On July 21st, 2021, I met God. In fact, I'll even do you one better. I smoked a cigarette with him.
Although, you know, I don’t really like cigarettes. I didn't even want to do it.
But it's God. What am I supposed to do? What do you supposed to say?
It isn't even really peer pressure at that point. It's like, I don't know, a commandment.
But after I've paid him his money, and left his luxury apartment in the hills,
I couldn’t help but feel that for a God he was kinda… human.
In a town above the absolutely stunning Lake Atitlan a drunk old man has been chainsmoking cigarettes
and lying to his grandchildren for hundreds of years.
In this small Central American country, he’s among the most powerful beings to have ever existed.
Hundreds of thousands worship him as a bridge between worlds, believing him to contain
the combined power of both Maya and Christian Gods.
He represents the spiritual grandfather of the local indigenous people, and ever since the colonization of Guatemala
he has been forced to exist as duality, a balance between halves. On one end, he’s the all-powerful ancestor. Rilaj Mam.
He’s their glory. He’s Tikal and Quirigua. But he’s also their failure.
He the throat that was crushed by the Spanish boot. He’s fault and vice, wisdom and strength.
He’s the all-encompassing Maya experience. He’s truly Guatemala.
But the thing is here that ancestors now don’t just point to the hills alone. The past of the world is a Gordian knot. You can’t just undo it.
The spirit of local grandfathers is mixed in both killer and killed. He’s the duality. He crosses that line.
He isn’t just Rilaj Mam, he’s Maximon. He’s Saint Simon on steroids.
He’s all of Europe’s power. He’s the invasion. The genocide. Conquistadors, Judas. He’s Saint Paul and Jesus.
He’s just as much that scourge of righteous fury as he is turning the other cheek.
He is the duality and not even that Catholic God is more powerful than him.
At least that’s one story. He’s also a very comical little figurine. Uh, he does not look very realistic.
Frankly it’s kind of hard to take him seriously standing there. But that said,
he is an incredibly serious figure to some and I’m going to try to present him as seriously as he’s been presented to me.
Not just because it’s respectful to them but because I do think
he offers an incredibly fascinating window into the development of religion.
Because Maximon is like a decentralized cult. He’s almost like a proto-religion.
Which is to say that there’s no pope. There’s no canon, no bible, no laws you have to follow. No centralized belief.
Belief is almost generic, not specific. Even outside the duality that he exists under,
there is no one Maximon. There’s dozens. There's as many as there are believers.
Because he has no priests. Nobody can tell you exactly what he is, and perhaps more importantly,
nobody can really stop you from setting up your own statue. At least, theologically.
Around Guatemala there are dozens of competing effigies scattered in just as many churches and apartments and bars,
each with their own specialty and price sheet and promises to pilgrims of what they might get for a donation.
There is no true centre. Each presentation is comes differently.
He’s a carved piece of wood in a three piece suit, he’s a stuffed doll.
In Atitlan, an indigenous heartland, he’s draped in the Maya cloth and his home is absolutely screaming with colour.
Even the corps of Saint Simon screams with Maya colour.
And yet, a few hundred miles away, the most prominent statue in the country is presented like it’s Catholic.
Here, Maximon is just another saint, the only difference being that outside his cathedral Maya priests are lighting fires
and performing rites. He’s the duality.
But no matter how he comes to you, no matter where you meet him in this country,
the boys who maintain him promise if you stuff a couple hundred quetzales under his tie,
he’ll tell you whatever it is you need to hear. The thing is, though, they’ll also tell you that he’s a liar.
They’re not hiding anything. He’s 400 years old and he’s absolutely hammered.
He was drunk when you were born and he will be drunk when you die.
So yeah, okay, he might make a few bold promises, but let’s remember that this is just grandad talking… and it’s late evening.
Do you ever talk to your grandfather after seven pm? He might say he knows the secrets to fixing your corn problem
but that doesn’t mean you should actually believe him.
And obviously, religion doesn’t really work like that anyway. You can’t just snap and get what you want.
