Allen J. Christenson

Maize Was Their Flesh: Ritual Feasting in the Maya Highlands

Recently I accompanied a Tz’utujil-Maya ajq’ij (traditionalist priest) and six of his companions on a pilgrimage high in the mountains above Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala, to visit a ritual cave. The cave is considered one of the most sacred spots in the Lake Atitlan region and is seldom visited without first carrying out a series of ceremonies to petition the gods and ancestors who are believed to live there to purify the participants. This particular journey was the culmination of 6 months of preparation to determine the best day on which to visit the cave and to ensure that it was permissible to enter the cave without offending its divine inhabitants. The principal purpose of the visit was to ask for a good harvest in the coming year and for rains to return abundantly in season (that year had been a relatively poor one with regard to the maize harvest and the rains had been unusually spotty).