Ancestral people lived in complete harmony with nature, from China to the Amazon, it has been proven that indigenous people have taken care of Mother Earth for millennia. Pre-Hispanic peoples were no exception and proof of this is the chinampa systems developed by the Mexica. The Mayans, for their part, also saw the sacredness of life in nature and took the ceiba tree as the divine being that communicated them with heaven and the underworld.
Connection between the three worlds
The Mayan worldview is not only based on gods, but they included flora and fauna within their understanding of reality. For the Mayans, some animals and plants were endowed with divine powers that played an important role in their culture. This is the case of the ceiba tree, which for them was the sacred tree representative of life itself.
The entire constitution of the ceiba was loaded with important symbolism for the Mayan culture. Its branches represented the sky due to its large size that embraced the heights, while the trunk alluded to the earthly plane and finally its roots that go beyond 20 meters deep, weave the underworld.
In that sense, the ceiba was the sacred entity that symbolized the completeness of reality because it connected and, therefore, communicated, the three levels of the Mayan cosmogony. The branches that extend towards the sky with grace, open towards the four cardinal points, uniting with the divinities in charge of controlling the rains and winds, which in turn marked the directions of the physical world.
As far as archaeologists have managed to glimpse, there is no special glyph for the ceiba. However, in some Mayan vestiges the word Yaxhe has been found written as a reference to ‘green tree’, so some researchers believe that this would be the term used for the ceiba.
The tallest tree of all
The Mayan belief that the branches of the ceiba tree point to the four cardinal points is no coincidence. The ceiba is in fact one of the largest in all of tropical America, the average specimens measure 20 to 40 meters, but ceibas have been found up to 70 meters high.
The sacred Mayan tree whose scientific name is Ceiba pentandra (L.) Gaertn, has actinomorphs with whitish petals that are also close to pink. Its flowering season is from December to March and after the flowers reach maturity, fruits appear in the form of oblong or elliptical capsules that are responsible for spreading the seeds so that the reproduction of the species occurs.
It lives throughout much of Mexico, as well as throughout Central America and other countries such as Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil and Brazil. It grows easily in different types of soil, from humid to sandy, although it requires tropical climates to survive.