The Birth of a Universe:
The Maya Science of Pregnancy
By Apab'yan Tew
Book Introduction
We are not what was left of a civilization; we are the current Maya civilization. We wrote the Popol Wuj.
We keep writing and we continue to practice the wisdom inherited from our ancestors. This is a millennial knowledge. What is written here is not a treatise of beliefs, superstitions, or merely local traditions. There is a continuity of ancient science as it was formulated in a distant time and which, at the same time, is a science capable of being rewritten in contemporary terms.
We keep writing and we continue to practice the wisdom inherited from our ancestors. This is a millennial knowledge. What is written here is not a treatise of beliefs, superstitions, or merely local traditions. There is a continuity of ancient science as it was formulated in a distant time and which, at the same time, is a science capable of being rewritten in contemporary terms.
There is an accumulated weight that puts pressure on the specialists of our culture, the disintegration of our communities, the dissolution of the sensitive human link between therapist and patient in favor of technology and the exploitation of time. The overload that, by principle, means not listening directly to us but through third-party filters, publications, reports, being them first interpretations and then judgments. We are not directly asked who we are and, rarely, do we accept to speak.
This is an exception. This essay explores various aspects of the Maya health sciences. It focuses on the conception of the human being and the continuous line of monitoring the calendar of our ancestors. In addition, it is not just about us Mayans; it is about all of us, everyone in this world born of a mother, created in a woman. It is not about, as my teacher and spiritual guide continuously said, to stop believing in something to start believing now, in something else. It is about ceasing to believe. This is an objective science that also, and I know from personal experience, transcends the Maya cultural matrix in which it arises and develops. By following time counts in exact correlations of the calendar, you can read the ancient writings in stone and use this same knowledge to understand who they were and how the conception of our grandmothers and grandfathers was given. The dates are there, undeniably. The same applies to a baby about to be born, be it here or anywhere else in the world. It is equally valid for any birth with a correct registration date. |
Apab'yan Tew
|
I will make an effort to create a link with the reader. This is a very sophisticated knowledge and this work is not a manual to begin to apply without the necessary preparation and responsibility. The interest must be mutual and respectful because to date, another of the overloads and lacerations in our culture, is given by charlatans of all types. What is written here, I can certainly say, has not been read before, not directly from an expert and in his own terms. I hope that the bond is born just when the reader begins to wonder who he is and how he can learn from a true source.
Various institutions begin to be born on Maya soil. For me, the immediate reference is the Universidad Maya Kaqchikel, (UMK) of Guatemala. We are making a very big effort, with very precarious resources, to write with new characters, the portentous legacy of philosophers and scientists. Artists, our people. When you search for knowledge, you may find yourself far away in the mountains and jungles where it is guarded with zeal. If you cannot do that, you should locate at least someone with a good academic backing. The applied effort deserves it.
Various institutions begin to be born on Maya soil. For me, the immediate reference is the Universidad Maya Kaqchikel, (UMK) of Guatemala. We are making a very big effort, with very precarious resources, to write with new characters, the portentous legacy of philosophers and scientists. Artists, our people. When you search for knowledge, you may find yourself far away in the mountains and jungles where it is guarded with zeal. If you cannot do that, you should locate at least someone with a good academic backing. The applied effort deserves it.
Apab'yan Tew
|
Let us start with an important point: I expose the canvas sample to start laying the threads of this warp. The most important thing is that there is no such thing as Maya astrology. No. The knowledge reached by our grandmothers and grandfathers of the movement of the stellar bodies is famous. There is Maya astronomy, yes, and it is still active. We follow the trace of the celestial bodies to understand ourselves in time and the fascination of mathematics, dictating hidden counts that protect the very precise knowledge of a "we" that embraces all of us who inhabit the earth. Not only humans, everyone.
If we have to reformulate our accumulation of observations and data verification about the understanding of the human being to find a common format for researchers, the ideal for this discernment would be to call it graviditalogy, study or pregnancy science. Word composed in Latin and Greek that comes from the conjugation of the terms 'graviditas', pregnancy, and 'logia', science or study. Maya graviditalogy. This does exist and we are going to discover it. |
The base knowledge is circumscribed in two Maya villages of the K'iche' linguistic community of the Guatemalan highlands. Si'j ja', from where it comes as such, and Nawalja', which is a town founded after the first. Focusing on the area of action, we find professionals in the use and practical application of the ancestral calendar, women and men ajq'ij, "those who bear the burden of time," so we are told. Between us, there are divisions in specialization of activities. What I learned comes from two important leaders in the community. My teacher nan Ia' and my teacher tat Te'k. She is a midwife and ajq'ij, he is a ceremonial guide, linguist and ajq'ij.
