Unificacion Maya

15th-18th December


Three shamen

This year’s festival in and near Tikal to celebrate the Mayan solstice and prepare for the beginning of the next Mayan 5,200 year long count era is upon us. We are back in El Remate for a week to participate and help with the festival, organised by Anne of Project IxCanaan. This year is special because the 19th December is the New Year’s Day of the 260 day annual Mayan sacred calendar – the first time in a while the new year and solstice are so close to each other.


Tata and Nana

Three Mayan shamen from the Guatemalan Highlands are leading sacred fire ceremonies each morning by the lake, keeping a sacred fire continually burning where they are staying, and giving information and consultations on the relevance of each person’s Mayan birth date before leading ceremonies with up to 2,500 shamen at Tikal on the 21st to 22nd December.



It is very interesting learning about the traditional Mayan spiritual world and the shamen who connect people with that world of energies that influence our lives. It is a continuation of a 3,000 year-old tradition that has outlasted the abandonment of the Mayan city states, Spanish Conquest and Inquisition, smallpox, denigration of indigenous identity, Civil War, genocide, globalisation and even North American evangelism.


Tata Pedro Cruz welcomes the sun

The people attending the festival, apart from the shamen, are approximately 25% Guatemalan and 75% North American or European. The latter are much the same people who would be attracted to stone circle paganism in Britain, except here there is a direct continuation of the tradition managed and perpetuated from one generation to another by generations of Mayan shamen.



Three things strike me at present.

The spiritual principles discussed by the shamen are similar in many ways to the principles of Hindu Yogis including reincarnation of a spiritual body, meditation, the body as connecting rod with the divine. Now that’s worth thinking about how we explain this without cynically kicking the question in to touch or getting all Graham Hancock over everything. What does this mean? I should find out afgter my consultation with the shamen.

Is it better for westerners searching for spirituality to hang out with people who know what they’re talking about or stone circles?

My birth date sign is a turtle which is highly significant for my life. The lake is my doctor. My birth date is 2 turtle, origin day is 7 monkey, my mission date 10 noj (not yet sure what animal this is). Together it means I am well-balanced, have lots of forward momentum and can go anywhere - sunrise, sunset, where the winds blow, where the winds hide to do my mission which may or may not be about healing but is to do with helpìng others in some way.

El Remate and La Biblioteca

There are also some photographs of El Remarte and La Biblioteca on my flickr stream .

We have now been in El Remate for three weeks. It is a village of maybe 2,500 people spread back into the jungle alongside the road from Santa Elena, the nearest town 30 km away, to Tikal. It lies on the eastern edge of the mighty Lake Peten Itza, the largest lake in the region. Tikal is nearly 30k in the other direction, and the border with Belize 60km to the east. We stay in a cabana in the lakeside garden of a house. We swim in the constantly warm lake almost every day and watch the sun set over the water.

There are details of La Biblioteca under the IxCanaan link, along with the other initiatives supported by the Project.

Georgia spends each weekday afternoon leading activity sessions for about 25 children between 4 and 12. Other volunteers she has worked with include Eva from Poland and Marilyn from Chile. I have helped suggest ways of packaging an event run by the project to celebrate the Mayan solstice. Called Unificacion Maya it is a week of events designed to bring tourists into the village to participate in ceremonies and go on other activities from horse riding and boat trips to learning about Mayan cooking, medicine and their calendar. I also designed the leaflet and have installed a common suite of applications on the library computers including much-needed anti-virus software along with Word, Excel and Firefox. The computers are used by older children for internet research, when not browsing porn!, and hopefully future volunteers can teach various computer skills including word-processing, spreadsheets, web design and picture editing. I have been hoping to take high quality photographs of carved wood ornaments women make for tourists but despite the enthusiasm of the president of the women’s group nothing has appeared to photograph yet. Mañana, Mañana!