514 UNIT 4 MESOAMERICAN CULTURAL FEATURES
Box 14.1 Precepts of Mayan ReligionIf Aztec spirituality was preoccupied primarily with the problem of fulfilling and paying for cos-
mically ordained destiny, the dominant motif of Mayan religion was the preoccupation with cos-
mic time and the organization of human affairs in accordance with the sacred dictates of the
many cycles, natural and arbitrary, that comprised it. Ultimately, divine rulership and, hence, the
political order, were linked to the creator Sun God and his cosmic pantheon. It is thus to the issue
of divinized time that much of the energy of Mayan spirituality was directed. The concept of the
Mayan “chronovision” is here summarized by León-Portilla:From at least the time of the first inscriptions of Maya Classic (A.D. 300), the concept of time
as an abstraction, derived from the cyclical nature of the sun and the related “day” unit, had
primacy in the sphere of Maya culture. Proof of this comes from the ancient word kinh,
whose meaning is identical in different groups.... Kinhis primordial reality, divine and with-
out limit. Kinhincludes, conceptually, all of the cycles and all of the cosmic ages that have
existed.... The universe of time in which the Maya lived was an ever-changing stage in
which one was able to feel the sum of influence and actions of the various divine forces
which coincided in a particular period.... Since the essence of the nature of kinhwas cycli-
cal, it was important above all to understand the past in order to understand the present and
predict the future.... The faces of time, that primordial reality which obsessed the Maya,
were objects of veneration.... The Maya sages invented a cosmovision. Since it was his-
tory, measure of, and prediction about the total reality whose essence was time, it would be
more appropriate to call the Maya world view a chronovision.... To ignore the primordial
importance of time would be to ignore the soul of this culture. (León-Portilla 1968:62–63,
109–110; translated by G. Gossen)To this discussion must be added the caveat that time itself was not a deity for the Mayas.
Time did, however, form the very complex cyclical matrix in which deities acted and therefore,
in logical sequence, time also dictated the schedule of human propitiation to them. Finally, it
should be noted that Mayan chronovision was bothcyclical and linear: cyclical, in that what was
will be again in pattern,but will also move forward, as a weaver moves back and forth along the
warp, repeating a pattern, but also moving forward, producing variation on the pattern.
It is further worth noting that these fundamental Mayan precepts, as with those of the Aztecs,
functioned as powerful underlying forces that entered actively into the process of subsequent
Christian missionization. Furthermore, there is abundant evidence from the modern era that
demonstrates that centuries of contact with Christianity have not eliminated these ancient
Mesoamerican ideas: restructured them, yes; transformed them, perhaps; supplanted them, not
at all.Of Human Destiny in Ancient Mexico. Bernardino de Sahagún’s Nahuatl-
speaking assistants recorded their soul beliefs in the middle of the sixteenth
century as follows:It was said
that in the thirteenth heaven
[in the uppermost of the heavens]
our destinies are determined.