Maya Religion

Religion had already existed for more than two millennia as a recognizably distinct phenomenon within the Maya culture. This religion had spread over to many other indigenous cultures throughout Mesoamerica. Each distinct culture with their own variations in local traditions and practices.

Today there is movement of Maya descendants that seek to reinvent the old traditions by merging them with new traditions. The modern Maya religion of today coexists and interacts with various other belief systems and religions, including those of Christianity and its various denominations.

Traditional Maya religion had become more of a generalized belief system that is often referred to locally as “costumbre,” which means 'customary.' The “costumbre”

are referred to as the customary local religious practices, in contrast to the established Orthodox Roman Catholic ritual that was brought by the Spanish.
To a large extent, the modern Maya religion is a complexity of ritual practices from various beliefs that are both new and old. The practitioners of the modern Maya religion in the indigenous Yucatec villages are usually priests who are referred to as “jmen,” which means in their language, 'practitioner.'
The core of Maya religious practice, both that of the new combined ways and those of the ancients, is the unfailing performance of ritual
Ritual is among the main concepts which relates to Maya religion.
The Maya landscape is a ritual topography that is rich with many significant landmarks such as mountains, wells and caves, all of which have been assigned to specific ancestors and deities.
The Tzotzil town of Zinacantan is surrounded by seven 'bathing places' which are dedicated to various mountain-dwelling ancestors revered by the Maya. One of these sacred waterholes serves as the residence of the ancestor's nursemaids and laundresses.'[126]
Many important rituals also took place at or around or around many other landmarks in the Yucatán, such as the karstic sinkholes (cenotes).

All of these sites were considered sacred to the ancient Maya.

The geographical lay-out of shrines and temples wasn't the only thing that governed ritual locations, some locations were set by the projection of calendrical models onto the landscape. An example of this would be when certain sacred location casts a shadow upon a certain spot at different times of the year.

The Maya also had specific combinations of day-names and numbers which were ascribed to specialized shrines in the mountains and other religious landmarks. The location of the Sun at a certain time of the year or the position of a planet or star relevant to the location of the shrine would also signal when it was the appropriate time for their ritual use.[127]

Another sacred location in the northwestern Maya highlands is where the four days, or 'Day Lords', who start the year are assigned to four mountains. The entire landscape itself was also considered sacred and signaled when and where certain rituals took place during the

year.
For example, during the early-colonial period of the Yucatán, the thirteen katun periods and their deities were sectioned onto the very landscape which was conceived as a 'wheel' and were said to be successively 'established' or attached to specific ancient Maya towns.[128]
Many things signal when rituals were to take place, but the biggest source was in their various calendars. The main calendars which governed ritual were: the divinatory cycle of 260 days, which was important for individual rituals, kept on the Tzolkin and the calendar year of eighteen months kept on the Haab', which determined the pace of the public feasts.
There were also very elaborate New Year celebrations that were witnessed being performed on the Yucatec kingdom of Maní that were described by Diego de Landa.[138] It is not known how widely this festival cycle was shared by other Yucatec kingdoms, or if it was also valid for the earlier Maya kingdoms. These were observations were few and not much more was recorded about them.
Our limited Knowledge of Pre-Columbian Maya religious practices and beliefs come from a limited variety of sources.

Some of these primary sources are the three surviving and authentic hieroglyphic books, the Maya Codices: The Dresden, The Madrid, and The Paris Codices, all of which date from the Post-Classic period after 900 AD.

Additionally, we get some of our information from what are called the 'ceramic codex' (the corpus of pottery scenes and texts) and from surviving mural paintings on Maya ruins. These are the sources from which we've gained much of our knowledge from from the Classic (200 AD - 900 AD) and Late Preclassic (200 BC - 200 AD) periods of Maya cultural development.

Our knowledge about Maya religion during the Columbian Period comes from sources such as; the Popol Vuh, the Ritual of the Bacabs, and, at least in part, from the various Chilam Balam books.

We also rely on an abundant of our information from gathered journals and records from Spanish treatises made during the Colonial Period. Such records and descriptions as those from Diego de Landa for the Lowland Mayas and Las Casas for the Highland Mayas. These is also lexicons such as the early Motul (Yucatec) and Coto (Kaqchikel) dictionaries that were

created.