Mayan Beliefs
- The most important deity to the
mayans was the supreme god name Itzamna which they believe is the creater god,
the god of fire and of hearth.
- Bolon Tzacab who is represented
with a branching nose and is held as a symbolic shaft in the ruler’s hand. Bolon
Tzacab is functioned as a god of royal descent.
- The mayan rulers can be known
as mediators between the gods and the people and when they died were buried in
tombs with their favorite objects.
- Their view of afterlife was
that it was a dangerous journey of the soul going to the underworld, which
contained sinister gods, and the symbol that was represented was a jaguar.
-The majority of the Mayans went to the underworld but people that were sacrificed or died during childbirth went to heaven.
- The mayans considered science
and religion to be the same thing, they counted it as one.
- The Mayans created a system of
mathematics and astronomy.
- Their mathematical system included their positional notation (encoding numbers) and how they used the number zero.
-In astronomy they used how the moon and Venus was positioned to create a solar year.
- Mayans had a strong belief with
time and were effectuated to understand it.
- They wanted to understand how the previous cycles worked in order to take advantage of using their natural resources. - Their Mayan Cosmology (origin)
was that they believed the world was created five times and destroyed four
times.
Mayan Practices
- One form of practice is called
divination, which the priests recognizes lucky days from unlucky ones that way
he would advise the rulers when to plant, harvest, and wage war.
- The Mayan Calendar was another
form of practice, their calendar went by solar years.
-The solar year consisted of 18 months, each month containing 20 days, and then followed by a 5 day period of highly unlucky days.
- Mayan hieroglyphic writings is
another practice they utilized, the writings that they have written are about
the waged wars between Mayan cities, how their rulers gained their power, and
so on.
- A frequently practice that they
always did was human sacrifice, the Mayans believed it increased fertility and it
was their way to honoring the gods.
-The Mayans practice was to sacrifice a human because they thought that the human blood was the appropriate way to making a connection with the gods.
-If the sacrifices were not down the Mayans thought that they were neglecting their rituals and would it would create chaos among them.
-The proper way to sacrifice a human was that a human was held down at the top of the pyramid while the priest cut below the human’s rib cage and rip out the heart with their bare hands. The hear was then burned and nourished to the gods.