Perinatal Rites in the Ritual of the Bacabs, a Colonial Maya Manuscript

Abstract

Pregnancy and childbirth were among indigenous Maya women’s most dangerous life experiences, with very high maternal and perinatal death rates from pre-Hispanic times through the first decades of the twentieth century. This article contributes to the knowledge of colonial Yucatec Maya women through the interpretation of documentary evidence of three indigenous rites meant to facilitate women’s perinatal health and successful childbirth. This evidence is contained in the eighteenth-century collection of healing chants known as the “ritual of the bacabs.” The chants include those for cooling the steam bath used in indigenous perinatal treatments, for difficulty in childbirth, and for rites surrounding the disposal of the afterbirth. Through an analysis that combines philological approaches with ethnographic interviews of contemporary Maya speakers, this article provides new insights into the intersection between ritual and culture-specific notions of the body among the colonial Maya.

Full text

Perinatal Rites in the Ritual of the Bacabs,
a Colonial Maya Manuscript
Timothy W. Knowlton, Berry College
Edber Dzidz Yam, Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios
Superiores en Antropología Social
Abstract. Pregnancy and childbirth were among indigenous Maya women’smost
dangerous life experiences, with very high maternal and perinatal death rates
from pre-Hispanic times through the first decades of the twentieth century. This
article contributes to the knowledge of colonial Yucatec Maya women through
the interpretation of documentary evidence of three indigenous rites meant to
facilitate women’s perinatal health and successful childbirth. This evidence is
contained in the eighteenth-century collection of healing chants known as the
“ritual of the bacabs.”The chants include those for cooling the steam bath used
in indigenous perinatal treatments, for difficulty in childbirth, and for rites
surrounding the disposal of the afterbirth. Through an analysis that combines phil-
ological approaches with ethnographic interviews of contemporary Maya speakers,
this article provides new insights into the intersection between ritual and culture-
specific notions of the body among the colonial Maya.
Keywords. Maya, childbirth, ritual, ethnomedicine
Introduction
Several decades of scholarship has elucidated many aspects of the child-
birth experiences of indigenous women in pre-Hispanic and colonial Latin
American societies (e.g., Bruhns and Stothert 2014; Kellogg 2005; Socolow
2015), including the Maya women of Yucatàn (Chuchiak 2007; Restall
1995; Vail and Stone 2002). However, given the patriarchal social condi-
tions of the colonial epoch and the resulting lacunae in the documentary
record, our knowledge of colonial Maya women’s experiences is incomplete.
Ethnohistory 66:4 (October 2019) doi 10.1215/00141801-7683312
Copyright 2019 by American Society for Ethnohistory
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As in the case of colonial Nahua women in Central Mexico (Polanco 2018),
we know little of Yucatec Maya women’s roles and experiences in the
domain of indigenous healing.Furthermore, pregnancy and childbirth were
among women’s most dangerous life experiences, with very high mater-
nal and perinatal death rates from pre-Hispanic times through the first
decades of the twentieth century (Sesia 2016). Even today, living at the
intersection of social and gender-based inequalities, indigenous Maya
women are at substantially higher risk of maternal death in Yucatán
(Rodríguez Angulo, Andueza-Pech, and Oliva Peña 2018). This article con-
tributes to our knowledge of colonial Yucatec Maya women through the
interpretation of documentary evidence of three indigenous rites meant to
facilitate women’s perinatal health and successful childbirth.
Documentary evidence of the three perinatal rites under discussion
appears in the colonial manuscript known to scholars as the Ritual of the
Bacabs (Arzápalo Marín 1987; Roys 1965). This manuscript is among the
richest Maya-language sources on rites relating to the human body. Maya
treatments (both then and now) include combinations of herbal decoc-
tions, physical manipulation of the patient’s body, and ritual chants. The
Ritual of the Bacabs is a colonial compilation of these healing chants and
some herbal remedies, written in Yucatec Maya using a modified alphabetic
script introduced by the Spanish. Although the extant manuscript dates to
the late eighteenth century, the healing lore within it bridges pre-Hispanic
epigraphic records and the reports of later ethnographers working in Maya
communities. Scholars have long recognized these esoteric chants as among
the most important, yet notoriously difficult, sources of Maya culture to
interpret (Thompson 1970; Houston et al. 2009: 28). The chants are nota-
ble for the prominent roles of pre-Hispanic Maya goddesses (Knowlton
2015a; 2016) and for their use of archaic metaphors that appear in those
Classic period (AD 250–900) hieroglyphic inscriptions that describe the
conjuring of divine forces (Knowlton 2010; 2012).
As Matthew Restall (2003: 124–25) has noted, developments in
Maya epigraphy in recent decades enable the colonial Maya ethnohisto-
rian to not simply “upstream”from modern ethnographic data, but also to
move forward to the colonial period from pre-Hispanic sources. With the
eighteenth-century manuscript as our datum, we employ a similar meth-
odology here as well. In contrast with similar texts collected in the course of
ethnographic research (e.g., Levi-Strauss 1950), the chants accompanying
colonial Maya perinatal rites apparently were written by indigenous heal-
ers for indigenous healers in a context historically distant from our own.
