Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilNuméros en texte intégral110-2ArticlesThe prophet Enoch among the Maya ...

Articles

The prophet Enoch among the Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula

Le prophète Hénoch chez les Mayas de la péninsule du Yucatán
El profeta Enoc entre los mayas de la península de Yucatán
Paul Sullivan
p. 77-101

Résumés

Les Mayas du Yucatán et du Quintana Roo, au Mexique, racontent qu’ils ont reçu la visite d’un prophète de l’apocalypse qui se faisait appeler Hénoch. Cet article relate le contenu de ces histoires, révèle l’identité du prétendu prophète et explore comment les Mayas ont transformé une figure chimérique des années 1920 en un messager divin doté d’attributs tirés des mythologies mayas.

Haut de page

Entrées d’index

Palabras claves:

Mayas, Yucatán, profetas, tradición oral
Haut de page

Notes de la rédaction

Manuscrit reçu en mars 2024, accepté pour publication en octobre 2024.

Texte intégral

1In the late 1970s and early 1980s I lived and studied among Mayas in Quintana Roo, Mexico, descendants of rebels of the 19th-century uprising known as the War of the Castes. Oral history and prophetic traditions were principal topics of my investigation, so I naturally took an interest in stories I heard, beginning shortly after my arrival in the region, of the barefoot wanderer who Mayas said visited their communities much earlier in the 20th century. They called him tata enok, Father Enoch, or, sometimes, tata nok, Father Noc. Stories about Enoch related how he came one day before peace and freedom had finally settled over the land. He walked down forest paths that were otherwise hidden to outsiders. Along such trails Mayas had torn small patches of bark from trees to one side or the other, so friends could find their way, while enemy soldiers would not. Enoch came out of the north, drifting slowly south, from one village to another, ever deeper into the territory of the rebel Mayas of Quintana Roo.

2I said Enoch walked, but some claim his feet did not actually touch the ground. Rather, he would glide along just inches above the earth. He carried nothing with him but a hollow reed (jalal) and a small shoulder bag woven from henequen fiber (sabukan). His clothes were shabby and ragged about the hem. To whomever he met Enoch taught the Lord’s Prayer, urged the following of God’s way, and warned of the coming of the apocalypse. Sometimes he prophesied other things, too. He did not linger long among the Mayas before continuing further east or south, never to be seen again. Most believe Enoch was not human, or winik. Instead, they reckon, he must have been a divine being, a santo.

3“How the biblical figure of Enoch, rather than any of the other more renowned Judaic and Christian prophets, came to walk among the Mayas of Quintana Roo is a story only the outline of which can be traced here.” That is what I confidently wrote in my dissertation (Sullivan 1983, p. 129). I presumed that Mayas had invented this Enoch. That they had, through a melding of their own apocalyptic expectations and fragmentary knowledge of European Christian lore, fashioned him as a living figure in oral tradition, someone whom everyone could remember as having once come to preach and prophesy.

4My argument went, largely verbatim, like this: Enoch was a minor figure from the Old Testament. He was the son of Jared and father of Methuselah. Enoch prophesied that the Lord would come to punish sinners. He was most noted for having been taken bodily into heaven, without first suffering the pains of death. Early Christians associated Enoch with esoteric, hidden knowledge of heavenly things (after all, he had been up there) and the apocalypse. Later, Christians bearing a heightened interest in the imminence of the Second Coming of Christ paired Enoch with the prophet Elijah, of whom it was written in the Old Testament: “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the land with a curse” (Malachi 4:5). In the New Testament the Book of Revelation mentioned two “witnesses” who would come to preach against the Antichrist in the Final Days. They would themselves be slain by the Beast, but would be brought back to life and taken once again into heaven (Revelation 11:1-13). As early as the mid-1st millennium of the Christian era, Enoch and Elijah were identified as those two witnesses (Alexander 1967). Thereafter, the belief that Enoch and Elijah would return to preach against the Antichrist and to convert the Jews (a precondition for the Second Coming of Christ) was a persistent theme in popular European millennialism (Cohn 1970, p. 145; Randolph 1975, p. 17).

5The Franciscan Order proved particularly receptive to theologically elaborated versions of medieval millennialism, including to notions of the coming of Enoch and Elijah as a necessary precursor to the advent of the Final Days. They came to view themselves as the “mystical representatives” of Enoch and Elijah, indeed they held that their founder St. Francis was himself Elijah (Gardner 1966 [1912], p. 64). In the later Middle Ages the association came repeatedly to be made: the two witnesses of the Antichrist and converters of the Jews were Enoch and Elijah, who were two Franciscans, or the Franciscan Order itself. To that Order later fell the task of missionizing the newly subdued Mayas of 16th-century Yucatan, at the very time when some influential clergy believed they lived in the End Times and that the New World would be the physical theater for the final, climactic chapter in the history of humankind (Phelan 1956, p. 55).

6Unfortunately, for the purpose of the argument I was constructing in my dissertation, an argument reprised in somewhat different terms in Restall and Solari’s 2012 and the End of the World (2011, p. 91-100), we have little evidence concerning the content of Franciscan teachings to the Maya. Their catechisms have been preserved: points of prayer and doctrine, the commandments of God and the church, etc. But concerning what else early missionaries might have emphasized about Christianity and the tumultuous times they and the Mayas were then living through, there is precious little to go on. Even recent, thorough investigations of the Christian textual heritage of colonial-era missionizing among the Indians of Mexico has turned up little additional insight into the Christianizing of the Maya, due to the relative dearth of surviving texts (compared to a relative abundance of sources for the Nahua of central Mexico; Christensen 2013, 2016, 2022). Little, but not nothing. Two Maya manuscripts, one from the 16th century (the so-called “Morley Manuscript”) and one from the 19th century (the Chilam Balam of Tuzik), both include a version of the European apocrypha “The Fifteen Signs Before Doomsday” (Heist 1952). That fact suggested to Mark Christensen that “the apocalypse and its signs clearly made an impression on the Yucatec Mayas as they made conscious decisions century after century to preserve the event in their local manuscripts” (2022, p. 77). And there is a curious, unique passage in the Chilam Balam of Chumayel which appeared to its capable translator, Ralph Roys, to have been inserted there directly by a Spanish missionary. “The text seems to adhere too closely to the rules laid down by the Spanish writers on Maya grammar for it to have been written by an Indian,” he noted. The passage contains a rather standard account of what will happen to good and bad people at the time of the Final Judgment, and in its last lines the passage notes: “There are three men, the true servants of God, well beloved of God. Elias [i.e. Elijah], and Methuselah, and Enoch are their names; they are living to this day” (Roys 1967, p. 163).

7That was my circumstantial case for why Mayas in their oral tradition had conjured a biblical prophet to walk among them prophesying a Christian-style apocalypse. For good measure, in my dissertation I went on to speculate why Mayas would choose Enoch rather than his companion Elijah. There I noted:

Recalling that of the Final Days contemporary Maya expect great upheaval, war, breakdown of social and natural order, perhaps even an inversion of earth surface and subsurface, it may be significant that Mayas of eastern Yucatan refer to this prophet figure as tata nok, “father nok.” For in Yucatec Maya, the root nok means “turn upside down.” (Sullivan 1983, p. 135)

8It sounded good to me. But I was wrong. Perhaps Franciscans had long ago drawn the attention of Mayas to Enoch and Elijah as prophets of the apocalypse, and perhaps the very sound of the name of enok rang more true to Maya word forms than elias, as Spaniards would have called Elijah. But that was not why Mayas were telling me that Enoch had walked among them and prophesied the Final Days. Mayas had not conjured him from the vapors of a millenarian tradition. A man calling himself Enoch actually had wandered among the Mayas, counseled them and prophesied, and then disappeared.

