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.


The Mayan religion also known as Maya, was born in Mesoamerica approximately 250 AD. This particular religion was influenced by the Olmecs. Within the first 650 years, the civilization of the Mayans ended up taking over 40 large cities which laid out across Mexico, North Belize and Guatemala. This period of their time was called the Classic Period. During their time, the Mayans developed a calendar known as the Maya Calendar. This Calendar is said to be one of the most documented and best understood calendars of our time. With predictions made from this calendar, people looked forward to the future hoping that the calendar would prove itself right. These predictions came from the Mayan peoples themselves by studying the constellations in the night time sky. 


In the long darkness before creation, the Maya gods pondered the dawning of a new age and the making of a people who would give them honor. They sought yellow corn; they sought white corn, for, as the Maya later wrote in the Popol Vuh, "these were the ingredients for the flesh of the human work, the human design" (Tedlock 1985:163). Water was ground with the maize to yield blood and flesh. The gods had tried to create humankind before, but their first attempt at creation, the animals of the earth, could not praise their makers. When the gods formed humans of earth, they collapsed as mud; when the gods carved humans out of wood, the forms looked like people, but they could not worship the gods and so the gods destroyed them. The gods succeeded in populating the earth only when humanity was shaped from maize, the very staff of human life.


One central aspect to Maya religion is the idea of the duality of the soul. The Maya saw one part of their soul as indestructible, invisible, and eternal. The Maya referred to this soul as "ch’ul," "k’ul," or "ch’ulel." The second soul, is the "Way', defined as "supernatural guardian" or "protector": This is a supernatural companion, which usually takes the guise of a wild animal and shares ch’ulel with a person from birth. The fates of the baby and the animal spirit are intertwined, so that what befalls the one affects the other for good or ill"


The Maya had a large pantheon of gods (more than 165) that often had different aspects (the combination of young and old characteristics or human and animal forms) and fulfilled different functions. The Kings were the incarnation of the Maize God as depicted in the San Bartolo Murals and the Popol Vuh. By comparing Classic Period imagery and contemporary beliefs with the Popol Vuh story line, these basic myths and their associated deities can be fleshed out and expanded.  The Popol Vuh god called Feathered Serpent was identified with sheet lightning and was parallel to the Waterlily Bird Serpent found in Maya art, and Vak’ (the laughing falcon of the Popol Vuh) was parallel to the Principal Bird Deity of the Classic Period, who was the bird manifestation of the creator grandfather.