Therefore, we employ a mixed methodology that combines textual analysis
of a colonial Maya language manuscript with data from key consultant
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interviews with contemporary Yucatec Maya healers (h menob) as well as
free list interviews (Quinlin 2005) with a stratified sample of Maya lay-
people. This is done to enrich our interpretation of otherwise esoteric texts
by providing the necessary contextual information not fully accessible in
the extant historical record.
We argue that the Ritual of the Bacabs is one of our best Maya sources
for indigenous rites surrounding childbirth, even though it has not always
been recognized as such. We assert that manuscript pages 174–89 contain
three distinct chants directed at three different concerns regarding child-
birth, although only one of these three has been consistently recognized
as dealing with perinatal rites. The pioneering ethnohistorian Ralph Roys
(1965) noted in his English translation of the work that the chant on
manuscript pages 174–80 accompanied a ritual for the afterbirth, yet he
misidentified the purpose of the two other chants following it. For example,
Karl A. Taube (1998: 439) recognized that the chant on manuscript pages
180–83, which Roys had identified as being for cooling a pit oven, is in fact
for cooling a steam bath (both of which during colonial times were called
pib).
1
Steam baths were important structures in traditional Mesoamerican
healing traditions, including for treating women giving birth. As Stephen D.
Houston (1996) has demonstrated, the cognate term pibnah appears in
classic Maya epigraphic texts referring to archaeological structures func-
tioning (actually or symbolically) as steam baths. And as we will argue in
this article, a third chant (ms. pp. 183–89) is also for treating a complication
during childbirth. In total, these three chants provide a unique insight into
the relationship between the work of ritual healers (h menob) and midwives
treating women during the colonial period in Yucatán. Furthermore, we
hope that theresults of this analysis demonstratethe productivity of a mixed
methods approach to ethnohistoric reconstruction and interpretation.
Steam Bathing in Colonial Perinatal Rites
The first chant we will discuss begins on manuscript page 180, where it is
labeled by the scribe as vtħanil u siscunabal pib lae,“This is the word for
the cooling of a pib.”Sweat baths are an important feature of autochtho-
nous Mesoamerican medical systems, and their use was prescribed in some
colonial Maya remedies (Gubler 2018: 117). Although no longer in regular
use in Yucatán today, at least two forms of sweat-bath structures are known
from the early seventeenth-century Motul dictionary of the Yucatec Maya
language. The first was a more temporary structure called puc na che,
defined in the Motul (Ciudad Real 2001: 512) as “a little hut made of cane
so as to take sweats in it”(“chozilla hecha de varas como para tomar
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sudores en ella”). This description parallels the wattle-and-daub steam
baths still in use in some Tzeltal Maya communities in Chiapas (Groark
1997: 30–31). A second, more permanent structure was known as the pib.
Today in Yucatec, pib refers only to the pit oven in which ritual foodstuffs
are cooked, but in colonial times it also referred to the “bath or temazcal in
which those women who are about to give birth or who had recently given
birth are purified”(“baño o temazcal en que se purificaban las parturientas
o recién paridas”; Ciudad Real 2001: 491).
The text of the chant for the steam bath includes a description of
dousing heated rocks counterclockwise in the four cardinal directions
(indicated by their respective color symbolism) to generate steam for heating
and purifying women’s bodies during perinatal rites:
oxlahun pul bacin yn ɔonotil ha Thirteen pitchers of my cenote
water evidently,
2
oxlahun pis yn [181] batil ha Thirteen measures of my hail-
stone water
oc ti zintunil enter the steam bath stone.
same tun ualaccen t u pach chac
munyal yk
Already then I may stand be-
hind the red cloud wind;
[sa]me tun ualaccen t uu ich sac
munyal yk
Already then I may stand facing
the white cloud wind;
same tun ualaccen t uu ich ek
munyal yk
Already then I may stand facing
the black cloud wind;
\same tun ualaccen t uu ich kan
munyal yk
Already then I may stand facing
the yellow cloud wind.
(Ritual of the Bacabs ca. 1779: 180–81. All translations by Timothy W.
Knowlton unless otherwise noted.)
Furthermore, the chant closes with what, when properly translated, is
a recognizable metaphorical description of birth that corresponds with pre-
Hispanic imagery:
colpay tun bacin [183] yn cah ti
x um xuchit
I forcefully remove the flower
bud then evidently.
pa a chi yɮam Open your mouth, Itzam!
he tun ɮilil Here is the unchaste woman
then.
(Ritual of the Bacabs ca. 1779: 183.)
One area in which the Ritual of the Bacabs departs from contemporary
Maya healing chants ethnographers have documented is in the frequent
reference to pre-Hispanic deities, many of which have since been replaced
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by Christian saints (with the exception of the Chac storm gods). In this
chant, the image of the crocodilian god Itzam’s open mouth suggests the
common birth scenes of deities emerging from gaping reptilian jaws found
in much earlier classic Maya iconography (Taube 1994; fig. 1a) on through
the Postclassic period (fig. 1b).
