The Canon · No. 044
Maya Religion
Classic Maya state religion
c.2000 BCE – c.1697 CE (state form) · Indigenous American · Living · Guatemala, Belize, southern Mexico, Honduras
IV. THE CLASSICAL & IMPERIAL WORLD — c.200 BCE – 500 CE
How many
The Classic state religion is gone. Around six million Maya people survive and many practise Maya Catholicism, a genuine synthesis in which the old calendar and daykeepers persist under Catholic forms.
Who began it
No founder.
What it is for
To feed the gods and keep time. Maya religion is organised around two obligations — blood offering and the exact tracking of interlocking calendars — because both were understood to keep the cosmos running.
What it worships
Itzamna (creator, writing), Kinich Ahau (sun), Chaac (rain, with his axe and long nose), Ix Chel (moon, weaving, childbirth), the Maize God whose death and rebirth is the central agricultural myth, and the Hero Twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque who defeat the lords of the underworld at a ballgame.
What it holds
The world has been created and destroyed several times; humans of the current creation were successfully made from maize after failed attempts with mud and wood. Time is cyclical and layered: the 260-day tzolk'in ritual calendar, the 365-day haab, their 52-year meshing in the Calendar Round, and the Long Count running from a base date of 11 August 3114 BCE. Kings were divine intermediaries whose personal bloodletting sustained the world.
What it does
Autosacrifice — kings and nobles drawing their own blood by piercing the tongue, ears and penis with stingray spines and drawing a barbed cord through the wound, catching the blood on paper and burning it. Human sacrifice, mainly of captured enemy nobles, including decapitation and heart extraction, well attested but less industrialised than in Aztec Mexico. The ballgame, played on formal courts as a re-enactment of the Hero Twins' underworld contest, with sacrifice attached. Pyramid temples aligned to solar and Venus events. Cenote offerings at Chichen Itza.
After death
Most of the dead descend to Xibalba, the place of fright, a wet underworld of nine levels ruled by lords with names like One Death and Seven Death, reached by a difficult and unpleasant journey. It is a destination of endurance rather than punishment. Exceptions bypass it: those who die in childbirth, in battle, in sacrifice, or by suicide by hanging — for which there was a goddess, Ixtab — go directly to a paradise beneath a shade tree. Kings were expected to ascend and become divine.
Its texts
Four surviving bark-paper codices — Dresden (astronomical tables of extraordinary accuracy), Madrid, Paris and the disputed Grolier. Everything else was burned. The Popol Vuh, the K'iche' creation epic, written in the Latin alphabet in the 1550s and the single most important surviving Mesoamerican text. Thousands of carved monument inscriptions, now largely readable.
Its branches
Regional variants; modern Maya Catholicism and the surviving daykeeper (aj q'ij) tradition in highland Guatemala.
Of note
The Maya are the only Mesoamerican people whose own written voice survives in quantity. Everything we can read of Aztec or Inca thought comes filtered through Spanish transcription; here we have the kings' own inscriptions.
Its timeline
- c.2000 BCE–250 CE Preclassic; Maya civilisation forms, monumental architecture at El Mirador.
- 250–900 CE Classic period; Tikal, Palenque, Copan, Calakmul. Full hieroglyphic writing, the only complete writing system developed in the Americas.
- c.800–950 CE Classic collapse in the southern lowlands; drought, warfare and political failure combine.
- c.900–1500 CE Postclassic; Chichen Itza, then Mayapan.
- <strong>1562 CE</strong> Bishop Diego de Landa burns the Maya codices at Mani, destroying almost an entire literature in a single afternoon. He then wrote an account of Maya culture that, with bitter irony, preserved the alphabet key later used to decipher the script.
- 1697 CE Nojpetén, the last independent Maya kingdom, falls to the Spanish.
- 1950s–1980s Decipherment. Yuri Knorozov in the USSR establishes the phonetic principle in 1952; Tatiana Proskouriakoff shows in 1960 that the inscriptions record real dynastic history.
- 1960–1996 CE Guatemalan civil war; the state campaign against Maya communities is found by a UN-backed commission to constitute genocide.
- 21 December 2012 CE The 13th b'ak'tun completes. Contemporary Maya elders spent the preceding years explaining, mostly to no avail, that this was a calendar rollover and not an apocalypse.
Sources
Not yet checked against named sources. This entry is the house's reading; until it is checked, treat each claim as unverified. Correct it, with a source.