When it comes to Mesoamerican cosmology, the Aztec tend to get the most press—largely because more Aztec history survived the Spanish than was preserved from many other cultures. When it comes to the Maya, the majority of their codices were destroyed, forcing modern scholars to reconstruct their beliefs from depictions on the structures and artifacts that avoided similar destruction. These efforts are aided by the one mythological text that was preserved by a uniquely forward-thinking Spanish monk named Francisco Ximenez: The Popol Wuj (or Popol Vuj), a name that roughly translates to “Book of the Community”. This text includes the Maya creation story, which flows into the tale of their culture heroes, the twins Hunahpu (or Junajpu) and Xbalanque.

If any place could be said to be the modern day domain of the Maya, it’s Guatemala. Of the 17.6 million people who live in Guatemala, nearly half (43.75%) belong to the Maya peoples. Maya culture lives on in the country’s food and customs, while the empire’s history can be traced through a slew of archaeological sites and the artifacts recovered from them.  

In its heyday, the Maya empire also included the western portions of Nicaragua and Honduras, as well as the Yucatán peninsula, which is the region of the former Maya territory best known today thanks to tourist-friendly sites like Chichen Itzá and Tulum. This is a result of accessibility more than relative importance—for a long time, during Guatemala’s civil war and the years following, the country was essentially off-limits to your average tourist, and archeaologists risked armed standoffs to continue their work on the site. 

That’s no longer the case, though, and while it’s still not easy to get to many Guatemalan Maya sites, today it’s a question of infrastructure. El Mirador, for example, is technically open to anyone—there just aren’t any roads going there, so unless you have $600+ for a helicopter ride or the chutzpah for a 5-day hike through the jungle, you’re probably not going to see it first-hand. Others have been buried under modern construction, like most of the remains of Kaminaljuyu, which stood where Guatemala City is today. The few parts of that ancient city that have been excavated are today an active spiritual hub, where modern Maya use the altars their ancestors built for offerings.

As you might guess from this lengthy intro, I’m mildly obsessed with Maya history. I’m also currently in Guatemala, so that portion of their former empire is front and center in my mind. For anyone else who’s Maya-curious, here are some of the basic details of their myths and cosmology.

The Maya universe

Like many cultures, the Maya saw the universe as being made up of three major parts—and, also similar to other cultures, they envisioned the whole thing as a tree. A ceiba tree specifically, in the case of the Maya, which is one of the largest trees in the world, growing up to 230 feet tall (and, not coincidentally, the national tree of Guatemala). 

The upper branches of the ceiba tree were seen to represent the sky, ruled over by the 13 lords of the celestial realm, known collectively as Oxlahuntiku. The roots of the tree represented the underworld which was envisioned as having 9 levels, each overseen by one of the 9 lords of the night (collectively the Bolontiku).

In between was the mortal realm. This is where the Earth could be found, depicted as either a turtle or a caiman floating in the primordial sea. The living world was divided into 4 areas based on the cardinal directions. A smaller ceiba tree marked each of these cardinal points, collectively referred to as yaxche’. 

Humans were not permitted entry into the celestial realm, but there was some permeability between the living world and the underworld (Xibalbá for the Quiche, Metnal for the Yucatec), where the souls of the ancestors went after death. Waterways and caves were seen as the main entry points to Xibalbá. These were viewed as transitional spaces, existing in both the living world and the underworld. Of particular spiritual importance were cenotes, sinkholes filled with water that are common throughout the Maya territory. Cenotes were also a more common water source for many Maya settlements than lakes and rivers, which is likely the origin of the association between water and the underworld.

The creation myth

The Maya credited their gods with creating humans. Exactly how many gods were involved depends on the culture, and ranged from 2 to 13, but the gist of the process was the same across myths and basically goes like this: 

In the beginning there were only the gods, and they were feeling a bit lonely and unappreciated. They decided to create other life that could speak their names and give them their due honor. To start off, they created animals like the jaguar, snake, crocodile, and several birds. Unfortunately, none of these creatures could talk, which made it hard for them to pay the gods proper tribute.

So the gods sent the animals to live in the jungle and started on plan B. Their first attempt at humans was to make them out of mud. That didn’t work so well—these people could barely move, still couldn’t speak, and would dissolve into piles of muck as soon as they got wet. It was no good, the gods decided, so they tried again.

The second time, the gods made humans out of wood. This worked a bit better—they could walk and talk, and stayed intact even when it rained. They weren’t very smart, though. Their memories were terrible and they kept forgetting to pay their creators proper tribute. Plus they were kind of dumb and couldn’t properly consult the calendar. Frustrated, the gods sent a flood to wipe them out. A few of the wooden people clung to trees and survived, becoming monkeys.

