The jaguar-balam, in Maya-stares down from the mantel, its glass eyes catching the light of Seattle’s setting sun through the living room windows.
The eyes glow a nearly fluorescent green, the same color as the water that filled the cenote called Dzitnup-a natural well in the heart of the limestone shelf in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, the 100,000-square-mile Maya homeland. Dzitnup is 4 miles east of Chichen Itza, and it’s where this balam comes from.
I bought it from among four or five figures in the wheelbarrow of an Indigena (native Maya) woodcarver who sat, silent and passive, outside the mouth of the cave that sloped underground to the cenote. I was shamed into buying it by the man’s 10-year-old son.
The boy noticed how the figure’s glowing eyes-even there in the deep shade of the trees-held me. I felt as if it were hunting me.
That’s what the boy said when I turned to walk away: that I had to buy the figure. I was this jaguar’s prey. And how much would I pay . . .?
Jaguars are one of the most common figures in the Mayan cosmos. Scores of Mayan kings bore the name Balam. The jaguar’s skin was the symbol of all chieftains and covered their seats of office. It was the symbol of leadership, ferocity and courage-the patron of war. Its figure was associated with the ritual acts of bloodletting and sacrifice, animal and human.
Jaguar was the symbol of shamans as well-and more than symbol: It was the form into which shamans could transform themselves.
A host of gods also took the balam form or name-such as Baby Jaguar; Water Lily Jaguar; Lord Torch Jaguar, a sun god. A jaguar deity’s pelt spread across the heavens formed the night sky, its spots shining as stars.
Then there was the Jaguar God of the Underworld, where jaguar spirits roamed and from where they will emerge at the end of this creation to devour the sun and moon.
That might be one reason that the balam drew me so strongly there at Dzitnup. According to the Maya, caves and cenotes are direct pathways to and from Xibalba, the Underworld.
And so the eyes draw me back to the Yucatan, where impressions and images flowed freely, as if through gauze, between the end of the 20th Century and Mesoamerica more than a millennium ago.
The walled city of Tulum and the grand expanse of Chichen Itza were picturesque disappointments. I visited during the November-April high season, and both sites were almost oppressively crowded. Both are close enough to Cancun, Mexico’s 20-year-old tourist ghetto, to make them standard day trips.
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These days, one enters the two most popular sites in the Yucatan through fume-filled parking lots packed with buses, which keep their motors running to power the air conditioners, to cool the tourists on their way back to Cancun’s Hotel Zone, where little that is Mexican or Mayan need intrude on a good vacation.
And with menial, behind-the-scenes work in the hotels the best most Mayas can find, many tourists have little notion of a contemporary Mayan culture.
Nearly 15 percent of the Yucatan Peninsula’s population is Mayan; many live in traditional villages and follow traditional ways in the shadow of their forebears’ monuments. Yet, in the language of Yucatan tourism, “Maya” almost always implies dead and gone for at least 500 years.
The nearly 5 million Mayas who live from the Yucatan Peninsula south through Guatemala and Belize and into Honduras and El Salvador compose the largest native group in the Americas north of Peru. Their life spans are significantly shorter, illiteracy and infant mortality rates significantly higher and incomes significantly lower than those of their Ladino neighbors.
In 1992, Amnesty International cited dozens of violations of the human rights of Mayas carried out by Mexican authorities and the Guatemalan military.
Still, the Tulum ruin is pretty, perched 80 miles south of Cancun on the only promontory that can be called a cliff for hundreds of miles along the coast.
Its heyday was as a commercial port between 900 and 1521, making it one of the last outposts of Mayan civilization before the Spanish conquest.
They were international businessmen, and their seagoing canoes-up to 8 feet wide and as long as a Spanish galleon, according to a scribe along with Columbus on his fourth and final voyage in 1502-plied waters well into South America.
Archeologists suggest that it was during this time that competition and warfare among the Mayan city states intensified. War changed from limited, ritualized affairs for the purpose of gaining captives for slaves and sacrifice to brutal campaigns of conquest.
Not that the Mayas were ever the reclusive, peaceful, philosopher-priests that many guides at the ruins describe for their tourist charges. Most archeologists believed that, too, until about 25 years ago, when major breakthroughs in deciphering hieroglyphics yielded new understanding about the civilization.
But Tulum and Chichen Itza present stunning examples of the science and art of the ancient Mayas.
At Tulum, it’s humbling to contemplate a Stone Age culture-laboring without the wheel-creating precise architectural alignments that direct sunlight to gateways and ceremonial platforms on certain days of the year.
At Chichen Itza, there’s the famous Castillo-temple to the feathered serpent god Kukulcan-which, on the spring and autumn equinox each year, presents the spectacle of a snake composed of sunlight and shadow slithering down its walls.
And deep at the heart of the pyramid lies the jaguar throne-balam.
On the road from Tulum to Chichen Itza, a 50-foot red-barked tree rose dramatically from the monte (the dry, scrub jungle that covers much of the northern lowlands of the peninsula with green-gray monotony).
About three-quarters of the way up, its trunk split into two branches, forming a kind of cross. The ceiba-the silk-cotton or kapok tree native to Central America-was sacred to the ancient Mayas and remains a durable symbol to their descendants today.
In the Mayan cosmology, the axis that reached through the center of the three domains-the heavens, the middle world of Earth, and the dark waters of the underworld-was the wacah chan, the World Tree.
Superseding balam, it was the path of communication between the natural and supernatural world and was reflected, in the material world, by the ceiba. The tree often grew at the mouth of caves, those gateways to the non-physical realms, and its red sap evoked the sacrificial blood of the Mayan kings, which fertilized the earth and maintained the cycle of life.
When Christianity was brought to the Mayas, the cross became an easy symbol to adopt-its arms spread like the split trunk of the ceiba. A cross with pine boughs tied to its trunk or beams is often seen in Mayan religious festivals.
The old religion and the new also have become amalgamated in the rituals of contemporary shamans as they divine the future from the ancient calendar, call on the spirits of nature to protect the village cornfields, or invoke the spirits of the forest who have taken the names of Christian saints.
And in a world still populated by invisible but ever-present spirits, balam the jaguar stands among the yuntzilob, the Worthy Lords. They, too, are guardians of the fields, and stand sentry at the entrances of Mayan villages, set at the points of the four primary directions as in the great stone cities of the distant past.
Tradition still governs the planting, nurturing, harvesting of corn, and the grinding of it into the dough called masa for tortillas and tamales.
And it stabilizes the structure of the family and the traditional community. Those who know the Mayas say they will survive even the current hardships.
For time passes in ever-repeating cycles, the Mayas have always believed. The ancient Mayas believed, for instance, that the world had been created and destroyed at least three times before the beginning of the current creation on Aug. 13, 3114 B.C. (translated to our calendar).
Archeologists reviewing the ancient tables have divined that shortly after the new millennium begins by our calendar, a great cycle will end-according to the so-called Long Count calendar of the Mayas-on Dec. 23, 2012. Some New Age alarmists have predicted the end of the world on that date.
Not to worry, says Linda Schele, an expert on Mayan myth and art. There’s evidence in the Mayan heiroglyphics that, in fact, the current creation faces a minimum length of just less than 142 nonillion (142 followed by 30 zeros) years.
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Time, space and conventional assumptions about the world tend to shift when one travels through the Yucatan seeking understanding of the Mayas, ancient and contemporary.