Although today steam baths are no longer used in Yucatec Maya
perinatal rituals (Jordan 1993), there remains a concern with the physi-
ology of expectant mothers both before and after childbirth. In our own
Figure 1a. Classic Maya birth scene on ceramic vase with aged god emerging from
a gaping reptilian mouth (K1198; research.mayavase.com/kerrmaya.html; Photo-
graph copyright by Justin Kerr; used with permission).
Figure 1b. The aged god Itzamna emerges from the gaping maw of a reptilian
being (Dresden Codex 4b).
Perinatal Rites 725
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conversations with contemporary Maya healers, for example, children
born on the spiritually significant days of Tuesday or Friday are thought to
possess a “force”that Maya people call kinam. In Yucatec Maya, the term
kinam often describes kinds of pain felt in the body. In their dictionary
of the contemporary Yucatec Maya language spoken in Hocabá, Victoria
Bricker, Eleuterio Po’ot Yah, and Ofelia Dzul de Po’ot (1998: 153) define
kinam as “pain”of an aching or throbbing character. In interviews con-
ducted by Dzidz Yam in January 2017, Maya speakers distinguish numer-
ous subtypes of kinam pains depending on the location and character of the
harm, including “burning”(eelel), “shocking”(léemléem), and “stinging”
(t’óot’och) varieties.
Beyond referencing pain, however, kinam refers to a broader ethno-
physiological concept of the variable quality of things, with certain objects
and living beings having greater kinam than others (Villa Rojas 1980;
Ciudad Real 2001: 336; Knowlton 2018). Among the twentieth-century
Maya of Quintana Roo, community leaders and individuals known to
possess kinam were the ones chosen to operate the fire drill during the
New Fire ceremony (Villa Rojas 1945: 122). The proximity of persons with
relatively stronger or weaker kinam is an important concern. For example,
proper marriage partners should be of comparable “heat”or else one of the
spouses will become sick (Redfield and Villa Rojas 1934: 163; Villa Rojas
1945: 133).
To help resolve ambiguities in the documentary and ethnographic
record, Dzidz Yam conducted free list interviews in January 2017 in Yucatán
about what causes kinam in a person. Respondents composed a stratified
sample of thirty male and female Maya speakers between the ages of twenty
and sixty-four from the community of Yaxunah (population 637). The
transcriptions were subsequently analyzed by Knowlton using Visual
Anthropac software (Analytic Technologies 2003) to determine the fre-
quency and salience of items in the freelists (Bernard and Ryan 2010).
Important kinam-causing items included exposure to sexual activity, to the
sun, to excessive cold (pasmo) or heat, to domestic animals, to winds, and
to cemeteries. However, by far the most frequent and salient cause listed
was exposure to pregnant women (figs 2a and 2b).
3
The managing of pregnancy before and after childbirth is not only a
concern for the pregnant women but for those members of the commu-
nity in proximity to her in her body’s charged state. Therefore perhaps it is
unsurprising that the Ritual of the Bacabs contains more materials per-
taining to perinatal rites than had been recognized by scholars previously,
but which a mixed methodology makes more apparent.
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Figure 2a. Causes of kinam among Yaxunah respondents, by frequency
Figure 2b. Causes of kinam among Yaxunah respondents, by salience
Perinatal Rites 727
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Midwifery in Ritual of the Bacabs
Maya midwives have assisted births since pre-Hispanic times (Landa [ca.
1566] 1978: 56; Taube 1994). Attempts by the state to regulate midwives in
what is today Mexico began as early as the late eighteenth century, although
success was limited until the second half of the twentieth century (Sesia
2016). Biomedical intervention in childbirth in Yucatec Maya communities
has increased substantially since the late 1990s (Veile and Kramer 2018),
and contemporary Maya midwifery undoubtedly has been transformed by
training courses and certification programs conducted by Mexican public
health authorities (Güémez Pineda et al. n.d.). Nonetheless, we have found
that even where coordination between midwives and h menob (“ritual
healers”) has declined, memories of previous concepts and practices remain.
According to our contemporary Maya consultants, kinam is an
important consideration in birth rites and the practice of midwives. For
example, the excessive kinam of children born on Tuesday or Friday can
cling to the hands of the midwife by the time she has delivered her thirteenth
child. Although not often practiced at present, a cleansing ritual by a h men
(ritual healer) can prevent this excess force from being transferred to other
pregnant women in the course of the midwife’s prenatal massage, to the
patient’s detriment. One healer described this as the “vapor”(y oxol)and
“smoke”(ubuɔil) of the kinam, which remains on the hands of the midwife
after so many deliveries (interview, 14 January, 2015, Yaxunah, Yucatán,
Mexico). As the second colonial chant under discussion demonstrates, in
the past this partnership between ritual healers and midwives extended to
addressing other perinatal issues, including obstetric crises.
