Worshipers and objects of worship

I generally find religion to be a little bit of a sad topic, so I generally stay out of it. How ridiculous would it be if we said that only our own language was true, and all other languages were wrong? That's often what I see with religion, where most people seem to be unable to break through a thin doctrinal veneer to get to the underlying philosophical issues. However, in Guatemala religion is just too important to be overlooked. It is all too easy to forget that the few news we get from Central America are restricted to the tiny ruling class and natural disasters. It must be remembered that Central America is mostly about peasants and gods, not politicians and hurricanes.

First of all, the dead are a little bit more alive. We all know about the Day of the Dead in Mexico, but there is another aspect to this. Certain dead people have more influence than other. Those dead people are on their way to becoming minor deities.

Witness, for example, this interesting grave in Xela. It is that of a girl who supposedly killed herself in 1927 when the man she loved came back from Spain with a wife. A famous poem was written about her by Jose Marti:

Quiero, a la sombra de un ala,
contar este cuento en flor:
la niña de Guatemala,
la que se murió de amor.

Eran de lirios los ramos,
y las orlas de reseda
y de jazmín: la enterramos
en una caja de seda.

…Ella dio al desmemoriado
una almohadilla de olor:
él volvió, volvió casado:
ella se murió de amor.

Many people are convinced that this dead girl can infuse love into their wayward husbands and beloved classmates, so they'll write little recados, or wishes, all over the tomb, which has to be repainted quite frequently in order to make blank spaces.


Some of these dead people become deities, like the little skeleton effigy of El Rey San Pascual, which was recently booted out of a Catholic church because he was distracting the worshipers. The worshipers just built a whole new chapel around him, and he even gets recados from Guatemalans who emigrated to the United States. Many, many towns have such minor deities.


Here is one of the more controvertial among those minor deities. Meet San Simon, a strange object of veneration. This person is the effigy of a white man, and supposedly stands in for a complex Mayan deity, or the devil, or a Christian saint, or nothing at all, depending on who ou ask. The fact is, very poor people waste their money and their hopes giving his puppets whiskey, tequila, cigarettes, candles, incense, money, and some say that women sleep with the life-size puppet of him in a couple of towns.


He is the perfect excuse for an annual day of debauchery. The whole town (pregnant and old women included) gets drunk "in his honor," and he even has a sponsor beer.


Did I mention the dead person who made it furthest? Guatemala is very Catholic, and various brands of evangelical movements have been very active lately. I once dared suggest that had Muslims invaded, raped, and destroyed Meso-American civilizations, Central America would be Muslim, and that had Buddhists invaded and enslaved the Mayan heartland, Guatemala would be Buddhist. The very liberal people to whom I suggested this were incensed. Of course, there is only one true religion, everyone else is wrong, God speaks to some people and Satan to others, and I am going to hell. Quickly.


Thankfully, the traditional religions are being revived in more tolerant, objective, and open-minded ways in many, many places. It's not always New Age ideas, either. Some of it is real, deep, and directly connected to solid traditions and scholarhip. There are more Mayan priests all the time, and they might be getting better all the time, too.


There are many people who have been climbing mountains to light candles in sacred places where there is no mandatory tithing, no tequila store, and more than one possible way to understand the world.


But there are also some clear disconnects with the traditions, such as with this statue of a monkey in Takalik Abaj. Many locals believe that it helps fertilitybecause it is "pregnant." In fact, modern scholarship is pretty unequivocal: that's just the style of the bygone civilization that carved it.


Here's a celebration of the Mayan New Year in Laguna Chicabal - a volcanic crater lake that supposedly harbors the gods of rain.


Many people saw nothing strange about having a Pentacostal ceremony on the lake shore.


Most of the ceremonies were private and traditional, but the church still has its hand in this. The Mayan oral tradition is almost entirely lost, and most of what we know of it comes from a corrupted version written down by a priest. Many traditions were artificially paralleled with Catholic traditions. This particular one was changed to where the "Mayan new year" coincides with ascension, so that it no longer follows the Mayan calendar, or coincide with the beginning of the rainy season.


