Chol Ritual Language
with Terrence Lee Folmar, Heidi Altman, Ausencio Cruz Guzmán, and Bernardo Pérez Martínez
©1996 J. Kathryn Josserand and Nicholas A. Hopkins

Other Named Statuses and Titles

In contrast to the ’holy work’ done by the cargoholders, the officials of the civil government are referred to as x’e’telob lak yum ’he of (or master of) the work of the Owner’ (Spanish trabajadores del patrón). This is not ’holy work’, but work done for "an authority that is not Indian" or even for "Earth Owner (Spanish Dueño del Cerro)" (Aulie and Aulie 1978: 144, entry for yumäl). Thus the two competing kinds of authorities are likened to the forces of the Ancestors (the cargoholders) and those of Earth Owner (the civil authorities). Earth Owner is, in highland Chiapas mythology (see Vogt 1993: 16-17), the owner of all the material goods and resources of the earth, and he is both the source of material wealth and the potential enslaver of souls, to whom petitions must be made for the use of his earthly resources, and through whom witchcraft may be practiced against others (by selling souls into slavery in his mines and plantations).

Ritual specialists outside the cargo system include the x-wujt, x-’ilaj, or tz’äk-ayaj, alternate terms for ’curer’.  The latter term comes from tz’äk-an ’to cure someone’, which is based on the adjective root tz’äk ’complete’.  A curer is someone who makes his patients ’complete’. The term x-’ilaj is based on ’ila(n) ’to see’ (thus, a ’seer’). X-wujt may be related to wut ’eye’ or ’face’, but the etymology is obscure. One specialist whose designation is of historical interest is the malaria worker, who takes blood samples. He is known as x-lok’ ch’ich’ ’he who takes out blood’.  Note also that the verb joch’ is still recorded in modern dictionaries as the term for ’to pierce with a glass splinter for bloodletting’.

Two classes of female curers are recorded. Midwives, x-yot’-onel, take their title from the verb yot’ ’to exert pressure on the abdomen’.  Other female curers are named for their technique, x-yojk-onel ’curandera’, from yojkon ’to jump over a patient’, one element of a curing ceremony.

Other terms for statuses or ceremonial roles which may ultimately prove of intertest are aj pa’an-ob-äch ’those who are present, visible’; nujp-em-ob-ix-bä ’married people (’those who have already been united’), and aj k’ajt-iyaj ’the one who asks’.

Finally, some status terms are loans from Spanish, and several of these are of interest because their altered shapes attest their age and therefore aspects of early Colonial Chol social organization. The loan misiuneruj ’missionary’ is probably a recent loan from Spanish misionero.  Older loans include motomaj ’mayordomo’ (from Spanish mayordomo), palej ’priest’ (from Spanish padre), and trensipal-ob ’principales, respected elders’ (from Spanish principal). One term, tala or tal’a ’priest’, is obscure in origin, but may be another loan from Spanish padre.

While these titles are interesting from a modern language-and-culture perspective, they are also of interest to epigraphers, since they demonstrate the patterns of status or role names in Chol, a pattern which might be expected to show up in hieroglyphic expressions. Such "titles" are marked with prefixed aj- or x- (individual vs. collective agentive prefix for nouns) and they are often followed by the -aj (agentive suffix for verbs) or by the modern Chol relativizer -bä ’who/which’, which replaces the Classic Maya -Vl (vowel + l) suffix.

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