These ethnographic interviews with contemporary Maya healers have
also contributed to resolving long-standing misunderstandings about the
purpose of some chants in the Ritual of the Bacabs. The chant on pages
183–89 is titled v sihil tok, which Roys (1965: 61) translated literally as
“the birth of the flint”and believed accompanied flint knapping. This
interpretation seemed to be supported by the references to tok (“flint
blade”)andhalal (“reed”), the latter of the kind from which arrow shafts
were traditionally made (Ciudad Real 2001: 241). Also occurring in the
chant is an invocation of four color-directional butterflies (pepen), the
butterfly being a martial symbol best known from the arts of Classic and
Postclassic Central Mexico (Berlo 1983; Taube 2001). These references to
butterflies in the Maya chant are highly unusual for colonial texts, with
pepen only occuring once in the eight different colonial Books of Chilam
Balam transcribed by Helga-Maria Miram and Wolfgang Miram (1988:
993).
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Nonetheless, the internal location of this chant in the manuscript
between two chants related to perinatal rites (pp. 174–83) and two others
directed at constipation (pp. 189–206) suggests that the chant might be
directed at a complaint regarding the lower body. During our interviews
with contemporary Maya healers, we learned that u sihil tok can refer to a
kind of complication during childbirth. One Maya healer explained to us
that in cases of a tok birth, the child’s head cannot exit because of obstruction
by the placenta, perhaps describing the medical condition known as placenta
previa.
4
This condition is associated with obstetric hemorrhage and with
placenta accreta, major contributors to maternal death among contem-
porary indigenous women in Mexico and Central America today (Schwartz
2018b: 43–45), and presumably in the past as well.
So what are we to make of the colonial chant? Several of the terms that
suggest martial accoutrements also have meanings in the context of mid-
wifery and healing. In ethnographically documented Maya communities,
the halal reed is traditionally used by the midwife to cut the umbilical cord
(Redfield and Villa Rojas 1934: 182). Moreover, tok can refer not only to a
flint blade but also to a serpent fang or other such lancet used to puncture or
let blood (Bricker, Po’ot Yah, and Dzul de Po’ot 1998: 279; Ciudad Real
2001: 552). In the past such lancets may have served as the tool for clearing
the obstruction, although our consultant describes using the teeth of a comb
to do so in more recent times. And given the frequency of maternal death
prior to the twentieth century, the difficulties associated with placenta
previa and other obstetric conditions certainly were life-or-death situa-
tions. The Mesoamerican notion of the parturient mother as warrior, well
documented for Late Post-classic Aztec society (Schwartz 2018a), might
help to explain the unusual butterfly imagery peculiar to this colonial chant.
Even in the absence of the identification by our consultants of u sihil
tok as an obstetric condition, the chant makes reference to several elements
of perinatal practices known ethnographically. For example, early in the
chant the healer announces:
cħabtex y uɮil mehene Engender [2pl] his healthy child,
uɮiuile this blessed one!
ca ix u natab cuxanilon [184] And then he may understand
us living things.
kamex cħab Receive [2pl] the progeny!
y emel tun u cħab ti cab His progeny descends to the
earth then.
(Ritual of the Bacabs ca. 1779: 183–84.)
Perinatal Rites 729
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Kam (“to receive”) can refer to the work of a midwife, called in modern
Yucatec “the woman who receives the baby”(in modern orthography:
xk’am chaampal; Gümez Pineda 2000: 324).
5
As mentioned previously, an important part of Maya midwifery past
and present is the practice of massaging the pregnant woman up until the
time the child is born. The final massage involves “manipulating the uterus
to its correct position and the baby to its normal position, ready to be born”
(Redfield and Villa Rojas 1934: 360). This practiceis described in this chant
as well:
he tun bacin cin can uuɔtu
nak can
Here then I vigorously bend her
womb.
(Ritual of the Bacabs ca. 1779: 183.)
Another documented practice mentioned in the chant is ɔuɔ(“to suck”),
the Maya term for the medical practice of cupping (Bricker and Miram
2002: 137). Cupping was part of the medical bloodletting rite (tok)oftheh
men observed by Robert Redfield and Alfonso Villa Rojas (1934: 172–73),
which parallels the apparently pre-Hispanic practice of medical bloodlet-
ting noticed in the sixteenth century by Bishop Diego de Landa ([ca.1566]
1978: 47). However, twentieth-century Maya midwives practiced cupping
on pregnant women without bleeding them (Redfield and Redfield 1940:
71–72), which is perhaps the practice discussed in the chant as well:
sam yn kamab u kinam Already I shall receive her kinam,
can pel t u ba yn chacal ba[c] Four times in my own flesh,
cex can tul ti ku You four who are gods,
cex can tul ti bacabe You four who are skybearers.
sam tun ualaccen Already I shall stand up then.
yn tec ɔuɔte I shall suck it rapidly;
yn kam u kinam I receive her kinam.
he tun bacin Here it is then evidently.
cen ti ualhi It is I who stood.
(Ritual of the Bacabs ca. 1779: 186.)
