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Maya Sacred Geography and the Creator Deities. Karen Bassie-Sweet. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. 384 pp.
Mythology was ancient Maya society's ideological lynchpin, a point driven home by the 2001 discovery of the San Bartolo murals with their vividly painted mythic scenes. The urgency to recount mythic events may even have inspired Maya art's achievements in complex narrative. Since the 1970s, scholars have recognized that the K'iche' Maya tale of world creation, penned in the 16th century as the Popol Vuh, offered a literary source of Maya mythology that resonated in ancient art. Prehispanic parallels to characters in the Popol Vuh - such as Hunahpu, Xbalanque, One Chouen, One Batz, Seven Macaw, and assorted underworld denizens - were familiar by the 1970s, and, critically, in the 1980s, Karl Taube linked One Hunahpu to the Classic Maya maize god (Hun Ixim). A landmark achievement of David Freidel and colleagues' Maya Cosmos (1993) was to transform these Popol Vuh-inspired insights into a unified creation myth and show that it had structural analogues in the natural world with the seasonal cycle of maize and celestial mechanics.
Karen Bassie-Sweet's Maya Sacred Geography and the Creator Deities follows in these pioneering footsteps while setting its own...