"Mak", Agrarian Mayan Rituals of Fire and Water in "Relación de las cosas de Yucatán"

Abstract

This paper seeks to understand the symbolic structure that support the two ritual phases of the feast of mak, a twenty-day period of the Maya calendar. We use mainly the testimony of Diego de Landa, bishop of Yucatan in the sixteenth century. In order to study the phenomenology of the religious fact, we use other testimonies: the Maya prehispanic Codices, the Colonial Maya Literature and the ethnographic contemporary reports. Through the parallelism between the ritual and agriculture practices, we can think about the Mayan beliefs on fertility and about the ways to accomplish the normative and practical function of the Maya Religion.