BY ALPER ÖZKAN (MSN/PhD)
d_ozkan@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
I must confess that I rarely receive feedback on this column of mine, and even rarer are the times I get a request for a column theme—but when I do, I am only too happy to oblige, provided that I am qualified to do so. That latter condition is why I was in equal parts elated and troubled when the folks from the office next door suggested that I should write about the slump that our national football team is evidently in.
Now, I am vaguely aware that Turkey is represented by a football team of sorts, and I even recall that, back when I was in junior high, it did particularly well in some tournament or another, but covering their exploits is obviously beyond my capabilities—at least when, rather than writing a column, I should be chanting nianfo and hoping that the Pure Land has some nice beds in stock. You see, I have recently depleted my stamina over the course of four consecutive all-nighters (turns out that book chapters aren’t things that you write in one sitting), so it’s a wonder I’m still conscious, and in any case I do not intend to be so for long. Fortunately, though, Mayan mythology does have a rather nice story about a ball game of a different sort, and it certainly looks like it’s high time to write about it.
Mesoamerican mythologies often have an air of casual brutality—worlds get destroyed and rebuilt at the gods’ whims, good harvests are granted in return for children’s tears, and not even the sun can be taken for granted, for it needs to be kept running with a steady supply of human blood. Their societies, though, did not seem to despair all that much at the sheer unfairness of their situation in the world, and developed methods to cope—Aztec war tactics, for example, were specialized to keep casualties at a minimum, so that prisoners of war could be taken for sacrificial purposes (this function was so important that the Aztecs were surprised to see the Spaniards “waste” so many perfectly good potential sacrifices during their wars).
Seeing their sheer indifference regarding a life mired in blood and death, you’d figure that the Aztecs would have had some very lofty afterlives to compensate—and they did have a rather wide array of such realms, ranging from survival challenges (which I imagine to be much like action platformers—you’re already dead, so it’s not like it’ll get any worse; you probably just restart from the first level whenever you die there) to more traditional paradises. Mayans, though, certainly had it much easier, given that they had all but destroyed their equivalent of hell—and all because a pair of twins wanted to play a ball game and made an awful mess out of it.
The ball game in question is a rather mysterious sport, but it is clear that it was as cheerfully brutal as the rest of Mesoamerican culture. The ball, made out of rubber and reaching weights up to four kilograms (that’s about as heavy as nine soccer balls), was to be hit by the hips of the players, which didn’t bode well for the hips in question—and it boded even worse for the more vulnerable parts of the body, since death was evidently possible if the ball struck a particularly vital region. This level of danger, though, is clearly too low for our twins, who in the myth also decide to play near Xibalba, the Mayan underworld. I must note at this point that the twins’ father and uncle were beheaded for playing ball near Xibalba, so they were pretty much straight up asking to get murdered too. Their death wish is quickly answered by the residents of the underworld, who invite the heroes for a nice, friendly ball game in their court.
They then try to kill the pair in about a dozen different ways.
First up are the wooden statues, which are mixed among the Xibalban royalty—the idea is to make the brothers bow before the statues, playing them for fools. But the brothers send an insect ahead of them to prick all the figures standing around, allowing them to tell the real lords from the fakes, and the conversation carried on by the Xibalbans during the pricking session allows them to learn each of their names. Next, they are told to rest on a bench before the match, but they correctly identify the “bench” as a cooking stone (unlike Okuninushi, our heroes have their wits about them). Then they get to play their game (they also use their own ball, since the Xibalban ball turns out to be a bladed death machine) and are invited to stay over, which leads to their third trial—they are given torches and told that it is taboo to let them burn out, so they will be sacrificed if they fail to keep them intact for the night.
They handle this by covering the torches in red sand, play their second game, survive two more simple tests (the House of Cold and the House of Jaguars) and sneak a troop of ants past the serpent-guards of the underworld to steal some flowers for their next trial. The third game then commences without incident, but the Xibalbans are far from deterred, and the twins are sent to the House of Bats, where one of them gets beheaded by a bat. Yes, you heard that right—they survive the snake pit and the jaguar house, but the bats get them. In any case, they replace the twin’s head with a nearby tortoise (nobody notices the difference), play their fourth game—during which they find the head and swap it back—and are announced the winners. Then, as a victory celebration, they perform some miracles which, among other things, involve burning houses and raising them again, and killing a dog and resurrecting it.
The Xibalbans are interested in the latter feat, and want to be killed and revived too, so that they will gain a glimpse of the afterlife (one of the brothers asks why they want to do that when they are already the rulers of the underworld, and is told not to worry too much about it). The brothers, as you might expect, let the Xibalban lords kill themselves, and don’t revive them. They then curse the remaining Xibalbans to rule over nothing but bees (so I guess there is still a hell, but only for bees) and ride off into the sunset.
Wait, did I say sunset? I meant the sun. In one variant of the myth, the twins just climb up to the sky and become the sun and the moon. I still prefer the intrepid scab-god sun and snail-god moon, though.