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Mayan Religion
The Maya practiced human sacrifice. In some Maya rituals
people were killed by having their arms and legs held
while a priest cut the person's chest open and tore out
his heart as an offering. This is depicted on ancient
objects such as pictorial texts, known as codices
(singular: codex). It is believed that children were often
offered as sacrificial victims because they were believed
to be pure.
Much of the Maya religious tradition is still not
understood by scholars, but it is known that the Maya,
like most pre-modern societies, believed that the cosmos
has three major planes, the underworld, the sky, and the
earth.
The Maya underworld is reached through caves and ball
courts. It was thought to be dominated by
the aged Maya gods of death and putrefaction. The Sun and Itzamna, both aged gods, dominated the Maya idea of the
sky. The night sky was considered a window showing all
supernatural doings. The Maya configured constellations of
gods and places, saw the unfolding of narratives in their
seasonal movements, and believed that the intersection of
all possible worlds was in the night sky.
Maya gods were not separate entities like Greek gods. The
gods had affinities and aspects that caused them to merge
with one another in ways that seem unbounded. There is a
massive array of supernatural characters in the Maya
religious tradition, only some of which recur with
regularity. Good and evil traits are not permanent
characteristics of Maya gods, nor is only "good"
admirable. What is inappropriate during one season might
come to pass in another since much of the Maya religious
tradition is based on cycles and not permanence.
The life-cycle of maize lies at the heart of Maya belief.
This philosophy is demonstrated on the Maya belief in the
Maize God as a central religious figure. The Maya bodily
ideal is also based on the form of the young Maize God,
which is demonstrated in their artwork. The Maize God was
also a model of courtly life for the Classical Maya.
It is sometimes believed that the
multiple "gods" represented nothing more than a
mathematical explanation of what they observed. Each god
was literally just a number or an explanation of the
effects observed by a combination of numbers from multiple
calendars. Among the many types of Maya calendars which
were maintained, the most important included a 260-day
cycle, a 365-day cycle which approximated the solar year,
a cycle which recorded lunation periods of the Moon, and a
cycle which tracked the synodic period of Venus.
Philosophically, the Maya believed that knowing the past
meant knowing the cyclical influences that create the
present, and by knowing the influences of the present one
can see the cyclical influences of the future. |