After the flood, the god Xumucane stepped up with their best plan yet. She decided to make people out of maize. First, she ground up some white and yellow corn, making masa that she formed into human figures. After that, she washed her hands and saved the water to make a sacred broth. This broth is what gave live to her creations, who had water as their blood and maize as their flesh.

The hero twins

Hero twins are a recurring feature of world mythologies, particularly prevalent in the indigenous cultures of the Americas though also present elsewhere, like in the Norse myths from northern Europe. A brief summary of the Maya version of the tale goes like this: 

Hun Hunahpu, a corn god (probably), and his brother Vucub Hunahpu were invited to the underworld to play pok-ta-pok against the Lords of Death. Why they agreed to such an obviously bad idea isn’t clear, but they were both skilled ballplayers so maybe they thought they had a shot. Predictably, they were defeated and killed, after which Hun Hunahpu’s head was turned into a calabash and hung from a trophy tree. 

Xquic, a daughter of one of the lords of Xibalba, spoke with Hun Hunahpu’s severed head. It spit on her hand and she got pregnant, because the Maya gods were apparently as wishy-washy on how children work as the Greeks’ (at least it’s slightly less gross than “pregnancy by golden shower”—looking at you, Zeus). 

The Hero Twins have several adventures, but the main one that gets highlighted is their journey to the underworld. Like their father, Hunahpu and Xbalanque were skilled at pok-ta-pok and played on the same court as Hun Hunahpu. The noise disturbed the lords of Xibalbá, who summoned the twins to come play in their court. The twins were a bit smarter about the journey than their dad, sending a mosquito ahead of them to uncover the identities of the Xibalbá lords, bypassing several of the tests their father and uncle had endured. 

Unfortunately, this just pissed off the underworld lords, who sent the Hero Twins to the Dark House where they were instructed to keep a torch and two cigars lit all night. Recognizing this as impossible, they put macaw feathers on the torch and fireflies on the cigars to make them seem like they were lit. Next they were sent to the Razor House, filled with knives that moved on their own. The twins spoke to the knives, promising them the flesh of all future animals, and the knives stopped.

More trials followed and the twins outwitted the dark lords in each: using willpower to defeat the Cold House, escaping the Jaguar House by feeding the animals bones, and sprinting through the Fire House to emerge merely singed. When they came to the Bat House, the twins hid inside their blowguns from the deadly animals—until Hunahpu peeked out to see if it was daylight yet, at which point he was decapitated by killer bats. 

Xbalanque wasn’t ready to give up, though. He summoned the animals, having a coatimundi bring a squash that he pretended was Hunahpu’s head (the lords of Xibalbá were vicious, but apparently not too bright). Once the game started, using Hunahpu’s head as a ball, Xbalanque had rabbits jump around to distract the dark lords. When his brother’s head went off the court, the lords chased the rabbits instead, letting Xbalanque retrieve the head and swap the squash in for the ball. They continued the game until the squash burst open, dealing the dark lords a humiliating defeat.

Lords of the underworld don’t admit defeat that easily, of course. They still tried to destroy the Hero Twins, summoning them to a giant oven. The twins let themselves be burned to ash, which was thrown into a river. What the Xibalbá lords didn’t realize was this was all part of their plan. In the water, the ashes regenerated into catfish, eventually transforming back into young boys, who passed unrecognized among the lords of Xibalbá. They became entertainers, performing various miracles, including a neat trick where Xbalanque cut up Hunahpu then reanimated him. 

The lords of Xibalbá were intrigued and called these unknown miracle brothers to perform for them. The twins did the cutting-up part of the trick on the two highest lords, but refused to do the reincarnation part. They then revealed themselves as Hunahpu and Xbalanque, demanding that the lords confess to killing their father and uncle. In punishment, Xibalbá would no longer receive offerings from the people of Earth. The twins got a reward, too: they retrieved the remains of their father, taking it with them back up to the surface then continuing upwards to the sky, where Hunahpu turned into the sun, and Xbalanque into the moon.

Maya gods

It’s difficult to determine exactly how many gods were in the Maya pantheon. Maya culture was not monolithic, and different regions likely depicted their gods in different ways or referred to them by different names. The gods may also have taken on different guises for specific situations, similar to the various incarnations of deities in Hindu or Greek myths. That’s why, depending on what source you look it, it might cite the number of Maya gods as being anywhere from 12 to 250. 

