CHAPTER 14 THE RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS OF MESOAMERICA 529Mesoamerica and in hundreds of contemporary communities. Shamanism, heroic
narratives, key integrating symbols, and deities themselves (particularly Sun, Moon,
Jaguar, Wind, Lightning, Earth Lords, Serpents, Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary and the
saints, even the individual coessences) all depend for their power and efficacy on
spatial mobility within all or parts of the tripartite vertical cosmos (sky, earth, and un-
derworld) and the related quadripartite (four-part) horizontal cosmos. Through the
mediation of supernatural forces that traverse this spatio-temporal whole, the indi-
vidual gains access to, and is also constrained by, the whole.
Supernatural Combat and Secular Conflict
as Creative and Life-Sustaining Forces
From grand mythical commentaries on the creation and early phases of the universe,
to the structure and content of sacred narrative, to the ordering of everyday life—
conflict is the genesis and precondition for order. This theme has countless permu-
tations, from the battles of the underworld in the Popol Wuh(the sixteenth-century
K’iché Maya epic; see the discussion in Chapter 6), to the dialectic of the male and
female principle in everyday life, to the problem of Indian ethnicity in the complex
modern societies of the region today. The theme of conflict as part of creation and
life-maintenance does not impress one at first as distinctive. Is it not part of the
human condition?
What makes the conflict motif peculiarly Mesoamerican is twofold. First, con-
flict is divinely ordained. Thus, it is primordial, ubiquitous, and easy to rationalize.
Second, the parties in the conflicts are often dual aspects of the same supernatural
being, social unit, or person. For example, the Passions, who are ritual personages
who sponsor the cult to the Sun-Christ deity in the Chamula Tzotzil (Mayas) ritual
of annual renewal, simultaneously sponsor the ritual warfare that is intended to kill
the Sun-Christ deity. The Passions’ ritual accomplices, the Monkeys, in the same fes-
tival simultaneously represent the precultural forces that helped to kill the Sun-Christ
before the First Creation of the mythic era, and that function as the policemen who
keep order at the festival and defend the sacred symbols of the Sun-Christ’s cult.
This of course echoes the dual nature of countless deities of the pre-Columbian
Mesoamerican pantheon (for example, the founding deity of the Aztec cosmos: the
Lord of Duality).
The issue of duality and subsequent dialogue and conflict between these dual
principles is indeed the dynamic force that creates the cosmos in the Mayan world,
ancient and modern. Dennis Tedlock has noted that the peculiar Mesoamerican
twist to this idea is not only that this dynamic tension is sacred but also that it is com-
plementary rather than oppositional, contemporaneous rather than sequential. This
reading of Mesoamerican dualism meshes intelligibly with the principles of cyclical
time (noted before) in that the elements in temporal cycles that are not currently ac-
tive always remain latent, ready to express themselves again in the same formal man-
ner, though perhaps in a different code. Latent elements do not disappear, nor do
they get permanently transcended or defeated.
The pattern of complementary dualism also recalls and illuminates the ubiqui-
tous Mesoamerican custom of addressing ancestors, deities, and ritual personages