Mayan Beliefs In The Movie Apocalypto

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The movie Apocalypto attempted to recreate what the Mayan civilization once was but fell far from that. If anything that Mel Gibson recreated successfully it would have to be that they were Mayans, and the clothing they wore. From the very beginning of the movie you can see a flaw, Jaguar Paw asked the villagers that were passing by who they were. The Mayans were very interconnected people, the larger towns were given tribute by the smaller towns for hundreds of years. Now although the Mayans did perform sacrifices of their owns they did not perform them in the way Apocalypto portrayed them. Apocalypto portrayed the Aztecs rituals, in which the kings would rip out the heart so that it would rain and so the gods would not be mad, and even then, the movie did not portray the Aztecs right because the man performing the rituals was not the king, it was another elite of the civilization, the priest. The Mayans mainly performed bloodletting in which they would cut parts of their bodies such as: The tongue, lips, and genitals. One of the ways the Mayans would actually perform human sacrifi...

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