What can Maya spirituality teach us about current efforts to colonise Mars?
For the first time, the West is listening to the wisdom of the people we have deemed to be our others. Can spiritual tourism offer us a way forward, or is it just a fetishisation of difference?
This week I attended a made-for-gringos fire ceremony led by Tata Búho, one of the Maya shamans who live on the shores of Lake Atitlán.
Why should you care? Because it reveals how the West is finally beginning to listen—and what we do with that listening will shape our spiritual and ecological future.
Búho invited us to make offerings to the 20 nahuales or spirit animals of the Maya calendar. He reminded us to practice gratitude—to our parents for giving us life, to the abundance of earth for sustaining us, even to the challenges we face, since that is where change is born: “We need the darkness of night to see the stars,” Búho reminded.
A phrase also attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson—so maybe we’re not so different after all.
Invoking the spirits of our ancestors, he stressed the importance of being close to our father’s family line and our mother’s line: the need to know where we come from to see where we are going.
The strength and unity of family in this part of the world should not be underestimated. It offers a powerful antidote to the individualism of Western modernity and a path for deeper self-awareness as we acknowledge how our ancestry continues to shape us and our experience of the world.
Redefining hierarchies between the West and the rest
One of the most powerful moments came when one of the women had to leave early. Búho asked her if she wanted him to offer her half-smoked tobacco to the fire, and proceeded to shower her in alcohol and half-chewed tobacco leaves with his mouth.
In the last years, fire ceremonies for western pilgrims, visitors, and tourists have become an important source of income for the tatas in the area, but perhaps more significantly, an arena for the exchange of knowledge and a space where westerners, for the first time since colonisation, are really listening to the ancestral wisdom of the people they colonised.
I must admit, it is with a certain ambivalence that I approach Western integration of indigenous cosmology. Our history is so full of arrogance and hubris that I feel compelled to tread lightly when I write about the wisdom of those whom we have deemed our others.
Some might say these ceremonies are just exotic shows for white tourists. And yes—sometimes they are. But there’s also a powerful revivalist current of ancient wisdom and a re-evaluation of indigenous knowledges that I feel honoured to be a part of.
Cause when has it been possible for an indigenous man to spit tobacco and alcohol on a white woman and be appreciated for it?
There’s clearly something here that is shifting hierarchies.
How can ancestral wisdom help us find a path forward?
Westerners are, for the first time, approaching other people as teachers rather than savages. We are realising that they have an understanding of the world that can help lost souls find a path back to purpose and meaning. And we are moving past distinctions between us and them, to recognise our shared humanity.
Listening to the wisdom of Búho and witnessing how he honors the traditions that are passed down through his family line made an impact on me.
Perhaps one of the biggest lessons that Búho and his Maya brothers and sisters have taught me is the importance of cultivating a healthy and respectful relationship with the lands we inhabit. To the mountains, rivers, and lakes. To the soil that feeds us.
Should we look to the sky or to the earth?
The Maya are grounded in Earth. For them, we all have our own Nahual—we all carry the energy of our spirit animals, the powerful beings that shape us.
The contrast could not be bigger from the Christian cosmology that permeates the West, and has taught us to see humankind as the pinnacle of creation. We are made in God’s image: separate from and superior to the world of animals, plants, and minerals. Closer to heaven than we are to earth.
Christianity sees to the sky. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons Silicon Valley is dreaming of Mars, while indigenous traditions are clamoring for us to take care of our planet. Our home. Our essence. Our spirit. We are not of this earth; we are it.
Maybe the real question isn’t whether we’ll colonise Mars, but whether we can learn to belong on Earth. What wisdom are you listening to?
Thank you so much for your words. I had a private fire ceremony with Búho. My intention was very clear and strong and it changed my life in beautiful and unexpected ways. It’s time for the west to listen and re-member that we all belong to the same Mother Earth.