Where Night Reigns Eternal: Darkness and Deep Time among the Ancient Maya (original) (raw)

2018, In Archaeology of the Night: Life After Dark in the Ancient World, ed. Nancy Gonlin and April Nowell, 201-222. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.

The most notable quality of night is darkness, an experience recognized in all cultures despite temporal and spatial differences. In many cases, the darkness of night is significant because it has always been there. It is therefore little wonder that many cultures have developed origin myths in which darkness or night shares generative qualities with the original creation. In late antiquity and the Western European early Middle Ages, monastic life held both theological and cosmological significance that could be traced back to Judeo-Christian mythic traditions regarding a chaotic primordiality (Helms 2004). In Genesis for instance, God creates light and separates it from the darkness, which he called night. This implies that in Judeo-Christian thought, night was always there first and by itself while light was the "divine creation" (Schnepel and Ben-Ari 2005, 153). Helms (2004, 178) notes that "darkness stands even closer than light to ultimate cosmological beginnings in that darkness is often identified in lore and legend as one of the conditions that preceded the formation of the lighted world." Unsurprisingly, these notions of night and darkness in Western thought are at home in the many rich mythic traditions regarding creation in Mesoamerica