Contemporary Maya Spirituality

Contemporary Maya Spirituality PDF Author: Jean Molesky-Poz
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292778627
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
An authoritative study of the indigenous religion still practiced in Guatemala based on extensive original research and participant observation. Jean Molesky-Poz draws on in-depth dialogues with Maya Ajq’ijab’ (keepers of the ritual calendar), her own participant observation, and inter-disciplinary resources to offer a comprehensive, innovative, and well-grounded understanding of contemporary Maya spirituality and its theological underpinnings. She reveals significant continuities between contemporary and ancient Maya worldviews and spiritual practices. Molesky-Poz opens with a discussion of how the public emergence of Maya spirituality is situated within the religious political history of the Guatemalan highlands, particularly the pan-Maya movement. She investigates Maya cosmovision and its foundational principles, as expressed by Ajq’ijab’. At the heart of this work, Ajq’ijab’ interpret their obligation, lives, and spiritual work. Molesky-Poz then explores aspects of Maya spirituality, including sacred geography, sacred time, and ritual practice. She confirms contemporary Maya spirituality as a faith tradition with elaborate historical roots that has significance for individual, collective, and historical lives, reaffirming its own public space and legal right to be practiced.

Contemporary Maya Spirituality

Contemporary Maya Spirituality PDF Author: Jean Molesky-Poz
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292778627
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book Description
An authoritative study of the indigenous religion still practiced in Guatemala based on extensive original research and participant observation. Jean Molesky-Poz draws on in-depth dialogues with Maya Ajq’ijab’ (keepers of the ritual calendar), her own participant observation, and inter-disciplinary resources to offer a comprehensive, innovative, and well-grounded understanding of contemporary Maya spirituality and its theological underpinnings. She reveals significant continuities between contemporary and ancient Maya worldviews and spiritual practices. Molesky-Poz opens with a discussion of how the public emergence of Maya spirituality is situated within the religious political history of the Guatemalan highlands, particularly the pan-Maya movement. She investigates Maya cosmovision and its foundational principles, as expressed by Ajq’ijab’. At the heart of this work, Ajq’ijab’ interpret their obligation, lives, and spiritual work. Molesky-Poz then explores aspects of Maya spirituality, including sacred geography, sacred time, and ritual practice. She confirms contemporary Maya spirituality as a faith tradition with elaborate historical roots that has significance for individual, collective, and historical lives, reaffirming its own public space and legal right to be practiced.

The Ancient Spirituality of the Modern Maya

The Ancient Spirituality of the Modern Maya PDF Author: Thomas Hart
Publisher: UNM Press
ISBN: 0826343503
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
The myth and ceremony of Maya beliefs have been sustained for over five hundred years in spite of massacres, persecution, and discrimination.

Maya History and Religion

Maya History and Religion PDF Author: John Eric Sidney Thompson
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806122472
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 470

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Book Description
In this volume, a distinguished Maya scholar seeks to correlate data from colonial writings and observations of the modern Indian with archaeological information in order to extend and clarify the panorama of Maya culture.

Transcendent Wisdom of the Maya

Transcendent Wisdom of the Maya PDF Author: Gabriela Jurosz-Landa
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1591433355
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
An initiate’s inside account of ancient Maya spiritual practices alive today • Includes a Foreword by José Luis Tigüilá NABÉ kaxbaltzij, spokesperson of the Maya municipality • Details the initiation process the author went through to become a Maya shaman-priestess, including rituals, prayers, and ceremonies • Explains the foundational spiritual wisdom of the Maya calendar as a living entity, its cycles of time, and the significance of “the counting of the days”, which helps keep time itself alive • Examines the power of dance and Maya ceremonies, Maya future-telling, and communication with ancestors through the sacred fire Offering an insider’s experiential account of ancient Maya spiritual wisdom and practices, initiated Maya shaman-priestess Gabriela Jurosz-Landa opens up the mysterious world of the Maya, dispelling the rampant misinformation about their beliefs and traditions, sharing the transcendent beauty of their ceremonies, and explaining the Maya understanding of time, foundational to their spiritual worldview and cosmology. The author, an anthropologist, details the initiation process she went through to become a Maya shaman-priestess in Guatemala, including rituals, prayers, the presence of numinous forces, and the transmission of sacred knowledge. She explains the spiritual wisdom of the Maya calendar as a living entity, its cycles of time, and the significance of “the counting of the days,” which helps keep time itself alive. She examines Maya spiritual and cosmological concepts such as how the universe is shaped like a triangle over a square. She reveals the profound power of dance in Maya tradition, explaining how ritual dance halts the flow of time, reactivates primordial events, and captures vital energies that keep the Maya spiritual tradition vital and alive. Exploring other Maya secret knowledge, she also details Maya ritual attire, Maya future-telling with the calendar, the reading of the Tzi’te beans, and how the Maya communicate with ancestors through the sacred fire. Illustrating how contemporary Maya life is suffused with spiritual tradition and celebration, the author shares the teachings of the Maya from her initiate and anthropologist point of view in order to help us all learn from the ancient wisdom of their beliefs and worldview. Because, to truly understand the Maya, one must think like the Maya.