What Mayas say about Enoch

9A few years after my dissertation research had concluded, I was able to return to the peninsula and follow more extensively the trail of this remembered prophet. In the stories which Mayas tell about Enoch, there are many fine details consistently recalled by one storyteller to the next, by people who lived many miles apart and had never met one another. For example, Dionisio Cantun, in Kaua, a town in eastern Yucatan, explained to me it was 1913 when Enoch arrived there (Figure 1). At the time we talked Cantun was 73 years old. His father, he explained, had been a slave on a local hacienda. After the revolution Kaua carved its community land out of the carcass of that estate. Cantun later served 17 years in municipal government, and worked for quite some time helping archeologists explore and rebuild the ancient Maya ruins at Chichen Itza. Dionisio sat on the stoop of his house early one evening as he described in Maya how Enoch came to town.

Well, when Enoch arrived here, it was exactly four in the afternoon, and he sat down over there on the corner where the old school was. A half an hour later he had visitors, people then, old/important men [nojoch mako’ob] came to visit him there where he was sitting. Then they began inviting him to come to their houses, or to the church, that they give him grace [grasia] like that. He did not allow himself to go anywhere. There where he was sitting, there would he spend the night like that. Later, when it was asked of him if he would eat some tortillas, well, he said no. “Thank you. But if perhaps you have a little honey, a little honey, with one banana, if you have any, that I will eat.” So, one Malboro, Malboro Aguilar went home, and he brought a calabash. Half of the calabash [was filled] with honey, with two tiny sweet bananas. Well, he took it and ate it. Well, it was eight o’clock when all the people retired from that place, and he was left alone. (Interview with Dionisio Cantun, Kaua, 8/14/1984)

Fig. 1 – Enoch on the Yucatan Peninsula, 1920s

Fig. 1 – Enoch on the Yucatan Peninsula, 1920s

(map Erin Greb Cartography)

10According to Cantun, Enoch departed the next morning. But before he did, he paused to counsel the men of Kaua to plant in their fields not only corn and beans, but plenty of yucca and yams as well—root crops that mature slowly and remain edible for a long time in the soil. That way, should a time of necessity arrive, they would have sustenance. And Enoch prophesied to them. He foretold something that would happen one afternoon the following April when the men of Kaua would be laboring at the archeological site of Chichen Itza. (More on that in the conclusion of this article.)

  • 1 . Dionisio Cantun told me that in Valladolid Enoch had been abused by the municipal president, Aure (...)

11As Cantun told it, Enoch exited Kaua at seven in the morning and arrived the very same instant in Valladolid, about 13 miles away. Police soon seized Enoch from the streets of that city. A local official named Centeno denounced him as a madman, and to humiliate the would-be prophet he ordered Enoch’s hair to be cut short. In response, Enoch warned that as such mistreatment befell him, so too would the political boss (jefe político) suffer. Enoch vanished soon thereafter from the city. And sure enough, just six weeks later, Dionisio Cantun explained to me, the abusive official was assassinated. Enoch did not do it. Centeno was killed by a gunman hired by the irate husband of a woman with whom the political boss was having an affair. But Enoch saw that it would happen. He had a certain power, Cantun explained.1

12“Where did that power come from?” I asked.

13“Well,” Dionisio mused, “perhaps he read a testament that Handsome Lord [ki’ichkelem yum] has left here like that. He [Enoch] did like … he studied it.” When Mayas like Dionisio mention the testament, or testamento, they refer not to the Bible or any part of it. Rather, they allude thus to an ancient, hidden book in which is inscribed the entire future of mankind, a book they call the “History of God,” or sometimes the “Night Writing,” áak’ab ts’íib (Vapnarsky and Chi 2021).

14Dionisio was just one of many elderly people who could, when asked, relate the story of their encounters with Enoch. Not only do the details of their accounts suggest authenticity, but the geography works, too. One storyteller has Enoch arriving from one direction, departing in the other. The next storyteller, from their regional vantage point, adds to a consistent narrative about a character traversing the landscape in a direction generally from west to east to south.

15Though when I talked to her Basilia had long lived in Tuzik, Quintana Roo, she was born and raised in Tekom, Yucatan, south of Valladolid. Her late mother told her that Enoch had passed through there heading south. He carried some sort of small machete, she recalled, which was tied to his waist. But ruffians in the next town beat him up and took it from him.

16Continuing along trails south, Enoch would soon have exited inhabited lands and passed through a forest left vacant by the War of the Castes. Travelers through that forest would still periodically chance upon the overgrown ruins of houses and whole villages whose people were killed or driven off in the decades-long conflict. The war had subsided, but settlers still feared the once rebel Mayas of the south, and the no-man’s-land had yet to attract any new settlers.

17Francisco Chan was an elderly man living in one of those towns, Saban, that was resettled after the war. He explained to me that when Enoch crossed through that stretch of the forest, he did not yet live in Saban, but, rather, in a small forest hamlet called Chan Chichimila. His wife, who was present when we talked, was the daughter of a slave who had escaped fighting around Valladolid in 1910. Neither of them had seen Enoch personally. But Chan could with confidence declare that Enoch came out of Valladolid in 1922 and that “as he began to travel, the trails were all flooded. Despite how the trails were, when he arrived at a place, his clothes were clean.” “His clothes were clean? So he didn’t actually step on the [muddy] ground?” I asked. “Nothing at all [on his pants]. God knows how he traveled. If the rain fell like it’s raining now [it was pouring outside and thundering while we talked], wherever he stood he’d just do like this [clasp his hands over his head].” “And he wouldn’t get wet,” I offered. “He wouldn’t get wet.” Nor, Francisco added, would he eat.

18Wandering further south, Enoch entered territory where the once rebellious Maya still ruled their own communities. Santiago Cen, relative of one of the greatest Maya generals, Bernardino Cen, lived in Chun On when I asked him about Enoch. He claimed to be 100 years old. His wife, a woman of about 80, was daughter of a late, prominent Maya leader and prophet thereabouts, Florentino Cituk. As we talked she sat by the fire, along with a pregnant granddaughter.

  • 2 Another personal account of the epidemic was documented by anthropologist Villa Rojas (1945, p. 30 (...)

19Cen was alive when Enoch passed through, but Enoch did not come to Chun On. He passed further west and south. While in Yucatan people are comfortable relating such events to precise historical dates—1913, 1922—in former rebel territory people are more accustomed to talking about whether this or that thing happened before or after a common historical watershed, as Lorena Martos has discussed (1994). The Great Fire is one such widely known watershed, a terrible smallpox epidemic followed by a global influenza pandemic that decimated the rebel Mayas early in the 20th century. Santiago Cen’s wife reminisced about the plague while sitting there at the hearth. When the Great Fire came it took both of her parents and almost all of her siblings. Only three small children, including herself, survived in her family. The houses of neighbors were left empty. There was hardly anyone left alive in the whole village. The children went thirsty. Dogs ate the unburied, or shallow-buried corpses. She and the other people were all like chickens, she said. Like chickens, they could be healthy one day and dead the next.2 According to her husband, Santiago, Enoch came shortly after the Great Fire. Santiago was 100 years old. When the Great Fire came, he was only four feet tall. Armed with these facts, he suggested, you can calculate what year it was when Enoch passed through.

