Epilogue: Confusion of tongues

Summary

The events of 1562 probably marked a major shift in Maya evaluation of the status of the Spanish religion. Until that point, the Spanish presence was seen as temporary, and Christian teachings as little more than interesting novelties to be scanned for useful notions. That attitude changed, I think with the trials. In that three-month-long reign of terror the priests of the new religion, until then peripheral or intermittent factors in Indian awareness, came and sat down in the villages. The idols and the jewelled skulls of the ancestors were burned at their command. The violence, the sufferings inflicted by the friars, the destruction of the idols, signalled that the time of the old gods was indeed over, and the rule of the new gods had begun; when ‘the descendants of the former rulers are brought to misery; we are christianised, while they treat us like animals’. The Chumayel characterises 9 Ahau as the katun ‘when Christianity began, when baptism occurred. It was in this katun that Bishop Toral arrived here also. It was when the hangings ceased in the year of Our Lord 1546. And 7 Ahau was when Bishop Landa died …’