Maya or Mayan mythology is part of Mesoamerican mythology and comprises all of the Maya tales in which personified forces of nature, deities, and the heroes interacting with these play the main roles. The myths of the era have to be reconstructed from iconography. Other parts of Mayan oral tradition are not considered here.
Kʼawiil, in the Post-Classic codices corresponding to God K, is a Maya deity identified with lightning, serpents, fertility and maize. He is characterized by a zoomorphic head, with large eyes, long, upturned snout and attenuated serpent foot. A torch, stone celt, or cigar, normally emitting smoke, comes out of his forehead, while a serpent leg represents a lightning bolt. In this way, Kʼawiil personifies the lightning axe both of the rain deity and of the king as depicted on his stelae.
Itzamna is, in Maya mythology, an upper god and creator deity thought to reside in the sky. Itzamna is one of the most important gods in the Classic and Postclassic Maya pantheon. Although little is known about him, scattered references are present in early-colonial Spanish reports (relaciones) and dictionaries. Twentieth-century Lacandon lore includes tales about a creator god who may be a late successor to him. In the pre-Spanish period, Itzamna was often depicted in books and in ceramic scenes derived from them. Before the names of the Maya deities were deciphered, Itzamna was known as "god D", and is still sometimes referred to as "god D" by archeologists.
Bacab is the generic Yucatec Maya name for the four prehispanic aged deities of the interior of the earth and its water deposits. The Bacabs have more recent counterparts in the lecherous, drunken old thunder deities of the Gulf Coast regions. The Bacabs are also referred to as Pauahtuns.
Hunab Ku is a colonial period Yucatec Maya reducido term meaning "The One God". It is used in colonial, and more particularly in doctrinal texts, to refer to the Christian God. Since the word is found frequently in the Chilam Balam of Chumayel, a syncretistic document heavily influenced by Christianity, it refers specifically to the Christian god as a translation into Maya of the Christian concept of one God, used to enculturate the previously polytheist Maya to the new religion.
The Maya calendar is a system of calendars used in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and in many modern communities in the Guatemalan highlands, Veracruz, Oaxaca and Chiapas, Mexico.
Chan Santa Cruz was the name of a shrine in Mexico of the Maya Cruzob religious movement. It was also the name of the town that developed around it and, less formally, the late 19th-century indigenous Maya state, in what is now the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, of which it was the main center. This area was the center of the Caste War of Yucatán beginning in 1847, by which the Maya established some autonomous areas on the east side of the Yucatán Peninsula. The main conflict ended in 1915, when they agreed to recognize the Mexican government, but guerilla fighting would persist into the 1940s.
The Books of Chilam Balam are handwritten, chiefly 17th and 18th-centuries Maya miscellanies, named after the small Yucatec towns where they were originally kept, and preserving important traditional knowledge in which indigenous Maya and early Spanish traditions have coalesced. They compile knowledge on history, prophecy, religion, ritual, literature, the calendar, astronomy, and medicine. Written in the Yucatec Maya language and using the Latin alphabet, the manuscripts are attributed to a legendary author called Chilam Balam, a chilam being a priest who gives prophecies and balam a common surname meaning ʼjaguarʼ. Some of the texts actually contain prophecies about the coming of the Spaniards to Yucatán while mentioning a chilam Balam as their first author.
K’uk’ulkan, also spelled Kukulkan, is the Mesoamerican serpent deity of the Pre-Columbine Yucatec Maya. It is closely related to the deity Qʼuqʼumatz of the Kʼicheʼ people and to Quetzalcoatl of Aztec mythology. Prominent temples to Kukulkan are found at archaeological sites in the Yucatán Peninsula, such as Chichen Itza, Uxmal and Mayapan.
Stingless bees, sometimes called stingless honey bees or simply meliponines, are a large group of bees, comprising the tribe Meliponini. They belong in the family Apidae, and are closely related to common honey bees, carpenter bees, orchid bees, and bumblebees. Meliponines have stingers, but they are highly reduced and cannot be used for defense, though these bees exhibit other defensive behaviors and mechanisms. Meliponines are not the only type of bee incapable of stinging: all male bees and many female bees of several other families, such as Andrenidae, also cannot sting. Some stingless bees have powerful mandibles and can inflict painful bites.
Bees have been featured in myth and folklore around the world. Honey and beeswax have been important resources for humans since at least the Mesolithic period, and as a result humans' relationship with bees—particularly honey bees—has ranged from encounters with wild bees to keeping them agriculturally. Bees themselves are often characterized as magically-imbued creatures, and their honey as a divine gift.
