In Harmony With ‘Maya Cosmos’ : Researching the ancient people’s beliefs, says Joy Parker of San Clemente, changed her world view and started her on her own spiritual journey.

The Maya--the Indians found on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras--were known as one of the world’s most highly developed civilizations. They were master astronomers and architects, brilliant statesmen and great warriors. Highly literate, they created one of the most subtle and sophisticated languages in the ancient world, and scribes--an honored social class prized second only to priests and kings--wrote beautifully illustrated books on bark paper.

Although the Maya civilization was in decline when the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the early 1500s, the Spanish influence squashed any social reorganization the Maya were undergoing at the time: Over a 75-year period, 90% of the estimated 7 million Maya died of smallpox, measles and other European diseases. In converting them to Catholicism, Spanish priests burned virtually all of the Maya books. And over the past 500 years the Maya have been removed from their ancestral lands so the land could be used for huge plantations.

And yet, says Joy Parker, co-author of a new book on the Maya, many of their religious traditions and their world view have survived over the centuries in one form or another.

“It’s astonishing,” says Parker, a San Clemente resident. “When the Maya look at the world they have a lot more in common with their ancestors who lived 2,000 years ago than they do with you and I.”

In “Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path” (Morrow; $30), Parker and her co-authors--archeologist David Freidel and linguist and art historian Linda Schele--examine Maya mythology and religion. In so doing, they show how the 5 million Maya living in Latin America today have managed to preserve their most sacred beliefs over the centuries.

Parker offers two explanations for that.

“One is just pure stubbornness,” she says. “The Maya must be the strongest people on the face of the Earth, I’m convinced, because they went through terrible persecution and repression after the Spanish conquest 500 years ago.”

The second reason, she says, “is the fact that there were so many parallels between the Catholic religion and the Maya religion as far as symbols.”

The Maya took the Catholic saints and gave them Maya characteristics and blended them with their pantheon of gods, she says. And the central religious symbol of the Maya is the “World Tree,” which they represented as a cross.

“Here these Catholic friars come along and hold up a cross (and say) ‘You are going to worship this,’ ” says Parker. “Basically, the Maya managed to preserve a sort of inner life: Nobody knows what you’re thinking when you kneel down in church. I’ve seen this over and over again--in the American Indians, the Maya, the Africans, and you see it the Jewish nation too: The one thing that keeps them going is their spiritual belief.”

“Maya Cosmos,” which has received praise for not being a dry academic report, shows how Schele came to the realization that the many cosmological symbols in Maya art can be “woven together into a coherent, eminently logical pattern that is, in essence, a map of the sky.”

Indeed, Schele discovered that the World Tree actually represents the Milky Way galaxy. (In the Maya creation story, Parker explains, their god lifted the sky above the Earth using the World Tree at the center as a kind of giant cosmic support column.)

“When the Maya looked up at the Milky Way they were seeing the World Tree,” says Parker, adding that Schele’s discovery “shed light on many Maya astronomical and religious writings that we had not understood clearly before. It was like finding a Rosetta Stone to a lot of images and written information.”

“Maya Cosmos,” which USA Today calls “a tour de force” that “will take its place among the best books on the Maya,” comes on the heels of a 1990 book Parker ghost-wrote for Freidel and Schele: “A Forest of Kings,” a critically acclaimed history of the pre-Spanish Maya based on newly deciphered hieroglyphic of the Classic era (300-900 AD).

Parker will sign “Maya Cosmos” from 1 to 3 p.m. Saturday at Waldenbooks in the Brea Mall.

A self-described “refugee from New York City who moved to San Clemente 18 months ago,” Parker has an unusual background for someone writing books about the indigenous world: She’s a classically trained singer who earned her living specializing in avant-garde and Elizabethan music.

But after eight years of singing in restaurants, at art gallery openings and in small concerts, Parker says, she wanted to take her life in a different direction: to devote full-time to writing.

“Music is something you start very young,” says Parker, 41, who began taking voice lessons at 12. “You’re not really mature enough to make a choice. I always loved writing, and it was always something I thought I would get back to.”

