and in this direction their chiefest power is exercised. By a strange mixture of Christian and pagan superstition they are called in to celebrate the misa milpera, the "field mass" (misa, Spanish, "mass"; milpera, a word of Aztec derivation, from milpa, "cornfield"). In the native tongue this is called the tich, which means the offering or sacrifice. It is a distinct survival of a rite mentioned by Diego de Landa, one of the earliest bishops of the diocese of Yucatan.[1]
The ceremony is as follows: On a sort of altar constructed of sticks of equal length the native priest places a fowl, and, having thrown on its beak some of the fermented liquor of the country, the pitarrilla, he kills it, and his assistants cook and serve it with certain maize cakes of large size and special preparation. When the feast is ready, the priest approaches the table, dips a branch of green leaves into a jar of pitarrilla, and asperges the four cardinal points, at the same time calling on the three persons of the Christian Trinity, and the sacred four of his own ancient religion, the Pah ah tun. These mysterious beings were before the conquest and to this day remain in the native belief the gods of rain, and hence of fertility. They are identical with the winds, and the four cardinal points from which they blow. To each is sacred a particular colour, and in modern times each has been identified with a saint in the Catholic calendar. Thus Father Baeza tells us that the red Pahahtun is placed at the East, and is known as Saint Dominic; to the North is the white one, who is Saint Gabriel; the black, toward the West, is Saint James; the yellow is toward the South, and is a female, called in the Maya tongue X'Kanleox," the yellow goddess," and bears the Christian name of Mary Magdalen.
The name Pahahtun is of difficult derivation, but it probably means "stone, or pillar, set up or erected," and this tallies quite exactly with a long description of the ancient rites connected with the worship of these important divinities in the old times. There are some discrepancies in the colours assigned the different points of the compass, but this appears to have varied considerably among the Central American nations, though many of them united in having some such symbolism.
- ↑ Landa, Relacion de las Cosas de Yucatan, pp. 208 et seq. The work of Landa was first printed at Paris in 1864.
