Semana Santa Santiago Atitlan
. Photos by David Hamilton
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Holy Week Santiago Atitlan Photo Photo
. On Good Friday in the Tz'utujil Maya town of Santiago Atitlán, two longstanding religious traditions of the village ritualistically confront one another in public. On this day, the annual penitents procession commemorates the crucifixion of Christ. Approximately 50 young Atiteco men dressed in their finest traditional dress emerge from the town's 16th century cathedral carrying an immensely heavy wooden bier on which rests the Holy Sepulcher containing the symbolic body of Christ. For the next 15 hours, until dawn of the following day, they inch slowly forward through village streets that have been decorated, using vividly colored sawdust and flower petals, with scenes of the life of Christ and other Catholic imagery. These "paintings" are a collective neighborhood project often not completed until moments before the procession arrives.

When the bier has descended the perilously steep cathedral steps and traversed part way across the church courtyard, the renowned local Mayan idol, Maximon, emerges from his nearby chapel on the shoulders of his tenenel to join the procession. Maximon has been described as a mixture of Saint Peter, Judas Iscariat, and the hated conquistador, Pedro de Alvarado. He is also called "Lord of diviners and daykeepers. . . lord of sexual matters (who) watched over wives when husbands were away, but sometimes slept with them himself. . . the ancient Maya deity, Mam . . the year-bearer. . .the meeting of opposites, the soul of ambiguity."(1) In general, he is a principal symbol of traditional Mayan religious beliefs.

In the center of the church courtyard, the two traditions meet and "spectators size them up to decide which of the two is more magnetic—the flamboyant and unregenerate Maximon, with his long history of debauchery, or the martyred Christ, with his dolorous face and colorful funeral cortege."(2)

—David Hamilton

(1) Time Among the Maya, Ronald Wright, p. 179.

(2) Unfinished Conquest, Victor Perera, p. 175.

   
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