Maya religion

The traditional Maya religion of Guatemala, Belize, western Honduras, and the Tabasco, Chiapas, and Yucatán regions of Mexico is a southeastern variant of Mesoamerican religion. As is the case with many other contemporary Mesoamerican religions, it results from centuries of symbiosis with Roman Catholicism. When its pre-Spanish antecedents are taken into account, however, traditional Maya religion already exists for more than two millennia as a recognizably distinct phenomenon. Before the advent of Christianity, it was spread over many indigenous kingdoms, all with their own local traditions. Today, it coexists and interacts with pan-Mayan syncretism, the 're-invention of tradition' by the Pan-Maya movement, and Christianity in its various denominations.

The most important source on traditional Maya religion are the Mayas themselves: the incumbents of positions within the religious hierarchy, diviners, and tellers of tales, and more generally all those persons who shared their knowledge with outsiders (such as anthropologists) in the past and continue to do this until today.

What is known of pre-Spanish Maya religion stems from heterogeneous sources (the primary ones being of Maya origin):

Traditional Maya religion, though also representing a belief system, is often referred to as costumbre, the 'custom' or habitual religious practice, in contradistinction to orthodox Roman Catholic ritual. To a large extent, Maya religion is indeed a complex of ritual practices; and it is, therefore, fitting that the indigenous Yucatec village priest is simply called jmen ("practitioner"). Among the main concepts relating to Maya ritual are the following ones.

The Maya landscape is a ritual topography, with landmarks such as mountains, wells and caves being assigned to specific ancestors and deities (see also Maya cave sites). Thus, the Tzotzil town of Zinacantan is surrounded by seven 'bathing places' of mountain-dwelling ancestors, with one of these sacred waterholes serving as the residence of the ancestors' 'nursemaids and laundresses'. As in the pre-Hispanic past, an important part of ritual takes place in or near such landmarks, in Yucatán also around karstic sinkholes (cenotes).

Ritual was governed not only by the geographical lay-out of shrines and temples, but also by the projection of calendrical models onto the landscape. In contemporary Quichean Momostenango, for example, specific combinations of day-names and numbers are ascribed to specialized shrines in the mountains, signalling the appropriate times for their ritual use. In the northwestern Maya highlands, the four days, or 'Day Lords', that can start a year are assigned to four mountains. In early-colonial Yucatán, the thirteen katun periods and their deities, mapped onto a landscape conceived as a 'wheel', are said to be successively 'established' in specific towns.

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