Lintel 24 is the designation given by modern archaeologists to an ancient Maya limestone sculpture from Yaxchilan, in modern Chiapas, Mexico. The lintel dates to about 723–726 AD, placing it within the Maya Late Classic period. Its mid-relief carving depicts the ruler of Yaxchilan, Itzamnaaj Bahlam III, and his consort Lady K’abal Xoc, performing a ceremony of bloodletting; the imagery is also accompanied by descriptive captions, and a signature by the sculptor, Mo’ Chaak.
The traditional Maya or Mayan religion of the extant Maya peoples of Guatemala, Belize, western Honduras, and the Tabasco, Chiapas, Quintana Roo, Campeche and Yucatán states of Mexico is part of the wider frame of Mesoamerican religion. As is the case with many other contemporary Mesoamerican religions, it results from centuries of symbiosis with Roman Catholicism. When its pre-Hispanic antecedents are taken into account, however, traditional Maya religion has already existed for more than two and a half millennia as a recognizably distinct phenomenon. Before the advent of Christianity, it was spread over many indigenous kingdoms, all with their own local traditions. Today, it coexists and interacts with pan-Mayan syncretism, the 're-invention of tradition' by the Pan-Maya movement, and Christianity in its various denominations.
Tortuguero is an archaeological site in southernmost Tabasco, Mexico which supported a Maya city during the Classic period. The site is noteworthy for its use of the B'aakal emblem glyph also found as the primary title at Palenque. The site has been heavily damaged by looting and modern development; in the 1960s, a cement factory was built directly on top of the site.
Like other Mesoamerican peoples, the traditional Maya recognize in their staple crop, maize, a vital force with which they strongly identify. This is clearly shown by their mythological traditions. According to the 16th-century Popol Vuh, the Hero Twins have maize plants for alter egos and man himself is created from maize. The discovery and opening of the Maize Mountain – the place where the corn seeds are hidden – is still one of the most popular of Maya tales. In the Classic period, the maize deity shows aspects of a culture hero.
Chichén Itzá was a large pre-Columbian city built by the Maya people of the Terminal Classic period. The archeological site is located in Tinúm Municipality, Yucatán State, Mexico.
Until the discovery that Maya stelae depicted kings instead of high priests, the Maya priesthood and their preoccupations had been a main scholarly concern. In the course of the 1960s and over the following decades, however, dynastic research came to dominate interest in the subject. A concept of royal ʼshamanismʼ, chiefly propounded by Linda Schele and Freidel, came to occupy the forefront instead. Yet, Classic Maya civilization, being highly ritualistic, would have been unthinkable without a developed priesthood. Like other Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican priesthoods, the early Maya priesthood consisted of a hierarchy of professional priests serving as intermediaries between the population and the deities. Their basic skill was the art of reading and writing. The priesthood as a whole was the keeper of knowledge concerning the deities and their cult, including calendrics, astrology, divination, and prophecy. In addition, they were experts in historiography and genealogy. Priests were usually male and could marry. Most of our knowledge concerns Yucatán in the Late Postclassic, with additional data stemming from the contemporaneous Guatemalan Highlands.
The Maya death gods, known by a variety of names, are two basic types of death gods who are respectively represented by the 16th-century Yucatec deities Hunhau and Uacmitun Ahau mentioned by Spanish Bishop Landa. Hunhau is the lord of the Underworld. Iconographically, Hunhau and Uacmitun Ahau correspond to the Gods A and A' . In recent narratives, particularly in the oral tradition of the Lacandon people, there is only one death god, who acts as the antipode of the Upper God in the creation of the world and of the human body and soul. This death god inhabits an Underworld that is also the world of the dead. As a ruler over the world of the dead, the principal death god corresponds to the Aztec deity Mictlāntēcutli. The Popol Vuh has two leading death gods, but these two are really one: Both are called "Death," but while one is known as "One Death," the other is called "Seven Death." They were vanquished by the Hero Twins.
Melipona beecheii is a species of eusocial stingless bee. It is native to Central America from the Yucatán Peninsula in the north to Costa Rica in the south. M. beecheii was cultivated in the Yucatán Peninsula starting in the pre-Columbian era by the ancient Maya civilization. The Mayan name for M. beecheii is xunan kab, which translates roughly to "regal lady bee". M. beecheii serves as the subject of various Mayan religious ceremonies.