If that’s all prayer was, people wouldn’t do it.
There’s more to Maximon than just the faulty promises of a few drunk caretakers. He’s a cultural experience.
Visiting him isn’t just respecting tradition, the journey itself is healing.
Guatemala is a beautiful country, and Atitlan, for lack of a better word, feels holy to visit.
Standing here you can completely understand why the Maya worship it. This landscape invokes you to more.
To come here at a big moment in your life, to spend an obscene amount of money on the trip,
it inspires you to think deeper about your problems. To reflect and overcome.
The point of Maximon is deeper than just visiting a doll, it’s about finding the calm
that you need to accept change. It’s about repeating a tradition that has a value deeper
than anything provided by that little wooden statue and the money that you put in his tie.
The family just ahead of us told me they’d come to pray for their son who was illegally sneaking into the United States.
They just didn’t know what else to do, so they came to the most spiritually important place in their people’s history
and offered 40 dollars and a pack of smokes to a carving they were told was powerful.
They said they didn’t actually expect it to work, not exactly anyway, not out loud to me,
but what was their other option? Sit at home and worry?
Go to the same ineffective church that they’d been to every other week that got them here?
There’s a certain simplicity to Maximon.
He’s like a magic eight ball on a mountaintop that won’t even show you the answer. He doesn’t even pretend to tell you an answer.
You just imagine he said something good and go home. The point isn’t knowing the answer,
it’s the journey to that mountaintop. It might sound hokey, but that’s the true core of religion.
Once it was my turn, though, standing before him as a non-believer, it was kinda hard to take the carving all that seriously.
All I could think about was the money. Because I did the math in my head talking to that family
and for a four hundred year old man in rural Guatemala, Maximon is making a hell of a lot of money.
The average salary in this part of Guatemala is something like two thousand dollars a year,
and the statue is at minimum turning over two hundred and fifty times that.
Five hundred grand if not much more. It’s presumably the most profitable business in this entire town.
Which, naturally, if you know anything about the violence of this country, speaks to a strong hand controlling it.
Because nobody can be in charge of something this powerful here without a way of defending it.
So I asked a lot of probing questions to those boys who ash his cigarettes and it wasn't like they spoke in plain terms, obviously,
but they did lay it out I think as clear as it needs to be.
In Atitlan, for the very least, the only place where I asked,
Maximon acts as a power-sharing structure between the locals elites. Together they serve as a community protection for their unique resource.
Ownership is shared between 12 powerful families,
each cycling in a young man on a bi-weekly basis to serve as the fee collector.
These drunk children ashing his cigarettes don’t just watch over the doll, they watch over each other.
They watch over the money. And together their families muscle out any new statues popping up on the lake.
They’re like a religious mafia making millions, but they’re also providing a service that people are willingly paying for.
It’s not like they’re muscling people in here.
Elsewhere, though, there are whispers of genuine true criminal control over the statues.
Gangs who've understood that the opiate of the masses turns out to be just as profitable as the opiates.
They’ve wrestled control of the prayer boxes from those who started them and by now it would be hard to untwin the two.
Plus, if God is made in our grandfather’s image, as a violent womanizing old drunk,
who’s to say he wouldn’t even condone them doing it? Hell, he might even appreciate it.
So what do you do, as a believer? You pray anyway. You pray because this is your ancestry.
You overlook the cost, you overlook the lie. But really, what are you supposed to do?
It's not like he’s the only one doing it. A Maya priest is going to ask you three times this much in Atitlan.
The church hits you up every time you enter. No blessing comes for free.
At least this way you got to see Atitlan. And looking back, it might not have actually helped, but, it truly was a beautiful trip.
Okay, so he might be a little drunk,
he might smoke too much, he might sleep around. Hell, he might even get abusive,
but he is our grandfather. And in turn he’s us.
Rilaj Mam is a saint, but he also not. He’s human.
Just don’t ask where the fifteen dollars goes.
This is Rare Earth.
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