Syncretism, the merging of pre-Columbian religious beliefs with Catholic rituals—another of the pillars of Mexican cultural identity—is viewed with similar suspicion, though in this respect, at least, The Book of Lamentations is willing to acknowledge some kind of amalgamation. The Tzotzil religious universe includes the brujos, ilols, and pulsetakers of Maya tradition alongside a panoply of Catholic saints presided over by San Juan. But just as a word that moves from one language into another can take on an entirely different or opposite meaning, the Catholicism practiced by the Tzotziles is something else altogether. Their belief is intense, but very far removed from what their catechizers set out to imbue in them.

Syncretism exists: that much Lamentations will grant. But it does not exist as the simple persistence of a few old traditions within a slightly modified Catholicism. It is the new monster that has slouched towards Bethlehem and that has been born. The crucifixion which is the central event of the novel achieves its unendurable power because it takes place in the narrow space where the spheres of Mayan and Catholic belief overlap: human sacrifice. Domingo’s death echoes both Christ’s solemn, singular sacrifice and the exuberant, kaleidoscopic human sacrifices of the Popol Vuh. In both traditions, sacrifice holds out the promise of overthrowing the constraints of the material world, cheating death, and achieving eternal life.

The hero twins of the Popol Vuh, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, defeat their enemies, the Lords of Xibalba, by voluntarily sacrificing themselves. The Lords of Xibalba have prepared a wide stone oven, and the twins throw themselves into it, headlong. Afterwards, by a plan prearranged between the boys and two seers, their bones are ground up and spilled into the river where they sink to the bottom and the boys become whole again. When the hero twins reappear, they have defeated death. They can kill themselves and come back to life at will, and they cavort about, gleefully killing and resurrecting animal and human sacrificial victims. When the Lords of Xibalba witness this prowess they beg the twins, “Do it to us! Sacrifice us!” and voluntarily submit to what Dennis Tedlock’s brilliant translation of the Popol Vuh calls “the heart sacrifice”—the extraction of their living hearts.