Coming of the White Man to Maya Land!

Source: Schele, Linda and Freidel, David. A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1990.

Adapted from pages 377-379, high lighted hither and yon.

"Naum-Pat, Halach Uinic (true human), felt the gentle waves of the dark, glittering sea lap against his feet as he watched the strange canoes bob against the stars. They were vast floating palaces really. Lit from within with lamps and torches, their tall masts and rigging graced the cool moonlight of Lady Ix-Chel.

"Mother of all, he whispered to himself, where did these foul-smelling barbarians come from?

"He sighed in astonishment and worry. He had been a seaman all his life. Like his people a thousand years before him, he had plied the deep blue waters and treacherous shallows in great canoes, laden with honey, salt, slaves, chocolate -- treasure of all kinds. He had fought enemies upon its rolling surface; he had ridden out the great storms that graced its shores. The sea was his, world of his ancestors, great and dangerous and rich in prescious, holy things.

"Now it had vomited up this monstrosity -- a canoe that was a house. The light-skinned barbarians wielded great power, no doubt about it. A shiver ran up his spine. They would be worse and more dangerous than the Aztec pochteca -- those dangerous merchants from the west who were extending the Mexica empire toward the ancient lands of the true people.

"On the temple mountain yesterday,

that old fool of a priest had addressed these new strangers as if they were gods.

"He had blown incense on them only a moment before they pushed him aside and entered the sanctuary. After defiling and smashing the sacred images of the gods, they had opened the bundles and handled the holy objects of the ancestors, taking those made of sun-excrement -- the yellow metal the foreigners coveted.

"Worse than looting the temple -- other pirates had done that -- these men had raised up the World Tree in the form of a wooden cross. They had opened a book -- small, black, and poorly painted, but still a book -- and read from it in their unutterable tongue. The chilan, his city's prophet and interpreter of the gods, had watched from the crowd at the base of the temple, shaking his head in fear and wonder.

"Naum-Pat shuddered with horror of the memory of what the strangers had done. As he did so, the words of the famous prophecy of the Chilam Balam went through his head.

"Naum-Pat had watched in stunned disbelief as the strangers threw down the kulche', in the Holy House, and put the wooden Tree in its place.

"Like the chilan, Naum-Pat had seen the raising of the Tree as a powerful portent, but somehow the strangers' black book had frightened him more. In all the world, only real human beings, only Maya, had books. Others, like the Mexica, had pictures of course, but not the written word of ancestors and heroes, not the prophecies of the star companions.

Books were records of the past, they were the truth, the guide to the cycles.

"The strangers' metal knifes were powerful weapons, but many weapons of the Maya could kill just as efficiently. It was the books that Naum-Pat feared, for with the books came true knowledge, knowledge that could vanquish his people's present and capture their future.

"He had planned a feast for them tomorrow in the council hall and would treat them distantly, yet with dignity. But what of the future? As Naum-Pat turned his back to the quiet beach and headed home, his thoughts turned to his children."

Page 495:

Chilam Balam -- "The last great Maya prophet: chilam, 'interpreter [of the gods],' and balam, 'jaguar.' which was probably his family name. Roys (1967:3 and 182-187) suggested that Chilam Balam lived during the last decades of the fifteenth century or perhaps during the first part of the sixteenth century and that his lasting fame came from his foretelling the appearance of strangers from the east who would establish a new religion."