The 2012 Story

series of murders against alleged leftist sympathizers, including Victor’s brother. They effectively unleashed an episode of terror and violence that obliterated most of the village and its citizens. Victor himself was taken prisoner and endured a night of horror that he later described in his published testimonial:

[They] lifted me up by my arms, then dragged me outside, past the pillar I had been tied to and across the patio to the rim of a foul cesspool filled with mud, water, and garbage. As they held me at the rim I heard a muffled cry rise from the depths and a head broke the surface, struggling to free itself from that horrible captivity… “T-t- take me out or shoot me, but don’t leave me in here,” he wailed pitifully. One of the soldiers leaned over the rim the man was clinging to and hit him in the face with his rifle butt, sinking him once again into the dark murky waters of the pit. “Shut up, turd…”

All at once a piercing scream tore through my thoughts and caused my heart to pound violently; it was like a howl from the world beyond. The soldiers had become so inured to these hair-raising screams, not one of them stirred in his bunk. They all kept on snoring, impervious to what was happening in the adjoining torture chamber.³

Montejo survived that terrifying night and was later reunited with his wife and children. He soon learned that his name was on the death list and he, like thousands of other Maya refugees, fled Guatemala. By 1989 he had received an MA from the State University of New York at Albany, and by 1993 an anthropology PhD from the University of Connecticut. He held teaching posts at Bucknell University, the University of Montana, and the University of California, and he received a Fulbright scholarship in 2003. In that year, back in Guatemala, he was elected congressman by popular vote and was appointed vice president of the Commission on Indigenous Affairs by the Guatemalan National Assembly. In 2006, he sponsored and helped pass a law designating a National Day for the Indigenous Pueblos of Guatemala.

His books range widely over poetry, folklore, politics, anthropology, and Maya traditions. In his “brief” resume he lists his many areas of experience and expertise: social, political, and cultural anthropology, specializing in the indigenous peoples of the Americas; Latin American diaspora, human rights, migration and transnationalism, comparative ethnic and religious studies, and native worldview and knowledge systems. As a political activist and community leader he has been involved in indigenous community development, rural and sustainable development, cultural/economic/political self-determination, cultural resource management, and poverty-alleviation strategies.⁴ His other accolades and activities are too numerous to mention, but I’d like to focus on two things: his defining use of the concept of “Mayanism” and his discussion of the “Baktunian” movement, revealing the role he sees 2012 playing in what he calls the “Maya intellectual renaissance.”⁵

MAYANISM AND THE BAKTUNIAN MOVEMENT

In Chapter 6 I discuss the appearance of the term “Mayanism” in a new Wikipedia entry, where it is used as a blanket term to refer to the New Age appropriation of 2012 and Maya concepts. I pointed out that using it in this way conflicted with the proactive use of similar terms, such as “Hinduism” and “Buddhism,” and distorted Victor Montejo’s original use of the term. In 2001, no less reputable a source than The Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures listed an entry called “Pan-Mayanism,” consisting of a cultural entry by anthropologist Kay Warren and a political entry by Victor Montejo. Neither entry gives the slightest indication that Mayanism, or Pan-Mayanism, has anything to do with the New Age appropriation of Maya traditions. Montejo observes that a new identity for the Maya is forming as the twenty-first century begins, one that involves “reorganizing themselves and making alliances among distinct Mayan organizations in order to reach a consensus on how to negotiate with the government of Guatemala on behalf of their communities.”⁶ Acknowledging common goals, beliefs, and identity is at the root of this development.

Kay Warren, in her cultural section of the Pan-Mayanism entry, notes that “indigenous activists have confronted powerful stereotypes” and in response “Mayan-identified activists have created hundreds of organizations and institutions in the 1980s—including research institutes, publishers, training centers, libraries, and training groups—to identify the vitality of indigenous language and culture.”⁷ Out of this process a Pan-Mayan identity is emerging, one that is predicated on shared beliefs, customs, and values among many different Maya groups speaking different languages. A truly universal level of Maya tradition has been found in this process. This Mayanism highlights the common values and goals of diverse Maya communities, based on the core elements they all have in common.

Some of these shared qualities and values are elaborated in Montejo’s article “The Road to Heaven: Jakaltek Maya Beliefs, Religion, and the Ecology.” While his Oxford entry on Pan-Mayanism focuses on political struggles, this article is much like a companion piece that explores folklore and religious beliefs. He states that the theories advanced to explain the “primitive religions” of indigenous people are unsatisfactory. Early anthropologists were likely to explain Maya traditions as a product of magical thinking and superstitions, a laughable belief in ghosts and protective prayers motivated by a fear of the unknown. This is the typical view of scientism toward indigenous practices, and Montejo rightly observes that “Western scholars have tried to explain indigenous religiosity from a Eurocentric point of view.”⁸ He identifies the reference point of nature as a common thread of indigenous Maya beliefs, one that might be considered the hinge point of Mayanism. Cycles in nature, patterns in the sky and in agricultural rhythms, life cycles of animals and plants and human beings were all joined under the unifying umbrella of nature, Mother Earth and Father Sky, or as the Quiche Maya say, “all the sky- earth.”⁹

“Earth and Heaven,” Montejo writes, are “the generators of life and happiness.”¹⁰ This viewpoint provides a reference point for a pan-Maya identity and a satisfactory framework for a correct understanding of the term “Mayanism,” stated in the work of a Maya intellectual and professor of anthropology who provides “an indigenous perspective,” arguing that a “concern for the natural world, and the mutual respect this relationship implies, is constantly reinforced by traditional Mayan ways of knowing and teaching.” Importantly, he formulates his thoughts on this pan-Maya basis of Maya spirituality in terms of what we could call a realized Perennial Philosophy: “For indigenous people, the environment and the supernatural realm are interconnected. This holistic perspective of human collective destiny with other living creatures on earth has a religious expression among indigenous people.”¹¹ I interpret this as coming from the perspective, or value position, in which ego is already placed in right relationship with the unitary consciousness; Seven Macaw has successfully been transformed into One Hunahpu. The fourth point in Huxley’s elucidation of the Perennial Philosophy, in which the purpose of human life is to live in the awareness of eternity, has been achieved. Paradoxically, this can occur only when the full life-and-death whole is embraced, something indigenous cultures are much more adept at than Western Eurocentric cultures, which deny death and thereby drive their citizens less elegantly toward it.

Victor Montejo’s book Maya Intellectual Renaissance is an important resource for understanding the political, mythological, and social implications of a burgeoning Maya revival. He specifically suggests that the 2012 cycle ending is a critical component of this process. Framing the entire discussion within the emergence of a new Maya leadership taking the world stage (e.g., Rigoberta Menchu), Montejo explains “the present revitalization of the Maya culture in terms of its place in history, as occurring in the ‘pro phetic’ cycle of time, the oxlanh b’aktun.”¹² The word “oxlanh” means 13, and “b’aktun,” or “b’en,” refers to the Baktun period of the Long Count. Montejo points out that the phrase “Oxlanh B’en” was found in a Jakaltek Maya folk-tale he documented and translated, called “El Q’anil: Man of Lightning”:

…But in Oxlanh B’en, when the war breaks out
We ourselves will come back as we are now
And nobody else will act in our place
Then, we will finish off the enemy.¹³

The context of the phrase makes sense, and Montejo believes it is a late reference to the 13-Baktun cycle