Maya Pilgrimage to Ritual Landscape

Maya Pilgrimage to Ritual Landscape PDF Author: Joel W. Palka
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826354742
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Through cross-cultural comparisons, archaeological data, and ethnographic insights, Joel W. Palka addresses central questions about Maya pilgrimage practice and discusses the broad importance of Maya ritual landscapes and pilgrimage for Mesoamerica as a whole.

Popol Vuh

Popol Vuh PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780888999214
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Mayan civilization once flourished in what is today Guatemala and the Yucatan. The Mayan sacred book the Popol Vuh tells of the creation of the universe, the world of gods and demi-gods and the creation of mankind.

On Being Maya and Getting By

On Being Maya and Getting By PDF Author: Sarah R. Taylor
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1607327724
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
On Being Maya and Getting By is an ethnographic study of the two Ek’Balams—a notable archaeological site and adjacent village—of the Yucatán Peninsula. When the archaeological site became a tourist destination, the village became the location of a community-based tourism development project funded by the Mexican government. Overt displays of heritage and a connection to Maya antiquity became important and profitable for the modern Maya villagers. Residents of Ek’Balam are now living in a complex ecosystem of natural and cultural resources where the notion and act of “being Maya” is deeply intertwined with economic development. The book explores how Ek’Balam villagers negotiate and maneuver through a web of social programs, tourists, volunteers, and expectations while living their daily lives. Focusing on the active processes in which residents choose to participate, author Sarah R. Taylor provides insights into how the ideological conflicts surrounding economic development play out in the negotiations between internal community politics and external social actors. The conflicts implicit to conceptions of “community” as a target for development are made explicit through the systematic questioning of what exactly it means to be a member of a local, indigenous, or sustainable community in the process of being developed. On Being Maya and Getting By is a rich description of how one community is actively negotiating with tourism and development and also a call for a more complex analysis of how rural villages are connected to greater urban, national, and global forces.

The Birth of a Universe: The Maya Science of Pregnancy

The Birth of a Universe: The Maya Science of Pregnancy PDF Author: Apab'yan Tew
Publisher: Jade Publishing
ISBN: 9781949299090
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
So begins The Birth of a Universe, a profound exegesis by Apabyan Tew, a K'iche Maya midwife and daykeeper. We are bound to the ancient 260-day Maya calendar just as we are bound to the planets that gave birth to that divinatory calendar, our conception, growth, and destiny guided by nawales, the spirits of the days. This system, where everything in intertwined and shapes the nature of the soul and consciousness, is the essence of Maya science. Westerners may divide indigenous science into various disciplines such as physics and astronomy. The vital details of the parents' circumstances and emotions at the moment of conception some would call psychology, a psychology that takes into account every intense mood and feeling-the very atmosphere-from the sexual act to the miraculous birth of the child. Others would call the daykeeper's acute analysis of consciousness, spirit, gender, and material status a new (though age-old) philosophy. Like all well-wrought philosophies, this one is intricate and complex. In fact, it reflects a rational world grounded in earth and sky, basic human emotions and urges, as well as invisible forces.This wise, sometimes esoteric volume is an antidote to chaos, presenting a Unified Theory of Birth that opens a pathway to the fates and to the eternal.

From Moon Goddesses to Virgins

From Moon Goddesses to Virgins PDF Author: Pete Sigal
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292757867
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
For the preconquest Maya, sexuality was a part of ritual discourse and performance, and all sex acts were understood in terms of their power to create, maintain, and destroy society. As postconquest Maya adapted to life under colonial rule, they neither fully abandoned these views nor completely adopted the formulation of sexuality prescribed by Spanish Catholicism. Instead, they evolved hybridized notions of sexual desire, represented in the figure of the Virgin Mary as a sexual goddess, whose sex acts embodied both creative and destructive components. This highly innovative book decodes the process through which this colonization of Yucatan Maya sexual desire occurred. Pete Sigal frames the discussion around a series of texts, including the Books of Chilam Balam and the Ritual of the Bacabs, that were written by seventeenth and eighteenth century Maya nobles to elucidate the history, religion, and philosophy of the Yucatecan Maya communities. Drawing on the insights of philology, discourse analysis, and deconstruction, he analyzes the sexual fantasies, fears, and desires that are presented, often unintentionally, in the "margins" of these texts and shows how they illuminate issues of colonialism, power, ritual, and gender.

Art and Society in a Highland Maya Community

Art and Society in a Highland Maya Community PDF Author: Allen J. Christenson
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292789831
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
A study of a major piece of modern Mayan religious art.