Another relevant association recognized by scholars working with
other Mayan language communities (Prechtel and Carlsen 1988) is that
of midwifery with weaving. In our interviews with contemporary Maya
healers, a h men called in to assist with a difficult childbirth will pass a
cotton ball made up of thirteen threads over the body of the pregnant
woman (interview, 14 January, 2015, Yaxunah, Yucatán, Mexico). Already
by the twentieth century, backstrap loom weaving and its related equip-
ment were much less common in Yucatán than in some other areas with
Mayan language speakers. Nonetheless, references to it do appear in these
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colonial chants. For example, alongside the reed (halal) traditionally used
by the midwife to cut the umbilical cord, there is reference to the warping
frame (chuch; Ciudad Real 2001: 204) used in weaving:
bal tun bacin yn halal What is my reed then evidently?
yax kam It is the first thing received.
lay tun bacin u uayasba yn
halal
This is the icon of my reed then
evidently.
bal tun bacin u chuchteil What is its wooden warping
frame then evidently?
[198] u natab yn x bolon puc
u uayasba u chuchteil
One might understand that my
Lady Nine Hills is the icon of its
wooden warping frame.
(Ritual of the Bacabs ca. 1779: 197–98.)
Figure 3. The aged midwife goddess Chac Chel weaves using a backstrap loom
(Madrid Codex 79c).
Perinatal Rites 731
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Lady Nine Hills is the title of a deity paired with Chacal Ix Chel
elsewhere in the manuscript (ms. pp. 12). Ix Chel is the goddess whom
Bishop Landa ([ca. 1566] 1978: 56) famously attributed the role of patron
of childbirth. The aged midwife version of this goddess, called Chac Chel,
appears both in Classic Maya birth scenes (Taube 1994) and engaged in
backstrap loom weaving in the Postclassic codices (fig. 3).
The description of Lady Nine Hills as the “icon”(uayasba;see
Knowlton 2015b, 2018) of the warping frame is reminiscent of the warping
boards in human form used by contemporary Tz’utujil Maya people in
Santiago Atitlán (Prechtel and Carlsen 1988: 125). Therefore, in this pas-
sage we may have a reference in a Maya language manuscript to the practice
reported by Bishop Landa ([ca. 1566] 1978: 56), who noted that the
“sorceresses”(indigenous midwives) attending a woman placed an image
of Ix Chel near her during childbirth.
As we have seen, even when significant elements of past ideas and
practices are no longer current (such as the sweat bath and invocationof the
pre-Hispanic deities), data from ethnographic interviews can help resolve
enduring problems of translation and interpretation. Having established a
range of Maya birth rites and practices in the Ritual of the Bacabs not
previously recognized by scholars, we turn to an extended interpretation of
the single chant already known by Roys (1965) to be associated with birth
rites, that of manuscript pages 174–80.
The Chant for the Afterbirth
As previously mentioned, three chants in the Ritual of the Bacabs address
rites surrounding childbirth. These include a chant for the afterbirth, a
chant for cooling a steam bath, and one for difficulty in childbirth. Steam
bathing facilitated health by restoring vital heat during and after childbirth.
Despite the decline of steam bath use in Yucatán, the maintenance of vital
heat during the perinatal period remains a major concern in Maya medi-
cine. As Redfield and Villa Rojas (1934: 181–82) describe for the twentieth-
century Maya community of Chan Kom: “The new-born child and the
recent mother must be guarded from the various communicable evils, and
at the time of birth ‘hot’foods and medicines are essential. . . . The midwife
may administer ‘hot’drinks, or warm the mother’s body with a fire, for
cold, at this moment of crisis, is very dangerous.”
These concerns and related perinatal practices are found in the Ritual
of the Bacabs as well, in the case of the chant for the ibin. According to the
Motul dictionary (Ciudad Real 2001: 301), ibin means most generically
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“thread or net”(tela o red) but also refers to the placenta. The polysemy of
this term is probably not circumstantial, given the widespread linking of
weaving and reproduction in Mesoamerican thought (Sullivan 1982; Taube
1994; Pretchel and Carlsen 1988). The placenta is subject to fire-related
rituals in modern Yucatec Maya communities, as Redfield and Villa Rojas
(1934: 182) report: “The afterbirth is either burned or buried; the preferred
place in which to dispose of it is under the hearthstones of deserted houses.
This practice, also, is a preventative of the danger of ‘cold,’for under such
an old hearth ‘there are many ashes, and if the afterbirth is buried there, the
mother is thus warmed.’The same feeling is present if the afterbirth is
burned.”
6
As we will discuss, the colonial chant for the afterbirth on mansucript
pages 174–80 follows much the same rationale, although the location in the
colonial text of the rite may apply equally to a steam bath structure or to the
traditional three-stone domestic hearth (fig. 4).
Figure 4. Traditional three-stone hearth (koben) in the residence of a Maya
herbalist in Pisté, Yucatán (photograph by Timothy W. Knowlton, 13 June 2013)
Perinatal Rites 733
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The section begins:
upeɔil ybin lae This is the chant for the afterbirth.
——-——-
he tun t a nup Here it is in your spouse then;
tun top ɮilil The unchaste woman gives birth
then.
max tun bacin u cool cit be Oh! Who is the mischief of the sire
then evidently,
u cool akabe the mischief of this night?
yx hun ɔit balche tun bacin
u cool cit
Lady One ɔit Balche is the mischief
of the sire then evidently,
u col akabe this mischief of night.
