 presents my fellow history and archaeology nerds. Welcome back. Today we're gonna be talking about something that's apparently pretty popular in modern Mayanism circles, that is the New Age Maya movement, not the historical study of the Maya. People do tend to get those two mixed up sometimes. The Hunapku is a weird thing and there's a lot of misinformation and just downright false beliefs about it, mostly coming from people not having a proper understanding of the ancient Maya religious system, its processes, symbols, and beliefs. But before we take a deep dive, let's do a quick rapid fire of some important points. First point is, Hunapku might be a Mayan word, but the symbol that's used in New Age circles, you know, that weird circle swiggly thing, is actually Aztec, not Maya. And they're very different cultural groups. The second point is, the symbol was originally a square design that's featured on some Aztec priest robes and arguably had nothing to do with any deity. And the third point being that the New Age interpretations of Hunapku come mostly from the 1953 book A Synthesis of Maya Philosophical Thought by a guy called Domingo Martinez, which asserts the Hunapku as a monotheistic idea, which underlies much of the New Age belief on the subject. So with that, let's get started. Most of you watching right now are probably still asking but what is Hunapku? Believe it or not, that itself is more complicated than a lot of people think. In Mayanism circles, it's usually shown as a symbol and is widely presumed to be a Mayan representation of a major deity or force, while also representing the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Pretty cool stuff. But whatever it was, it must have had a lot of cultural significance. Even today, it still uses a textile pattern in a lot of native Mexican artwork. It's quite mesmerizing. The first time the symbol was brought into New Age thought was in the work of Martinez, who in the 50s and 60s believed that the concept was evidence that the Maya actually believed in a single deity or supernatural force rather than the usual polytheistic system. He had some kind of weird ideas too though, believing that the Maya pre-system was linked with Freemasonry and notions of alchemy, especially the Masonic interpretation of God, and a great architect of the universe. Now, Martinez went majoritably unnoticed and his work never really gained any traction until Jose Arguez published the Mayan Factor in 1987, which brought the whole symbol and context surrounding it directly into public eye, and more importantly, into New Age thought. Arguez explained that in 1968, he visited a town called Tiochilan de Valet near the Zapotec site of Manse Alban in the mountains of Oshaca in central Mexico, and was shown two rugs with the pattern on them, which the local shopkeeper told them was a kind of Mexican yin and yang, inspiring him to recreate the symbol in a more cyclical or circular fashion to better match the tower's concept. Here's where the whole shebang gets a little wonky though. The symbol most Mayanism circles use originally didn't have anything to do with the monotheistic interpretation of the Hunabcu. In fact, Hunabcu was a separate concept enforced entirely when that Arguez never actually explained in his book. Followers of Arguez who associate the symbol with the deity were likely influenced by modern Maya daykeeper Hunbatsmen, who was a close personal friend in a collaborative of Arguez. In 1986, Hunbatsmen published his own book on the symbol where he explained that the Mexicas, by which I think he meant Aztecs, worshipped Hunabcu, and they, as well as the mixed texts, also worshipped the Milky Way. A lot of Mesoamerican archaeologists disagree though, with anthropologist Herbert Spindon arguing that the symbol was simply a design representing sand and water. Okay, sure. Great. But what's the symbol's relevance to its actual creators? Well, the earliest evidence of the symbol itself comes from a 16th century Aztec document called the Codex Maglia Bacchiano. In it, you can find different patterns of the original rectangular design. And I'll throw a little fun fact at you. Historians say that it was a design for ritual cloaks used in festivals. So basically, the link between Hunabcu and the symbol we all know is kind of just a modern misunderstanding that I think the locals were using to make a sale. I mean fair play to them for pulling such elaborate ruse. Credit where it's due, I guess. So despite everything Martina's Arguez and the Hunbats claim, there's no known representations or evidence of the Hunabcu symbol that had been documented in any ancient Maya source. In fact, it might even be purely Aztec motif that the Yucatan Maya had no knowledge of whatsoever. That said, just because the modern symbol may have come to us by way of a touristy sales gimmick or a misunderstanding of history, that doesn't mean Hunabcu itself or the New Age revival around it is devoid of spiritual meaning. So far, when we've mentioned the concept Hunabcu, it's as a reference to the symbol. But actually, the real Hunabcu is much more ancient and makes things a hell of a lot more interesting. So without further ado, let's talk about the Maya religion for reels, or at least what we actually know about it. Before we hop in the saddle, though, let me just say I am not a Mayanist. So I'm certainly no expert on Mayan religion, and its nature is strongly debated in archeologically circles. Just wanted to throw that out there. But if any of you guys watching are, we invite you to share your experiences below and even enlighten us to, well, basically on anything we may not cover today. The reason for this debate, though, is that archaeology has absolutely zero agreed upon theoretical or methodological framework for dealing with prehistoric religion, or spirituality in general. It's just one of those weird gray zones. You have the running joke of, well, if you don't know what it is, say it's for ritual purposes. But other than that, you have some scholars who deny the importance of religion entirely and focus only on material evidence, and some who look for imaginative ways to reconstruct ancient beliefs to suit personal fantasies. At the end of the day, it's all just a messy guessing game. One of the biggest problems