Jaguar Princess
Jaguar Princess
CHANLA PEX, descendant of the Maya jaguar king B’alam, lives near a ruin in rural Yucatán.
She learns to read the Maya glyphs on the stone monuments. Archaeologist BURT WALLACE
calls her his Rosetta Stone and sponsors her for a college scholarship, but the gods will punish
her if she refuses their call to become a shaman. To avoid the summons from the gods, she
must not spend the night in a sacred cave. While exploring a cave, she encounters a looter who
threatens her with a knife, binds her hands and feet, and leaves her to die in the dark. She
escapes from the cave with a jaguar talisman. In a coming of age story, she must learn how to
combat modern thieves and how to control her abilities as a shaman.
Coming in October, 2011. Check Amazon.com
Contact the author at marjohnson@mac.com for a signed copy.
The Yucatán Peninsula is a land without mountains, without metals, and without large
domesticated animals. In the sixteenth century, the Spaniards with their guns and horses
made an easy conquest, even though the Maya resisted them with ambushes, traps, and
misinformation. Today, four million Maya live in the Yucatán and speak Yucatec, the Mayan
language most like that spoken in classical times.
The northern Yucatán juts into the Gulf of Mexico like a large thumb and consists mainly of
lowland areas, with the driest areas in the northwest. A land with no surface rivers, it sits on a
horizontal bed of limestone above hidden caves and lakes connected by underground rivers.
More than three thousand sinkholes, called cenotes, penetrate the limestone shell. The cenotes
are important sources of water and come in many sizes and shapes, some large enough to support
fishing lodges and scuba diving schools, some only small wells for local farmers. The Caribbean
Sea to the east contributes to its warm and humid climate, and its heaviest rainfall occurs from
mid-May through September. In the drier north, the soil is porous and supports only tough skinned
and spiny vegetation. The southern area borders tropical jungle.
The Maya had a written language and valued books. A Maya codex is a manuscript book written on
a long strip of paper folded like an accordion and stored in an elaborately carved wooden box. Each
book (hu’un) was a work of art, the glyphs painted onto long strips of whitewashed bark paper
(huun) using brilliantly colored inks. Classical Mayan glyphs, somewhat like Egyptian hieroglyphs,
convey both sound and meaning. Diego de Landa, Bishop of Yucatán 1573-1579, listed symbols
keyed to the Spanish alphabet as given by the Maya priest, Nachi Aj Itz’aat. However, his list was
unusable: Mayan glyphs represented syllables, not alphabet letters, and he needed about 700 more
symbols. The Mayan glyphs remained largely undecipherable until the work of Yuri Knorozov
(1940s) and Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1960s).
The Maya were extraordinary astronomers, using only the unaided eye. The Dresden Codex, one of
three existing Mayan books, gives a table of heliacal rise/set phenomena for the planet Venus with
calculations correct to one day in 500 years. Because Maya codices included religious rituals and
beliefs, the Spaniards collected and burned them during the Spanish Inquisition at Maní in 1562. In
Jaguar Princess: The Last Maya Shaman