(Ritual of the Bacabs ca. 1779: 174.)
The scribe’s introductory statement can be taken to mean either that
the text is the sung chant for the afterbirth itself, or that it is for the mid-
wife’s massage to assist with expelling the afterbirth, as both are called peɔ
in colonial Maya. The chant proper begins by addressing the husband, who
alongside the midwife in Yucatán traditionally accompanies the wife during
childbirth (Redfield and Villa Rojas 1934: 181; Villa Rojas 1945: 140).
The pregnant woman is referred to here and elsewhere in the chants as
ɮilil, which the Motul dictionary glosses as “that which is unwoven, is torn,
or for a woman to be corrupted”(Ciudad Real 2001: 165). The obvious
reference here in the context of pregnancy is to a woman who is not a virgin.
Top in contemporary Yucatec is translated as chingar (“to fuck”)ornacer
(“to give birth”) (Martínez Huchim 2006: 230), although in the second
sense of the word it is more often pronounced top, which also means “to
blossom”as in fruits, flowers, seeds, and even hatching birds’eggs.
7
The
divine patroness of the pregnant woman’s ailment is Ix Hun ɔit Balche
(“Lady of One Long-Thin Balche Tree”). This is a reference to the divine
patroness of the balche tree (Lonchocarpus longistylus Pittier), the alco-
holic drink of which served as a purgative medicine during Maya festivities
(Roys 1931: 216), and also invokes its ancient association with both
drunkenness and erotic pleasure (Houston, Stuart, and Taube 2006). Fol-
lowing this identification of the pregnant woman and the divine patroness,
the chant continues:
canchelic tun bacin yn
chacal toncuy
My red heel is propped up then
evidently,
.4. [white, black, yellow].
la tun bacin tin taccah yalan
u homtanil yɮamcab
I placed this beneath Itzamcab’s
bowels then evidently.
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canchelic tun bacin yn met My trivet is propped up then
evidently.
u met y it yn cat xani [175] Its trivet is the base for my cooking
jar also.
hunac pecni Greatly she writhed,
hunac chibalnici Greatly she hurt.
piccħin tun bacin t u ɔulbal Cast it violently then to its arbor,
ti y acantun to its lamentation stone,
tumen u na t u chũbin kinim because its mother is at the heater’s
base reportedly.
can kin bin chellan t u chun
kinib
Four days [she] reclined at the
heater’s base
tiba t u cħah u kinami as its kinam seized her there.
piccħin bin t u chun chacal
chi
Cast it violently to the base of its
boiling mouth reportedly,
tiba t u cħah u kinami [xu]
nan xani
as the kinam of the lady seized [her]
there also.
(Ritual of the Bacabs ca. 1779: 174–75.)
At this point, the chant describes the elements of the healing space. A
cooking pot, called the “bowels of Itzamcab,”is propped up by a trivet over
the fire.
8
The pregnant woman is described as reclining near the “heater”
(kinib), which is either the hearth or steam bath fire heating her body during
the course of her ordeal. The healer orders her or his tutelary spirits (pre-
sumably the Bacabs evoked in other chants) to expel the cause of the sick-
ness from the patient and into elements of the ritual space, such as an altar,
or “lamentation stone”(acantun), and the arbor (ɔulbal), the latter still
constructed over the offering table during some rituals in Yucatàn today.
Being near the fire is a means of helping reinforce the health of the
woman who has given birth by “heating”her, as discussed above. Likewise,
the woman is given “hot”drinks to reinforce her health, in this case “boiled
chocolate honey”:
bal tun bacin u uayasba u
cabil yn ci
Then what evidently is the icon of
my pulque’s honey?
chacal chocuah [176] cab u
uayasba u cabil yn ci
The boiled chocolate honey is the
icon of my pulque’s honey;
chac bolay It is the jaguar.
tux bacin yn uayasba Where evidently is my icon
ca t ualhen yn tackabte u
homtanil yɮaamcab [a]yn
as I stood that I might touch It-
zamcab Crocodilian’s bowels?
(Ritual of the Bacabs ca. 1779: 175–76.)
Perinatal Rites 735
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The chacal cocuah cab (“boiled chocolate honey”) undoubtedly refers
to the honey that “sweetens the chocolate [drink] given to mothers after
childbirth”(Villa Rojas 1945: 58, 141; see also Redfield and Villa Rojas
1934: 183). In the colonial text, the chocolate is called the “jaguar”(chac
bolay). This recalls a comparable passage in the Book of Chilam Balam of
Chumayel that identifies the chac bolay and chocolate with the balamte
(Roys 1933: 36, 111). The balamte is a particular “wild”variant of cacao
that is sometimes used as well (Theobroma bicolor Bonpl.; Kufer and
McNeil 2006). The chocolate drink is prepared with boiled water, and
Betty Bernice Faust (1998: 616) notes in the context of a contemporary
Maya ritual that the frothing of the chocolate with a special stick is occa-
sioned by jokes about its similarity to sexual intercourse.
