Did the Mayans Practice Human Sacrifice?

[Valerie]

The short answer is, "yes."  However, there is no evidence for the large scale human sacrifice as depicted in Apocalypto. The Aztecs were far more well known for it.

Maya Civilization

The Maya cosmos comprised a wide range of diverse and varied supernatural beings or deities. The chief god, Hunab Ku, the creator of the world, was considered too far above men to figure in worship. He was more important in his manifestation as Itzamna, a sky deity considered lord of the heavens and lord of day and night who brought rain and patronized writing and medicine. He was worshiped especially by the priests, and he appears to have been the patron deity of the royal lineages. Closer to the common people were Yum Kaax, the maize deity, and the four Chacs, or rain gods, each associated with a cardinal direction and with its own special color. Women worshiped Ix Chel, a rainbow deity associated with healing, childbirth, and weaving. All the Maya revered Ixtab, goddess of suicide, and thought that suicides went to a special heaven. The Maya also recognized the gods who controlled each day, month, and year. See also Pre-Columbian Religions.

The Maya performed many rituals and ceremonies to communicate with their deities. At stated intervals, such as the Maya New Year in July, or in emergencies—such as famine, epidemics, or a great drought—the people gathered in ritual plazas to honor the gods. They hung feathered banners in doorways all about the plaza. Groups of men or women in elaborate feathered robes and headdresses, with bells on their hands and feet, danced in the plaza to the music of drums, whistles, rattles, flutes, and wood trumpets. Worshipers took ritual steam baths and drank intoxicating balche. Participants often ingested other hallucinogenic drugs, such as mushrooms, and they smoked a very strong form of tobacco with hallucinogenic effects. Young Maya nobles played a sacred ball game on specially constructed courts. Without using their hands, players tried to knock a rubber ball through one of the vertical stone rings built into the walls of the court. On special occasions players who lost the game would be sacrificed to the gods.

Many ceremonies focused on sacrifices to gain the favor of the gods. The sacrifices took place on the great stone pyramids that rose above the plazas, with stairs leading to a temple and altar on top. The temple, a resting place for the god, was deeply carved or painted with designs and figures and was topped with a carved vertical slab of stone called a roof comb. Some had distinctive corbeled arches, in which each stone extended beyond the one beneath it until the two sides of the arch were joined by a single keystone at the top. Before the altar, smoke rose from copal incense burning in pottery vessels.

Worshipers sometimes gave the gods simple offerings of corn, fruit, game, or blood, which a worshiper obtained by piercing his own lips, tongue, or genitals. For major favors they offered the gods human sacrifice, usually children, slaves, or prisoners of war. A victim was painted blue and then ceremonially killed on top of the pyramid, either by being shot full of arrows or by having his arms and legs held while a priest cut open his chest with a sacrificial flint knife and tore out his heart as an offering. Captured rulers were sometimes ritually sacrificed by decapitating them with an axe.

http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/refpages/RefArticle.aspx?refid=761576077&pn=2

[Valerie]

Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Mel Gibson's Apocalypto

How accurate is the cinematic fantasy, Apocalypto, a film by Mel Gibson that presents his version of the end of Mayan civilization? Scholars on the Maya and other Mesoamerican civilizations are not holding their breath. Despite the Hollywood movie’s dazzling look, the film contains numerous factual errors. If you want an accurate examination of Mayan civilization, there are many absorbing scholarly books on the topic written by experts, but if you don’t care about facts and will settle for an action adventure set in an exotic location - Apocalypto is for you.



[ A scene from Mel Gibson's cinematic fantasy, Apocalypto. ]

Apocalypto presents the viewer with Gibson’s take on the fall of Mayan civilization, and he attributes this collapse to corrupt rulers desperate to hold on to power by any means. According to Gibson, Mayan elites used religion as a means to control and manipulate the people, and the film focuses on the director’s view that the practice of ritual human sacrifice - which the movie depicts as having been performed on a massive scale, was one of the primary reasons for the downfall of the Maya. That is what raises the eyebrows of archaeologists and scholars - since there is absolutely no evidence that the Maya practiced human sacrifice on a massive scale. Gibson’s contention reveals his religious bias, he sees the Maya as victims of a controlling religious cult - but sees his own religious dogma as "the one true faith." The film’s official website even uses the tagline, "When the end comes, not everyone is ready to go", which can also be construed as a clear reference to the end times and one’s acceptance of the Christian savior.

It is well understood by the scientific community that the Maya did conduct rituals involving blood as a supplication to their gods. In prayer, Mayan priests and political elites pierced their earlobes, tongues, lips and even genitals, offering the drawn blood to favored deities. Everyday worship also involved making prayers to agricultural gods and goddess, providing deities with offerings of food, flowers, and other forms of tribute. During special observances or events, individuals were sacrificed by priests who cut out the hearts of the victims - but this practice was limited and not conducted to the magnitude depicted in Gibson’s film. While Archaeologists agree that warfare played a major role in the life of Mayan Kingdoms, they also agree that Mayan religious practice played no significant role in the collapse of their civilization. Gibson’s assertion to the contrary is pure conjecture on his part - and further evidence of his own zealous religious beliefs.

