Between the ruined Mayan cities of Kabah and Uxmal, in the Mexican state of Yucatán, there is a red church on a hill. The interior is lined with strange wooden shrines, their doors ajar like cabinets of curiosities. A caretaker who was clearing away the guttered candles welcomed us and said sadly, “We don’t hold so many religious festivals these days. Because of the chupacabra, you see.”
The chupacabra? It translates literally as “goatsucker” – a cryptid, or mythical beast, that the villagers of Santa Elena believe preys on livestock. If you hold a festival you are just asking for the chupacabra to saunter along and pick off the goats and pigs you bring to feed the festival-goers. So it’s best not to hold festivals in the first place.
Superstition runs deep here – as deep, indeed, as el inframundo, the underworld, which underpinned the beliefs of the old Mayan civilisation of Mexico and Central America. This year the eyes of the world are turning afresh on this extraordinary people and period of history.
This is because, according to selective interpretation of Mayan cosmology, time reaches its sell-by date on December 21, or possibly December 12. The whole shebang has been whipped up by a potent mixture of new archaeological finds, conspiracy – and apocalypse-peddlers on the internet. This month it was reported that remains of what could be a Mayan city had been found in eastern Honduras. A couple of weeks ago a new discovery was announced at the Mayan site of Xultun in Guatemala that is bound to fuel the hysteria. In a small chamber dating from the ninth century, archaeologists have uncovered hieroglyphs that represent the oldest known Mayan calendar. It’s a reminder, if any were needed in this auspicious year, that the Maya were the original time lords.
By common agreement, the Mayan calendar suggests merely that a cycle of time is due to conclude this December – but myths have clung like lianas to the Maya since early European explorers believed them to have been one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. And in any case the Armageddon scenario is a gift for the tourism authorities, which are expecting a bumper crop of visitors in 2012.
My journey back through the time cycles began in one of the world’s great portals to the past, the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. Here you learn that the Maya were the greatest civilisation of Mesoamerica, the term for the cultures of Central America before the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century.
Their heyday of power and influence, known as the Classic Period, was from AD300 to 900 and it was in this time that they developed great cities such as Palenque and Chichén Itzá and became brilliant astronomers and mathematicians. In the old lands of the Maya – the south-eastern Mexican states of Chiapas and Yucatán, and across Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador – the indigenous people are nominally Christian these days. But the old belief systems remain as intoxicating to them as the cane liquor they drink.
To experience this living history for myself I flew south-east to Chiapas, a region of rainforest and exotic birds, of fiestas and political radicalism, where a quarter of the population of four million is indigenous, mostly of Mayan origin.
In the colonial town of San Cristóbal de las Casas I wandered the elevated pavements through streets of brightly painted houses and crossed a plaza with a café hidden in the bandstand like a rabbit in a hat. When the conquistadors arrived in this hilly region in the 1520s, the glories of Mayan civilisation were long past. The Spanish found a hostile people steeped in heretical beliefs, and promptly imposed Roman Catholicism on them, destroying temples and icons and punishing the old ways, often brutally.
“They concentrated the Maya in reducciones – mission villages – gave them a patron saint and showed them how to worship,” explained my guide, Hector Mejia (like all my guides in Mexico, he was a mestizo, of mixed Spanish and indigenous ancestry).
The Maya took on the outward forms of Catholic observance and, today, many remain deeply religious. In the church of Santo Domingo in San Cristóbal, the devoutness of a huddled old couple was palpable – but their expressions of devotion were strange.
“He is 'pulsing’ her,” whispered Hector, indicating the man’s fingers on the woman’s wrist. “He is a healer. The Maya believe that blood is the path to the spirit world. They can tell what is wrong with you by feeling your pulse, and make you feel better.”
The healers are the priests of the old belief system. To witness them at work we drove six miles north-west to the Mayan village of San Juan Chamula, where the Day of San Sebastian was being celebrated with music, revels and devotion.
In a church strewn with pine needles, festooned with white flowers and heady with copal incense, a band played – deafening drums and trumpets – kneeling shamans healed pilgrims by holding sacrificial chickens above their bodies, then wringing the fowls’ necks, and intoxicated men swigged posh (cane liquor) from old soda bottles. They didn’t keep it all to themselves – every second mouthful they blew over worshippers in a mist of clear alcohol.
As we watched – strictly no photographs, or even note-taking – a healer lit two small candles and placed them at our feet. This is to ward off fear, according to Mayan ritual, but the healer had slightly misread our expressions. It was amazement, not fear, we felt. For a moment, we had felt transported to pre-Hispanic times.
