Mayan Rituals Remembered
My regular pagan holiday post
I’ll be wearing white on the spring equinox
Colonialism: the violent seizure of land, the domination of people, the erasure of cultures. The practice of extending and maintaining political and economic control over another people, typically through displacement, suppression, and destruction.
While researching pre-christian seasonal celebrations around the world, I keep running into the same brutal reality: colonialism didn’t just conquer people — it annihilated their histories, their traditions, and their sacred knowledge. Lately, I’ve been searching for evidence of spring rituals in Latin America, only to find that much of what once existed has been deliberately erased.
European colonial invasion of the Americas was not just a conquest — it was an extermination. The very term “pre-Columbian” grates, as if history only begins with Columbus’s arrival, ignoring the fact that indigenous civilizations flourished for millennia before European diseases and massacres decimated their populations.
Nowhere is this erasure more apparent than in the destruction of Mayan knowledge. In the 16th century, Spanish catholic priests set fire to nearly all Mayan codices, incinerating vast repositories of scientific, spiritual, and astronomical understanding in a frenzied effort to impose christianity. Only a handful of these texts survived. What remains is a civilization whose intellectual and architectural brilliance we can only glimpse — its great stone pyramids standing defiantly even as its written history was reduced to ashes.
Yet, despite this attempted obliteration, traces of indigenous traditions persist. In Mexico, celebrations of the spring equinox remain deeply connected to pre-Hispanic heritage, even as they blend with modern religious elements. Across the country, people gather for festivales de primavera, celebrations that embrace the new season and pay homage to a past that refuses to be forgotten.
Chichén Itzá in Yucatán remains the most famous site for these celebrations. Every spring, thousands of people come to witness the astonishing spectacle of light and shadow on the Kukulcán pyramid. Designed with mathematical precision, the structure casts shadows that create the illusion of a serpent slithering down its steps during the equinox. This event is not a coincidence — it is the result of a civilization that understood celestial mechanics better than many modern observers. The pyramid, built in the 12th century CE, stands as a testament to Mayan brilliance, though the city of Chichén Itzá itself dates back to 550–800 CE.
Another important site is Teotihuacan, where thousands — often dressed in white — gather to greet the equinox. With arms raised to the sun, they take part in rituals of purification and energy renewal, honoring the sacred astronomical knowledge that once made this city one of the most important spiritual centers in Mesoamerica.
I plan to adopt the tradition of wearing white on the spring equinox. I still have my white jeans and jacket, bought in anticipation of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential victory. White is also the color of the women’s suffrage movement, and it seems we might need to again fight for the right to vote. Trump and his allies would like to take us back to the 18th century. I’ll be holding onto my suffrage gear as we witches resurrect our hexes.
The vernal equinox this year falls on March 20. Holly and I will be visiting our exes in San Bernardino County’s high desert. My brother Don and his husband John will join us on their way back from Mexico to Vancouver. We hope the poppies in Antelope Valley will be in bloom, though the lack of recent rains might mean disappointment.
This winter, California has experienced what our weather guru, Dr. Daniel Swain calls hydroclimatic whiplash — extreme shifts between wet and dry weather, an increasingly common global phenomenon. Sonoma County saw zero rainfall in January. Then, in February, while dry Los Angeles burned in the worst wildfire in its recorded history, Northern California was drowning. Though the flooding wasn’t the worst ever, two people died, reminding us to take road warnings seriously: Don’t Drown. Turn Around.
Swain frequently references the Great Flood of 1862, when California, lacking big dams, saw the town of Sacramento submerged. Before colonization, the Central Valley was essentially a giant swamp, and California’s climate has always swung between extremes since it was first monitored in the mid-nineteenth century.
California winter holds some other surprises. February is skunk mating season and, driving around Sonoma County, we see bumper skunk roadkill. They traipse through our garden and they are welcome visitors, eating mice and grubs. Nearsighted but with a keen sense of smell and hearing, they are quite beautiful. Skunks are nocturnal and so we see them only on trips to and from the hot tub at dawn and dusk, which is where Holly encountered one. She didn’t see it until the tail was raised. Too late! The resulting stink resonated in our house for a week. She had to throw away her robe and slippers, which never recovered. Now we stop and look both ways before crossing the deck to the hot tub.
Spring equinox is a time of renewal, balance, and resistance. Let’s celebrate it in ways that honor the past while reclaiming our future.