[Valerie]

[ Apocalypto is pure conjecture. An action adventure/chase film set in an "exotic" past. ]

Jewish critics of Gibson's previous film, The Passion of the Christ, were fearful that movie would reinforce anti-Semitism, with some making the charge that the film itself was an exercise in Jew-bashing. Those accusations took on new life when an inebriated Gibson let loose a flurry of anti-Semitic diatribes against L.A. County Deputies during his arrest for drunk driving in July, 2006. "F**king Jews. The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world", was among the vitriol Gibson shouted at his arresting officers, and while Gibson apologized for his outlandish behavior - it’s still understandable why many Jewish people and their friends will not be flocking to see Apocalypto.



[ Apocalypto - full of visual details but short on historical accuracy. ]

The Walt Disney Co. is the distributor for Apocalypto, and they are investing big money into reshaping Gibson’s public image from that of an anti-Semite loudmouth to that of a sensitive master film director. An aggressive promotional campaign for the movie began Thanksgiving evening, when Gibson appeared on the Disney owned ABC network with Diane Sawyer in an hour long special on the film. Sawyer abandoned the role of journalist to become one of Disney’s marketers - politely asking Gibson softball questions that would allow him to promote his film. At one point Gibson said the local amateur Mexican actors and stand-ins he worked with were ashamed to speak Mayan Yucatec (the film is being shot in Veracruz, Mexico), but then arrogantly proclaimed that he had "made the language cool again" - a supposed fact that inordinately pleased him. With an equally bigheaded attitude, Gibson explained that he taught the actors, many of them descendents of the ancient Maya - how to dance like their ancestors. Where Gibson was schooled in the art of ancient Maya dance and how he became an expert in the field remains a mystery.

Diane Sawyer’s co-host was John Quinones, who reported from the Maya heartland of Guatemala in a series of remarkably uninformative and misleading "special reports." In one such commentary focusing on the squalor and poverty suffered by large numbers of Maya in Guatemala, Quinones actually said their misery was due to the "excesses of their ancestors." That utterly despicable remark fits the imperialist pattern of blaming the oppressed for their own misery. Quinones’ reports did not mention the Spanish invader’s murder and plunder of the indigenous peoples that truly did take place on a massive scale, nor did it mention the indigenous being ravaged by small pox, venereal diseases, and other plagues introduced by the Spanish conquerors - afflictions that took the lives of hundreds of thousands. The entire legacy of a brutal colonial rule was ignored. In passing, Quinones did mention that in the 1980’s over 200,000 Maya were killed by the Guatemalan army during the nation’s bloody counterinsurgency war, but he didn’t mention the U.S. arming, financing and training of the Guatemalan army. At any rate, his mention of the massive number of deaths that occurred during the genocidal war of the 1980’s was simply a footnote, as if it had little significance to the Maya and their way of life.

[Valerie]

[ The Maya did not practice ritual human sacrifice on a massive scale as depicted in Apocalypto. ]

The Walt Disney Co. has intentionally aimed Apocalypto at Latinos, hiring the oldest Latino marketing agency in the entertainment industry, The Arenas Group, to help popularize and sell the movie. The Beverly Hills-based Arenas arranged screenings of the film to the L.A. Latin Business Association, which afterwards conferred their "Visionary Award" to Gibson. Disney spokesman Dennis Rice said: "We think this movie plays to a wide audience and that there's going to be a tremendous amount of interest generated from the Latino community, especially the Mexican community, because this is a story about their ancestors." The elite sector of Latino politicians and businessmen in Los Angeles have been invited to advance screenings, including L.A.’s Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. The omnipresent Chicano actor, Edward James Olmos, attended a screening, and gave the film a good review, but he made an interesting remark in doing so. Olmos said, "Basically, if you watch Elia Kazan's movies, I could surely watch Mel Gibson's movie. I think more damage was done understanding what Elia Kazan did than what Mel Gibson did. That's his problem and he has to live with it."

Olmos was of course referring to director Elia Kazan having co-operated with the McCarthy era witch hunts of the 50’s, the repressive nationwide anti-communist campaign that also destroyed the careers of hundreds of Hollywood professionals. Kazan testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), giving them the names of fellow studio professionals who were supposedly communists or left-leaning sympathizers. To this day the name of Kazan can’t be brought up without getting into a discussion over his being a genius or a rat fink informant. You can view Kazan’s masterwork, On The Waterfront, as a morality tale about a common working man overcoming the corruption of big crime bosses, or as an autobiographical self-justification for Kazan’s own odious behavior before HUAC. That Olmos would compare Kazan to Gibson is appropriate, and while Olmos can separate the personal behavior of the two from their artistic accomplishments - many others cannot.

http://www.xispas.com/blog/2006/11/mel-gibsons-apocalypto.html

[Valerie]

'Apocalypto' a pack of inaccuracies

Maya experts say Gibson's violent film wrong historically

By Mark McGuire
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

December 12, 2006

Mel Gibson's historical drama “Apocalypto” certainly has a veneer of authenticity. If you have to scramble to remember your fifth-grade lessons on Maya culture, you'd certainly believe you're watching an accurate, detail-rich depiction of Mesoamerican life.



