Maya Religion

The Maya calendar is often described as uniquely elaborate. In its essentials it was shared across Mesoamerica. What the Maya added was the habit of recording dates in permanent public inscriptions, and a long linear count that few of their neighbours used to the same extent.

Two cycles ran together. The tzolk'in of 260 days combined thirteen numbers with twenty named days. The haab' of 365 days ran eighteen months of twenty days plus a short and inauspicious remainder. Because the two lengths share a factor, any given combination recurs every 52 years, a period conventionally called the Calendar Round. The 260-day count governed naming, prognostication and ritual timing, and it is still kept by day-keepers in the Guatemalan highlands, which makes it one of the longest continuously used calendars anywhere in the world.

For dating monuments the Classic Maya used the Long Count, a tally of days from a base date falling in 3114 BCE on the correlation most scholars accept. It is not cyclical; it simply accumulates. That is why Classic inscriptions can often be placed to the day, and why the dynastic history of the period can be written at all.

The completion of a large Long Count period in December 2012 produced a substantial popular literature claiming the Maya had predicted the end of the world. They had not. Period endings were occasions for ritual and for raising monuments, Classic texts project dates far beyond 2012, and the damaged inscription usually cited in support of the claim says a good deal less than it was reported to say. The episode is a useful illustration of how readily Maya material is made to carry meanings brought to it from outside.

Alongside the calendar ran astronomy of real precision. The Dresden manuscript contains tables tracking the cycle of Venus and the possibility of eclipses, worked out to serve ritual timing rather than pursued for its own sake.

Classic Maya inscriptions are overwhelmingly about rulers, because rulers commissioned them. They record a conception of kingship in which the ruler's own body was the instrument through which the community reached the gods and the dead.

Bloodletting is depicted repeatedly: a king piercing his body, a queen drawing a thorned cord through her tongue, the blood collected on paper and burned so that the smoke rises. Carved panels from Yaxchilan show such a rite with an apparition emerging from the smoke, which the text names. Whether that represents an experience, a claim, or a convention of the art is not something the monuments settle.

Rulers also danced, played the ballgame, impersonated gods in costume, and dedicated buildings at calendrically significant moments. Accession, warfare and the display of captives were recorded in the same register as ritual, and no line separates the political from the religious in these texts.

The landscape itself was structured. Caves and cenotes, the sinkholes that supply water in the northern lowlands, were entrances to the interior of the earth and received offerings, including human remains. Mountains, and the pyramids echoing them, were places of ancestral presence.

The K'iche' narrative known as the Popol Vuh was written in the colonial period but draws on older material. It describes an underworld called Xibalba, the defeat of its lords by a pair of twins, and the making of people from maize after earlier attempts failed. Scenes painted on Classic pottery centuries earlier match parts of it closely enough to indicate a long tradition behind the text, though not that the text preserves it unchanged.

The gods are less tidy than handbooks suggest. Itzamna, K'awiil, the Maize God and the rain god Chaak are securely identified; others are known only by letters assigned by scholars, their names still uncertain. Hunab Ku, frequently listed as the Maya supreme god, appears only in colonial-period sources and is widely thought to reflect missionary influence rather than pre-conquest belief.

The Maya are the only people of the pre-Columbian Americas who left a script recording their language in full, which ought to make their religion the best documented in the hemisphere. Most of the writing is gone.

Four books survive, all Postclassic or later, named for the cities where they ended up: Dresden, Madrid, Paris, and a fourth long dismissed as a forgery and now generally accepted, held in Mexico. They are almanacs and ritual calendars, concerned with prognostication, deities and astronomy. The rest was lost to climate, to conquest, and to deliberate destruction. Diego de Landa, later bishop in Yucatan, burned manuscripts and images at Mani in 1562 in a campaign that also used torture, and afterwards wrote the account of Maya custom and script on which scholars have relied ever since, including the flawed alphabet that eventually helped to crack the writing.

Inscriptions on stone, wood, shell and painted pottery number in the thousands and are contemporary with the events they describe, which makes them the most reliable source available. They are also narrow: they record what rulers wanted recorded. Decipherment came slowly. The calendrical portions were understood by the late nineteenth century, but the language itself was not read until the phonetic approach proposed by Yuri Knorozov in 1952 and the demonstration by Tatiana Proskouriakoff in 1960 that the texts recorded the lives of real people rather than pure astronomy. Readings are still revised, and popular books written before the 1980s often rest on interpretations since abandoned.

Colonial and later sources fill gaps at a cost. The Popol Vuh and the Books of Chilam Balam were written in Maya languages in European script after the conquest, by authors already living under Christianity. Ethnography among living Maya communities records practice that is genuinely old and also five centuries removed from the Classic period. Reading it back onto the monuments is a standing temptation and a standing source of error.