Ancient Maya Religion

Maya civilisation grew over many centuries in the lands that are now southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and parts of Honduras and El Salvador. Villages of maize farmers appeared well before 1000 BCE, and by the late Preclassic period cities such as El Mirador were raising pyramids of enormous size. The Maya shared much with their Mesoamerican neighbours, including the 260-day calendar, the ballgame and the feathered serpent, but they developed the most complete writing system of the ancient Americas.

In the Classic period, from about 250 to 900 CE, dozens of kingdoms flourished in the lowlands: Tikal, Calakmul, Palenque, Copán and many more. They were never one empire. Each city had its own dynasty, and rulers bore the title k’uhul ajaw, ‘holy lord’. Kings were sacred figures who mediated between people, ancestors and gods, and their monuments recorded their births, accessions, rituals and wars with exact calendar dates.

In the ninth and tenth centuries many southern cities declined and were abandoned. Archaeologists point to a combination of drought, warfare, overpopulation and the failure of royal authority. Maya life did not end. Cities in the north, such as Chichén Itzá and later Mayapán, rose to prominence, and highland kingdoms like that of the K’iche’ were thriving when the Spanish arrived.

Maya belief, as scholars reconstruct it largely from later sources, pictured a layered world: thirteen levels of the heavens above, the earth in the middle, and below it Xibalba, the underworld, entered through caves and still waters. A great tree, often drawn as a ceiba, stood at the centre and linked the levels, while four directions, each with its colour, shaped the earth’s surface.

Maize stood at the heart of this world. In Maya thought, the Maize God died and was reborn as the plant sprouted, and the Popol Vuh tells that the gods shaped the first true humans from maize dough after failed attempts with mud and wood. Rain gods, called Chaahk, brought water to the fields with their lightning axes; the sun god travelled through the underworld each night; and ancestors continued to watch over their descendants.

The Popol Vuh, the most important surviving text, was written down in the K’iche’ language in the 1550s by Maya nobles who had learned the Latin alphabet, apparently to preserve an older book. It tells of the Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who descend to Xibalba, outwit its lords in a ballgame and a series of trials, and rise into the sky as the sun and the moon. Scenes painted on Classic vases show that versions of these stories were known many centuries earlier.

Much of what scholars know about Classic belief comes not from books but from stone and clay. Inscriptions on stelae, lintels and stairways name gods, describe rituals and tie the deeds of kings to events in the deep mythical past. Painted vases, buried with the dead, show the gods of the underworld, the Maize God emerging from a split turtle shell, and scenes at royal courts. Tombs such as that of Pakal at Palenque, whose carved lid shows the king at the threshold between worlds beneath the cosmic tree, reveal how rulers hoped to be reborn like the maize. Since the decipherment of the script, these images can be read together with their captions, and a much richer picture of Maya thought has emerged than the Spanish sources alone could give.

Religion was performed in public. Kings and queens let their own blood in ceremonies that inscriptions describe as a way of making gods and ancestors appear, and they presided over rites at temples built on pyramid platforms. Human sacrifice also took place, most often of captives taken in war, though on a smaller scale, as far as the evidence shows, than in later Aztec Tenochtitlan. At Chichén Itzá, offerings of jade, gold and incense, along with human remains, were found in the Sacred Cenote.

The ballgame was both sport and ritual. Players struck a heavy rubber ball with their hips, and courts were built in almost every city. The game echoed the struggle of the Hero Twins against the lords of death, and some ceremonial games ended with the sacrifice of captives.

Temples themselves carried meaning. Pyramids were thought of as sacred mountains, and the doorways of their summit shrines as the mouths of caves leading to the world of the gods; at some sites, such as Copán, they were decorated with huge masks of deities. Cities were laid out with plazas for large public ceremonies, where dancers, musicians and nobles in elaborate costumes took part alongside the king. Ordinary households, too, buried their dead beneath the floors of their homes and kept up offerings to them, a reminder that Maya religion was lived in families as well as in royal courts.

Time was measured with remarkable precision. The 260-day sacred count and the 365-day solar year meshed every 52 years. The Long Count added a running total of days from a mythical starting point, which most scholars place in August 3114 BCE, grouped in periods of 20, 360, 7,200 and 144,000 days. The thirteenth b’ak’tun of that count ended on 21 December 2012, a date that inspired modern doomsday prophecies with no basis in Maya texts. Priests also tracked Venus and eclipses, as the tables of the Dresden Codex show.

The Spanish conquest of the Maya was long and uneven, lasting from the 1520s until 1697, when the Itza kingdom of Nojpetén fell. Missionaries suppressed public rites and destroyed sacred images and books. In 1562, at Maní in Yucatán, Diego de Landa held an auto de fe at which Maya books were burned; only four pre-conquest codices are known to survive. Ironically, Landa’s own account of Yucatán later helped scholars to understand the calendar and the script.

Knowledge of the writing was lost for centuries. Its decipherment, begun by Yuri Knorozov in the 1950s and carried forward by Tatiana Proskouriakoff, Linda Schele and many others, allowed historians to read the names and deeds of Classic kings. Today Maya scholars themselves take part in this work.

The temple religion of the divine kings is gone, but the Maya are a living people, not a vanished one. Several million Maya live in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize and Honduras and speak around thirty Mayan languages. Most are Christians, and many combine Catholic or Protestant practice with older ways: rain ceremonies for Chaac in Yucatán, offerings in caves and on hilltops, and highland daykeepers, aj q’ij, who still count the 260-day calendar to guide rituals and healing. In recent decades Maya spiritual guides have also revived public ceremonies at ancient sites, and their tradition is recognised in Guatemala as a living spirituality.