For the Maya, mountains, caves and sinkholes form a sacred map of ancestors
Maya religion has endured as a recognisable tradition for more than 2,500 years. Today it blends with Catholicism, yet its heart is still a landscape where particular peaks, wells and caves belong to specific ancestors and gods, and where calendar days decide which mountain shrine may be visited when.
The traditional religion of the living Maya, spread across Guatemala, Belize, western Honduras and several Mexican states including Chiapas and Yucatán, belongs to the wider world of Mesoamerican faiths. Centuries of contact have woven it together with Roman Catholicism, and it now also interacts with a pan-Maya revival movement. Before Christianity arrived, it was divided among many kingdoms, each with its own customs.
Knowledge of the ancient forms comes from mixed sources. Four hieroglyphic books survive, the Dresden, Madrid, Paris and Grolier codices, all from after 900 AD, alongside painted pottery, murals and stone inscriptions going back to the Late Preclassic. Sixteenth-century texts such as the Popol Vuh and the Chilam Balam books add more, as do Spanish treatises by Landa and Las Casas and anthropological fieldwork since the late 19th century. Living priests, diviners and storytellers remain the richest source.
It is above all a religion of practice, sometimes simply called costumbre, custom, as distinct from orthodox Catholic rite. In Yucatán the village priest is called jmen, which just means practitioner. Around the Tzotzil town of Zinacantan lie seven sacred waterholes of mountain ancestors, one said to house their nursemaids and laundresses. In Momostenango, set combinations of day names and numbers tell people when to use particular mountain shrines, and in the northwestern highlands the four days that can open a year are each tied to a mountain.
Pilgrimage links communities over long distances. Villages exchange visits of their saints' statues, and the Q'eqchi' travel to thirteen holy mountains. Around 1500 the great cenote of Chichen Itza drew pilgrims from surrounding kingdoms, while islands off Yucatán's east coast held shrines to Ix Chel. Some eight hundred years earlier, nobles from Classic kingdoms left records of their visits on the walls of the Naj Tunich caves.
Source: Maya religion
