Mayan Culture Quotes

my Mamá Grande, a tiny Mayan woman, took me aside when I was an adolescent and told me several things that didn't make a bit of sense to my young and inattentive ears, and as young people tend to waste all attempts of our elders to relay to us wisdom accumulated over the decades, I thought my Mamá Grande had a few mice in the attic.

More than half of Guatemalans are pureblooded Indians, descendants of the proud Maya-Quiche tribes. In their mist-shrouded villages, the Indians worship the corn god and the rain god, only vaguely concerned with the political entity known as Guatemala.

In some Mayan villages they even have a stage beyond the elder that they call the Echo Person. They say that when an Echo Person, whether a man or a woman, speaks, the words echo both in this world and in the other world. That's why they are called Echo People.

When we look back at the Mayans or ancient Egypt, we look at their art.

We found a large number of these books in these [Mayan] characters and as there contained nothing at all which was not to be superstition and lies of the Devil, we burned them all.

On first acquaintance, the mystery of the Mayans of Guatemala can seem simply bizarre, as it was when I first encountered Maximon the god.

A millennium before Europeans were willing to divest themselves of the Biblical idea that the world was a few thousand years old, the Mayans were thinking of millions and the Hindus billions.

The world now has a new kind of hero, one who listens more than speaks, who preaches in riddles not in certainties, a leader who doesn't show his face, who says his mask is really a mirror. And in the Zapatistas, we have not one dream of a revolution, but a dreaming revolution.