Guatemala

Guatemala has the largest Protestant share of any country in Latin America, close to parity with Catholicism, and the shift can be dated. Evangelical and Pentecostal churches grew steadily from the 1950s, accelerated sharply after the earthquake of 1976, when North American evangelical relief arrived in quantity and stayed, and gained a political profile under Efrain Rios Montt, a Pentecostal general who took power by coup in 1982.

Those years are also when the state made war on the Maya highlands. The army's counterinsurgency campaign destroyed hundreds of villages and killed tens of thousands of people, overwhelmingly indigenous, and it destroyed religious leadership along with everything else: catechists were targeted as subversives, and Maya ritual specialists were killed or driven out. A United Nations backed commission concluded in 1999 that acts of genocide had been committed.

The Catholic Church produced its own accounting first. The Recovery of Historical Memory project, known as REMHI, collected thousands of testimonies through parish networks and was published in April 1998 under the direction of Bishop Juan Gerardi. He was beaten to death in his garage two days after presenting it. Military officers were later convicted of the killing.

The 1996 peace accords included a formal agreement on the identity and rights of indigenous peoples that recognised Maya spirituality and undertook to guarantee access to ceremonial sites. Implementation has been partial, and a law on sacred sites has been before congress for many years without passing.

Popular devotion has its own figures, notably Maximon, also called San Simon, an image that receives cigars and liquor and is housed in rotation by member households of a confraternity.

The two hundred and sixty day ritual calendar of the Maya has been counted without interruption in the Guatemalan highlands, which makes it one of the few pre Columbian religious systems in the Americas whose continuity is not a reconstruction. In K iche communities the count is called the cholq ij, and the person who keeps it is the aj q ij, usually rendered daykeeper or sun priest.

The calendar combines twenty named days with the numbers one to thirteen, so a day is a pairing such as Eight Batz, and the cycle closes after two hundred and sixty of them. Each named day carries a character, and a person's day of birth is understood to give them a disposition and a set of obligations. Much of a daykeeper's work is accordingly biographical: reading the day of a birth, choosing days for undertakings, and conducting the ceremonies a particular day requires.

Divination uses a bundle of tz ite seeds and crystals, counted out in groups against the calendar while questions are put. Becoming a daykeeper is not a matter of study alone: the calling is typically indicated by illness, by dreams or by the day of one's own birth, and it is confirmed through a period of apprenticeship and a formal initiation. This is a living vocation held by people now, and the atlas describes its shape rather than instructing anyone in it.

Two pressures bear on the practice. Evangelical churches generally condemn it outright, and conversion in a family can break a lineage of transmission. And ceremonies conducted at archaeological sites depend on access arrangements with the state and with tourism operators, which is why the unpassed law on sacred sites matters in practice and not only symbolically.