20Anyway, concerning Enoch, Santiago said that “when the santo Enoch passed by, he was given corn [to eat], but he wouldn’t eat. But, ‘José, Pedro, who knows what name, María, whatever … if you give me a little honey water …’ So they gave him a small flask. He downed it faster than you could watch.” And, Santiago added cryptically, Enoch’s hair was growing back quickly.

21One of the first of the rebel Maya settlements Enoch entered was the hamlet Yokdzonot, which now languishes abandoned in the forest east of Tuzik. The place was vacated only in modern times. Amidst the trees and brush still stands the elementary school that the Mexican government built there in the 1960s or 1970s. From there Enoch walked west to a place called San Antonio. San Antonio had been, under some other name for sure, an important crossroads in the Maya realm, or so it appears in pre-Caste War maps. Today a pyramid shrouded in low vegetation stands at its center, while modern dirt roads have been cut right through ancient platforms here and there. In the 19th century it was the hacienda of the rich and powerful Catholic priest Antonio Mais, whose parish was centered in a town to the north called Tihosuco (Rugeley 1996, p. 152). In San Antonio one can still find the hacienda house and the great well or noria out of which a mule-driven contraption lifted water that was then poured into long stone canals—whether for irrigation or to water cattle, no one knows anymore. Anyway, when Enoch arrived, the place, like so many others, had long lain abandoned by its pre-war owners, none of whose descendants dared return again.

22When Enoch arrived in San Antonio, he was met by men from Tuzik who happened to be out there. They were armed and still wary of outsiders. The Tuzik men escourted Enoch back five miles further west to their village. Roque Nah recalled seeing the party pass. He was just a child then, but he remembered it well. Enoch was a curious character. He dressed as an ordinary man, and carried a hollow cane (jalal). He just carried it, he did not use it for walking. The guy would not engage in conversation—not when he was walking along, and not if it was idle chatter.

23Cipriano May, born around the beginning of the 20th century, heard from his grandmother in Tuzik how Enoch arrived from the east. Enoch came barefoot. The hems of his pant legs and his shirt were tattered. He would not eat anything, but he sure loved to smoke. He would pluck the leaves off native tobacco plants here and there, stuff them in his pockets, and later roll some into cigarettes. Enoch said he had come because the end of the world was near. But it did not turn out that way, Cipriano added for my benefit. He did not spend more than a day or so in any one place. And it was strange how when it rained, Enoch would just light up a cigarette and neither it nor he would get damp.

24Victoriano Tuz’s father—one of the founders of Tuzik—saw Enoch arrive there. But it was Victoriano’s godmother who told him memorable stories about that day. His godmother knew how to pray, and she later tried her best to teach Victoriano the prayer that Enoch had come to teach. The boy did not learn so well. “The Lord’s Prayer, supposedly said santo Enoch when he passed by, ’Learn it, José!’” Enoch called every man José, and every woman María. “Learn it, because it’s good for your souls when he comes … because ‘There will be the coming of the Antichrist. There will come the year when here passes by the Antichrist in order to find his people.’” Despite reports that Enoch only spent a day or less in any one place, Victoriano recalled hearing that he spent about 12 days in Tuzik. Enoch would go out each day from there to visit surrounding communities and ranches, and then return to sleep in Tuzik at night. Victoriano recalled, too, hearing that Enoch had a pretty odd haircut.

25When I talked about Enoch with the prominent shaman and commander Santiago Itza, he had not lived in Tuzik for many years. But he used to, and his late father—a shaman, too, and principal scribe to the officers of the region—saw Enoch arrive there and heard him teaching prayers. Enoch did not just teach the Lord’s Prayer, the one everyone remembers him teaching. He also taught the Protect-Yourself-When-Sleeping-Alone-on-the-Road prayer, the Protect-Yourself-from-Evil-Things prayer, and others. Enoch was a santo, a divine being, sent by God as a sign that people should cease their evil ways. He had some habits consistent with his non-human status. He would not use people’s names. If you were a man, he would just call you José. And he would not sit in just any old hammock. As Santiago explained, back then from time to time men from the villages would go to perform mandatory guard service in the shrine village of Xcacal Guardia, the successor rebel capital to the original Santa Cruz. They would go to Xcacal Guardia to protect and to serve for two weeks or so the Most Holy One, the original miraculous cross of the war-time rebel Mayas. When you went on guard service you would take a small traveling hammock to tie up in the barracks there. Since men went alone, not with their wives, in those small hammocks they would never have had sexual relations. Only in those hammocks, the never-had-sex-in-them hammocks, would Enoch deign to sit, for they were sujuy, virgin, not profaned.

26Santiago recalled that Enoch was different in yet another way. Even though it might be pouring rain, he would not get wet as would any ordinary person.

27And then there was the miracle of the crackers, like Jesus’ feeding of the multitudes with five loaves of bread and two fish. In one village children had gathered around Enoch, which angered the adults, but not the prophet. Enoch carried a very small bag. He thrust his hand in and pulled out two crackers and gave them to a child. And then two more to another, and then to another, and another and another, as though there were no end to the treats. If he was human, “He’d only have enough in that bag for two or three people,” my friend Miguel explained after our visit with Santiago Itza.

28From Tuzik, Maya men eventually escorted Enoch south to the neighboring community of Señor, passing first through the ranch called Ocantun, where he was heard to sing the Gloria. As usual, the trails were soaked by recent rains, but Enoch somehow just passed over them without stepping into any puddles. “When he was taken there where I told you, taken to Señor,” Victoriano Tuz vividly described:

It’s pouring rain. He clasped his hands over his head like this. He did that because water is pouring down everywhere … Water is pouring down everywhere and he pulls out a cigarette, and he puts it between his lips, and he takes a match, and he lights it. But the thing is, water is falling everywhere, so how could he light a match?

29Enoch just had the matches in his pocket, and now he’s smoking and walking along through the pouring rain.

Well he’s going through the water like that, but you’re not seeing him plop his feet down in it, nor are you seeing the water disturbed even though he’s going through the water. Nor are you seeing him plod through the water. The rain stops, he’s dry. Not a bit wet… That’s why I say he wasn’t just a man. If he was just a man, he’d have gotten wet.

30In Señor, as everywhere else he visited, Enoch would eat barely anything. Just a little bit of fruit, perhaps. One old man recalled that he would only eat honey—native honey produced by Maya bees (xuna’an kab), not the kind produced by European bees—and perhaps some squash. And everyone he met, he addressed them only as José or María.

31José Tec, who as we talked reckoned himself to be 90 or 100 years old, saw Enoch when he arrived from Señor in the next settlement, Chan Chen Comandante. Enoch stayed that afternoon at the village church and taught the Lord’s Prayer to people, and warned them of the coming of the Antichrist. In fact Enoch told him the Antichrist was already among them, in the guise of the Protestants then missionizing on the peninsula. The Antichrist would try to rally people to his side and away from God, and is that not what the Protestants do? Anyway, one old man who heard Enoch speak proceeded to think on it too much. He died soon after, of fright or despair. He just thought on it too much, folks recall.

