Mayan God

The Mayan and Aztec religions are part of Meso-American beliefs. Along with the Zapotecs and Mixtecs, Mayans and Aztecs believed in a vital force that distinguished living matter from non-living, or animate vs. inanimate. Mayans worshiped nature deities, had a priest class, valued astronomy and astrology…

Bowl with images of the Chocolate God Mexico or Guatemala, 400-600, stone Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections Washington, D.C. CACAO AND THE CHOCOLATE GOD Cacao grows in very moist tropical environments, usually under the high canopy of rainforest. Dried, roasted cacao was ground into chocolate…

Mayan Mythology [Go to 9:45] The Underground World of Xibalba [Go to 31:48] Maya mythology refers to the pre-Columbian Maya civilization s extensive polytheistic religious beliefs. These beliefs had most likely been long-established by the time the earliest-known distinctively Maya monuments had been…

This chapter has been published in the book . For ordering information please click here. Humans may have lived in the western hemisphere more than fifty thousand years ago as indicated by legends of ancient Lemuria or Mu and Atlantis. A land bridge from Asia to North America was apparently used by migrating…

The pantheon of the Maya is a vast collection of deities who were worshipped throughout the region which, today, comprises Yucatan, Quintana Roo, Campeche, Tabasco, and Chiapas in Mexico and southward through Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador and Honduras. Not all of the gods were venerated in all of the…

The Mayans developed a complex system of calendars that were dependent on the movements of the sun, moon, stars and planets. The calendars determined the timing of crop planting, the waging of war and the enacting of religious rituals. The cultivation of maize, the most important Mayan crop, was tied…

“ The primary purpose of the ancient Maya was to give a sense of order and control to life, that was their world view. What created their world view was the mere fact that their primary crop was corn and they had to manage the wet and dry seasons which would predict the timing of the corn cycle. In the…

Around 2500 B.C. the Maya started cultivating corn (maize) and abandoned a nomadic way of life to settle in villages surrounded by cornfields. With the domestication of corn and the harnessing of rainwater for irrigation, all the elements were in place to support a growing Maya population. Maya farmers…