Furthermore, the chant contains multiple invocations of biting insects
such as ku sinic ants and several kinds of wasps:
piccħin tun bacin y icnal u
yum
Cast it violently then in the presence
of its father evidently,
chacal ku sinic the red ku ant,
.4. [white, black, yellow],
ti bin t u cħah u chibali when the biting pain seized [her]
there reportedly.
……
oxlahun ɮucech t a ba You divided yourself into thirteen
parts,
cech chacal kanale you who are the red kanal wasp,
sacal kanale white kanal wasp.
oxlahhun ɮucech t a ba You divided yourself into thirteen
parts
cech ah chuctie you who are this ah chucti wasp,
sacal ah chuctie this white ah chucti wasp,
cech ah chucuke you who are this ah chucuk wasp,
cech chacal tupchace you who are this red tupchac wasp,
sacal tupchacce this white tupchac wasp.
(Ritual of the Bacabs ca. 1779: 175, 177.)
E. N. Anderson and Felix Medina Tzuc (2005: 190) report that in
contemporary Quintana Roo, these ants and other stinging insects are
boiled together with roots of subin (Acacia cornigera) trees, in whose
spines they live, to produce medicines that enhance sexual desire in men
and women. Of course, their inclusion in the decoction here (“cast into
Itzamcab’s bowels”) is not so much to induce sexual desire but is part of the
general goal of “heating”the woman during and after childbirth, sexual
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desire being an ethnophysiologically “hot”state (Redfield and Villa Rojas
1934: 168). Stinging insects are also invoked in another perinatal treat-
ment, sweat bathing. Because the sweat bath is no longer used in Yucatán,
we lack the kinds of ethnographic descriptions that we have for other ele-
ments of perinatal rites. However among Tzeltal Maya communities of
Chiapas, wasps and bumblebees are placed in the mud walls of the tra-
ditional wattle-and-daub steam bath to insure that the bath “bites”or
“stings”those within with sufficient heat (Groark 1997: 33). In the case of
the chant here, the biting insects are among the thirteen offering portions
cast into the boiling kettle over the flame. The division of offerings into
thirteen portions is a common element of Maya healers’rites observed in
Yucatàn today by us and others (see Love 2012).
Finally, the fire itself is personified in the ritual space where it receives
the offerings:
sam tun bacin a chib hun
y ahual uinicob
Already then you bite evidently, One
Enemy of the Peoples,
cech hunac ah kiname you who are the great Kinam,
cech hunac ah chibale you who are the great Biting Pain.
hek satalsat yan can This is the one who is completely
pardoned there in the sky,
satalsat yan luum completely pardoned there on the
earth
t uu ich hun y ahual uini-
cob
in the sight of One Enemy of the
Peoples.
……
sam tun bacin yn cumcint
can y ahual kak
Already then I caused Four Enemy of
Fire to increase evidently
y alan u homtanil yɮam-
cab xani
beneath Itzamcab’s bowels there
also.
oxlahun ɮucech t a ba tun
bacin
You divided yourself thirteen times
then evidently,
cech x mucuil kuɮyou who are the buried tobacco,
cech tin piccħintah ychil u
homtanil yɮamcab [a]yn
you who I cast violently into Itzam-
cab Crocodilian’s bowels.
(Ritual of the Bacabs ca. 1779: 178, 179.)
This personified fire goes by the title of ahual (“principal enemy and
adversary, who kills and destroys”and “vile thing, hurtful and perni-
cious”) (Ciudad Real 2001: 58). This Yucatec term might be cognate with
the Colonial K’iche’term ajal, itself a loanword from Chol, meaning “evil
spirit”or “demon.”In the colonial K’iche’manuscript of the Popol Vuh,
Perinatal Rites 737
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ajal is part of the name of several of the disease-causing lords of the
Underworld (Christenson 2007: 116n236; Christenson 2008: 66–67). Like
the stinging insects, the fire spirit “bites”the woman who gave birth, and
who now is said to be “completely pardoned”in the eyes of this same deity.
Recall that the Motul dictionary (Ciudad Real 2001: 491) states that a
function of the steam bath was to “purify”those women who had recently
given birth, and that is probably what is meant by the “pardon”here.
The healer stokes the fire “beneath Itzamcab’s bowels,”both heating
the woman who gave birth and receiving the thirteen portions of ants and
wasps mentioned earlier. In addition to biting insects, thirteen portions of
“buried”or “hidden”tobacco (x mucuil kuɮ) are cast into the fire. Tobacco
is widely used in Maya medicine for exorcizing sickness-causing winds
(Villa Rojas 1945: 157). Its uses in contemporary Quintana Roo also include
serving as a poultice applied to the navels of newborns (Anderson et al.