32Tec and 200 others escorted Enoch the next morning on to the rebel Maya capital of Santa Cruz, where General Francisco May still ruled his people. The “Time of General May” is another common historical marker for Mayas of that region. Francisco May ascended to the generalship of the rebel Mayas of Santa Cruz after the Great Fire epidemic wiped out their senior leadership. Federal Mexican troops had occupied the rebel Maya capital in 1901, but those forces were withdrawn for service elsewhere during the Mexican revolution. When the rebel Mayas reestablished themselves in their old capital at Santa Cruz, General May ruled there first as a belligerent, and later as a peacemaker with the Mexicans. He was finally forced to flee the region by subordinates unhappy with the many accommodations he had made to Mexicans and fed up with his predilection for inflicting corporal punishments on his people. That was in 1931. So, roughly speaking, the “Time of General May” was 1915-1931 (Hostettler 1996; Reed 2001, p. 307-321).

33As they walked to Santa Cruz it was, of course, raining heavily. Enoch, who was carrying some kind of stick, fell behind his escorts. Tec and the others tramped on through the water and mud up to their ankles. Everyone got well soaked. Except Enoch. When he caught up with them, his feet were clean, his clothes were dry. Enoch had a power.

34In Santa Cruz a long table was set up and decked with all kinds of food for Enoch to eat. He would not eat tortillas, though, the staff of life for Mayas. He would only consume honey, and then just a spoonful. Watermelon, melons, squash, bananas, anything else offered to him he would bless, but not eat. Enoch again preached the coming of the Antichrist, taught the Lord’s Prayer, and counseled his audience to plant yams, sweet potatoes, yucca, and corn, to plant everything in their fields, because the day of the war of the end of the world was not far off.

35From this point on the accounts of Maya witnesses and storytellers diverge, sending Enoch off in three different directions in the last days of his sojourn among them. Most agree, though, that he wound up at the edge of waters. As some tell it, after leaving Santa Cruz, Enoch wandered, accompanied by Maya men, northeast through small villages until, with only two companions left in tow, they arrived by the sea at Tulum. In those days Tulum village was a shrine center like Santa Cruz itself, where Maya men and women worshiped God before an oracular cross of war-time fame. Just up the coast from the village lay the famed post-classic ruins which foreign archeologists had already commenced to visit, clear, and study. With Enoch and his party at the ocean’s edge, a heron (ch’íich’i ja, literally, “water bird”) startled them. Enoch’s companions momentarily turned to watch the bird glide by. When they turned back, the prophet had vanished.

36As others tell it, when Enoch departed Santa Cruz he headed south to Santa Cruz Chico on the northern-most tip of Bacalar Lagoon. In earlier times Maya traders would embark from there in canoes and ply the lagoon’s blue waters for some 35 miles south. At lagoon’s end they could follow draining streams out into the Bay of Chetumal and the Caribbean. But Enoch did not board a canoe. Instead, at Santa Cruz Chico he spread a broad cloth over the water, sat on it, and was transported up over the water to destinations unknown.

37Still others tell that when Enoch left Santa Cruz he did head south with an entourage. But he and his party made it all the way to the settlement of Chetumal (then still called Payo Obispo) on the bay of the same name. At the time of first arrival of Spaniards on the peninsula of Yucatan, Chetumal was the seat of a densely populated and apparently prosperous Maya province. Those coastal Mayas were decimated by war and disease, and when Enoch reached the area he would have found only a small settlement of Mexicans and federal soldiers posted there since the beginning of the 20th century to cut off rebel Mayas’ access to British Honduras. Though he otherwise had no possessions, Enoch had brought with him some sort of canvas or tarp. He spread it over the water, sat on it, and flew off over the sea.

  • 3 My account of stories told about Enoch rests in part upon recorded interviews including: Dionisio (...)

38A few of the aged people who talked to me of Enoch were eye-witnesses. Others, if they’d even been born yet, were small children when Enoch passed through. Or they lived somewhere that Enoch did not visit. They learned in detail about Enoch’s coming from their parents or, often, from godparents. In any event, the fact that people living in different places, people who had never met one another, recounted the travels of Enoch in such precise and consistent detail convinced me that some flesh-and-blood individual actually had visited the Mayas early in the 20th century to teach prayer and warn of the coming of the Antichrist.3

Enoch in the flesh

39When talking about the teachings of other prophets from war-time or post-war periods, Mayas in Quintana Roo make them come alive through animated, reported speech. Speakers from the past directly address audiences in each new generation. That is not so much the case, however, with Enoch. One can sometimes hear him warn of the coming of evil:

lete ’áantakristo’ bíin yanak u máan utial u lo’obil tech ’u xáache’ tech ’u xáache’ de yeero yan ’u xáache’tikech ti u k’áatik u yu’ub bin teche’ máax ’a dyoos That Antichrist, there will be his passing by in order to do harm to you. He rakes you, a comb of iron, he will rake you with it. Then he asks to hear, reportedly, You! Who is your god?

40One can sometimes hear him advise how to prevent the Antichrist from raking the soul from your body. Reciting the Lord’s Prayer will shield you from that fate.

káj kanike’ex le Padre Nuestro tumen ti u ts’o’okol le k’íin le’aanyoso’ kij yan u taal le chagono’ kij Learn the Lord’s Prayer! Because at the end of the days of the year [era], he says the Beast will come, he says.

41And we can listen as Enoch counsels Mayas to prepare for hard times to come. In both Yucatan and Quintana Roo, he exhorts them to fill their fields with plantings that endure, which could be dug up and eaten in times of scarcity:

pak’e’ex tun kaanya kij pak’e’ex ja’as kij pak’e’ex makal súurtij ta koole’ex tumen k’aabet kij   pak’e’ex makal pak’e’ex tuláakal ba’al ich a koole’ex ma’a xáantal tun le kaj líik’ le geera tu ts’o’ok k’ìino’ kij Plant sugar cane!, he says Plant plantains!, he says Plant elephant’s ears [an edible tuber] Stock your corn fields! Because you need to, he says. Plant elephant’s ears! Plant everything in your fields. It won’t be long before it starts, the war of the end of days, he says.

42Yet apart from a few instances like those just quoted, Enoch does not have many direct, speaking parts in Maya recollections. That is unusual for Maya storytelling and the recitation of the words of prophets past (Vapnarsky 2018; Burns 1983). Knowledgeable Mayas refer to their own prophets as ah k’in bobat, and their words recited in the present are ’úuchben t’àan, “old words,” or talam t’àan, “mysterious words.” I never heard such labels applied to Enoch, however. If he was labeled at all, it was with the Spanish loanwords santo or discípulo, and his words were tsetsek t’àan, “counsel.” And as for the Lord’s Prayer as reportedly taught by Enoch, some elderly could recite it for me, or so they claimed. I was surprised to hear from them not the kayum, the Maya-language version of the Lord’s Prayer first translated by Spanish friars in early colonial times and recited always in Maya family, field, and village rituals, but garbled renditions of the Spanish Padre Nuestro. In hindsight all of these subtle clues pointed to a fact only later made clear—Enoch did not arise from among the Mayas. He was not one of them. Despite the few Maya words they put into his mouth, he may not even have spoken that indigenous language.

