My Unwitting Desecration of Sacred Sacbeob

I have always been fascinated by all things Mayan. Amongst my four impractical and unused college degrees is a BA in Latin American Studies. So I was really excited when I had the chance to return to Mexico to visit the Yucatan Peninsula in the early 90’s with a friend.

While there, we visited the Mayan ruins of Chichén Itzá and Dzibilchaltún. We wandered all over both sites, gazing in awe at the pyramids and the cenotes. We swam in a cenote in Dzibilchaltún. It was crystal clear and refreshing after the insane tropical humidity. It’s something I’ll never forget.

I thought I knew quite a bit about the Maya at the time, but in retrospect I had only scratched the surface. (In fairness, a lot more has been discovered recently due to satellite viewing and LIDAR. But still, I was steeped in hubris and didn’t even realize it.)

I say that because I walked on some sacbeob without even knowing how sacred they were. Sacbeob (singular: sacbé), loosely translated from the Mayan, means “white roads.” Satellite images are finding more and more of them in the dense jungles between Mayan sites. Hundreds of miles of them. They are basically causeways, raised up enough to make flat roadways through uneven or swampy terrain. In essence, the Maya had an interstate system centuries before America did.

The Mayans lined the edges of these sacbeob with large stones, and then filled the roadway between those stones with coarse gravel which became finer and finer as you got to the surface. They coated that surface with lime, which made the roads dazzlingly white. These roadways had a lot of ramps leading down to the villages they passed, or stairways leading up to sacred sites or what one assumes were wayside areas or runner relay stations that you’d find about once every mile or so. Some of these roads are as wide as a two-lane highway.

Creating these roads took a significant amount of manpower. One engineer calculated that it would have taken 1,000 laborers working 12 hour days about 2 years to complete one well known 62 mile sacbe. That includes clearing the jungle, finding and transporting the stone and gravel, and gathering the necessary food and water to support this operation.

The Maya appear to have maintained these roads diligently after construction. They used what look like 5 ton stone rolling pins to keep the roads flat. We know this because they left some behind. They’re now in museums. These sacbeob were not mere afterthoughts.

There were lots of stelae left at intersections and at some of the wayside areas. Unfortunately, most of them have been exposed to the elements to the extent that they can no longer be deciphered. I’d like to think they say, “This way to Yaxuna,” or, “Thanks for visiting Coba. Please come again!”

The weird thing is that if they were using these roads like we use them today, to get from point A to point B, they could have settled for paths through the jungle. The Maya had no pack animals, and no vehicles of any sort. They walked or ran. That’s it. So why all the effort? And even more weird is the fact that the vast majority of these sacbeob were built during times of political strife and/or war. You’d think they would have much bigger fish to fry in times like those.

There are several theories about these white roads. One is that they showed which nation-state a village belonged to. Roads connecting small towns to larger, more populus hubs meant that those towns were under the protection and influence of the hub in question. Or perhaps the sacbeob delineated territory. For example, “Everything south of this white way is ours, not yours.”

I’m sure they used these roads for troop movements, to facilitate trade and commerce with other towns, to spread news and to get to precious sources of water. Their utilitarian value cannot be overlooked. But what intrigues me most about these sacbeob is the religious and spiritual significance they held for the Maya.

According to this article, the information that has come down to us about the culture of these people indicates that the word sacbé comes from the terms sac (white) and beh (road), but beh means a lot more than that in the Mayan language. “Within the word beh is the unfolding of life, destiny, obligation, transformation, order, and a conduit to the supernatural, all bound to unending cycles of time.”

The Maya believed that life is a road, and that walking down a road is symbolic of the passage of time. The past is behind you and the future is ahead of you. And sacbeob often had an astronomical orientation. Indeed, they called the Milky Way the white road, too. So these sacbeob may have been created for religious processions and ceremonies. They may have also been used for pilgrimages.

I wish I could go back in time and sit beside one of these roads and observe the comings and goings of the Maya. But I have, at least, walked some of their sacred paths myself. I walked the sacbe that leads from the pyramids of Chichén Itzá to their most sacred cenote, where it is believed that human sacrifices were made.

I also walked the one that leads to the temple in Dzibilchaltún. Once there, I climbed up, went inside and took a nap, so I suppose I desecrated the temple as well. My only excuse is that it was hot and we had the entire site to ourselves. I was awakened by the sound of wings flapping, and opened my eyes to see gorgeous motmots fluttering above me. It felt as though I was in the land of Mayan mythology.

I pulled the pictures of those exact same sacbeob off the internet, as well as a pic of a motmot. You can see them below.

Had I truly known the significance of the paths I was on at the time, maybe I would have given some thought to my own path, and how it had led me to these places, and how it connected me to the past as well as to the very universe itself. Instead, I was probably focused on the oppressive heat and how footsore I was.

That sort of puts the “ug” in “ugly American”, doesn’t it? A little less tourism, a little more reverence would have been much more appropriate. How thoughtless of me. Youth is wasted on the young. I owe the Maya a profound apology for my disrespect. Cluelessness is no excuse.

Still, I was there, and I can now look back on the experience with a little more wisdom and deference. That section of my life’s path is something I won’t soon forget. What a gift.