Curanderismo Soul Retrieval: Ancient Shamanic Wisdom to Restore the Sacred Energy of the Soul - Erika Buenaflor M.A. J.D. 2019

Maya Manifestations of The Soul
The Soul: Concentrations of Sacred Essence Energy within the Body

For the ancient Maya, the terms k’uh or ch’u could refer both to a specific god and to the general quality of sacredness.⁴⁴ This concept was extended through the related word k’uhul, which referred to sacred animating energy that emanated from deities and the cosmos. This sacred life-force energy was present throughout the world. It pervaded the Earth and all of her inhabitants, including humans, animals, plants, sacred objects, the elements, and the landscape. Sacred items that were held while engaging in ritual dancing were considered to be imbued with sacred essence energy.⁴⁵ Bestowing names to sacred objects was a life-giving, soul-animating act.⁴⁶ It was this sacred life-force energy that animated humans; it was the stuff that the soul was made of.

Like the Mexica, the ancient Maya conceptualized different manifestations of the soul. Rulers often claimed that the spirits or sacred essence energies of deities, animals, and ancestors were reborn in them and took on their names.⁴⁷ Maya artwork and early ethnohistorical records suggest that this sacred essence energy was also concentrated in certain regions of the body, which likely included the head, heart, blood, and breath (respiratory system).⁴⁸ Through bloodletting, the Maya could use the blood’s animating force to conjure their deities and ancestors. The vision serpents depicted in Lintel 24 of Yaxchilán, for example, manifested themselves through bloodletting rituals, in which ancestors, deities, and nobles would materialize from the mouths of ethereal serpents.⁴⁹

The ajaw-face sign and the glyphs for k’uh and k’uhul related to the understandings of the spirit, souls, or internal essence of beings, particularly during the Classic period (250—904 CE). The ajaw face was often inserted into the glyph sak (meaning white, clean, or ear) to form a glyph that some epigraphers read as sak nik (white flower), an analogy of the sacred spirit or soul. The Maya depicted k’uhul in the form of glyphs of fragrant blossoms, breath volutes, jade beads, bones, shells, the color signs, zero signs, maize kernels, and mirrors.⁵⁰ Glyphic texts for k’uhul included spondylus shells, jade earpieces, jade beads, ajaw signs, shell or pearl counterweights, bones, and obsidian.⁵¹ The breath itself would be portrayed as animated beads of tiny flowers suspended in front of the noses and mouths of humans and supernatural beings. Equating human life with flowers suggested both the preciousness and the fragility of the soul.⁵²

According to modern ethnographic studies, the contemporary Maya believe humans have multiple souls, but the number varies from one Maya group to another. The Zinacantecos, like many other Tzotzilspeaking Maya, believe we have two souls: a ch’ulel and an animal coessence. Ch’ulel is believed to pervade the Earth and the sky, as well as things and beings that inhabit them, such as houses, candles, and images of saints.⁵³ There are many rites that are aimed to lock in the ch’ulel of a sacred object and guard it against soul loss.⁵⁴ The ch’ulel is eternal, indestructible, and invisible; in humans it is divided into thirteen parts.⁵⁵ It is the first animating energy that becomes associated with the physical body and is the last to depart from the body several days after the physical death. While its animating force is pervasive, it is concentrated within the hearts of humans. Soul loss could happen to a person as well as to a sacred item.⁵⁶

Ancient artistic representations of the soul as ephemeral, along with the corpus of modern Maya beliefs about soul loss and retrieval, suggest that the ancient Maya understood that sacred essence energy could leave the physical body, as well as sacred items.

Sacred Essence Energy in the Head

For the ancient Maya, sacred essence energy was concentrated in the head.⁵⁷ During the Classic period, rulers captured prisoners and brought them to the victorious city to be decapitated.⁵⁸ Their heads became trophies, and it was believed that their sacred essence energy was captured as well. In the late Postclassic period (909—1697 CE), skulls were often venerated in shrines along with their ancestral images.⁵⁹ Ears, along with mouths and noses, were believed to be portals that emitted and received sacred life-force energy within the body.⁶⁰ Heads were often placed in Maya mortuary spaces, being understood as seeds for facilitating soul departure and rebirth.⁶¹ Both the ancient and modern Maya regard the head as the physical manifestation of the self and identity. The souls of the dead were believed to depart from the head as a final flowery breath.⁶²

The understanding that the head had concentrated sacred-essence energy is attested to in the Popol Vuh, a sixteenth-century K’iché’ work composed of creation myths, legends, history, and ethical teachings. One of the central legends tells of battles between two pairs of twins and the lords of the Underworld. The first set of twins is defeated by the lords, who cut off the head of Hun Hunahpu, one of the brothers. Before placing his dead body underneath the ball court, the lords hang his severed head like a trophy on a tree. The animating energy from his head immediately stimulates the growth of gourds on the tree. Xkik, a maiden of the Underworld, is attracted by the gourds. She reaches out for one. The spittle from the head of Hun Hunaphu impregnates her with the second generation of hero twins, who go on to defeat the lords of the Underworld.⁶³ In this story the head of the deceased Hun Hunahpu acts as a seed with sacred essence energy that impregnates Xkik.