43Even as I was recording oral Maya accounts of Enoch’s travels through their land, a professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán published a revealing short article entitled “La agitación popular no política en Yucatán—el profeta Enoc” (“Non-political Popular Agitation in Yucatan—the Prophet Enoch”; Bojórquez Urzaiz 1984). Carlos Bojórquez Urzaiz wrote that popular oral tradition in villages and towns in the northwest of the Yucatan Peninsula—far from where I was gathering accounts—spoke of the visitation of a prophet called Enoch. In Halachó Enoch declared himself the last of the prophets on earth, and he told of things to come that would change the lives of the villagers. Apparently authorities jailed him for some time. Eventually he was released, and he moved on to Maxcanú. He did not walk, but floated over the ground. In Maxcanú he was met by a multitude who listened to his prophecies foretelling great changes in the henequen regime then dominant in the northwest of the peninsula, all of which, they later recalled, did come to pass. According to Bojórquez Urzaiz, people in Maxcanú remembered Enoch as having long hair, wearing a long cotton tunic, and declining all food, except for some pozole (k’eyem) to drink (ibid., p. 372-373).

44Bojórquez Urzaiz was a Marxist-oriented scholar. It was with some embarrassment that he deigned to write about this peculiar manifestation of social agitation in the Yucatecan countryside. Such strange characters were so different from the typical “insurrectionary worker with oily overalls and a railroad cap, styled by the French fashion designers of the Revolution” (1984, p. 369, my translation). The rebels about whom Bojórquez Urzaiz wrote, referring here to Enoch and a couple of other transient characters, are “idle rootless charlatans uttering apocalyptic verbiage taken from some divine revelation or biblical readings … and if, to one’s disgrace, one is asked to carry out a relevant investigation, it will be at the cost of being labeled reactionary, knowing that one will be expelled from the Party, or at least from bible circles, and forced to read Capital in full eight times …” (ibid., p. 369, my translation). One assumes he meant the Communist Party. Fortunately, Bojórquez Urzaiz did write his note about Enoch in Yucatan, providing us a clue to the origin and identity of this itinerant oddity. More on that below.

45Bojórquez Urzaiz suggested that the character of Enoch and the agitation he briefly provoked seemed typical of the “primitive rebels” about whom historian Eric Hobsbawm once so provocatively wrote (Bojórquez Urzaiz 1984, p. 371; Hobsbawm 1959). Hobsbawm surveyed a variety of what he called “primitive” or “archaic” social movements that had not only survived, but flourished in modern times. These movements were the expression of a normally “inarticulate” people, “pre-political people who have not yet found, or only begun to find, a specific language in which to express their aspirations about the world” (ibid., p. 2). Such people, at the time the historian wrote, constituted the vast majority of humankind, “and their acquisition of political consciousness has made our century the most revolutionary in history” (ibid., p. 2).

46Sociologist Miguel Bartolomé was actually the first investigator to glean from Mayas their memories of Enoch and publish a note about them. He and Alicia Barabas studied among the Mayas of the Yucatan Peninsula, including those of central Quintana Roo, in the early 1970s (Bartolomé and Barabas 1977). They subsequently argued explicitly against identifying Maya socio-religious movements as primitive or pre-political. They faulted Hobsbawm for relying on a narrow western conception of politics, and they argued cogently in various publications for a distinctive indigenous formulation of political action that wedded what we would call the “religious” and the “secular” in a unitary liberationist vision (Bartolomé 1988, p. 201; Barabas 1987). This, at a time when a left-oriented Mexicanist anthropology still strove to downplay the relevance of cultural and ethnic diversity in favor of analyzing the social situation of rural peoples in terms of Marxian class analysis (Barabas 2017).

47The wanderings of Enoch merited only a brief mention in the sweeping overview of Maya millenarian and prophetic movements from the conquest through the War of the Castes which Bartolomé and Barabas offered. They noted the by now familiar features of Enoch’s behavior and preaching: That he called everyone José, that he would not eat meat, but rather just honey and some tortillas. That he did not get wet when it was raining. That he prophesied the coming of the Antichrist. And Enoch warned, they had heard, as did I, that people should not be deceived by, nor follow, the new Protestant sects. (At the time, those would be Presbyterians.) With that latter admonition, in the view of Barabas and Bartolomé, Enoch served to strengthen and protect indigenous Maya millenarianism, born of colonial oppression, forged in the bloody decades of the War of the Castes, still quietly resonant among Mayas in post-war Quintana Roo but threatened by rising (North American-inspired) Protestantism (Barabas 1987; Bartolomé 1976, p. 628-629).

48I once considered Enoch just a figment of the Maya collective imagination. Bojórquez Urzaiz, Bartolomé, and Barabas, on the contrary, never doubted his existence. And they were right. Enoch was real. But was he a manifestation of popular social agitation? Did he serve as a quixotic spokesperson for a deep-rooted indigenous resistance to continuing colonial rule? To answer either of those questions, and to better understand Enoch’s small part in the long history of peninsular Maya liberationist thought, one clearly needs to know more about the man. Who was Enoch?

49Fortunately, in his short article on the oral tradition of Enoch in northwest Yucatan, Carlos Bojórquez Urzaiz provided the vital clue. He recalled that in a book published in Merida in 1968, Santiago Burgos Brito had written about the man. Burgos was a Yucatecan journalist, writer, lawyer, government official, and, briefly, state governor. He had witnessed Enoch’s coming. “Some years ago,” Burgos wrote, “through the streets of the city of Merida, there traveled a person extravagant, verbose and with long hair, who provoked laughter in some, indifference in most, and at times aggressive attacks from street boys” (Burgos Brito 1968, p. 63, my translation). It was, wrote Burgos, the man’s especially long hair and incessant preaching that attracted attention. His name was Lauriano Ojeda, but he preferred to be called Enoch, and “he hurled over his listeners his tremendous prophecies, his curses and counsels, speaking confusedly of everything and nothing in a mixed-up pile of delirious and disconnected ideas” (ibid., p. 63, my translation). Authorities snatched him from the streets of the capital and confined him in a local asylum for seven days, where, among other things, they cut his wild hair. Upon release, Ojeda disappeared from the city. Burgos figured he would begin preaching again once his locks grew back, but, alas, the prophet was never seen again in those parts, nor could Burgos learn anything more of his fate—until one day years later he opened a new book published in Argentina titled Mysticismo y locura, “Mysticism and Madness.”

50The book was a 1945 Spanish translation of a 1939 Brazilian study by Osorio César, a São Paulo psychiatrist. In that work César explored the interrelationships between mental pathologies and extravagant religious beliefs, offering case studies of messianism and prophets in Brazil. One of César’s examples concerned a man named Lauriano Ojeda who had been committed to the psychiatric clinic of the Medical Faculty of Rio de Janeiro in 1929 (César 1945, p. 165-174). Ojeda was then 36 years old. He had been born into a large Catholic family in Merida, Yucatan, son of a carpenter. Early in adulthood he acquired the belief that he was the prophet Enoch.

