THE PENINSULAR MAYA’S UNFINISHED SPIRITUAL CONQUEST

Abstract

Do Maya sacred artistic manifestations in sixteenth to eighteenth-century Franciscan convents, churches, and chapels reflect native ideological persistence, a Maya and Christian amalgamation, or a European Catholic subsumed spiritual meld? This study explores the sculptural and painted expressions that adorn Colonial religious architecture found in the Yucatan Peninsula. Ethnohistoric sources, historic documents, physical geographical location, and spatial layout for these buildings, their sculptural programs and mural painting iconographic motifs, and spiritual spaces surrounding those edifices erected by natives subsequent to European contact, conquest, and colonization provide a more complete basis from which to address such philosophical and anthropological concepts of religious permanence, syncretism, and/or fusion. These particular evidentiary aspects assess Maya sacred built space environments found in the Cehpech, Cochuah, Cupul, and Tases provinces prior to European contact and conquest. This paper will focus on twospecific areas: the municipal seat church and convent complex in one autonomous political jurisdiction near the Spanish viceregal administrative seat in Mérida, and will then compare/contrast those area-specific religious representations with built spaces and interior/exterior embellishments near the Spanish viceregal enclave at Valladolid, Yucatan, as well as in other indigenous community visita churches under this and Tizimin’s Missions ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the northeastern rural peninsular Maya hinterlands. Combined data sets from both regions suggest a more autonomously derived divine substrate to characterize viceroyalty period Maya religious practice, rather than a Roman Catholic and Maya syncretism or Catholic synthesis of autonomous ideological philosophy, and point to an unfinished evangelical conquest that flew under the ecclesiastical and Spanish administrative radar at that time. In some select cases these same hallowed essence and practices continue to present. Those spiritual expressions that embellish built environments with autonomous religious undercurrents also help to explain the repeated yet unsuccessful Franciscan endeavors to ultimately quash idolatry in the peninsular region.