Sacrifice in Maya culture
Sacrifice was a religious activity in Maya culture, involving the killing of humans or animals, or bloodletting by members of the community, in rituals superintended by priests.
What is known of Mayan ritual practices comes from two sources: the extant chronicles and codices of the missionary-ethnographers who arrived with or shortly after the Spanish conquest of Yucatán, and subsequent archaeological data.
Joralemon notes it is "virtually certain" that blood from the penis and the vagina was the most sacred and had "extraordinary fertilizing power" and that such rituals were essential for the regeneration of the natural world, particularly cultivated plants.
Bancroft describes one procedure:A long cord was then fastened round the body of each victim, and the moment the smoke ceased to rise from the altar, all were hurled into the gulf.
The crowd, which had gathered from every part of the country to see the sacrifice, immediately drew back from the brink of the pit and continued to pray without cessation for some time.
[13] According to Bancroft, one tribe sacrificed illegitimate boys twice a year, again by removing the heart, but collecting the blood in a bowl and scattering it to the four cardinal compass points within the temple.
Capturing prisoners after a successful battle also provided victims for sacrifice, presumably to propitiate whatever deity had promised victory in the first place, although there is no record of the Maya initiating conflicts solely for this purpose as was apparently the case with the Aztecs.
"[14] Mayanists believe that, like the Aztecs, the Maya performed child sacrifice in specific circumstances, most commonly as foundation dedications for temples and other structures.
[17] An excavation at El Perú-Wakaʼ turned up the remains of an infant with, unusually, those of an adult male, in the presence of extensive evidence of feasting that had followed the expansion of a residence which had then been "ensouled" by the rituals and sacrifices.
The analysis suggests that the "interments show that human sacrifice was not limited to the royal actors associated with the Classic Maya state, but could be practiced by lesser elites as part of their own private ceremonies.
[23] At Laguna de On Island, remains of tapir, peccary, deer, crocodile, iguana, and agouti were all found concentrated around a spot believed to have been used for ritual butchering.
Montero-Lopez argues that on the basis of analysis of the distribution of deer parts in Classical Maya sites that the archeological record does not support a clear distinction between the secular and sacred uses of animals.
[20] Both blood and human sacrifice were ubiquitous in all cultures of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, but beyond some uncontroversial generalisations there is no scholarly consensus on the broader questions (and specific mysteries) this raises.
Blood, and by extension the still-beating heart, is the central element in both the ethnography and iconography of sacrifice, and its use through ritual established or renewed for the Maya a connection with the sacred that was for them essential to the very existence of the natural order.
Julian Lee's observation that the Maya "drew no sharp distinction between the animate and the inanimate"[32] and the remarks by Pendergast[16] and others that sacrifices "ensouled" buildings and idols indicate a social meaning, as Reilly suggests, most akin to transubstantiation[33] – a literal rather than symbolic transformation on which the fate of the world and its inhabitants depended.
As with all known theocratic societies, it is likely the Maya political and religious elites played mutually reinforcing roles in supporting the position of the other and ensuring the social stability essential for both, with sacrifice rituals functioning as the performative centrepiece of communal integration.
