In this contribution, I provide an ethnography of the Maya New Year’s pilgrimage and sacrifice ritual, in which a delicate relatedness between people and animate mountains is established, enacted, and expressed.

The material I use here for presenting this particular kind of life and animacy has been collected during my ethnographic fieldwork among the Akatek Maya. in the Sierra de los Cuchumatanes, one of Guatemala’s most mountainous, isolated, and traditional areas.

Firstly, I will provide an ethnography of the pilgrimage from Chimbán to the mountain of K’utataj, where a young turkey is sacrificed. The ritual takes place at the end of a delicate five-day period (Wayeb’ or Oyeb’ K’u) before the advent of the Maya New Year. It is consciously understood as paying respect to the mountains and asking for good weather, a plentiful harvest, and all the best in the year to come.

The settlement of Chimbán, with a population of about 1,600, is the religious centre of all Akatek traditionalists inhabiting the municipalities of San Miguel Acatán and San Rafael La Independencia. In their eyes, the importance of Chimbán stems from the rigour with which local ritualists perform costumbre (literally the ‘custom’), a set of rites inherited from the ancestors that must be followed. The number of ceremonies and feasts, just as the number of saints in the local church, evidences the ritualists’ good work and justifies Chimbán’s reputation as the ‘real centre of the world’, where there is ‘still something going on’, as I learned from the mayordomo who was holding the service.