The powers of the natural and the supernatural worlds continued to be conjoined in Maya warfare long after the demise of the Classic period. In the war between the Maya and the Europeans in the sixteenth century, gods manifested on several battlefields. Although the Spanish accounts of these battles are often mundane, the histories written by the Maya record not only Maya gods but Christian saints and angels. At the battle of Cintla, which took place in the Lagunas de los Terminos region of the Gulf Coast, Maya warriors lured Cortes and the Spanish into the ditches of their fields and fired at them from the safety of surrounding stone walls. Defeat seemed imminent until Santiago, the patron saint of Spain, appeared on his great stallion to lead the mired horses of the Spanish cavalry to high and firm ground where they could wheel on the Maya and defeat them. The legend has it that the same Santiago appeared at the Battle of Otumba and saved Cortes from attacking Aztecs.
In their Dances of the Conquest, the K'iche' Maya of highland Guatemala still memorialize the great defeat of their war hero, Tekum Uman, by Pedro de Alvarado, the captain of the Spanish forces. The Spanish account describes the battle in purely material terms. On December 5, 1523, Cortes ordered Alvarado to southern Mexico to suppress a rebellion and begin the conquest of Guatemala. Alvarado took with him 120 horsemen, 300 foot soldiers, 200 Tlaxcalans, and 100 loyal Mexica. This company of 720 men were expected to face 3,000 or 4,000 K'iche'. The battle took place near the town of Xelahuh, today called O`uetzaltenango by Ladinos and Xelah by the Maya.
According to Alvarado, this was just another battle among many. In a letter to Cortes, he said that several thousand K'iche' warriors approached his troops while they were taking a break for food and water. They let the Indians close the distance. Then they attacked and routed the Indian army, pursuing them until they were trapped against a mountain. To draw them out, Alvarado's men pretended to flee on their horses and then turned, rallied, and defeated the assembled warriors. He mentioned that one of the K'iche' chiefs was killed, but he did not even record his name. The K'iche' account is told as if a totally different series of events had unfolded. Their story begins with the entry of Tekum Uman into the town of Xelahuh with 8,400 warriors, including 39 flagbearers and drummers. The warriors prepared themselves for battle with a bloodletting ritual. Tekum Uman was called the Lord of Banners and Staffs. His banner, according to the chronicles, was decorated with gold on the tip and many emeralds (or, more likely, jade). This is clearly the battle standard of the Classic period, rich with the same flashing decoration as its Aztec counterpart. Each Maya lord brought with him 10,000 warriors armed with bows and arrows, slings, and lances, as well as other arms. There were so many warriors they could not be counted.
When his host was assembled, Tekum Uman transformed himself before them. He put on "wings with which he flew and his two arms and legs were covered with feathers and he wore a crown and on his chest he wore a very large emerald [jade?] which looked like a mirror, and he wore another on his forehead. This captain flew like an eagle, he was a great nobleman and a great sorcerer." Tekum Uman had transformed into his way and he went to battle as a sorcerer against the magic of the Spaniards who fought in their wayob - Santiago and, as we shall see, the Virgin Mary.
The battle began with a skirmish when a chief, "Ah Xepach, an Indian captain who became an eagle," went to fight the Spaniards with three thousand of his soldiers. "At midnight the Indians went and the captain of the Indians who had transformed himself into an eagle became anxious to kill the Adelantado Tunadiu [Alvarado] and he could not kill him because a very fair maiden defended him; they were anxious to enter, but as soon as they saw this maiden they fell to the earth and they could not get up from the ground, and then came many footless birds, and those birds had surrounded the maiden, and the Indians wanted to kill the maiden and those footless birds defended her and blinded them." The attackers were paralyzed and blinded by the way of the Spanish the Virgin Mary and the Holy Spirit or perhaps angels who looked to them like footless birds.
The Indians fell back and yet another chief, one who had become lightning, went against Alvarado. "And as soon as he arrived, he saw an exceedingly white dove above all the Spaniards, which was defending them, and which returned to repeat it again and it blinded him and he fell to the earth and could not get up." Three times the lightning warrior went against the Spaniards, and then he too retreated to tell the king that only by killing Alvarado could they win.
