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The Heart of the Sky: Travels Among the Maya
New Yorker editor Peter Canby spent two years studying Mayan culture, both past and present, to provide this vivid portrait of these enigmatic people, their life style and beliefs. A fascinating glimpse into a world long forgotten by outsiders. 15 maps.
- GenresTravel
384 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1992
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 6, 2018
Peter Canby's The Heart of the Sky: Travels Among the Maya is such a good book that it is a shame it has not been revised over the last quarter of a century. Here was an attempt to render justice to the Maya of Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize -- both present day and going back to the classical era some 1,500 years ago. Canby visits only two of the famous Maya ruins -- Palenque and Copan -- and concentrates his efforts on today's Maya, which are fragmented into some thirty different languages which, though related, are frequently incomprehensible to other Maya.
He talks to archeologists, naturalists, linguists, shamans, cavers, members of cofradias, campesinos, clueless ladinos, and others, such that I cannot think of a major subject that has not been broached, in detail or in passing.
I will try to purchase a copy of this book because i want one on my shelf. It has an excellent bibliography and index. The only problem is that it was copyrighted in 1992.
He talks to archeologists, naturalists, linguists, shamans, cavers, members of cofradias, campesinos, clueless ladinos, and others, such that I cannot think of a major subject that has not been broached, in detail or in passing.
I will try to purchase a copy of this book because i want one on my shelf. It has an excellent bibliography and index. The only problem is that it was copyrighted in 1992.
June 18, 2023
This is a book that I read roughly 30 years ago and have just reread; partly revisiting the past and partly deciding what to keep as I downsize my library before moving.
Canby's travels and book are shortly after Wright's Time Among the Maya; two very different books with marginal overlap. Even when they visit the same places they have very different approaches. Wright follows a set route for his journeys, largely following John Lloyd Stephens route. While he covers both Mayan antiquities and the contemporary Maya, his unifying theme is Mayan time and daykeepers both past and present. Canby makes a number of separate trips from his base in San Cristóbal de las Casas, so Heart of the Sky is very episodic and often seems more like a series of articles than book. He visits many contemporary Maya settlements and provides lively and sympathetic accounts of the people. He also goes on jaunts with several archaeologists, drawing on their knowledge of antiquities. Among major Mayan archaeological sites, only Palenque and Copán receive extended treatment. Several chapters cover Mayan festivals and traditional religious observances which Canby attended. One of the final chapters is an arduous trek through Lacandón rain forests, in which Canby and his companions got lost, barely finding their way out before running out of provisions. It is a lively and entertaining book.
There are lots of maps (a real plus!), but the book badly needs photos. Canby also supplies a good bibliography, but no notes.
Canby's travels and book are shortly after Wright's Time Among the Maya; two very different books with marginal overlap. Even when they visit the same places they have very different approaches. Wright follows a set route for his journeys, largely following John Lloyd Stephens route. While he covers both Mayan antiquities and the contemporary Maya, his unifying theme is Mayan time and daykeepers both past and present. Canby makes a number of separate trips from his base in San Cristóbal de las Casas, so Heart of the Sky is very episodic and often seems more like a series of articles than book. He visits many contemporary Maya settlements and provides lively and sympathetic accounts of the people. He also goes on jaunts with several archaeologists, drawing on their knowledge of antiquities. Among major Mayan archaeological sites, only Palenque and Copán receive extended treatment. Several chapters cover Mayan festivals and traditional religious observances which Canby attended. One of the final chapters is an arduous trek through Lacandón rain forests, in which Canby and his companions got lost, barely finding their way out before running out of provisions. It is a lively and entertaining book.
There are lots of maps (a real plus!), but the book badly needs photos. Canby also supplies a good bibliography, but no notes.
September 20, 2016
_The Heart of the Sky_ by Peter Canby was an enjoyable if a bit disconnected account of his travels among the Maya people, each chapter pretty much a vignette, a report of his encounters in a village or at a Maya ruin site, each story interspersed with information on Maya history, culture, religion, and the history of the study of these interesting people.
The Maya are a resilient and diverse people, still prevalent as a distinct cultural group despite centuries of attempts at forcible cultural assimilation and often quite cruel subjugation and oppression. Speaking over thirty distinct and mutually unintelligible languages, the Maya have lived in a roughly 100,000 square mile region for about 5,000 years, an area that stretches from the Yucatan in the north through Guatemala to Honduras in the south and from Belize and the Caribbean in the east through to the Chiapas highlands of southern Mexico in the west, an area encompassing everything from dry scrub to dense tropical rainforest to near-alpine highlands. Canby never states their overall numbers, though he did mention at one time that some 4 million Maya live in Guatemala, which he said was more than half the total.