Advertisement“A lot of people will think this is how it was,” said Walter Little, an anthropologist and expert on Maya language and culture at the State University of New York at Albany. “Unfortunately.”
Little and two other Mesoamerican scholars at the Albany campus recently screened the big-budget, subtitled epic, which opened Friday and was last weekend's No. 1 movie, grossing $14.2 million.

All three said they were disappointed by the plot and taken aback by the graphic violence, which to these eyes suggested “Braveheart” as directed by Quentin Tarantino in a particularly vile mood.

But even if they could sponge away the blood, these experts found the devil – or at least a set of thumbs-down reviews – in the details.

“This was not a film about the Mayas,” said Robert Carmack, a retired anthropology professor from SUNY Albany's lauded Mesoamerican program. “It's a big mistake – almost a tragedy – that they present this as a Maya film.”

In any genre film, experts and geeks alike will pore over the minutiae. In their estimation, a movie rises or falls on the little things.

Seafaring experts debate the minor gaffes of “Titanic,” while experts on ancient Rome talk about minor historical imperfections in “Gladiator.”

Most moviegoers won't catch these mistakes or willful fact-doctorings. Does it matter to the average ticket holder that Gibson apparently fudged some facts? Not really, especially if you're just looking for a period adventure featuring, by my unofficial count, 12 wildly different modes of killing.

There are no guns, but lots of lethal weapons. To those in the know, however, the flaws stick out like Roseanne Barr in a Broadway musical.

Take the film's depiction of a major Maya city that serves as the setting for much of the film's third act. Many of the architectural details are correct, but they're cobbled together from different locations (including ancient cities in Guatemala and the Yucatan) and different eras, the experts said.

So what, you say? Try picturing 16th-century explorer Giovanni da Verrazano navigating the east coast of the New World, and then ending his journey by traversing the New York City suspension bridge that bears his name.

You get the idea.

The experts said they thought, during much of the movie, it was set sometime between A.D. 300 and 900 – until a closing scene places it closer to the early 1500s.

“It was a postmodern collage,” Little said. “It was a hodgepodge.”

Carmack grew more and more steamed in his post-screening analysis. In particular, he seethed over the portrayals of human sacrifices and other spectacles, which he said more closely resembled practices used by the Aztecs or even the ancient Romans.

The sadism that permeates the movie was simply not part of the culture, the experts said. Yes, the Mayas practiced human sacrifice, but in ways that were highly ritualized and usually involved a single victim. Not pretty, to be sure, but a far cry from the slaughterhouse of mass sacrifice depicted in “Apocalypto” – a virtual conga line of the soon-to-be headless, followed by desecration of their bodies.

The body count was high, and the treatment of the dead cavalier, all three anthropologists said.

The Mayas, an agricultural society, also would not have had an open field of rotting corpses situated near their crops.

Modern-day descendants of the Mayas “would be totally disgusted by this film,” Carmack said. “It was all invented. The ritual was a disgusting perversion of human sacrifices among the Mayas.”

Edgar Martin del Campo, a newly arrived faculty member who begins teaching at SUNY Albany in January, talked about religious glitches and other flaws. Examples: Mayas would not have been awed by an eclipse as they were in the film – they were, in fact, early astronomers. Villagers would not have been dumbstruck by a city; most lived in or around metropolises. The costumes were contrived.

Give the film this, the scholars said: Gibson was brave enough to make the movie in the Yucatec language. But just as the use of Yucatec isn't exactly a guarantee of boffo box office, the historical inaccuracies of Gibson's latest will zoom right by the average viewer. The gore will not.

Gibson's last subtitled period piece, 2004's “The Passion of the Christ,” was an international hit. Even so, that graphic drama drew criticism similar to that already levied against “Apocalypto,” angering many scholars and Jewish leaders for its depiction of Christ's final hours.

“The Passion” was a cultural phenomenon that sparked mainstream debate over the Gospels and the history of anti-Semitism, among other topics. It's doubtful the history behind “Apocalypto” will prompt widespread research by moviegoers – most of whom will be in search of nothing more than two hours of action. Regardless, the experts will be howling. It will be up to you whether to listen.

“The problem is when you misrepresent (a subject to) somebody, they don't always seek out the correct version of things,” Little said. “They're going to accept that as reality. So why would they go search out what it really is?”

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20061212/news_1c12mel.html