The loose ends and contradictions within Maya mythic narrative are legendary, and they have provided fertile ground for endless speculation and fill-in-the-blank interpretation. The desire to understand the foundational propositions that both unified and distinguished America's great pre-columbian civilizations has propelled many a career among archaeologists, art historians, social anthropologists, historians, linguists, and folklorists. The situation is compounded by a wealth of primary sources (visual, oral, and documentary) that span 2,500 years—not the least of which is the extraordinary Popol Vuh, a K'iche’ Maya creation narrative that has been compared to the Christian Bible. In many books and papers, primary sources often are cherry-picked to build a cohesive narrative over a very long arc of time. As a result, mythic narratives have suffered much abuse in the service of Maya and Mesoamerican studies. Analogical or associational reasoning that jumps from one visual cue to another has tended to dominate interpretation of Mesoamerican mythic depictions.
In Art and Myth of the Ancient Maya, Chinchilla Mazariegos takes a different and refreshing approach that is impressively comprehensive in scope. His primary goal is to decipher the mythic scenes depicted on Late Classic Maya (AD 600–800) painted and inscribed pottery vessels—the divine stories that provided the paradigm for human stories. Because of the naturalistic technique of portraying humans and nonhumans, these vessels—mostly from burial contexts—have been rapaciously looted, and they are now housed in museums and private collections that are not always accessible for study. Chinchilla Mazariegos, however, has amassed and presented images from a very large corpus of vessels. His stated intent is to draw out nodal events and characters within Mesoamerican cosmogony—not just Maya cosmogony. To get there, he guides us through mythic narratives and visual depictions from highland Mexico, Oaxaca, and Guerrero, as well as the Gulf and Pacific coasts. In presenting this large array of mythic accounts, Chinchilla Mazariegos reveals and revels in the rich diversity of iconographic depictions and narrative lore, while at the same time emphasizing the common themes—such as failed attempts to revive the father of a heroic god and, consequently, the inevitable acceptance of death and ancestor veneration as a necessary part of life.
The text is crafted around six protagonists (each of whom occupies a chapter): the maiden (a welcome change from traditionally androcentric analyses of Mesoamerican myth), the grandmother (often a sexually dangerous character), the sun's opponents (the birth of solar and lunar deities being paramount in Mesoamerican creation narratives), the sun, the perfect youth (personified in the hero twins or twin headband deities of Maya lore), and the father (who cannot be revived after an untimely death and who becomes a subject of veneration).
In Dickensian fashion, mythic characters overcome extreme adversity and go on to become epic monster slayers and solar gods who rival Marvel comic book heroes. Other deities—particularly the maize god, who is modeled as a paradigm of rich fecundity—preferred to dally with well-endowed females. It is hard to back away from the impression that wariness of the dangerous power of human sexuality and reproduction was deeply and didactically encoded in Mesoamerican myth. Grandmothers, in particular, are portrayed as dangerous sexual beings. Chinchilla Mazariegos proposes the existence of grandmotherly protagonists with toothed vaginas, although mythic descriptions of such extraordinary reproductive features are somewhat veiled and are not shown iconographically in this book (Figure 47, however, does show a Nahua Tzitzimitl with a serpent between her legs). Nevertheless, in a world in which a woman likely completed her childbearing years in her late thirties or early forties and could become a grandmother at the age of 32, grandmothers would have been formidable characters—still sexually active, but in mature and powerful ways that revealed male vulnerabilities.
By arraying mythic narratives from all over Mesoamerica and examining their “goodness of fit” with scenes depicted on Maya Preclassic murals, Classic-period pottery vessels, and—to a lesser extent—Postclassic codices, Chinchilla Mazariegos takes us on an open-ended exploration of Mesoamerican ontologies and embedded constructs of moral authority and existential dangers. Revealing a rich and varied knowledge tradition, Art and Myth of the Ancient Maya is written in a manner that is accessible to undergraduates, and it should be read by every student of Mesoamerica.
One wishes, however, that Chinchilla Mazariegos had moderated his stance against synthetic interpretation by composing a final chapter that returned to the common themes underlying his superpower-equipped nodal characters and their extraordinary adventures. Printed on glossy paper with hundreds of high-quality color photographs and black-and-white line drawings, the hardbound edition is priced accordingly—which dampens its potential utility for undergraduate and graduate courses in Maya archaeology, art history, folklore, or myth. Hopefully, a paperback edition will soon be available.
