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As Christianity spread throughout Europe, the diversity of peoples and cultures that inhabited it was converted by force and seduction to the new monotheistic religion, and its beliefs, myths, rituals, and other explanations of life and relationships were buried in the universe. Preexisting forms of society, cultural organization, art, and knowledge were completely and absolutely Christianized, giving rise to Western Judeo-Christian civilization, thus creating colonialism, colonization, and coloniality.
Europe, completely Christian; here is the core, the Roman Curia. There, the current Christian denominations and manifestations were consolidated: the Protestant Reformation, the construction of temples, monasteries and monumental cathedrals. Moreover, the Crusades, the Holy Wars, the burning of witches, the Inquisition and unimaginable genocides were the result of the imposition of a human-centered religion.
This was not the case for the peoples of Mesoamerica. Colonial Christianity and its legal and political consequences were gradually Mayanized, due to the power of Mayan civilization, whose elements were forged over thousands of years in a material, objective and ritual relationship with the universe, the world, nature, society and thought. Guzmán Böckler calls it an agrarian religion: it was not an intangible, ethereal, dogmatic and subjective relationship, as was the case with the essential elements of Christianity.
Here it becomes sacred:
Corn: Ixim,
Knowledge: Nogi,
Air: IQ,
Water, fabric: Ixchel,
From heaven: and,
Earth: Ulu,
Animals: Kiej, Ix, Tzikin, Cumatz,
Home: Ah, the life-giving energy is sanctified, not just the hope of transcending life as in Christianity.
The invaded peoples, through their capacity for adaptation, have managed to overcome violent bouts of epidemics, slavery, exploitation and subjugation, taking shelter in different manifestations of the newly imposed order that are essential elements of their worldview in order to survive as a people.
(frasepzp1)
The brotherhoods and their patron celebrations appear Christian, thanks to the image and name of the Western saint, but they are present at the same time, with flowers, pom, fruit, dances, rituals, invocations of the native language and community organization. The saint seems to be reshaped, almost hidden in front of the colors and cultural expressions of the town. The important rituals take place outside the church: where visible, Christian; inside, Mayan.
The photo in this article is a classic altar of our town, where various saints appear in the middle of the worship of nature, in this case behind the ancestral altar, where rituals are performed – Mayan rituals – typical of the town: requests for life, balance, harmony, gratitude for the arrival of a good harvest, commerce, travel, and even “sacred diseases”.
Given the great BroadCast Unitedlectual capacity of Maya scribes, Spanish was very useful in capturing stories, values, interpretations (such as the Popol Vuj), and different titles and documents of different peoples. Currently, it is the language used to express resistance to colonialism, which is still in force, and to understand and explain social phenomena that occurred over a wide range of time, where periods and inter-periods of more limited duration can be distinguished.
Despite its colonial ideology, official education has been the minimum basis for some scholars to receive training and recover their identity, a difficult task that does not allow everyone to recover dignity and the concept of “we”, trapping them in an alienated individualism.
Guzmán Bökler argues that these are some examples of strategies of historical memory that allow for understanding the fundamental lines of collective life of people from a standpoint that “(…) takes into account their feelings and thoughts, and leaves behind the burden of official history, which still seeks to rationalize and perpetuate, through distortion and disfigurement, a so-called historical truth based on errors and prejudices that emerged during colonization. (1)
(1) Restoring the Historical Initiative (Guatemala around 1992). Arcadia Press, Guatemala, 1995.
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