The following day we took that journey for real, driving north-east across the Chiapas highlands into a nexus of Classic Period sites. Our first stop was Palenque, a complex of limestone pyramid tombs and temples that seems to hover among the jungled hills. It wasn’t until the late 18th century that Europeans came across Palenque, and initial accounts were fanciful and romantic, likening it to the Lost City of Atlantis and ascribing to it all sorts of fantastical origins.
In slanting afternoon sunlight, it was easy to imagine those early explorers getting carried away. Toucans flew overhead. Iguanas slithered metallically across the old stones. In the Tomb of the Red Queen two grungy young Americans – no doubt the advance guard of the apocalypse followers – were meditating in front of the Red Queen’s sarcophagus (they broke off to glare at me as I bumbled along taking photographs).
This is the stuff of Rider Haggard novels or Indiana Jones movies, and the ruins of Yaxchilán, 80 miles south-east, are even more suggestive. The only way to reach them is on a 40-minute motorboat ride along the Usumacinta River, which forms the border with Guatemala. The site appears abruptly on the southern river bank – a tangle of vegetation and stone terraces like a skeleton in its rotting shroud.
Here, where rulers such as Shield Jaguar I and Bird Jaguar IV once presided over a powerful city state, the light is green and brooding, filtered through vast rainforest trees with serpent-like surface roots. Parrots and howler monkeys screeched and bellowed through the tree canopy, while bats hung in the clammy tunnels of the labyrinth. Apart from a brief flurry of noise and movement produced by an Italian tour group, we had the stelae, altars, hilltop temples and subterranean passageways of Yaxchilán to ourselves.
For many years, scholars had an idealised view of the culture that had produced such places. My guide in Yucatán, Pepe Gonzalez, likened early interpretations of the Maya to the fictional land envisaged by Thomas More in Utopia. But there was another side, summed up in two words: human sacrifice. It was the discovery of the next site on our itinerary, Bonampak, that shed new light on the nature and extent of sacrificial practices, darkening history’s view of the Mayan civilisation.
I had a personal interest in Bonampak because I know the daughter of the man who “discovered” it, an American photographer and adventurer called Giles Healey. Bonampak is buried deep in the jungle in the lands of the Lacandon Indians, a Mayan group, near what is now the Guatemalan border. This region is so remote it was not colonised by the Spanish, and the Lacandon were never converted to Catholicism.
In 1946 Healey – an Indiana Jones figure if ever there was one – was led to the overgrown site by two Lacandon who had stumbled on it while hunting with bows and arrows. Nowadays Lacandon taxi drivers, distinctively long-haired and wearing white robes, ferry visitors the last few miles to the site. Our driver said matter-of-factly, “Giles Healey? Oh yes. My mother’s brother was Pepe Chambor. He was the one who showed Healey the murals.”
Bonampak is relatively small and unremarkable – except for one unique feature. In a temple on a hill there are three chambers covered in paintings, of a graphicness and sophistication found nowhere else in the Mayan world.
They depict a battle and its aftermath. A band plays. Prisoners plead for their lives as they are tortured by having their fingernails pulled out. A severed head rolls down steps. White-robed women practise auto-sacrifice by piercing their tongues and birdmen bleed their penises. The world portrayed and celebrated here is bizarre and unsettling.
Murals at the grandest Mayan site of all, Chichén Itzá in Yucatán, tell a similarly brutal story, and it is thought that the sacrifice of humans at Chichén Itzá’s sacred cenote, a well of some 200ft in diameter, continued into colonial times – which is a bit too close for comfort, I thought, as I stood on the limestone lip of the cenote gazing down on its green waters.
The day after visiting Chichén Itzá we dropped in on the church of Santa Elena, the red church on the hill that is haunted by the mythical goatsucker. In 1980, during restoration work, the bodies of 12 children were found buried beneath the church. The part-mummified remains of four of them lie in little wooden coffins in a museum next door.
These children died probably no more than 200 years ago, in what circumstances no one knows. But, having just heard about the chupacabra, and mindful of the sacrificial well at Chichén Itzá, I was struck by a thought. It is possible the children were sacrificed, following pre-Hispanic Mayan tradition, and that the time lords of the Classic Period were still pulling strings long after their demise.
My trip across south-eastern Mexico threw up several such moments, when it felt as if the Maya were reaching forward from their past into our future. This December they will finally let time go, having reminded us of a truth that T S Eliot understood: “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past.”
Nigel Richardson's tour of Mayan Mexico was arranged by Journey Latin America (020 8747 8315; journeylatin america.co.uk). A 15-day trip costs from £2,061 per person, visiting Chiapas and Yucatán and taking in Mexico City and a beach stay in Tulum on the Caribbean coast, at the S & S Hip Hotel.
The price includes private excursions to the sites, land transport, breakfast and three domestic flights. International flights cost extra. British Airways (0844 493 0787; ba.com) operates four non-stop flights a week to Mexico City; returns from £845.79.