#tzutujil

Ironically, once a year on Good Friday the old-time Catholics had used the Hole to brace a heavy timber cross two stories tall on which they reenacted the crucifixion of their God-man Christ, with a well-articulated image of Jesus killed. The Mayans saw the cross as the original tree and Jesus as the diverse fruit of that tree, so they covered the dead Jesus at Easter with millions of beautiful flowers so that he was entirely hidden in beauty. When the Catholics lifted him nailed to his tree, the Mayans saw a flowering tree whose fruit was God's-gift-son crucified, whose blood ran down the tree into the Hole to feed the roots of creation.

It was not the original Tzutujil method, but since the Hole was left undis turbed the rest of the year there was no conflict. When the Franciscan fathers saw the hierarchy weeping, praying, placing fire, flowers, liquor, and incense into the Hole throughout the year, they assumed the Indians were venerating the Passion of Christ.

The sacred Hole was about words coming together and about longing, remembrance, and feeding what needed to live. Ma Um, Spider, was the official in charge of this portal. He would hold this position for life or as long as he wanted until he chose to pass the role of guarding and maintaining this Hole onto a shaman with the desire and knowledge. Ritually, we called this Hole the Umbilical Stump of the Earth Fruit and, like the navel on an orange, this spot was the memory of the ancient flowering.

Now avocado trees bear only avocados; deer don't give birth to falcons; birds don't hatch avocados. All things exclusively reproduce their own kind. Having achieved diversity, the old vine died back, the old tree dried up, and, over thousands of years, died and rotted into a humus that became the Earth. The vegetal memory of the old tree in its humus continued to fertilize the old tree's dream of diversity through its decay.

The places on this network of vines - the mountains and valleys, springs, oceans, and volcanoes where the first seeds took root, dawned, and sprouted this world into life - were the locations of those hollow knots in the maze of sacred places in the village streets.

Having died back, the vines and trees that bore all life left us with hollow places, mouths that had to be nourished, where trunks had once stood. This nourishment was ritual itself, and ritual fed the deified earth and the network of time carried from each of these old places as spiritual humus, allowing the ancestral roots of all things to absorb enough ritual nutrients to keep the earth alive in the diversified and motion-oriented forms we live in today.

When the Original Trunk and Vine had died back, she left us with the most powerful Hole, mouth, hollow knot of all, right in the center of the universe. Out of this Hole our lives still flow. We the Scat Mulaj fed the world there, and began and ended all our rituals there.

The Tzutujil people did not concern themselves with building large wooden and stone structures dedicated to their greatness or to the greatness of God, which would still be standing and proclaiming these things when they died. What monuments they did try to leave were a race of descendants who could continue feeding life. Culture was not measured by who had the biggest buildings but by the happiness of its people, and that came from their ability to make ornate gifts for the other world, gifts that decayed and disap peared, consumed by the spirits. There were many places on the earth where these powers of life and these deities could be fed. Extending in every direction out over the earth, in the Inner Bigness of the Universe they formed a huge net of holy places, a net of mouths. Each knot in this net was an actual spot on the earth that we considered to be hollow and hungry, little mouths through which ritual food could be pushed to nourish the universe. This kept the interconnecting lines between each of them, which were time and the bubbling life of the creations, from grinding to a halt of oblivion, truly keeping the whole world fertile and in live movement.

The Tzutujil demand that you "go the route" to learn anything, which means that questions are not answered until they are asked properly, which can only be accomplished by someone who has taken the time to get the Mayan vision of life. This can take years. But by then you are "Mayanized" and don't feel like writing anymore. So you go do something else! This has happened to more than a few. Outsiders who refuse to be Mayanized are coaxed into distributing lots of gifts, and when the gifts stop coming, the people utterly ignore the investigators until they flee in disgust, having learned nothing of what they came for.