51Most of what César wrote about Ojeda/Enoch derived from the text of a public presentation of the case in 1930 to the Medical and Surgical Society of São Paulo, where at the end of his long journey from Yucatan, Ojeda had again landed in an asylum. Ojeda told his physicians that as a child he had only received a few years of schooling but liked to read, especially as he approached adulthood, from the Old Testament. When he was 21 a misunderstanding involving him and a young woman in Merida resulted in them having to get married. He had, he claimed, simply helped the woman flee the household in which she suffered, “having no sexual intention, nor did he stain the honor of she whom he protected.” They subsequently had one child, a son. Ojeda worked, like his father, as a carpenter until at age 29 a vision struck him. He saw the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse before him, and one exhorted him to “Haz Luz! Haz Luz!,” “Make Light, Make Light!” That prompted Ojeda to abandon his wife and son and to seek work in Veracruz. There, while toiling in a government office, he experienced a second religious event—a voice commanded him to spread love and goodness everywhere.

52Ojeda, now well on his way to becoming Enoch, cast off his shoes, went directly to the sea shore, and began following the trails of Mexico south, preaching to whoever would listen. He suffered, he later told his Brazilian doctors, many persecutions by police and false priests, and was locked up for a time, including a seven-day stint in an asylum in Merida. Once released he wandered on, heading eventually south through Central America, Colombia, Venezuela, British and French Guyana, Surinam, Brazil, Uruguay, finally into Argentina, before turning back to settle on a beach near Rio de Janeiro. Around the shack that served as his chapel, Ojeda attracted growing crowds. They came seeking cures for their maladies, “physical and moral,” and they listened to him preach how he had entered this world to free humanity of its spiritual ills. Eventually the police seized Enoch and—again—cut his hair and beard and sent him to the asylum. They dubbed him the Prophet of Gávea, after the beach that served as his pulpit (Figure 2).

Fig. 2 – “Ojeda, profeta de Gávea”

Fig. 2 – “Ojeda, profeta de Gávea”

(César 1945, p. 161)

53In the psychiatric hospital Ojeda told his doctors that his journey had consumed three years. Sometimes he followed trails. Other times he hacked his way through thickets. Sometimes he let boats ferry him along impenetrable coasts. He slept in the open. He often ate very little, if anything, and he would never partake of the flesh of dead animals. Nor did he fear Indians, of whose ferocity he was warned from time to time.

54So Enoch of the Mayas was a kind of madman. His clinical diagnosis was paranoia and paraphrenia, with prophetic delusions and constant visual and auditory hallucinations, i.e. divine revelations, received both when asleep and awake. One of César’s purposes in writing about Ojeda and other, more consequential, cases of religious mania in Brazil was to show how such individual and mass psychoses arise from the atavistic beliefs of the so-called inferior races that constituted the foundation of Brazilian society (César 1945, p. 143). Concerning persons such as Ojeda, César noted that:

The paranoid rarely are found in the madhouse. They are sick individuals who live at large and whose lives are veritable novels—often tragic—that disrupt families, dissipate fortunes, but seldom land them behind the bars of an asylum. They defend themselves, constitute truly dangerous people. They present themselves as victims of ignominious persecutions. They debate, argue, sophisticate so skillfully that they deceive everyone. And they manage to impose themselves on multitudes. They pass for saints, for supermen. They find themselves surrounded by devotees, unconditional admirers. They are cases of collective madness … in which a stronger personality always acts as inducer, as the fanaticizing source. (César 1945, p. 152-153, my translation)

55It does not seem that Ojeda/Enoch held that kind of sway over his Maya audiences, however. They received him with interest, offered him food and shelter, listened to his exhortations, and then escorted him on his way. Enoch did not spark social agitation among the Mayas. They do not appear even to have pressed him to cure their ailments, as his followers in Rio did. But he did leave his mark on the collective memory of the Mayas of the Yucatan Peninsula, and that is what has interested me about him. Not what he did to them, but what Mayas made of him over the decades that followed, as they told each other the story of his itinerant ministry, and as they shared with outside investigators tales of the prophet who had walked among them.

Enoch transformed

56The mad prophet Ojeda was not the only Enoch who ever passed through Maya lands. Santiago Cen, whom I have already mentioned above, told me people were always showing up claiming to be the prophet Enoch. There was a guy he recalled, for example, who arrived once in his village of Chun On proclaiming himself the prophet of the Final Days. People gathered around and escorted him to the church in the neighboring shrine center of Chun Pom. Enoch redux counseled them to save their money, not to waste it on worthless fake gold jewelry that itinerant merchants so easily peddled to Indian women. The men of Chun Pom offered this Enoch some corn gruel to drink, a beverage fresh lifted from the church altar where it had just been served in a prayer ceremony. “Am I hungry, or am I not?” this Enoch mused out loud. They guessed he was hungry, because he siezed the bowl of gruel and chugged it down, which of course a real Enoch would not do. A week or two later, the fellow ran off with a woman from the village. They went to make some money gathering chicle in the forests for a while, before then settling down right there in one of the villages. He was all too human, just another fake Enoch tempted by food and flesh.

57The first Enoch was mad. But he was also special, a man with a power. Not in life, perhaps, but as Mayas molded him, little by little, all together, while they related over and over again how he came, what he did, where he went. This pan-Maya process of the mythification of historical figures and events was explored extensively by Victoria Bricker in her classic study The Indian Christ, the Indian King. The Historical Substrate of Maya Myth and Ritual (1981). Among her case studies from the Yucatan Peninsula, she did not include Enoch. She would not have known about him, and his sojourn among the Mayas was far too brief and inconsequential compared to the studies she did include, such as the Quisteil Revolt (1761) and the War of the Castes of Yucatan (1847-1901).

58Bricker did briefly mention the curious case of Juan Peón Contreras, one-time director of the Museum of Yucatan, who in 1887 quit his post and undertook a quixotic mission—part-peace envoy, part-merchant exploiting new markets—among the rebel Mayas around the coast near the ancient ruins of Tulum (Bricker 1981, p. 339, n. 60). In a later telling of his adventures among the rebel Mayas, Peón claimed to have presented himself as John the Baptist, Second Precursor of the Messiah, and the rebel Mayas prostrated themselves before him in evident awe of his holiness (Dumond 1997, p. 355-358). Contemporaneous documents do suggest that Peón had come prepared to deploy religious imagery and gestures to advance his diplomatic/commercial mission. He extracted from his museum and returned to the Mayas an altar cloth stolen from their church in Tulum in a Yucatecan raid 16 years before. Upon landing on the beach he commenced singing religious hymns to the accompaniment of an organ grinder, and he unfurled a banner festooned with some sort of Christian symbols. Peón was enthusiastically received by Mayas on the coast, feted, married to the widow of a Maya leader, and bestowed with the title of Governor of the Castillo and Port of Tancah, all of which gestures were cloaked in the Maya rebels’ own ritual acts, including masses in the church and an audience with the so-called Talking Cross of Tulum. Any important diplomatic or commercial contact between outsiders and the rebel Mayas was usually accompanied by such religious sanction, and Mayas’ embrace of Peón was likely prompted by his having brought axes and machetes to hand out and the bags of shelled maize he procured in Belize to alleviate food shortages due to a locust plague. The idea they would fall for his hokum about being a divine messenger is absurd on the face of it, and the story of his holy mission was likely made up (and published) only after he left that coast and fell deeper into the mental disturbances subsequent authors have attributed to him (Smith 1991).

