘Oakwood County High’ (probably with kids of their own now) would be if they could see their bus.

Chichi's is the market town of an estimated 20,000 Indians. Every week a large proportion of these swarm into the town to trade everything from hand-woven cloth and blankets to turkeys, chickens and goats, to farm tools and handicrafts.

I weaved my way across the plaza, past yelling Indians who were hurriedly erecting the wooden frameworks of their stalls. Some were already trading, with light-hearted haggling in Quiché being volleyed between the captains of industry - mostly portly women in bright, voluminous skirts - and experienced shoppers who know that there are bargains to be had on the eve of the market. Nobody took any notice of me.

Although attitudes are changing, as the tourist dollar provides an ever more attractive alternative to farming, Chichi’s is still essentially an Indian market. Drifting with the crowd you get the impression that you are so far removed from the Indian’s sphere or comprehension that for them you practically do not exist. In fact, to the Quiché Indians foreigners are simply ‘ghosts into whose hands has fallen the possession of the world.’

I paused briefly at the edge of the plaza to gaze up at the dignified white facade of the church of Santo Tomás. It was built shortly after the Spanish Conquest on the site of a Mayan temple-pyramid and perhaps more than any other monument in Central America it illustrates the confusion that Catholicism fostered in the New World. The Spanish padres directed their religious zeal into delivering the greatest number of souls from purgatory rather than wasting valuable time in instructing them accurately in the new doctrine.

When Aldous Huxley visited Guatemala in the early 1930s he found communities who, in their misguided fervour, actively worshipped Judas Iscariot as a god! Huxley also described a bizarre local festival based upon the belief that, on the night of the Crucifixion, Saint John and the Virgin had a love affair. To prevent a repetition of this shameful event the Indians locked images of the ‘lovers’ in separate cells of the town prison on Good Friday. The next morning the two fraternities would come and pay a fine to bail them out of captivity until next year.

The religious beliefs of many of the faithful at Santo Tomás have (to the eyes of an outsider at least) always been hopelessly confused. Nobody has ever been certain where pagan idolatry ends and Catholicism begins. On the church steps you can frequently see Indians burning incense for their ancestors and chanting prayers in honour of the Mayan calendar - just as their forefathers did on the steps of the old pyramid.

Entering the side door of the church you are immediately faced with three statues: Madonna and saints. Onto the robes of these worshippers have pinned quetzal notes, or even dollar bills. The floor is littered with rose petals, maize stalks, pine needles and bottles of corn-liquor wrapped in husks. These are offerings to the ancestors who, it is believed, are buried beneath the cool stone slabs of the floor.

Walking onward - cautiously now on the slippery cobbles - I turned down the side of a jade merchant’s store and then left at the machete maker’s workshop. Finally, I stepped out onto the bank of a small brook that led to the House of Masks.

For generations the family at Casa de las Mascaras have carved and painted the masks for most of the region’s festivals. After washing away the road-dust at a rusty rainwater butt behind my room, I sat in the dappled courtyard watching the patriarch of this little craft community as he hacked the beginnings of a jaguar mask. He turned the chunk of hardwood carefully in his hand studying the grain and with each thud and twist of his machete a wedge fell away and another angular feature was revealed.

The last time that I had been at the House of Masks I had commissioned a mask of Tecún Úman, the Quiché king who was defeated in single combat by the commander of the conquistadors. I was delighted to see that the mask had been finished: the quetzal and snakes on the headdress along with the fatalistic story of the king himself seemed to symbolise the history of Guatemala for me. It was said that, as the warrior lay dying on the battlefield, a quetzal (the luminously beautiful Mayan bird-deity) flew down and landed on his chest - to this day the quetzal’s breast is stained red with the blood of Tecún Úman.

As the afternoon cooled I climb the hill to visit Pascual Abaj, the shrine to the all-powerful Mayan earth-god. About three feet tall and resembling one of the uglier Easter Island heads, Pascual Abaj is believed to be over a thousand years old and stands in a clearing high above the House of Masks.

Even when the shrine is deserted, as it was when I approached from the shade of the eucalyptus, the hilltop seems to possess a powerful atmosphere.

The last time that I had visited the shrine, I had been travelling with a girlfriend and we had arrived just before dusk to see wisps of smoke curling from a small fire. Five Indians were in attendance at Pascual Abaj. So, staying amongst the trees, we circled them and sat down quietly. An older man with a strip of tasselled cloth around his head and the scuffed clothes of a farmer appeared to be blessing - or cleansing – another, younger barefoot man, by stroking him with the flat edge of his machete. Three women sat nearby, patient but apparently disinterested spectators.

The older man began swinging a censer, made from a punctured tin can. Heavy blue-black smoke gathered in clouds, evoking spirits, around the idol. His face looked strained as he begged blessings for the earth’s fertility. I noticed that even to the Mayan god his conversation was peppered with words that had been imported from Spain.

The younger man bowed low and held out two eggs. Whilst the shaman-farmer shuffled forward and broke them onto the mouth of the stone idol his assistant hurried (it seemed important not to keep Pascual Abaj waiting) to their bundle of possessions. My girlfriend gasped as he dashed back into the centre of the clearing swinging a fat brown hen by her feet. Between them, the two men struggled to pour some clear liquid into the struggling chicken’s throat (probably corn liquor, to calm it). Then, chanting under his breath, the farmer started to saw off the hen's head with his machete. When the last tendons were severed the assistant dashed, with the body still twitching in his hands, to rub the gushing stump across the idol’s mouth.

They were physically feeding their god - my mind rebelled at the thought. The two uneven hollows that were Pascual Abaj’s eyes seemed to stare icily and the jagged gash below them was soon hideously streaked with scarlet. Rivulets of blood ran onto the ground.

I realised that we were seeing a ceremony that is perhaps twice as old as Christianity. If a poor campesino family today will sacrifice a fat, healthy chicken, then it is it is easy to imagine that the great Mayan Empire once regularly honoured the gods with the blood of their greatest warriors.

To us, sitting in silent fascination amongst the trees, things became almost surreal when the old man stooped forward again to rinse the blood from Pascual Abaj’s pouting lips . . . with two bottles of ‘Gallo’ beer.

Since the arrival of the ‘true faith’ the Mayan religion had been consistently persecuted and suppressed. For centuries Christian fanatics have periodically ransacked the shrine of Pascual Abaj. Each time his devotees wait until the trouble has passed before they return to patch up the idol.

The Indians of Chichicastenango have had to learn to roll with the punches. But now, after almost five hundred years underground, their true beliefs have re-emerged and they are free to worship as their ancestors did. Pascual Abaj is once again king of the hill.

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