1 - Histomesoamericana

Introduction
The Book
The Books of Chilam Balam (Spokesmen of the Jaguar) of the Yucatecan
Maya constitute a treasure-house of historic and ethnographic information
collected by the Maya themselves over a period of many centuries.
They are exasperatingly difficult to translate and interpret for a number of
reasons. They are largely composed in archaic and elliptical language.
Their chronology is obscured by esoteric numerological, astrological, and
religious assumptions. The orthography of the surviving texts leaves a
great deal to be desired. But most of all the Books reflect a world view
and a sense of history that are distinctively Mayan.
An additional complication to the comprehension of these Books is the
fact that they are by no means purely Mayan. They have been shaped by
almost a thousand years of cultural confrontation—five centuries and
more of ideological friction between the Yucatecan heirs to the Classic
Mavan civilization and the invading groups of Náhuatl speakers from
Central Mexico, followed by an almost equal period of conflict and accommodation
between the Mexica-Mayan cultures and the European
civilizations of Spain and Republican Mexico. The resulting history is
dramatic and dynamic and reflects the influence of at least three thoroughly
different cultures.
Among the twelve surviving Books, the Book of Chilam Balam of
Tizimin is the most historical. Others come from Mani, Calkini, Ixil,
Chumayel, Kaua, Teabo (three of them), Tekax, Oxkutzcab, and Tusik.
The Tizimin was collected by the parish priest of Tizimin, Manuel Luciano
Pérez, who sent it to his bishop in Merida in 1870 with the remark
that it had been in his possession for a number of years [muy buenos
años) (Barrera 1948:291). The original is now in the Museo Nacional de
Antropología in Mexico City. I have worked from a photostatic copy in
the Latin American Library at Tulane University. All of the forty-two
texts of the Tizimin except chapters 9 and 22 to 25 are parallel to passages
in one or more of the other Books—those of Mani, Chumayel, or
Kaua, all of which include additional materials of a less historical order:
medical, exegetical, astronomical, liturgical, or literary. Taken by itself,
however, the Book of Tizimin constitutes an outline history of Yucatan
from the seventh century to the nineteenth, with explicit coverage of
each katun (approximately twenty years) from 1441 to 1848.
This is history in the Mayan manner. It is dominated by a sense of
cyclical repetition and by a profound faith that correct calendrical calculation
will enable the priests to predict the fate of the next cycle. In most
opposite: Tizimin geography instances the cycle in question is that of the katun, a period of 7,200 days
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