Mayan My Own Business

[New around here? We’re Mainers temporarily lost in the Yucatan. I promise we’ll go home and shovel more snow eventually]

There are distinct strains of Mesoamericans wandering around Mejico. Everyone in the US sorta lumps them all together, but they’re quite different. In the Yucatan, pretty much everyone is mestizo, i.e., mixed with Europeans, but the original gene pool is Mayan. I’m not capable of sorting out the Toltecs and the Aztecs and the Mixtecs, and the Zapotecs or even the Tlaxcaltecs, who had a (stone) ax to grind with the Aztecs, and helped Cortes conquer them.

The Maya civilization encompassed what is now the Yucatan peninsula, Guatemala, and Belize, plus parts of Honduras and El Salvador. I’d been in Guatemala before, and everyone in Mérida looked like long-lost brothers to them. The Mayas weren’t mud hut people, that’s for sure. They built stuff like this:

That was nicknamed The Castle by the Spanish freebooters who showed up post-Columbus. Unlike your humble author, it’s in great shape for its age. It’s fun to compare it today with the way it looked in 1892 when they Indiana Jonesed it out in the jungle:

It’s in Chichen Itza, along with a lot of other interesting, monumental structures. It’s a day trip from Mérida. There’s a new train called the Tren Maya that runs from Cancun, too. I don’t know what gets into human beings that makes them stack block on block in a pyramid shape, but it gets in their heads all over the world. It’s always been a Minecraft world, just waiting for computers to be invented.

The Maya were a pretty fierce polity. I think you might have descended those stairs with fewer internal organs or heads than you climbed up there with. I don’t judge such behaviors. Queen Elizabeth I was still burning people at the stake around the same time. It took the Spanish hundreds of years to beat the Mayans. In comparison, the Aztecs folded their tents pretty quickly. Then again, they might have mistaken the Spanish for gods. And you can’t blame them for being cautious about frontin’ some conquistadors. You don’t want to FAFO with anybody who might be Mexican gods, from the look of them in the museums.

They had a set of gods to put the Greeks to shame for variety and ferocity. The Guatemalans call this gent Quetzalcoatl, and the Mayans call him Kukulcan, but whatever you want to name him, he’s mostly pictured getting up to hijinks like this:

Putting on my archaeological thinking cap, and using my prodigious powers of observation, I gather he was either a serpent god, or a tax collector. In any case, even when he’s pictured at rest, having already devoured everyone within arm’s length, he always looks like he hasn’t heard a good joke in years.

We went to the Museo Regional de Antropologia on the Paseo Montejo, a sort of Champs Elysee in Mérida. It was full of Mayan stuff, but I would have gone to see it if it was emptier than a politician’s promise. Look at this baroque pile, will ya:

The interior is downright staid compared to the exterior. I doubt it was like that back in the day. Museums want you to look at the stuff, not the walls, so they have a tendency to paint everything in a plain color scheme. Still majestic in there, though:

That’s our friend Abby from Mérida. She was a good person to take along on these excursions. When in doubt, she could talk to whoever was giving you fits in rat-a-tat Spanish. I was getting along better with Spanish by this time, and didn’t even have to call her over to save me when I got yelled at for leaning on an exhibit. I took my beating like a caballero.

Here’s the more or less patron saint of the place, even if his halo is a little dented.

Desire Charnay got permission from the Mexican government to wander around and find archaeological treasures, and he only pocketed some of them when no one was looking. He appears to always have his likeness taken while standing on a subway grate. Someday when I’m old I’m going to start combing all my hair straight up like that.

Here’s a few things from the exhibits:

I like the Yucatan, and their museums. All the gods on display are either laughing at you, making funny faces, wearing a funny hat, or sticking their tongues out at you. It’s like a shrine to being in the fourth grade.

[To be continued.Thanks for reading and commenting and buying my book and contributing to my tip jar. It keeps this place going]