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The
American anthropologist Barbara Tedlock working among the
Quiché-Maya of Momostenango, undertook formal training
and was initiated as calendar diviner in 1976. Her report,
entitled Time and the Highland Maya, published in 1982,
is focused on the concepts and the procedures involved in
the training of a Quiché-Maya calendar diviner. It
not only presents new and exciting insights into the significance
of ceremonial time, location, and meaning, it also provides
us with a glimpse at the mental processes involved in the
minds of both diviner and client during the process of a
calendrical divination.
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 A
Quiché-Maya calendar diviner's hand arranges the red
seeds from the ts'ite - tree ( Erythrina
corallodendron ) on a blanket woven in a traditional
Quiché-design. The seeds are taken from two different
piles. Each arrangement is repeatedly being counted
and named following the sequence of the days of the
260-day calendar and their numbers. In this way the
Lords of the Days reveal their divinatory messages
to the calendar diviner. Momostenango, Guatemala,
1975-79. Foto: Barbara Tedlock.
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The
German anthropologist Eike Hinz has penetrated even deeper
into this unique complex of Maya mentality and thus not
only discovered their peculiar concept of sickness but also
analyzed what are the psychical, psychotherapeutical and
sociotherapeutical effects of healing in calendrical divination.
During fieldwork among the Kanjobal-Maya of San Juan Ixcoy,
Guatemala, between 1980 and 1983, Hinz was formerly trained
and initiated by one of their calendar-diviner-healers.
In his report, published in 1991, Hinz presents 12 complete
cases (of a total of 50 recorded) of calendrical divination
and healing. All divinations and ensuing therapeutical dialogues
between healer and patient were recorded by him in Kanjobal
and then transcribed in both Kanjobal and German. His book,
entitled Mißtrauen führt zum Tod ( Diffidence
leads to Death ), makes fascinating reading for the scholarly
accuracy which Hinz put to work as an anthropologist, as
well as for the clarity in which he presents his results
as a writer.
His
report is also quite moving for the close look it allows
us to take at the states of mind of Maya-man, so utterly
alien at times to our western ways of feeling and thinking,
yet so convincingly practical if one considers the view
which he had of himself, his community, the world, and the
universe.
Suffice
it to say that Tedlock as well as Hinz, as the basic condition
for the type of research work they did, had to have a rather
full command of the respective Maya idioms, Quiché
and Kanjobal. Naturally, the same holds true
for reading, interpreting and translating the life prognostications
from the Books of Chilam Balam which are written
in Mayat'an, the Yucatec Maya idiom,
of the 18th century.
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