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Mayan Religion

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Valerie
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« on: February 22, 2008, 01:26:26 pm »


Mayan Religion

For the Maya, Life was a burden, a kind of suffering that is measured by time. Humans suffer because the gods require it for their sustenance. In an interesting twist on the theme of Gilgamesh, in which we can seen the fatalism of the Mesopotamian people, who constructed a civilization, and struggled to keep it alive and to achieve, in their minds, despite the gods, who laughed at human
mortality and suffering, and in competition with nature, the Maya saw the suffering of humans as the mede of the gods. Human suffering - the unique ability of humans to be self-aware, and aware of the universe and nature, and the fundamental unfairness of life - that uniquely human energy, was the basis of eternity itself. This makes humans a crucial part of nature. It also means that humans' ability to be aware of nature and to use time makes them nature's time keepers and chroniclers. So rather than a fundamental unimportance of humans to any but themselves as the cause of struggle against nature, the Maya saw themselves as fundamentally important - in fact the keystone of the natural order. They were nature's consciousness, without which nothing would have meaning. It was thus their burden to give it meaning, every day, for the entire Long Count. In a metaphorical sense, the Maya believed that if a tree falls in the forest and no human is present to hear it, it does not make a sound - which would deny the death of that tree any meaning at all in the grand scheme of the universe. A complete tragedy.

Also, of course, this meant that the gods' need for suffering was the reason for human sacrifice. Much of Mayan warfare was ritualistic, and carried out with non-lethal weapons, with the chief aim of obtaining victims, both royal and otherwise, for sacrifice and ritual torture. Even rulers regularly tortured and mutilated themselves in grand ceremonies, believing that the visions produced by the
pain and the drugs that accompanied it, combined with the pleasure of the gods at the shedding of royal blood, would permit them to have visions that would tell the future.

It should come as no surprise that Mayan Religion permeated everyday life. The calendar was constructed in such a way that every day of the year involved rituals to two gods of the day, who varied over the course of the year, and whose needs were difficult to discern. The chief activity of every day then involved perfoming, or declining to perform, the activities that concerned these gods. Mayan laws stemmed from religious ideology; taxes were called "religious offerings"; even prices for items for sale at market reflected, as in our own society, their utility and scarcity, but were also reflective of relative religious importance. This of course meant prices could vary daily based on the need for them in a religious sense, to properly placate the gods of the day.

Since the Maya perceived one role of humans to be nature's time keepers, they developed sophisticated calendars. The ritual calendar, as mentioned in your textbook, was based on 13 twenty-day months. The regular calendar was a 365-day system. These two rotated together, and the the gods associated with one were matched with the gods associated with the other on a daily basis, providing the explanation, and the ritual source, of the daily difficulties and occurrences experienced by Maya people.

Interestingly, these calendars were improved versions of calendars that had existed in Mesoamerica since the Olmec civilization. They were all created after naked-eye observation of the skies, and were accurate to a point far beyond contemporary European, Chinese, or Muslim calendars.

To take care of their responsibility as time keepers for nature, the Maya also developed a calendar they called The Long Count. This was also a very accurate calendar that kept track of the events of civilization, nature, and the heavens in a multi-million-year cycle. The Long Count could be used to accurately predict such events as eclipses, solstices, periodic comets, and other large-cycle natural events.

In order to create such sophisticated calendars, among other things, the Maya developed a sophisticated mathematics based on the number 20. Their writing system, the first developed in Mesoamerica, was hardly less comples, and its decipherment was extremely difficult. However, that writing has recently been translated so we can read much of Mayan history - though all except three of the pre-columbian books were destroyed by Catholic missionaries from Europe, so the material available for reading is quite limited, both in scope and in purpose.

It appears that the Mayan civilization fell to a low point well before the Europeans arrived, however, largely because of overpopulation and over utilization of natural resources.

http://www.hcc.hawaii.edu/~patrick/151/151%20Lectures/early_american_civilization.htm
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Neart inár lámha, fírinne ar ár dteanga, glaine inár gcroí
"Strength in our arms, truth on our tongue, clarity in our heart"

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