They were very different, definitely. She was rough, harsh, direct, sapient in silence, as if counting words. Reserved, nothing social, almost nobody knew her. He was sweet, open, ductile, sapient and communicative. Cheerful, social, a friend of the whole town. In those extremes and during 19 years of isolation with them, I learn what I partially pour here. Learning is experiential, there are no special classes, there are no speeches, and there are no exams. With nan Ia' everything was severe and full of scolding to build discipline. With tat Te'k everything was loose and long conversations full of his wisdom well built. From one place to another, my surprise is constant and the wonder takes me and covers me. I did not want to be away from them at any time: I would leave her house to go with him and vice versa.
They were very different, definitely. She was rough, harsh, direct, sapient in silence, as if counting words. Reserved, nothing social, almost nobody knew her. He was sweet, open, ductile, sapient and communicative. Cheerful, social, a friend of the whole town. In those extremes and during 19 years of isolation with them, I learn what I partially pour here. Learning is experiential, there are no special classes, there are no speeches, and there are no exams. With nan Ia' everything was severe and full of scolding to build discipline. With tat Te'k everything was loose and long conversations full of his wisdom well built. From one place to another, my surprise is constant and the wonder takes me and covers me. I did not want to be away from them at any time: I would leave her house to go with him and vice versa.
They died and I could not be next to either of them. Years later, I still miss them, but I begin to realize that what they taught me I did not see elsewhere. Now I can affirm that the critical, acute and well tempered knowledge was created there in their mountains, perhaps coming from a foundation lineage to which they belonged or, perhaps, they were disciples of a teacher in common. I clarify that this study of the calendar and the human being beginning at pregnancy, the total atmosphere of conception and the understanding of the baby as a conscious being, is not entirely a common scientific and cultural heritage of what we call the Maya nation. I cannot affirm it, but I can re-emphasize that I have not seen it applied in other places with such a high degree of depth.
|
Apab'yan Tew
|
I offer an apology for such a severe statement, but I also offer a defense of the matter: the accuracy and proof of the data is more important. The body of the essay will be directed to expose the structure and nucleus of the act of investigation and the praxis of the lines of thought from both nan Ia' and of tat Te'k. Especially about her teachings, this is clear if we talk about midwifery and pregnancy, midwifery and calendar. While she was silent, tat Te'k clarified everything and answered my questions using old word relationships and endless oral history accounts. For her I was, above all, an assistant, for him, a spiritual son.
Tat Te'k and Apab'yan Tew
|
When they died, I had nowhere to go. Till this day, I do not know where I should return from. I like it so. I say this because of the following: thanks to this situation I have been able to prove and verify in the field, that the Maya science of pregnancy is applicable in all latitudes and with certain ways of using language to draw common bridges in the formation of ideas, the basic nucleus of K'iche' knowledge transcends.
It is not uncommon for me to be asked many questions when I am in consultation including a brief explanation of the Maya calendar. I am always flattered by people's interest and attention. The merit is not for me, it is for our ancestors and the calendrical counts and almanacs of the days. Then we board specific subjects. What happens if you program pregnancy, does it have an affect? What if it is by artificial insemination? What does it say about having sex without emotion? What if I went through nervous breakdowns? I had to restrict myself a lot in my diet, did my baby suffer? There may also be a few questions, but to stress on the point -specifying the fact that the baby is conscious- awakens the need of all types of story narratives in the mother, the mothers, the pregnant feminine. "My pregnancy was not welcome, my boyfriend knew that the baby was not his, my dad died during my pregnancy, my mom was a very strong person and it bothered me, I dreamed a lot of my baby but he told me he did not want to be born, my girlfriend beat me, I had strong sexual desires that I did not know how to satisfy, I hid my pregnancy until the sixth month, I did not know who the dad was, my husband liked to make fun of me because I was getting fat and I cried and he kept on...", etc. All kinds of questions have an answer in the knowledge of our grandmothers and grandfathers. |
Nan Ia', surely, would have warned me and even punished me for starting to write this. Tat Te'k, who used his computer like a teenager, would surely be advising me. Now I insist, the tensions between a contemporary science, its instruments of verification and the inherent method, reasonably coherent, before another millenary science that has not been seen beyond folklore and the use as a report of the exotic, the exogenous, the alien, can begin to be solved. The collection, the data, the resources of construction itself, can be examined in the light of a receptive intelligence that wants to delve into the epistemology of the language, the philosophy and the resilience of our permanence and continuity. Not knowing us is not reason enough to consider us savages, primitive, superstitious.
In this essay I will explain, to the extent that the interlocution of common terms allows it, the reasons and reasoning to make it accessible to those who like to learn, how we understand what it is to be human, what distinguishes us and what does not, within a common destiny: to preserve or destroy that which can make us coherent towards a future of incalculable results. Let us discover then, if there is room in the constructive common chaos, many ideas to explore and an ancestral science that explains us all. Everyone. |
Comment Box is loading comments...
|
|