Though often lumped together in the popular consciousness with the Aztecs and the Incas, the Maya were quite distinct. They reached their peak in the 8th century A.D., some 500 years before the apex of the Aztecs or Incas. They never formed a true empire like them either, but were always a series of competing city-states. They were quite advanced; inventing the mathematical concept of zero, performing advanced astronomical calculations, and had the only true writing system in the Americas. They also proved considerably more difficult for the Spanish to subdue, owing in part to their decentralized nature and in part according to French researcher Tzvetan Todorov their possession of writing (Todorov maintained that the Incas, who had no writing, viewed the Spaniards as gods, the Aztecs, who had pictograms, saw the Spanish at first as gods but soon changed their minds, and the Maya, who could read and write, knew from the start they were men). It took 20 years to subdue the major Maya groups and 150 years before the last independent kingdoms were conquered.
Unfortunately, the Spanish (and later the Guatemalan and Mexican) authorities weren't satisfied with merely besting them on the battlefield. Beginning in the second half of the 16th century, there was a systematic effort to erase Maya culture, language, and religion, as concerted efforts were made to find and burn all Maya books, impose Christianity upon them, and in short make them "into a compliant, Hispanicized peasantry." Combined with the devastating effects of European diseases and the desire to drive the Maya out of prime agricultural land (particularly for cattle and later for coffee), the Maya went from being a great urban culture, with cities that were compared at one time favorably with the cities of Spain, to a culture living in "sullen poverty" in the jungles and mountains, often times forced to work as seasonal laborers due to a lack of suitable agricultural land.
The oppression was still prevalent in Guatemala in the time of the author's travels (the book was published in 1992), as Canby vividly described the government's war on the Maya people, the discrimination and racism they faced, the destruction of their villages, and the internal refuge camps they were forced to live and work in.
Happily, the book is not all grim. Canby related many interesting facts about the Maya as asides during his travels, particularly when he witnessed Maya religious ceremonies, festivals, or visited Maya ruins and spoke with researchers. The reader learns that after an initial burst of missionary zeal in the 16th century, many of the more remote areas hardly ever saw priests (and still rarely see them today), resulting in many pre-Columbian religious practices surviving, sometimes barely disguised by a thin Christian overlay. One of the more interesting if not widely practiced ones involved introducing hallucinogenic substances obtained from the _Bufo marinus_ toad directly into the bloodstream via the colon walls (the drug administered by hollow-bone enemas).
Across the highlands of Chiapas and Guatemala some seventy Maya towns till follow one or both of two concurrently running Maya calendrical cycles known as the tzolkin (a 260-day ceremonial year of 13 months of 20 days each) and the haab (a 365-day solar year of 18 20-day months plus five "lost days," days in which the sun is reborn and evil spirits from earlier creations are loose on the earth).
The basis of Maya agricultural, the milpa, small plots of land set aside primarily to grow corn, beans, and squash, is poorly understood in the West. Not only does milpa cultivation have very strong religious overtones not appreciated in the West, but it was not an example of crude slash-and-burn agriculture, as it involved (and stills involves in many areas) the complicated cultivation of also other plants, notably upwards of 80 different fast-growing trees and root crops, plants that when a field is exhausted from growing corn form what are known as "planted tree gardens," basically producing a useful orchard and a home for wild game. As complicated as the milpa system is however the great ancient Maya cities had a still more complicated agricultural system, one that entailed the use of raised fields built in swamps and river floodplains, using muck supplied from a system of canals.
He discussed at length the great efforts made to decode Maya hieroglyphics as well as the importance of the Popul Vuh, the "Book of Council" or "Book of Time," a colonial-era document written between 1554 and 1558 in a Spanish alphabet version of Quiche Maya, an extraordinary book that Canby compared to the _Iliad_ or the Ramayana and Mahabharata of Hindu literature.
My only complaints are his darting from one site or village to another (the book's various chapters didn't really flow into one another) and the lack of photographs.
The Maya are a resilient and diverse people, still prevalent as a distinct cultural group despite centuries of attempts at forcible cultural assimilation and often quite cruel subjugation and oppression. Speaking over thirty distinct and mutually unintelligible languages, the Maya have lived in a roughly 100,000 square mile region for about 5,000 years, an area that stretches from the Yucatan in the north through Guatemala to Honduras in the south and from Belize and the Caribbean in the east through to the Chiapas highlands of southern Mexico in the west, an area encompassing everything from dry scrub to dense tropical rainforest to near-alpine highlands. Canby never states their overall numbers, though he did mention at one time that some 4 million Maya live in Guatemala, which he said was more than half the total.