with reconstructing ancient Maya spirituality is that the majority of sources on it were written by Spanish conquistadors and priests. You know, those guys with the funny hats who searched for the fountain of youth who, in classic 16th century Christian fashion, burnt most of the indigenous stuff to the ground because they were found to be the work of savage heretics, which means that most Mayan sources are written by outsiders rather than the actual Mayans themselves. Now, the first aspect to try and narrow down when talking about Mayan spirituality is the idea of a pantheon of gods. When most of us think about a polytheistic religion, we think of it in terms of the Greco-Roman one, or maybe the Avengers, where you had a family of humanoid gods all existing at the same time, who all took care of different things. And even that isn't technically accurate, but hey, that's another video. With the Maya, it wasn't really like that. While there's still a lot of debate over whether they had personal gods in the sense we know them, or if they worshipped impersonal nonhumanistic natural forces, most historians either think that Mayan religion was animistic, believing in essences and spirits of the natural world, or animatistic, believing in impersonal spiritual forces. Another big slice of the problem pizza was that the early Spanish writers had absolutely zero understanding of the royal ancestor cults, where the Maya and Zapotec worshipped dead kings. And one of the funny things that came out of the whole thing was that in town after town, the Spanish fires wrote down the names of these deified rulers, thinking that they had seen the idols of human like gods from some kind of pantheon. And that's why people think the Mayan had over 250 gods. And that's a few too many if you ask me. The other thing to bear in mind is that the Mayan spirituality transformed a lot through its history. So while some people argue that the classic period Mayans had no humanoid gods, it's an entirely different ballgame when talking about the Spanish perceptions of Maya, since the classic period ended 600 years before the Spanish even arrived there. I mean, just look at how much our society has changed since the 90s. By the time the post classical Mayan society, at least when the Spanish dudes were writing about the religion, people like Bernadito de Sahagún talked about how the nearby Aztecs believed in both impersonal and personal gods, and even Fitfels actually pointed out that Chilpel can prefer to both God or divinity in the concept of spirituality and sacredness in general, unconnected to a personal form. So basically it's just a confusing dumpster fire because apparently the Spanish had more than a few pyromaniacs. While images of gods do appear on classic Mayan pottery, not much appears in writing since all the tablets or statues that are inscribed were mostly political monuments. Now there is considerable support for the idea that the phrase is actually just a Spanish invention that was used to convert the Maya to Christianity, as it's a colonial word that means one god in the Mayan language. The phrase is unknown in any pre-conquest inscriptions in Mayan writing, and it only appears in writings that are heavily Christianized, suggesting that, you know, the Spanish Colonials probably had their figure in this culture super investigating here. While this is the default view for a lot of people, I think it's eternally possible that Hunabcu was simply the post-classic name for a concept that was always present in Mayan spirituality way back into the classic period. Most scholars will argue that the use of Hunabcu, literally one plus suffix plus god, for the singularity of god is linguistically similar to the oneness of the father, son, and holy spirit. It does appear in a lot in missionary writings, but at the same time it's not set in stone that Hunabcu could also refer to a non-Christian deity. After all, the term was only joined up with Yahweh because it was remarkably similar to meaning universal oneness, and perhaps it just made sense to the Christian missionaries. So Hunabcu doesn't necessarily mean one god in the sole Christian sense, but can also mean single spirit or sole divinity, which arguably has more in common with the concept of oneness spoken about in many spiritual circles. That said, it's probably more appropriate to think of Hunabcu as either a unified creator or force. Interestingly, the Zapotecs also seem to have a similar concept of an invisible creator or spirit, so it's kind of a common thing in Mesoamerican spiritualities. Since Hunabcu was this super cool, detached, and invisible creator, no images or statues unfortunately were ever made of it, since it was without form and couldn't really be pictured, and this could account for it not being present in the archaeological record prior to being written down by the Spanish. Based on classic period Maya writing, there is a specific god written with the hieroglyph Ku, which is often identified with God-C, as in the letter C. Don't ask, it's kind of a long weird story. Rather than being a specific deity with its own mythic cycle, God-C appears to embody the ancient Mayan concept of spirit or creating consciousness, same as Hunabcu. Funnily enough, in the rare events he's shown in pictures or carvings, it's in the context of other gods or ritual items or temples, implying that, while he wasn't a god in the sense we know it, he was kind of the concept of spirit itself, like the thing that gave other things a divine or sacred quality. Hunabcu isn't just a spiritual force or universal soul, since the Maya also had the word ik, which meant breath, wind, or soul. So Hunabcu is definitely more of a one among many kind of god, but was also the concept of vinity and spirituality in itself. Maybe Hunabcu was just another name for the other creator god, Yichamna, which is definitely a possibility, or maybe it really was just the Mayan name for the Christian god, or perhaps it was a universal spiritual force that was present in all things. While the Hunabcu symbol might be a bit dubious, the concept itself expresses an element of Mayan spirituality that tells us that potentially everything is connected and part of a single divine force, which, if you ask me, is always something worth exploring. Toodles!