In ancient Maya art, warriors and supernatural beings were often shown with flowers on their brows, suggesting the concentration of animating energy here. The warriors at the upper temple of jaguars at Chichén Itzá and on sculpted piers likely portray heroic warriors in the Upperworld paradise of Flower Mountain. The warriors are displayed with Toltec weaponry and costume, which includes a segmented headband with a large central flower, as they stand on top of a zoomorphic witz head, the Maya rendition of Flower Mountain.⁶⁴ They have become, or will become, animating energy and will assume their place within the Flower Mountain realm as honored warriors. The belief that the soul as sacred essence energy was concentrated in their heads is evident both in the artwork and in ethnohistorical records.

Sacred Essence Energy in the Heart and Center

The ancient Mesoamericans commonly divided the world into both a quadripartite form, horizontally ordered in four cardinal spaces with a center in the middle, and a tripartite form, a vertical division of the Underworld, Middleworld, and Upperworld. Communication between the vertical levels took place through the Center.⁶⁵ The centers of places and people were associated with the heart, the organ rich in sacred energy force in the form of blood. The architectural layout of Maya cities reflected this understanding. There was typically a ceremonial center that was the heart of the city, its fifth direction.⁶⁶

In the Popol Vuh, after the world was created with its four corners and four sides, the mother and father of life and creation were the “giver of life” and the “giver of heart.” The “creation [wa]s to be under the direction of its hearts sky.”⁶⁷ In regard to “giver of heart,” translator Allen J. Christenson explains in a footnote that the heart is understood as the central defining essence of a person, or what might be referred to as the soul. Thus the creators are those who ensoul living things; it is the heart into which they place their sacred essence energy.⁶⁸ Ch’ulel is the modern Tzotzil Maya term for the inner soul located within the heart and is closely related to the Classic Maya words for divinity, k’uh and k’uhul.⁶⁹

Sacred Essence Energy as the Breath

The ancient Maya identified the living soul with the breath. The breath as a sacred animating substance came from the divine and all of its embodiments and gave life to Earth’s inhabitants. The breath as the breath soul or k’uhul was closely associated with substances that had ethereal qualities carried by wind or air, such as scent, including the sweet aroma of flowers and copal, and sound, especially music.⁷⁰ The breath soul was portrayed in the form of speech scrolls, flowerlike signs that typically hovered over the nose.⁷¹ At late Postclassic Tulúm, breath blossoms are typically shown as beings with zoomorphic snouts, such as Chaak, K’awiil, and serpents. A roughly contemporaneous mural from Xelhá shows the Maya sun god exhaling an elaborate floral breath scroll from his nostrils.⁷² In the Dresden Codex 9b and Kerr Vase 504, Itzamná displays an earspool bead identical to the breath sign before his face (see plate 2).⁷³

Breath or wind was the food of the gods and ancestors, as well as what constituted their spiritual nature. The ancient Maya god of wind, God H, embodied the breath spirit. Both the Classic and the Postclassic versions of God H are handsome young men with long hair, a segmented woven headband with a prominent floral element on the brow, and usually an ik (wind sign) on the cheek. God H was identified with the breath soul, flowers, and music—again, ethereal substances carried by wind or air. He is often depicted playing rattles. In ancient Mesoamerica, music was used to conjure gods and other supernatural beings. Like incense fumes, music was both the food and the essence of gods and ancestors.⁷⁴

The breath soul, which gave and denoted life, could be carried by divine beings and could be captured, for example, by gems. In excavations of Maya burials, jade beads were found in the mouths of the deceased.⁷⁵ A jade bead was recovered from the jaw of King Hanab Pakal in Palenque and from many skeletal remains in Preclassic burials at Kaminaljuyú.⁷⁶ Bartolomé de las Casas, a sixteenth-century friar, recorded that the northern Poqom Maya captured the breath soul of a dead ruler in a stone jewel, likely jade.⁷⁷ Jade objects were also often denoted with breath scrolls in Maya art.

According to the ancient Maya, the breath soul could be pleasant and invigorating or toxic and possibly deadly, depending on whom or what it was coming from. The breath of royalty was seen as fragrant and pleasing. Rulers were often adorned in jade flowers and depicted with jade beads or flowers emanating from the nose.⁷⁸ Scenes from Cotzumalguapa suggest that the breath of the Lords of the Underworld could induce illness. Foul smells were depicted with symbols for darkness, bones, and “elements of death and the underworld.”⁷⁹ The quality of the breath soul consequently correlated with the class of the person and the type of beings and places from which it was emanating.