Note: It looks like I have offended some Mormons who don't want you to read this book. Nevertheless, science won't go away. Your "helpful" votes are appreciated
Schele and Freidel's book takes you into the mind of the ancient Maya, where bloodletting induced visions that opened doors into the world of pagan spirits and everyone had an animal "familiar."
The description of the "War of Conquest" of Tikal (tee-kal) against Uaactun (wa-shak-toon) is riviting. It is fascinating that we know the name of the general of Tikal, "Smoking-Frog." At other places, we now also know the names of the Maya leaders. "Ah Zacol...governed Lacanja for Knot-eye-Jaguar, the king of Bonampak." Other names are equally strange. I won't list the name of one king because Amazon's filter's would reject my review. Anyway, his name was "p-n-s of the jaguar."
I came to my interest in the Maya from my early encounters with Mormon authors who used specious scholarship to connect the Maya to the religious novel called the "Book of Mormon." Now that Maya writing has been deciphyered, all those false claims have been exposed. In many cases, the truth was known, but Mormon writers were engaging in the practice of lying for the Lord to promote their faith.
When the Spanish first saw Maya art, they misinterpreted it. They named one temple, for example, the "temple of the cross." The cross-like tree was seen as evidence that the Maya were Christians. Now we know that in the case of the temple of the "Foliated Cross" that the cross-bar of the cross is actually a maize plant with a "human head as an ear of maize." The maize plant is growing out of the "waterlily monster."
It was interesting to learn that the upright stone monuments, or stela, were known as "tree-stones" and the doorways into the temples were represented as the mouths of mountain monsters. The doorways are seen as caves into the mountain.
"Bloodletting, the focus ritual of Maya life, was the instrument" of the materialization of other-worldly beings.
The claims of Mormons and others that Stela B at Copan depicts elephant trunks was refuted even before the translation of the Maya glyphs. The trunks are actually the long beaks of macaws (you can see the colorful birds there today). The false claim is now doubly refuted because the writing on the stela refers to "macaw mountain," a nearby hill--not "elephant mountain."
Mormons are still claiming that there is a horse carved on the Temple of the Wall Panels at Chichen Itza. It is actually a damaged feathered-serpent (one feather hangs down to make the so-called horse's head). In reality, the Maya were so ignorant of horses that when Cortes left his lame horse among the Itza, they fed it meat.
The strange diet cause the horse to die and the Maya made a statue, calling it "Tzimin Chac," from the "Tzmin," meaning tapir (the animal most similar his general shape to a horse), and "Chac," the god of rain and thunder. When Father Urbita came to convert the Itza, he destroyed the idol at great risk to his life.
The Book of Mormon connection to ancient mesoamerica is without foundation. As you go back in time, the paganism only increases. There was no Hebrew civilization in mesoamerica.
This 500-page book belongs on the shelf on anyone interested in the mind of the ancient Maya.
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Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on May 26, 2008
- Reviewed in the United States on February 4, 2003
Top reviews from other countries
- D. NjokuReviewed in the United Kingdom on August 22, 2015
Some surprising revelations
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- Tony RowlandsReviewed in Australia on October 23, 2020
New revelations about the Maya
- Steve HammondReviewed in the United Kingdom on January 7, 2019
Dated and biased but still interesting