59In any event, shortly after Peón departed from those shores, intending to return later with more gifts and a freed Maya woman he would fetch from Merida, less welcoming rebel Mayas from Santa Cruz entered Tulum and executed most of Peón’s hosts and collaborators. That bloody gesture likely ensured Juan Peón Contreras/John the Baptist left no trace among the former rebel Mayas, unlike his successor, Enoch.

60With his peculiar mission around Tulum, Peón inserted himself in a long and sometimes violent dispute among rebel Maya officers over the nature and control of sea-borne commercial and diplomatic contacts with foreigners, whether enemies from Yucatan or friends from British Honduras (Sullivan 1997). That doomed his mission to failure. Lauriano Ojeda, on the other hand, was a harmless soul who posed no challenge to political order in former rebel territory. So Maya officers let him wander, preach, and prophesy, offering him food and water along the way, until he drifted beyond the horizons of their world. Almost lost in Maya stories about the wanderings of the mad prophet is perhaps another reason for the friendly attention Enoch received in former rebel villages. He came, they say, after the Great Fire (noj k’ak’) had passed, the smallpox epidemic of 1915-1916 (Villa Rojas 1945, p. 50), and after the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 (Sullivan 1989, p. 225). Such was the mortality wreaked by the twin plagues in central Quintana Roo that a census made in 1935 counted only 28 people 50 years or older in a population of over 700 (Villa Rojas 1945, p. 49). The Mayas whom Enoch visited were no longer the armed and confident rebels who snuffed out Peón’s redemptionist fantasies back in the 1880s, but survivors, younger adults and children receptive, evidently, to preaching of the impending end of the world.

61Another Maya reseacher who has studied storytelling in Quintana Roo has reflected on how Mayas suppressed memories of war-time trauma and displacement and reshaped them into mythico-historical stories of sacred migrations (Vapnarsky 2009, p. 349). What I have related here is not a Maya migration myth, as such. No Maya would tell the whole story of Enoch’s wanderings as I have here, because no Maya individual could know the whole story. People simply tell of what they saw, or what their parents and grandparents saw, within the limited orbit of their village lives. And yet their collective, collated recollections still bear evidence of the kind of myth-making transformation about which Bricker and Vapnarsky have written. I’m quite sure Lauriano Ojeda could not glide over water, or keep the rain from falling on his head. Maybe he liked honey and smoked a lot, but that would not have shielded him from inclemency, and he must sometimes have drawn sustenance from other sources. Nor could Ojeda transport himself instantly from one destination to the next, as some remembered Enoch doing. Obviously Mayas made more of Ojeda/Enoch than he was in real life. Having decided he was not an ordinary man (winik), but a messenger from God, a disciple (discipulo), or even an actual divine being, a santo, they endowed him with traits and powers indicative of his extraordinary being. Those traits and powers were not typical for an Old Testament prophet (as Ojeda fancied himself to be), but rather ones more befitting Maya understandings of sacred beings, especially those, both Maya and Christian in origin, to whom they prayed for life-sustaining rains. Enoch’s intimate association with honey, tobacco, and rain is highlighted over and over in Maya stories about him—especially rain, the annual rains brought by the chaks, who rode on horseback across the sky, scattering water from the heavens upon the fields and forests of the Maya. Maya gods loved to smoke tobacco, none more, perhaps, than the chaks (Tozzer 1907, p. 155; Robicsek 1978, p. 59-107).

62The eminent Mayanist J. Eric Thompson once wondered in print how it was that the Mayas, who did not have horses before the coming of the Spaniards, would say after the conquest that their rain gods rode horses across the sky as they spilled water on the fields and forests. He speculated that it came from Maya readings of the Christian Book of Revelation. The chaks each rode a horse of a different color—red, white, black, yellow—even as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse road horses that were red, white, black, and pale (Thompson 1970, p. 257). Anthropologists working in Yucatan in the 1930s documented a folktale that lends some credence to Thompson’s suggestion. In the story a man enters a cave and witnesses the chaks calling for their horses and flying out to water the fields of Yucatan. The man imitates them, calls for a horse, and gets the sorrel one. He tries to ride it up and out yet manages only to conjure the winds of a hurricane. “But they say that on the day that the sorrel-colored horse rides forth again, the chaac ikal [chak ik’al, hurricane] will come again and the world will be destroyed” (Redfield and Villa Rojas 1962, p. 334).

63Ojeda/Enoch fancied himself a prophet of the apocalypse, and Mayas seem to have accepted him as such, some thinking he might be the risen Christ himself—One man who saw him told me Enoch bore the stigmata. But his Maya audiences, or those who heard the stories later, domesticated him by linking him indelibly to honey and tobacco and rain: incessant rain—it was always raining as Enoch moved from village to village—though he never got wet himself. And then there was his Kaua prophecy, delivered in the first of a chain of encounters described in this article. According to Dionisio Cantun, whose recollections I related earlier, before Enoch took his leave of the men and women of Kaua, he told them that on the 14th of the following April, at three in the afternoon, when they were working for the archeologists at Chichen Itza, hail would fall from a blue and cloudless sky. Once it was finished, they would be walking on ice. Then rain would sweep down on them and a hard wind would blow.

64It came to pass, they tell, just as Enoch said it would. According to an archeologist then working at Chichen Itza:

  • 4 My thanks to colleague Evan J. Albright for finding this report.

On April 14, there occurred at Chichén Itzá the heaviest hail-storm within the memory of anyone living in the region. The individual hail-stones were in many cases 1.25 inches [3.2 cm] in diameter, and such was their size and number that they had not entirely melted 24 hours later. The most striking effect of this fall of ice was that it literally beat the forest bare. Scarcely a leaf remained on a tree; the bush in every direction looked like a December landscape in the United States, the trees gaunt and naked, stripped completely of their foliage. Even the undergrowth, bushes, vines, grasses, etc., were beaten to the ground until the city was exposed to view, as doubtless it had not been since the days of its final abandonment in the middle of the fifteenth century.4 (Ruppert 1925, p. 269-270)

65Enoch was a prophet who knew his weather, or so Mayas eventually decided.

Haut de page

Bibliographie

Alexander Paul
1967  The Oracle of Baalbek. The Tiburtine Sibyl in Greek Dress, Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, Washington.

Barabas Alicia
1987  Utopías indias. Movimientos socioreligiosos en México, Grijalbo, Mexico.

Barabas Alicia
2017  “Testimonios de más de cuatro décadas en México,” Cuicuilco: Revista de ciencias antropológicas, 69, p. 65-83.

Bartolomé Miguel
1976  “La iglesia maya de Quintana Roo,” Actas del XLI Congreso Internacional de Americanistas, 2, p. 621-636.

Bartolomé Miguel
1988  La dinámica social de los mayas de Yucatán, Instituto Nacional Indigenista, Mexico.

Bartolomé Miguel and Alicia Barabas
1977  La resistencia maya. Relaciones interétnicas en el oriente de la península de Yucatán, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico.