In short: nobody’s got a damn clue how many distinct gods there were. But quite a few of them are recorded, or at least solidly speculated. I won’t go into the full list here because—like I said above—that could be a lot. But here are a few of my favorites: 

• Acan – The god of intoxication, associated with balché (a mead-like drink made of bark and honey). A boisterous god who often makes a fool of himself when drunk, his name means something akin to “belch”
• Acat – The god of tattooing, a sacred art among the Maya that was thought to imbue them with the essence of the gods
• Ah-Ciliz – Servant of the sun who sometimes also eats him, causing solar eclipses
• Ah-Puch – The god of the 9th level of the underworld. He’s a two-faced kind of god, overseeing death, disaster, and darkness, but also child birth and regeneration. He can be shown as a corpse with an owl’s head or a rotting body topped by a skeletal face, and was nicknamed “The Flatulent One” (I’m not sure why and honestly don’t care)
• Bacab – an Atlas-like set of gods who stand at the four corners of the world holding up the sky. They also give weather forecasts and are often shown as old men wearing turtles on their backs. They also have other aspects, like Backlum Chaam, the god of male sexuality, who’s shown with a very large erect penis (natch)
• Bolon Tz’akab – Lighning god and patron of harvests and seeds. What’s most fun about him is his appearance: he has a mirror on his forehead with an ax blade sticking out of it, and has a snake for a leg
• Chaac – The god of storms and rain who taught people how to farm. Rain is said to be his tears. He’s reptilian with fangs, a droopy snout, tendrils curling from his mouth, and permanently knotted hair. He also carries a lightning ax and wears shells over his ears (the height of fashion in the Maya pantheon)
• Chaac Uyab Xoc – Fish god and patron deity of fisherman, who is considered benevolent despite eating people who fall overboard from boats
• Chin – God/goddess (goes both ways) of homosexual relationships, who was said to have introduced homosexuality to Maya nobles. They were also a deity of maize and magic, associated with the moon
• Cizin – God of earthquakes and one of the gods who lived in Xibalbá, often shown as a dancing skeleton smoking a cigarette wearing a collar of human eyes dangling from their nerve endings. Another one with a fun nickname, The Stinking One, because he had a foul odor. He’s also the one who keeps the souls of evildoers and torments them after death
• Gukumtz – A feathered snake deity closely related to Kulkulkan who has a lot in common with the Aztec Quetzlcoatl (there was a lot of interaction between the cultures, so there may have been mutual influence involved here). A creator figure who taught humans basically everything about civilization. He came out of the sea, gave people wisdom, ruled for a while, then dipped, promising to come back some day
• Hunraqan – A god of weather, wind, storms, and fire, one of a triad known as the Heart of the Sky. He thought the earth into being, helped make humans, and was the one who sent the flood to wipe out the wood people. He’s also the one who gave people fire and has one human leg and one leg that’s a snake (apparently a theme among the Maya pantheon)
• Ixchel – Jaguar goddess responsible for medicine, midwifery, and weaving. A moon goddess, usually shown as an old woman with snakes for hair wearing a skirt made of crossbones
• Ixtab – Goddess of suicide, depicted dangling from the sky with her neck in a noose. She’s responsible for gathering up suicide victims and taking them to heaven. It’s worth noting that suicide was considered an honorable death in many situations in May culture, and was considered to guarantee instant passage to paradise (bypassing a stop in Xibalbá)
• Izama – Celestial lord who invented books and writing, teaching people things like medicine, art, sculpture, and literacy. Also the one who created the calendar and taught humans to cultivate cacao and maize. He can resurrect the dead, too, because why not. Usually shown as an old man without teeth
• Kam – One of many death gods, specifically death by violent means like decapitation or stabbing. He’s shown as a shadowy figure with eyes covered by a black stripe
• Nohoch Ich – God of the planet Venus, called the Big Eye in Space. Mostly associated with divining, telling the rulers the best time to declare war. Notable here is the fact that he’s associated with both the Morning Star and Evening Star, showing the Maya understood these were the same celestial body (many ancient cultures didn’t)
• Wayeb – God of the Five Unlucky Days, “blank” days added at the end of each year to make their calendar fit. These days were seen as times of uncertainty and inauspicious events. He’s portrayed as a drunk sex fiend who lives in a snail shell
• Xaman Ek – A god of travelers and merchants, shown with the head of a black monkey. Travelers often left offerings to him on the side of the road, especially copal incense, which he was thought to be fond of

 

See similar posts: 

#Mythology #Religion #Maya