Tzutujil Story of Birth

From: Secrets of the Talking Jaguar by Martin Prechtel

The Tzutujil are a tree and bird people. Everybody is metaphorically a Bird or a Tree, depending on what you're trying to say. The tribe is a tree, rooted in the first placenta of creation, with its trunk coming through the other three layers of heartwood, xylem, and bark, into this fifth world of the fruit, as it is called, or ruachu/iu, meaning Earth Fruit. The other four creations were still happening right now, just like the fifth one, and everything in this fifth one was rooted and created in one of the other four. All these creations were taking place right under your feet. I knew a guy who showed me a rock you could pull up to see them!

Every child born into the village had already been born into and passed through the other four layers of creation, one layer at a time. In each of these consecutive creations, the child received an essential layer of his/her own physical and spiritual composition. After having received and lived these four layers of lives, the child was given form and born into this fifth layer of the Earth Fruit, the world of form, this world. In this way, all of us humans relived the history of the world and actually were diminutive earths walking around in the earth, with everything inside us in miniature that was visible to us on the outside.

The first creation was stone and fire; in this layer you received what was hard and hot. Here you got your bones, your heart, and your gall bladder. Grandfather Fire lived in your bones, and the Mother of Life lived in your heart. Your personal soul was housed in the gall bladder. Dreams originated from the gall bladder, and its tenant was called Q'aq’al or Fire Soul.

In the second layer you were given your flesh because this creation had all the food plants, flowers, and trees. All Tzutujil people know that flesh comes from eating plants. In the third creation you acquired the layer of your blood and nerves and all the liquids of your body, because here was the land of water, rivers, rain, lakes, springs, clouds, mist, and lightning. In the fourth, a layer of breath, vision, and movement was tied into you, this being the layer of wind and animals. Then you were born into the fifth layer, here to have form, becoming fruit on the branches of the Old Life Tree of the Village.

Two Deities, an Old Man and an Old Woman, sat in each of these creation layers, and they were the ones who assembled you. In each creation, Deities did different things to put you together. The Old Man would be putting male things together to make a child, and the Old Woman in each creation would be doing female things to add to the child's makeup. Every child got both elements, regardless of gender.

As each pair of Old People did this in each creation, they uttered special magical words and phrases. These words became the very things they described. The Gods spoke the world into life by continuously repeating their names. When they reach the fifth creation, the Deities' names take on physical form and function.

These words were a kind of counting, sacred prayer counting. In one creation layer, the Old Man tied knots to make a child's muscles, while his consort wove a story into its life. As the Old Man and Old Woman did this, they counted out roll calls of sacred things your body needs. These counting prayers never ended, going from one layer to the next, being basically the Mayan calendar. We are made of words, and those words are places in our bodies and on the earth, too. The fifth world gave all those Old People's words a place to have form and run around, happy to be alive and eating together.

Each pair of Old Folks passed you to the next creation, where the next pair got busy putting you together, and on to the next, and so on until you were passed into this world, where hopefully the village and your mother's midwife were waiting for you to welcome you Home. A child was actually counted into life by the Gods.

That's why it was so easy to become a part of the village, because every Tzutujil started out in life as a sincere amnesiac who spent the rest of his or her life putting back together his or her memory of the other worlds, enough so as to serve the greater good of the village and the World-Earth Fruit, and teach those new amnesiacs to remember.

Not only did we owe our births to the Deities of the other layers, but our tactile life of movement and eating, the Earth Fruit existence, was fueled and kept alive by other Deities and forces living in these same other worlds, spirit worlds. Just like the tree, our world was the fruit, and the Deities were the Roots, Trunk, Heartwood, and Bark; and through these the Gods of the other worlds pumped the sap of life into our world, where we enjoyed what they could not.

Though the old Gods and Deities of the layers made our lives possible, they still had to stay in their own worlds. Yet this fifth world is so delicious that they desire it. A spiritual contract between the people of the village and the Gods said that they would keep life coming to us if we promised to send them remembrance. The fruit of our remembrance was this earth and our lives, and we had to send them some of its deliciousness by means of ritual.

Just as each villager worked hard to carry his or her own weight in the economy of each family compound, the village as a whole had to maintain the spiritual expense of its existence by giving the food of remembrance to the spirits, Gods, and forces of the magnificent layers of the other worlds. Just like the old people in the village, the Gods were never left out or forgotten. We always sent to the elders our gifts, food, and a percentage of whatever we had, to remember them by keeping them well fed and healthy. By remembering our elders, we learned not to forget the Gods. The old reminded us today to feed what had fed us as people up till now.

The Gods gave us life so that we could remember them, to keep them alive. The Gods of all layers ate remembrance. The Gods gave us things they didn't have, so we could create beautiful rituals, speeches, objects, and ways of being that remembered, put the Gods together again, just like they did us in the womb.

Keith and Marnie Elliott’s “REMEDY” Site

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