Maya's civilisation

Final paper presentation about maya’s mythology

Antoine Franc Ronan Revaillot-Guilbert

The Mayan peoples settled on a territory covering the Mexican states of Yucatán, Campeche, Quintana Roo, and parts of Tabasco and Chiapas, as well as the countries of Central America such as Guatemala, Belize and the western regions of Honduras and El Salvador. The total area of the Maya is almost 400,000 square kilometers.

About thirty ethnic groups, each with its own idiom, inhabit this territory. Languages spoken include Yucatec Maya, Chontal, Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Quiche, Cakchiquel, Mam Tzutuhil and Ixil. The Mayan languages form a linguistic group of common origin.

The great Mayan region has an extraordinarily rich and varied geography. It includes huge jungles of trees that grow in warm and humid climates; vast marshy and rainy expanses; high-flow rivers such as the Río Grijalva and the Río Usumacinta. But it is also distinguished by cold climates, volcanic mountain ranges that can reach 4000 meters of altitude, large lakes and thick forests in the middle of which were erected imposing constructions.

In this presentation, we are going to talk about two different subjects, but who are, in our opinion, quite related.

First of all, Ronan will address the religious system of the Mayas and some questions linked to cosmology.

In a second time, I will deal with maya’s mythology and summarize some of their gods, what they were specified in and their benefits or inconvenient to the human.

I start off this oral presentation with a brief explanation of the religious system of the Maya and their representation of the creation world. This religious system dates back to 250 from 900 CE (common era).

But first, I’d like to precise that all the sources we have nowadays come from books written by the Maya themselves during the colonial period. According to the cosmogonic myth Popol Vuh, a book written by the Quiché people both in quiché and spanish, the world was made up from scratch by Gods. This cosmogonic point of view explains that the world is created from two actions : destruction and creation. Both actions correspond in fact to the different cosmogonic ages. That’s why Gods failed a few times before succeeding in making up the best human beings. Gods used at the very beginning clay to shape human beings. However they somehow crumbled and ended up in tatters. Then they used wood but wooden human beings were utterly foolish. That’s the reason why Gods turned them into monkeys. Eventually, Gods, helped by other animals, devised the very best human beings from a holy substance, corn. Moreover, according to the Sololà Memorial, Gods added tapir and snake blood to the corn paste which signifies for the Mayas that the human body is composed of plants and animals. This is an accurate proof that confirms the existence of a deep brotherhood which brings together human beings with their environment. This holistic conception of the world is also shared by other peoples, just like the Sami people for instance.

Moreover, I really want to underline that the existence of the world only relies on human beings, whose purpose consists of honoring and nourishing Gods. If not, Gods could perish and then should come along the end of the world. In fact, Mayas thought they were the keepers of harmony in the world. Whereas human beings were kept away from Gods, they were the very core of the cosmos.

Now I am going to talk about time in the religious system of the Maya people. Myths take place in a different time in which characters could live way longer than real human beings. Furthemore, present and future coexist. It actually means that those figures could move through different times, as if they were living in a dream. In fact, the time of the myths is considered to be another time. That’s why I’d like to highlight this kind of representation of time because both times, the real one and the mythical one, are lived at once, which is another kind of feature of the maya religion. 

Eventually, when it comes to talking about time in the Maya era, we usually think about the Maya calendar. Anthropologists back up the idea that a very complex system divided into 819 days got off the ground during the Maya era. And this year, scholars succeeded in unearthing the operation thereof but I think it’s a very complex subject  which I am not going to tackle since I am definitely not a specialist. However, everyone knows in this classroom that the entire world was about to collapse eleven years ago because of the predictions of the maya calendar. Popol Vuh mentioned indeed the end of the fourth world, the world human beings are living in, because the world would have reached in december 2012 its 13th baktuns, namely 5 125 years. 

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