2003: 172), which may be significant given the topic of this chant. At the
same time, Yucatec Maya childbirth rites traditionally involve the crema-
tion or burial of the afterbirth beneath the hearth (Redfield and Villa Rojas
1934: 182). So it is also possible that the buried afterbirth itself is meant (as
auayasba [“likeness”or “icon”]) instead of literal tobacco. Indeed, in the
orations of Nahuatl midwives that Friar Bernardino de Sahagún recorded,
it is said of the newborn boy’s umbilical cord to be buried in the battlefield:
“With this you shall make yourself an offering. . . . This precious object
taken from your body shall be counted as your offering of maguey thorns,
tobacco, reeds, pine branches”(Sullivan and Knab 1994: 137). And
regarding the umbilical cord of the newborn girl, Sahagún’s work reports:
“You shall be the covering of ashes that banks the fire, you shall be the three
stones on which the cooking pot rests. Here our lord buries you, inters you”
(138). In either case, the health of the new mother is facilitated through this
cleansing offering.
Conclusion
We have argued here that the colonial manuscript known as the Ritual of
the Bacabs, though often enigmatic, provides a crucial bridge between
scattered sources of pre-Hispanic practices and ethnographic accounts of
Yucatec Maya birth rites today. Although previously not always recog-
nized as such, several chants of the Ritual of the Bacabs were used for dif-
ferent aspects of Maya perinatal rites during the colonial period. The indig-
enous Maya medical tradition involves ritual chants, herbal decoctions,
and physical manipulation of the patient’s body, all of which we have been
able to identify in the manuscript texts through the mixed methodology we
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employed. In this article we have established that chants for cooling a
steam bath used in perinatal ritual, for difficulty in childbirth, and for rites
regarding the disposal of the afterbirth form a unit in the corpus present in
the manuscript. We also elucidated the important role that culture-specific
notions of the body, in particular the force called kinam, played in these
perinatal rites. We established that ethnographic interviews in present-day
Maya communities can aid in these colonial chants’interpretation, yet at
the same time these chants invoke deities and accoutrements from the pre-
Hispanic era that contemporary Maya healers of today are largely unaware
of. As such, no single method of analysis is sufficient in the case of a colonial
manuscript as notoriously difficult to interpret as the Ritual of the Bacabs.
Although the use of indigenous consultants to aid in the translation of
colonial manuscripts (Tedlock 1996) and the ethnohistoric reconstruction
of elements of Maya medicine (Kunow 2003) is not new, we believe the
combination of key consultant interviews, free list interviews, and system-
atic methods of text analysis (Bernard and Ryan 2010) to be an especially
productive methodology. In the present case, this methodology has enri-
ched our knowledge of those rites meant to manage the dangers accom-
panying colonial Yucatec Maya women’s experiences of pregnancy and
childbirth. However, such mixed methodologies might be applied pro-
ductively to other domains where serious impediments exist for the eth-
nohistoric interpretation of the surviving documentary record.
Notes
1 We use the colonial orthography for Maya terms throughout this paper in order
to maintain fidelity to the original sources as well as to facilitate comparison of
this colonial material across epigraphic and ethnographic sources:
b voiced, glottalized bilabial stop
ɮvoiceless, plain alveolar affricate
ɔvoiceless, glottalized alveolar affricate
ch voiceless, plain alveo-palatal affricate
cħvoiceless, glottalized alveo-palatal affricate
h voiceless, laryngeal spirant
j voiceless, velar spirant
c voiceless, plain velar stop
k voiceless, glottalized velar stop
l voiced, alveolar lateral
m voiced, bilabial nasal
n voiced, alveolar nasal
p voiceless, plain bilabial stop
p voiceless, glottalized bilabial stop
z/s voiceless, alveolar fricative
Perinatal Rites 739
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x voiceless, alveo-palatal fricative
t voiceless, plain alveolar stop
tħvoiceless, glottalized alveolar stop
u/v voiced, labiovelar glide
y voiced, palatal glide
a low, central, unrounded vowel
e low, front, unrounded vowel
i/y high, front, unrounded vowel
o low, back, rounded vowel
u high, back, rounded vowel
Phonemic tone is not usually marked in colonial-period Yucatecan alphabetic
texts, and therefore is not represented in transcriptions of these texts here.
Neither vowel length nor the glottal stop are consistently represented in colonial
Yucatecan alphabetic texts either; when a vowel is represented by two letters
(aa, for example), this may represent either V’V or a long vowel.
2 Dzidz Yam observes in these chants a progression from irrealis to realis lan-
guage familiar to him from contemporary Maya petitionary speech.
3 Dzidz Yam notes that many of the causes documented ethnographically have to
do with bodies’exposure to, or processes involving, koko kik (“hot blood”).
4 In modern orthography: k’alal,tóok’yanik beyo’(“it [the child’s head] is
trapped, it is tóok’like that”) (interview, 14 January 2015, Yaxunah, Yucatán,
Mexico).
5 Other terms for midwife, such as x alansah (“she who facilitates birth”) are also
used in modern Yucatec.
6 Dzidz Yam has documented similar practices of burning and disposal of the
umbilical cord outside the edge of the community in contemporary Quintana
Roo during fieldwork in August 2017.
7 There are several examples in the Ritual of the Bacabs manuscript of evi-
dent confusion by the scribe putting it to writing whether a plain or glottalized
consonant was meant by the orator dictating the chants, so either reading is
plausible.
8 For analyses of chants where the parts of the hearth are identified explicitly with
parts of the god Itzamcab’s body, see Knowlton 2015b, 2018.
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