02/10/2026
On the traditional cosmovision of the Tutziljil Mayan society:
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This entire spirit system as a whole was also Deified but not as a singular Deity nor a set number of many deities, for it was made of Time as a diverse phenomenon in eternal motion and mutation. As far as the part of this system for which we human beings were responsible, it was the creations of beauty that our unique hands and speech could make by which Time was nourished. In order to stay intact, the world had to eat the beauty we made. In order to keep up with the debt we humans incurred against the Net of Time for the displacement and death of living plants, places, and animals of the Earth we caused in just feeding ourselves, clothing ourselves, appropriating our living space, and the power to make more of ourselves in pursuit of the top-heavy folly of human reality, the Tzutujil had rituals that required the expenditure of a large percentage of the “time” of our everyday existence to make Beauty, and be beautiful in every occasion. Everyday Beauty was an obligation of remembering that even in just how we walked, we fed God.
All the natural things of the world also addressed the “debt” they too caused the natural world, because of course they too needed to eat, fly, swim, live, flower, and take cover. But because the natural things of the world were the diverse manifestations of Holy Time itself, they could feed the Holy “whole” of Nature by just being themselves. A falcon’s life was a ritual, and all falcons followed the ritual obligation of what it took to be a falcon and thereby fed the Holy in Nature by being falcons to the best degree. Every willow, cloud, or water snake did the same. In other words, the Holy natural things fed all the other Holy natural things: animals, plants, winds, rains, canyons, lakes, etc., in the way they lived and by dying to feed one another in staggered units of naturally played-out schedules of deaths, births, and periods in which they thrived. Everything was fed and supported by the next thing that died to feed it by living according to its nature.
Only humans had a greater debt, because for all their ingenuity they made demands beyond their already overly heavy debt for the multifaceted gift of human complication. The human capacity to damage and interrupt the proceedance of all natural life and matter with their clever ability to exploit nature to not only feed themselves, but “get” what they wanted, was tallied by the Holy in Nature as a debt of such immensity as to be unpayable to this Holy Diversity in a natural fashion. While we humans, like all other beings, had to live and die, having agreed that our natural deaths should let our bodies become food for all the matter that gave life to us, the “extra” burden of the human magnificence and the strangely unique overload of human cleverness made the debt that humans caused to the Net of Time to be something about which the Tzutujil spiritual specialists, Diviners and Shamans, were eternally trying to address by way of the unique phenomenon of human ritual. While our debt could never become even, addressing this eternal debt as best we could in the most beautiful, determined, and patient way was the Tzutujil definition of what made a real adult person. A “real” person was an initiated person who tried to maintain Time by feeding this Holy system the “fruit,” as the people called it, of the same creative hands, delicious creative language, rich generously long rituals, and cleverness of humans whose Earth-wrecking cleverness also did the wounding. People became real humans when they learned how to stay in debt beautifully instead of getting away with ripping Nature off and deferring the debt to future generations. These fruits of our unique minds, thumbs, and voices flowered ritually on the trunk of ancestral knowledge of how to go about this a long “time” ago when the original treaty agreement between the Divine nature of Time in Nature and the people had been ratified. Thus ritual actually meant an organized spiritual application that employed the same unique mind that in everyday life caused humans to wound and mine the world with their agriculture and human-centered demands. With these same mental tools, instead of blenders, phones, shopping malls, airplanes, war, and overcrowded pharmaceutical-dependent cities, people made what the Holy as Deified Time needed for food and clothing, which did not resemble what people wanted; what the Deified Time as all Matter needed was a specific type of beauty of which only humans are capable: a Ritual Beauty that took a lot of time, know-how, and non-returning gift-giving that was not a stock investment in the future, but a late payment for the grace of living. This was maintained through certain given rituals of human beauty without trying to benefit from the gift as a human. These rituals were given to the Holy at certain “nodes” or junctures in Time to feed the new growth of Time, or otherwise the effects of our top-heavy physical taking out of the land and the price of spiritual equilibrium would suck the trunk of the Time tree dry.
Time, to speak colloquially, like all living things and people themselves, was known as an organic thing, a growing thing with a plantlike nature. To all Mayans everything in the world was understood according to the nature of plants. People, Time, and the Holy in Nature were all plantlike. The so-called Mayan day names were the officially designated names of what lived and died during each of those days, and were called flowerings. To keep the world flowering meant to keep the blossoms on the trunks and branches of Time flowering so the flowers could again make “seeds” in hopes of replanting the continuing Eras of Time and the physical things that occurred during them.
Time did not exist; it spoke. And when it spoke, it spoke in flowers. And when it sang its story, these flowers turned to fruit whose seeds sprouted the physical reality of our living world. It lived, grew, flowered like nodes on a grass, fruiting then dying back to seed again the next cycle back into view. Thus time had to be fed and fertilized for reality to grow.
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From Martin Prechtel's "The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic".