Alvarado and his Tlaxcalans charged and routed the Indians before him. After taking thousands captive, and killing and torturing many of them in their search for gold and treasure, the Spanish prepared to go deeper into Maya territory. The next day, February 22, 1524, and 1 Q'anel in the Maya calendar, Tekum Uman himself came against the Spanish in his eagle way. "And then Captain Tekum flew up, he came like an eagle full of real feathers, which were not artificial; he wore wings which also sprang from his body and he wore three crowns, one was of gold, another of pearls and another of diamonds and emeralds." Tekum Uman went forward with the intention of killing Alvarado and thus defeating the battle beasts and the way of the Spanish. He struck at the great man-beast with all his power, hitting Alvarado's horse and taking its head off in a single blow. According to the K'iche, his lance was not made of metal, but of shiny stone which had a magic spell on it. When Tekum realized he had killed only the battle beast and not the man, he flew upward and came at Alvarado. The Spaniard was ready and impaled the charging king on his lance.
The K'iche', seeing that their king had died on the lance of Alvarado, fled, only to be pursued and slaughtered by the Spanish. So many of the Indians died, their blood made a river. Called Olintepec by the Spanish, this river was named Q'iq'el "blood," by the Indians. The battle of Xelahuh pitted Tekum Uman and his companions who fought in their way as eagles and lightning against the Spanish supernaturals a floating maiden (the Virgin Mary), footless birds (angels), and the Dove of Peace (the Holy Spirit). There is good reason to believe that the Spanish carried their own litters and battle banners into the fray. In the summer of 1992, Federico Fahsen called our attention to a very old statue of the Virgin famous in Guatemala. On the day of Santiago, July 25, a procession brings the statue from the cathedral in Guatemala City to the ruined cathedral in Antigua, the capital destroyed by earthquake in the eighteenth century. Tradition has it that this is the Virgin Alvarado carried into battle with him.
The battle of Xelahuh was fought between worlds and the gods who ruled them. As Victoria Bricker (1981:40) said, "The Indians lost the battle because their magical arsenal was no match against the spiritual arsenal of the Spaniards." In the eyes of the Maya who survived the battle and suffered the rule of the victorious Spanish, the eagles and lightning beasts of their ancestors were grounded, blinded, and immobilized by the battle beasts of the aliens who had invaded their world.
As horrible as it was, however, the conquest of Christian divinities over the old Maya gods was only temporary. Just as the Waxaklahun-UbahKan of Teotihuacan became a Maya god in the fourth century and joined the other battle beasts of those ancient kings, so the Christian supernaturals, the combatants of the terrible battle of Xelahuh, have joined with Maya gods in the modern Otherworld. Tukum Uman became the principal Mundo, one of the Earth Gods that protect the K'iche' people today. He lives, they say, in the cave under the ancient, now-destroyed capital of Kamaar Kah. But the war god of the Spanish also became a Maya god.
In 1906 the K'iche' of Momostenango proved their valor and that of their war god in combat against Salvadoran troops. Led by a famous Ladino military hero from Momostenango, two Indian regiments placed in the front lines broke the Salvadorans sent against them. Priest-shamans performed rituals before and during the battle to protect the K'iche' soldiers from the enemies' bullets. Santiago, the very being who, four hundred years earlier, had appeared on his mighty horse to save Cortes from the Mexica now flew over the heads of the K'iche' wielding his sword in their defense. In an incredible ironic turnabout, we see the patron saint of Spainbrought by the Spanish, albeit unknowingly, to vanquish the battle beasts of the New World - transformed into a battle spirit defending their K'iche' victims.
This Santiago, however, now the patron of Momostenango, no longer speaks Spanish. He speaks only Maya and requires another saint to translate for him into Spanish. A fierce and wrathful being who punishes those who fail him in their duties, he is regarded more as a powerful object vested with irresistible force than as a being with personality. His Maya name means Venus Morningstar, the death star that manifested war for the Maya centuries before the coming of the Christian saint presiding in his church. While the flint-shields of the Maya lie broken or buried in their sacred temples in the forest, the undying beasts of battle follow new talismans and new Maya heroes who wield them in our world today.
The spiritual beings of Maya combat never discouraged their human counterparts from undertaking careful material preparations. Training, logistics, tactics, and strategy served the Maya well. They were very good at war, peasant militia as well as noble officers; and while they fought fiercely among themselves, we don't believe they were ever conquered by non-Maya peoples before the arrival of the Europeans with their horses, guns, and devastating diseases.' It is no accident that it took the Spanish the better part of forty years to establish a firm foothold on the peninsula. Ever since, in periodic, armed rebellions, the Maya have resisted the domination of the Spanish conquerors and their Ladino descendants. One of the most extraordinary examples of this resistance is found in Chamula's Festival of Games.
From: Maya Cosmos by David Freidel, Linda Schele, Joy Parker 1990
Pages: 327-331