The Importance Of Human Sacrifice

Maya human sacrifice is the term used for the act of killing human beings on the part of religion or ritual. It resembles the slaughter of animals served for religious purposes. Maya art and hieroglyphic texts demonstrate that the Maya believed these visions jumped the thresholds between cosmic layers. Within the charged luminal spaces of their human sacrifices, elite participants opened channels of communication with deified ancestors and other gods. By engaging in these otherworldly exchanges, Maya rulers expressed their divine heritage and their right to temporal rule. Many visual images illustrate the specific deities conjured through such bloodletting rituals.

Bloodletting rituals allowed rulers to communicate with ancestors, bloodletting pervades many aspects of Maya existence. Hieroglyphic texts document that the rituals were performed at various times during the lives of Maya lords. Particularly important events that frequently involved human sacrifice rituals were kingly births, accessions, and anniversaries, as well as celebrations of specific periods of the calendar. Through ritual contact on such occasions, the gods could be persuaded to sanction new rulers, to intervene in human events, and to protect the

ruler and his people through calendared transitions.
One of the most pervasive elements of Maya religion was the idea that the cosmos was governed by cycles of time that were constantly in motion. The cosmos was created, later destroyed, only to be created anew. On the human level parents died, but children continued their legacy on earth. Death and destruction were never permanent, nor was life eternal. The Maya felt that the end of the great cycle would not bring about an absolute apocalypse; but, the death of this era of creation would serve to give birth to a new one (Chase, 1991).

The Maya culture encouraged elite human sacrifice offerings.

Instead, specific implements, which were regarded as harboring their own powers, were utilized as ritual perforators of human flesh. Stingray spines, obsidian lancets, and carved bone awls served as tools to sever the penis, cheeks, ears, and tongue. Because their spines were naturally angled in one direction, stingray spines forced a ritual participant to complete the act of piercing; once the stingray spine had already begun to sever the flesh, a reversal in direction would have resulted in more severe and drastic cuts than if the stingray spine were pressed all the way through the flesh in the same direction. Nevertheless, human sacrifices represented utmost importance in Maya

culture.