Bojórquez Urzaiz Carlos
1984  “La agitación popular no política en Yucatán –el profeta Enoc,” in Francisco Anda Vela (ed.), Capitalismo y vida rural en Yucatán, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, Mérida, p. 369-374.

Bricker Victoria
1981  The Indian Christ, the Indian King. The Historical Substrate of Maya Myth and Ritual, University of Texas Press, Austin.

Burgos Brito Santiago
1968  Gentes y cosas de mi tierra, Editor Pacheco Cruz, Mérida (Yucatán).

Burns Allan
1983  An Epoch of Miracles. Oral Literature of the Yucatec Maya, University of Texas Press, Austin.

César Osorio
1939  Misticismo e loucura. Contribuição para o estudo das loucuras religiosas no Brasil, Oficinas Gráficas do Serviço de Assistência a Psicopatas, Juqueri, São Paulo.

César Osorio
1945  Misticísmo y locura, Editorial Partenón, Buenos Aires.

Christensen Mark
2013  Nahua and Maya Catholicisms. Texts and Religion in Colonial Central Mexico and Yucatan, Stanford University Press, Palo Alto.

Christensen Mark
2016  The Teabo Manuscript. Maya Christian Copybooks, Chilam Balams, and Native Text Production in Yucatan, University of Texas Press, Austin.

Christensen Mark
2022  Aztec and Maya Apocalypses. Old World Tales of Doom in a New World Setting, Oklahoma University Press, Norman.

Cohn Norman
1970  The Pursuit of the Millennium. Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists, Oxford University Press, New York.

Dumond Don
1997  The Machete and the Cross. Campesino Rebellion in Yucatan, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.

Gardner Edmund
1966 [1912]  “Joachim of Flora and the everlasting gospel,” in Paul Sabatier and others, Franciscan Essays, vol. 1, reprint edition, Gregg Press Limited, Farnborough, England.

Heist William
1952  The Fifteen Signs Before Doomsday, Michigan State College Press, East Lansing.

Hobsbawm Eric
1959  Primitive Rebels. Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Manchester University Press, Manchester.

Hostettler Ueli
1996  Milpa Agriculture and Economic Diversification: Socioeconomic Change in a Maya Peasant Society of Central Quintana Roo, 1900-1990s, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Anthropology, University of Berne.

Martos Lorena
1994  Projecting the Past to the Present. The Historical Knowledge of a Mayan People, unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, Education, Stanford University.

Phelan John
1956  The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World. A Study of the Writings of Gerónimo de Mendieta (1525-1604), University of California Press, Berkeley.

Randolph Daniel
1975  The Franciscan Concept of Mission in the High Middle Ages, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington.

Redfield Robert and Alfonso Villa Rojas
1962  Chan Kom. A Maya Village, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Reed Nelson
2001  The Caste War of Yucatan, Stanford University Press, Stanford.

Restall Matthew and Amara Solari
2011  2012 and the End of the World. The Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham.

Robicsek Francis
1978  The Smoking Gods. Tobacco in Maya Art, History, and Religion, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.

Roys Ralph
1967  The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.

Rugeley Terry
1996  Yucatan’s Maya Peasantry and the Origins of the Caste War, University of Texas Press, Austin.

Ruppert Karl
1925  “Report on the secondary constructions in the court of the columns,” Carnegie Institution of Washington Year Book, 24, p. 269-270.

Smith Alan
1991  “Una posible fuente panfletaria de Nazarín: ‘Evangelio de Don Juan; el moderno precursor en la segunda y anunciada venida del Mesías’,” Anales galdosianos, 26, p. 51-55.

Sullivan Paul
1983  Contemporary Yucatec Maya Apocalyptic Prophecy: The Ethnographic and Historical Context, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University.

Sullivan Paul
1989  Unfinished Conversations. Mayas and Foreigners between Two Wars, Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

Sullivan Paul
1997  “The search for peace between Yucatan and the rebel Maya,” Saastun: Maya Culture Review, 0 (3), p. 3-46.

Thompson J. Eric
1970  Maya History and Religion, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.

Tozzer Alfred
1907  A Comparative Study of the Mayas and the Lacandones, Macmillan Company, New York.

Vapnarsky Valentina
2009  “La migración en voces y tierras mayas: historias hacia la historia,” in Mario Humberto Ruz, Joan Garía Targa, and Andrés Ciudad Ruiz (eds.), Diasporas, migraciones y exilios en el mundo maya, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México, p. 327-352.

Vapnarsky Valentina
2018  “De la politique à la grammaire. Recompositions prophétiques chez les mayas crusob,” in Andrieu Chloé and Sophie Houdart (eds.), La composition du temps. Prédictions, événements, narrations historiques, Éditions de Boccard, Paris, p. 203-215.

Vapnarsky Valentina and Hilario Chi Canul
2021  “Écritures nocturnes. Régénération et circulation des écrits chez les Mayas cruzo’ob,” Gradhiva, 32, p. 83-104.

Villa Rojas Alfonso
1945  The Maya of East Central Quintana Roo, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington.

Haut de page

Notes

1 . Dionisio Cantun told me that in Valladolid Enoch had been abused by the municipal president, Aureliano Centeno, who was assassinated six months later. Ben Fallaw, an historian of Yucatan, has kindly pointed out to me that in 1913, one José Isaac Centeno Pereira was the jefe político, or political boss, of Valladolid. That may have been the “Centeno” who Cantun told me had persecuted Enoch. His brother Aureliano Centeno was assassinated on December 26, 1931 by a hired gunman. Enoch’s prophecy evidently took much longer to fulfill than Cantun remembered.

2 Another personal account of the epidemic was documented by anthropologist Villa Rojas (1945, p. 30-31).

3 My account of stories told about Enoch rests in part upon recorded interviews including: Dionisio Cantun, Kaua, 8/14/1984; Francisco Chan, Saban, 7/27/1984; Santiago Cen, Chun On, 7/9/1985; Victoriano Tuz, Tuzik, 7/26/1984; Santiago Itza, San Francisco Aké, 8/9/1984; Miguel Aguilar Dzidz, Tuzik, 8/13/1984; Don Luse, Señor, 8/7/1984; José Tec, Chan Chen Comandante, 1984; José Pat, Señor, 8/2/1984; Incarnación García Poot, Filomena Mata, 7/26/1984; Juan Bautista Poot, Yaxley, 7/23/1984; José Chable, Kampokolche Nuevo, 7/17/1984.

4 My thanks to colleague Evan J. Albright for finding this report.

Haut de page

Table des illustrations

Titre Fig. 1 – Enoch on the Yucatan Peninsula, 1920s
Crédits (map Erin Greb Cartography)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/jsa/docannexe/image/23699/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 337k
Titre Fig. 2 – “Ojeda, profeta de Gávea”
Crédits (César 1945, p. 161)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/jsa/docannexe/image/23699/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 292k
Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence papier

Paul Sullivan, « The prophet Enoch among the Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula »Journal de la Société des américanistes, 110-2 | -1, 77-101.

Référence électronique

Paul Sullivan, « The prophet Enoch among the Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula »Journal de la Société des américanistes [En ligne], 110-2 | 2024, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2024, consulté le 19 avril 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsa/23699 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13hkq

Haut de page

Auteur

Paul Sullivan

Independent scholar, Fitchburg (USA)

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-SA-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-SA 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

Haut de page
Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search