National Geographic: Lost Kingdoms of the Maya Page #4

---

is a blend of these two ancient faiths

The Maya have clung tenaciously to

many aspects of the old culture.

In the highlands of Chiapas

and Guatemala

their unique dress not only defines

them as Maya,

but identifies the particular village

where they live.

It is said that when a Maya woman

puts on her traditional blouse,

called a huipil,

her head emerges at the very center

of a world woven from dreams,

just as the great tree of life

emerges from the earth.

In the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico,

Chip Morris had been working

with weavers for 20 years.

The weavers have always said that

their designs come from the beginning

of the world,

meaning the beginning of their culture

When I started looking at

the archeology of the sculptures

and the statues, the things that show

what the weaving was like,

there are a number that are all

but identical to the weavings of today.

What's in the designs is a map

of the Maya world,

but not the surface of the earth,

not where we are standing now,

but it's the dream world.

It's that world where the gods are,

where the beings that control rain,

where Angel, the lightning bolt lives.

There are no trucks,

there are no houses on a blouse.

It's all images of that

sacred universe that creates rain,

that creates life,

that maintains the world.

In a world where the line between

the secular and the sacred

is almost imperceptible,

everything is more than is seems.

Pyramids symbolize sacred mountains

where the ancestors dwell.

Doors represent the mouths of caves

passageways into the mountain's

dangerous underworld.

The Maya believed they went to

that underworld when they died.

They called it Xibalba.

It was the "place of fright"

a watery realm of disease and decay

that ordinary people

had little hope of escaping.

How the Maya treated their dead

is being investigated here

at a site 130 miles north of Copan.

These are the ruins

of a city called Caracol.

Once it was a prosperous

administrative center.

Today it is remarkable for the scores

of tombs discovered here.

I think we'll leave the rest

of this until we move the rocks.

Okay.

Arlen Chase is a potter expert.

Diane Chase is an authority

on human bones.

They're trying to understand

how the Maya thought about death.

We tend to think of things

in Westernized terms.

The Maya were not a Western society;

they didn't do anything

the way Europeans do.

It's so hard for our own society

to understand how the Maya lived.

I mean we don't have dead living

with us, you know, every day.

We don't put them in a room

in our house and maintain them there.

Well, the Maya essentially did that

in their living groups.

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes