The Talking Cross

(This article first appeared in Fortean Times)

The flag of the Cruzob, the Mayan state founded by the followers of the Talking Cross

Around 1841 the Yucutecos, the Creole population of the Yucatan peninsula, broke with Mexico. The Mayan population of Yucatan soon rose up against their Creole overlords, beginning a fifty-year conflict. The Mayans quickly drove the Creoles back to the north of the peninsula before abandoning their siege when the corn-planting season started. Yucuteco reinforcements pushed the Mayans into the jungles of the south and east of the peninsula.

A band of Mayan insurgents took refuge around a small spring at Chan Santa Cruz, ("the Little Sacred Cross"), where a mahogany tree grew at the edge of a cave. The tree’s trunk bore several carved cross shapes a few inches high. At least one of these carved crosses appeared to produce sounds. The Cult of the Talking Cross was born, which inspired the Mayans to at least 50 years of resistance against first the Yucutecos and then the United Mexican States. The bizarre Talking Cross faith survived at least three incidents of capture or destruction of its talking crosses and possibly up to three exposures of ventriloquist fraud. And the Talking Cross whistled!

Juan de la Cruz Puc first heard the cross talk, although others could hear it forming sounds. Puc shared with his neighbour Manuel Nahuat what the cross had told him. Nahuat, who was a ventriloquist, projected his voice so that everyone could hear the words from the Talking Cross. Proclamations by letter also appeared, signed "San Juan de la Cruz", St John of the Cross. The Proclamation of St John of 1850 founded the rebel Mayan regime known as the Cruzob with Chan Santa Cruz as its capital.

The Talking Cross – now freestanding, much bigger and made of wood – was moved to a large church built to house it, the Balam Na (the "House of the Jaguar" or “House of the Priest”). In the darkened interior of the Balam Na, the booming voice of the Talking Cross issued pronouncements to a prostrate congregation. It’s unclear how much of the current church on the site is from the original.

The Talking Cross's earliest verbal pronouncement, in December 1850, said “The Whites will never win... These people of the Cross who will win". It ordered an attack on the nearest Yucuteco garrison at Kampochche. It was a disaster. A promised immunity to bullets didn’t materialise, the Mayans were driven off with heavy losses. The Yucutecos attacked Chan Santa Cruz in March 1851, seizing the Talking Crosses (there were now two of these) and killing Nahuat.

But the Yucutecos lacked the forces to occupy the Cruzob capital. A new Talking Cross and two other crosses immediately appeared at the shrine by the spring. Puc now claimed the Talking Cross spoke via "three mysterious personages" with himself as interpreter or secretary, and that the Yucutecos "will be severely punished." Bankrupt and facing the prospect of endless war with the Maya, the Yucutecos eventually accepted Mexican sovereignty in 1853, so it was Mexico that the Cruzob now fought. English visitors and Mexican prisoners described the Talking Cross being taken into battle by the Cruzob armies.

The Cruzob’s survival was assisted by the neighbouring little colony of British Honduras (now Belize). With their tiny garrison, the British realised they stood a better change of survival against the much bigger Mexico if a Mayan state prevailed. So the British for a time supplied arms to Chan Santa Cruz. In a letter to the "magistrates of Belize", a Cruzob leader wrote, "the Holy Cross begs you to give them powder and shot and all the implements of war."

The Balam Na today. Adam Jones Phd, Wikimedia Commons

While the Latinos had for centuries refused to ordain Mayans as priests, Mayans now served as priests to their own congregations, but their version of worship became only loosely based on mainstream Catholicism. In Cruzob cosmology, there were several versions of God, there were angels and other lesser gods, elementals such as the jaguar and also the "Beautiful Grandmother" – equivalent to the Virgin of Guadeloupe.

Venancio Puc emerged as the new "interpreter" of the Cross and tatich (Pope). The Talking Cross now spoke to Venancio Puc and occasionally to his generals, with his son Atanacio Puc performing ventriloquism via a barrel-shaped device in a hidden space near the Talking Cross. The cross spoke sometimes in words, sometimes in a sharp, whistling voice – a "fine, thin whistle" according to one witness.

Lieutenant Plumridge of the British Army described being made to wait all day and much of the night until “God came”, when a "rather weak voice... which seemed to originate in the midst of the air" told them "If the English want a fight, let them come... and I will dispose of (them) at once." A escaped Mexican army prisoner described being led to the Cross, which ordered him to repay the 28 pesos he’d won playing cards with his guards and to receive 25 lashes.

In 1867 the tatich was a mezito, Gerardo de Castillo, who admitted to the superintendent of Belize that "Divine Providence"had caused himself and colleagues to seize power from Venancio Puc and kill him. De Castillo admitted that the voice had been produced by Puc’s son, and explained that "the use of ventriloquism to make the cross speak was the work of evil men and a thing of the past". While the tatich still maintained the holiness of the Talking Cross, his admission had lost the cult much of its power. San Juan still communicated his proclamations by letter.

Cruzob authority was now fragmenting. Travellers to Tulum – an ancient pyramid and fortress complex on the coast North of Chan Santa Cruz – described in 1866 seeing there another church shrouded in darkness where the high priest and his wife were patrons of the cross, which talked in a whistling voice to a kneeling congregation. There were by then other Mayan statelets where the "parents" of the Speaking Cross kept it in their houses. By 1872 a third rival centre of Talking Cross worship appeared at San Antonio Muyil. In the 1890s there were at least four such competing Talking Cross centres. The Mayan community at Ixchanha rejected the Cruzob’s break with traditional Catholicism, preferring to accept nominal recognition of the Mexican state. The Cruzob made war on all of these Talking Cross variants. By 1895 Chan Santa Cruz was all but abandoned, still guarded for visits by Cruzob officials, who had reportedly relocated their base somewhere to the northwest.

A contemporary map of Yacutan.

In 1901, a Mexican army under General Ignacio Bravo finally occupied Chan Santa Cruz for good, its troops bringing measles and smallpox which devastated the local population. Bravo's army reported discovering the hiding place near the Talking Cross where a ventriloquist could have hidden, their voice amplified by the barrel-type device. Maya guerrilla warfare against Mexico persisted, ending only with a formal peace treaty in 1935.

In 2002, the Mexican Government finally recognised the Church of the Talking Cross as a legitimate religion. A more moderate version of the Cult of the Talking Cross still exists. The spring where the Talking Cross first manifestedis a hangout for students, in a town now with the more secular name Felipe Carrillo Puerto. Some claim the cross at the spring continues to talk to this day.

It turns out the symbol of the cross long predated Christianity in the Yucatan anyway. Mayan cosmology features the yaxche (mahogany tree), the Tree of Life, the navel of the world, a straight tree vaguely in the form of the cross. In some representations of the yaxche, the cross shape is formed by a double-headed serpent spread out in its branches and by a bird perching atop the tree. The yaxche anchored the various parts of the universe in their place and spread from the earth into the heavens and reached with its roots down into the underworld. Amen!


Copyright Matt Salusbury 2022

Tulum, the ancient pre-Columbian Mayan temple and fortress complex on the coast where Mayan insurgents took refuge. Wikimedia Commons.