It's nice to see that people can now practice their traditions without being persecuted for it.


And by the way, if this is interesting to you, you might want to look into the cult of the Santa Muerte in Mexico. What are its links to organized crime? Is it a native tradition? Is it compatible with Christianity? Is it pseudo-witchcraft? What right does the Mexican government have to act against it? Is it going to become a significant trend in the US?


Clearly there are many questions, and no easy answers, even if one sticks to the basic aspects of any religious practice.

Playing with reptiles

The three weeks since I last posted a blog entry have been entirely swallowed up by interminable hours of dreary shift work in the heat, and a move to new barracks where we just now got internet installed. The best things I have done in the past three weeks are:

- I read a few books in Spanish.
- I bought an airplane ticket to Santiago, Chile, for when this deployment is over (I am planning to be in Chile from early November until January).
- I put an eighteen inch “Dhub dhub” lizard in the commander’s desk.

“Dhub dhub” (or “Dhub,”) is the Arabic name of a sort of whiptail lizard that is extremely common around here. Its genus name, I guess, is Uromastyx sp. It is a pretty impressive lizard that is completely harmless. In fact, it lives rather like a tortoise, eating vegetation, drinking little or no water, sleeping and hibernating in burrows, living a long time and growing slowly. Rather unlike tortoise, however, Dhub lizard are very fast runners, and hard to catch. Some of us have been able to outrun them, but I haven’t caught one yet since I am not much of a sprinter. This one was caught by an undisclosed friend, and I took this picture after we fashioned a little leash for it out of parachute cord, and tied it off to my couch (yes, I have a couch!).

After dark, I managed to sneak into the commander’s area , remove some pens and supplies from his desk drawer, and replace them with the lizard. Sadly, the command post’s air conditioner is a true blast freezer, chilling the tent to a quasi-arctic 60 degrees F (it is eighty degrees F inside my room right now, and about 118 degrees F outside). This caused the lizard to go into hibernation inside the desk, so when the commander opened it the lizard didn’t leap out. The effect was still quite worth the effort – according to people who were there at the time, the commander almost fell backwards over his chair in fright. Here is another Dhub lizard – this time a baby that is being kept as a pet by a friend:

Speaking of reptiles… I think this is the Arabian sand boa Eryx jakayari. We caught it at night, in the desert. Its eyes and nostrils are located on top of its head, so it can lay buried in the sand and still be able to see and hear, like an alligator in water. Also like an alligator, it will wait for a prey to come by, and emerge at the last split second to pounce. Since it is a boa, it will then crush its prey like a constrictor, and swallow it whole. When we caught it, it got scared and coughed up a half-digested young gerbil. It is a very fast little creature that kept trying to get away from me, but after a few minutes of harassing it so I could get its picture it calmed down and I could just hold it in my hand.



As always, I have been reading the news. As you probably have heard, seen and read, there are a lot of tragic events in this region of the world and others. However, they managed to be trumped in my mind by the idiotic Fatwa of a Kuwaiti cleric.

Doctor Ezzat Attiya (yes, I am talking about a guy who has studied for many, many years) has recently put out a religious edict saying that in order for a woman to work in a place where there are men, she must breastfeed the men. Yes, that’s right! According to this highly trained genius, if a woman breastfeeds a man, he will become her son in the eyes of God, and the man will stop having sexual thoughts about her. And no, he didn’t say that breast pumps were authorized for that purpose by Allah. In my neophyte opinion, that shows precious little knowledge of the male psyche and a worryingly low opinion of his deity’s intelligence. More worrying: the guy is in effect a government employee, because his university is part of a mosque, and all Kuwaiti Sunni mosques fall under the ministry of Awqaf and Islamic affairs. It is kind of funny to ponder some problematic scenarios, such as: what about royal family women who are government ministers? What about women who cannot produce breast milk? What if a woman ends up marrying a coworker after he has been declared her son?