When it comes to religion I often feel like Hans Solo in the first Star Wars movie when he says
“I’ve flown from one end of the galaxy to the other and I’ve never seen anything to make me believe there’s an all powerful force controlling everything.”
Well, I have been all over the WORLD and often think that most religions -even my own- are little more than witchcraft and parlor tricks.
I definitely felt that way in 2003 when I started working on a story about Maya Religion. But a couple of things happened while shooting that story that I can’t explain away.
In Santiago Atitlan there is a Maya deity named Maximon. One of the things that you do as a tourist in Santiago is go visit the confredia house where Maximon is staying. That is what I did while I was in town for a couple of weeks. I went to see Maximon as a tourist and gave a couple of Quetzals as an offering.
Later that week I was photographing in the Confredia of San Martin (a different house) and during a ceremony there gave a much larger offering to San Martin. I swear the very second that I gave more money to San Martin my camera stopped working! It was a practically brand new Canon EOS 3, it had never given me trouble before, but it -inexplicably- quit!
Later I told Alan Christenson about it and he commented that, well in Santiago you pray to San Martin for health, but you pray to Maximon not to get sick. In short it sounded like Maximon got into my camera.
That experience reshaped my thinking about Maya religion. It definitely made me question what I thought I already "knew."
Anyone have an experience like that where you go in "knowing" something but come out like Hans Solo at the end of the movie saying "the force be with you?"
When my wife April and I went to Lake Atitlan on vacation last week, the first thing that we did was go see Maximon. This time though we did a whole protection ceremony. My cameras worked all week.
-Stephen Alvarez
(thanks to Joshua and Rachel for tracking down the Hans Solo quote)
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