Table of Contents
The Maya, like other peoples of Mesoamerica, saw the world as ruled by powerful gods. Those gods had to be kept content with offerings and ritual.
Ancestor worship stood at the center of their religion. Dead ancestors were thought to speak for the living when they dealt with the gods.
Shamans were the first to stand between people and the supernatural.
Oracular priests, called chilan, took hallucinogens during ritual. Their visions were likely helped by eating water lilies, which cause hallucinations in high doses.
Over time, the ruling class shaped this world view into religious cults. Those cults gave the rulers a sacred right to power.
In the Maya view the cosmos had a strict order: thirteen levels in the heavens, nine in the underworld, and the human world between them.
Every level had four cardinal directions, and each direction had a colour. North was white, east red, south yellow and west black. The major gods had aspects tied to these directions and colours.
The supernatural touched every part of Maya life. It mattered in cooking and other daily work, in trade and politics, and in the lives of the elite. The gods ruled both the seen and the unseen world.
The priesthood was closed to outsiders. Its priests wrote ever more complex ritual knowledge into hieroglyphic books: astronomical observations, calendar cycles, history and myth.
Almost all of those books were later destroyed. Wikipedia’s article on Diego de Landa says that at the ceremony in Maní, a disputed number of codices (27 books, by Landa’s own count) and about 5,000 cult images were burned. Only three pre-Columbian Maya books and fragments of a fourth survive; one is the Madrid Codex.
Landa burned the Maya books at Maní in 1562.
On 12 July 1562, Diego de Landa had burned all the books and images of the Maya gods, which he was able to seize, at an inquisitorial court of law, an “autodafé,” in Mani, south of Merida.
Quoted on this page; source not yet identified
The Paleo-Indian and Archaic periods
Joyce Marcus says the earliest period is known from only a few sites.
The Paleoindian period in the Maya region (c. 10,000–8000 B.C.) continues to be known from just a handful of sites. Data on the Archaic period (8000–2000 B.C.) are accumulating, however, particularly in Belize…
Joyce Marcus, "Recent Advances in Maya Archaeology", Journal of Archaeological Research 11 (2), 2003, p. 74, short excerpt for review and study
In Belize, seven new Preceramic sites have been reported (Rosenswig and Masson, 2001).
In 2020 scientists found the largest known ancient Maya ceremonial structure, at Aguada Fénix in Tabasco, Mexico. It is a platform about (0.87 miles) long, (1,312 feet) wide and (32.8 to 49.2 feet) high. Radiocarbon dating of charcoal samples from the platform showed it was built between 1000 and 800 B.C., which also makes it the oldest known ancient Maya ceremonial structure.
The rapid decline of classic Maya civilization
Classic Maya civilization occupied much of present-day Mexico and Central America between 300 and 1000 AD. Its rapid decline has long puzzled archaeologists. No clear explanation has emerged for why a society known for its advanced calendar and its pyramids seemed to collapse between 800 and 1000 AD.
In 2012 a team led by Douglas Kennett of Pennsylvania State University studied a 2,000-year-old stalagmite from a cave in southern Belize, which records rainfall over the centuries.
Kennett said the picture was still incomplete.
We’re talking about a complex story, and we don’t have all the details nailed at this point,
Douglas Kennett, quoted by Helen Shen, "Drought hastened Maya decline", Nature news, 2012, short excerpt for review and study
Kennett proposes that unusually high rainfall led to a population boom between 440 and 660 AD. The stalagmite also showed long dry conditions between 660 and 1000 AD. That matches a time of political instability, seen in a fast rise in dated stone monuments put up by different rulers.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11780
Popol Vuh
In the early colonial period, an unknown nobleman of the Kʼicheʼ Maya wrote down the Popol Vuh in the Latin script.
The Popol Vuh tells the myth of how the world was created, the adventures of the Hero Twins, and the history of the Kʼicheʼ kingdom in the Postclassic period.
The deities in the Popol Vuh include Hun Hunahpu, whom some see as the Kʼicheʼ maize god, and a group of gods led by the Kʼicheʼ patron Tohil. The other two gods of this trio are the moon goddess Awilix and the mountain god Jacawitz.
Maya architecture and sculpture
There are hundreds of Maya sites across five countries: Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. Some are famous for their architecture and sculpture. Notable sites include Chichen Itza, Palenque, Uxmal and Yaxchilan in Mexico, Tikal in Guatemala and Copán in Honduras. Other important sites, though hard to reach, are Calakmul and El Mirador.
In the Puuc region, after Uxmal, important sites include Kabah, Labna and Sayil.
Toward the east of the Yucatán Peninsula are Coba and the smaller site of Tulum.
In the Río Bec area at the base of the peninsula, sites such as Becan, Chicanná, Kohunlich and Xpuhil stand out.
In Chiapas, besides Palenque and Yaxchilan, Bonampak and Toniná are important.
In the Guatemalan Highlands, notable sites include Iximche, Kaminaljuyu, Mixco Viejo and Qʼumarkaj (Utatlán).
In the northern Petén lowlands of Guatemala there are several sites, and Tikal is the most famous.
Other Petén sites include Dos Pilas, Seibal and Uaxactún.
In Belize, important Maya sites include Altun Ha, Caracol and Xunantunich.
The Maya went underground
Some claim that since ground-penetrating radar was declassified many years ago, striking data have come out about complex, maze-like underground systems in many parts of the world (unchecked; no source found). In Guatemala, they say, tunnels have been mapped under the Maya pyramid complex at Tikal, running a full (497 miles) to the other side of the country. Investigators are said to have remarked that this showed how half a million Maya escaped the destruction of their culture. (See also underground cities.)
Sources
Much of the religion section follows Robert Sharer and Loa Traxler, The Ancient Maya (2006), pages 91 to 93, as cited on Wikipedia’s “Maya civilization” page.