Though often lumped together in the popular consciousness with the Aztecs and the Incas, the Maya were quite distinct. They reached their peak in the 8th century A.D., some 500 years before the apex of the Aztecs or Incas. They never formed a true empire like them either, but were always a series of competing city-states. They were quite advanced; inventing the mathematical concept of zero, performing advanced astronomical calculations, and had the only true writing system in the Americas. They also proved considerably more difficult for the Spanish to subdue, owing in part to their decentralized nature and in part according to French researcher Tzvetan Todorov their possession of writing (Todorov maintained that the Incas, who had no writing, viewed the Spaniards as gods, the Aztecs, who had pictograms, saw the Spanish at first as gods but soon changed their minds, and the Maya, who could read and write, knew from the start they were men). It took 20 years to subdue the major Maya groups and 150 years before the last independent kingdoms were conquered.
Unfortunately, the Spanish (and later the Guatemalan and Mexican) authorities weren't satisfied with merely besting them on the battlefield. Beginning in the second half of the 16th century, there was a systematic effort to erase Maya culture, language, and religion, as concerted efforts were made to find and burn all Maya books, impose Christianity upon them, and in short make them "into a compliant, Hispanicized peasantry." Combined with the devastating effects of European diseases and the desire to drive the Maya out of prime agricultural land (particularly for cattle and later for coffee), the Maya went from being a great urban culture, with cities that were compared at one time favorably with the cities of Spain, to a culture living in "sullen poverty" in the jungles and mountains, often times forced to work as seasonal laborers due to a lack of suitable agricultural land.
The oppression was still prevalent in Guatemala in the time of the author's travels (the book was published in 1992), as Canby vividly described the government's war on the Maya people, the discrimination and racism they faced, the destruction of their villages, and the internal refuge camps they were forced to live and work in.
Happily, the book is not all grim. Canby related many interesting facts about the Maya as asides during his travels, particularly when he witnessed Maya religious ceremonies, festivals, or visited Maya ruins and spoke with researchers. The reader learns that after an initial burst of missionary zeal in the 16th century, many of the more remote areas hardly ever saw priests (and still rarely see them today), resulting in many pre-Columbian religious practices surviving, sometimes barely disguised by a thin Christian overlay. One of the more interesting if not widely practiced ones involved introducing hallucinogenic substances obtained from the _Bufo marinus_ toad directly into the bloodstream via the colon walls (the drug administered by hollow-bone enemas).
Across the highlands of Chiapas and Guatemala some seventy Maya towns till follow one or both of two concurrently running Maya calendrical cycles known as the tzolkin (a 260-day ceremonial year of 13 months of 20 days each) and the haab (a 365-day solar year of 18 20-day months plus five "lost days," days in which the sun is reborn and evil spirits from earlier creations are loose on the earth).
The basis of Maya agricultural, the milpa, small plots of land set aside primarily to grow corn, beans, and squash, is poorly understood in the West. Not only does milpa cultivation have very strong religious overtones not appreciated in the West, but it was not an example of crude slash-and-burn agriculture, as it involved (and stills involves in many areas) the complicated cultivation of also other plants, notably upwards of 80 different fast-growing trees and root crops, plants that when a field is exhausted from growing corn form what are known as "planted tree gardens," basically producing a useful orchard and a home for wild game. As complicated as the milpa system is however the great ancient Maya cities had a still more complicated agricultural system, one that entailed the use of raised fields built in swamps and river floodplains, using muck supplied from a system of canals.
He discussed at length the great efforts made to decode Maya hieroglyphics as well as the importance of the Popul Vuh, the "Book of Council" or "Book of Time," a colonial-era document written between 1554 and 1558 in a Spanish alphabet version of Quiche Maya, an extraordinary book that Canby compared to the _Iliad_ or the Ramayana and Mahabharata of Hindu literature.
My only complaints are his darting from one site or village to another (the book's various chapters didn't really flow into one another) and the lack of photographs.
April 11, 2018
Generally not my kind of book, but it was a fascinating read. Definitely learn a lot about the Maya and their history, as well as their present. I do kind of feel like their ending was a little abrupt.
Read
February 25, 2020Just skimmed a few chapters in this one. Only one chapter dealt with Belize, the area I was visiting. The bits I read did not entice me to read any further.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews