Abstract
Pilgrimages have played an important role in Maya culture since pre-Columbian times. Even today, sacred journeys to significant mountains and caves are made by the traditionalists of Akateko and Chuj communities.
In this paper, I describe a pilgrimage and sacrificial ritual in connection with mountain veneration during the Year Bearer ceremony. Anthropologists, divided into culturalists and historicists, tend to interpret the "masters" of the mountains as expressions of essential cultural continuity or ethnic power relationships, respectively.
In order to span the theoretical division, I turn to phenomenal and existential aspects of the subject. In the eyes of the highland Maya, mountains are not just mediators between Earth and Sky, the representations of a bipartite concept of the world.
Through pilgrimage and sacrifice, humans communicate and interact with non-human, yet autonomous, living and volitional beings. I argue that rather than a descent to the underworld or ascent to the heavens, the ritual is primarily a journey to a specific mountain - delicate and powerful nonhuman being that brings rain, gives crops, and provides the renewed world with energy.
As such, mountains are not treated as mere social or cultural representations, but as actors that affect people's lives, and as actual determinants of existence. Drawing from my fieldwork experience from San Rafael La Independencia, Guatemala, and recent theoretical developments in the anthropology of ontology, I try to present Maya cosmology as a part of a particular lifeworld which is characterized by the lived experience of human negotiation with other beings of the cosmos.