Having written short stories and poems over the years, she enrolled in the graduate writing program at New York University in 1987. She was teaching writing at NYU when an editor at William Morrow linked her up with Freidel and Schele to write “A Forest of Kings.”

By then Parker was also fiction editor of Blue Light Red Light, a literary magazine that published magical realism, which she defines as a school of Latin American writing that deals with daily life as seen through the eyes of magic and the spiritual.

That background--along with several courses in anthropology--was good preparation for collaborating with the Freidel and Schele, who are considered two of the leading Maya scholars.

“As soon as I met with David and Linda, I knew we were on the same wavelength,” says Parker, whose job was to make the writing of two scholars more accessible to a broader audience.

That’s not to say she wasn’t daunted by the prospect of writing a book about an ancient civilization.

“I was actually a little scared, to tell you the truth,” she says. “I thought it was a huge project, but I love challenges--being pushed beyond my boundaries. It was too good a challenge to pass up: I had an opportunity to learn from people working in the field 25 years or more, to learn another way of looking at the world that was radically different from my western viewpoint.

“Another thing I’ve truly come to believe is you can’t look at your own culture clearly until you step outside of its boundaries. So when I stepped into the Maya world, I looked back at my world and went, ‘Whoa, things aren’t the way I thought they were.’ ”

In studying the Maya, she says, “I’d say my spiritual sense of the world was deepened. I became much more aware of the environment, the importance of nature. This was especially meaningful for me because I was living in New York City at the time. I’d say it really started me off on my spiritual journey.”

Parker said she began working with a spiritual teacher, a woman trained in a Peruvian tradition of shamanism. It was, she says, an eye-opening experience.

“The first thing it does it helps you to see how your own culture limits you. Our culture says you can do this, but you can’t do that with your life. Our culture trains us to discourage what Joseph Campbell calls ‘Follow your bliss,’ to do the things that you want to do the most.

“I’d say that working with the shaman has really taught me to know myself inside and out. Shamans were the first psychologists, long before Jung and Freud and all those guys. They help people to really work through their problems--whatever kind of identity crisis we’re going through--and get things together and go forward with our lives.”

Since working with Freidel and Schele on the two Maya books, Parker has served as editor on “Of Water and Spirit: Ritual, Initiation, and Magic in the Life of an African Shaman” with Malidoma Some, a West African shaman/diviner. She also is co-editing, with Native American writer Joseph Bruchac, an anthology that examines how Native American ceremonies have preserved the Indian culture and have had a deep effect upon the lives of non-Indians.

Parker says that despite the temptation to romanticize indigenous people, it’s a mistake. She concedes, however, that learning about the Maya has had a profound effect on her life.

The book she’s currently writing on her own--”Dancing in the Footsteps of the Elders”--is not about the Maya, she says, “but I’ll certainly use what I learned about the Maya in it.”

“This is a book that compares the attitude toward the elders in indigenous cultures to our society,” she says. “In indigenous cultures an old person is the most important person in the culture: They’re the wisdom keepers. They’re the leaders. They’re the people everyone turns to for the answers, especially the children.

But in our culture, she says, “old people are kind of the people we’d like to get rid of--they’re (considered) not very useful; they’re slow, not very smart. We certainly don’t honor them. People feel bad about getting old in our culture--it’s not a good thing--and I think we are the losers in having that attitude.”

Parker, in fact, says there is a direct connection between the loss of the influence of the grandparents in our culture and things such as gang violence.

“In traditional cultures the grandparents initiate the young; they help them to become men and women. In our culture, there’s no one to take kids by the hand and bring all of that energy they have into the adult world,” she says.

“There’s a saying in traditional cultures that if the older people don’t help the younger people to add their energy to the fire at the center of the community that the young people will turn around and burn down the community.

“We’ve seen this happen quite literally recently, haven’t we? What do people do during riots? They start to burn. To me, it’s like in this culture children are basically being lost. We complain about the inadequacy of the education system, but it’s much deeper than that. It has to do with the fact that the family structure has fallen apart. People have forgotten about how the dynamics of human relationships work.”

And by looking at both the Maya African cultures, she says, it becomes apparent “that all the bad things that indigenous people say are going to happen to the world if the elders are forgotten are the very things that are happening in our culture now.”