The Maya: becoming a civilization
Human societies tend to be linked together or formed under the base of fear. We can say than that the main fears to mention are:
- The “religious fear”, which states that you are going to hell if you don’t behave, or suffer some godly punishment.
- The “legal fear”, which will send you to jail if you don’t attend certain given laws. And more recent.
- The “Commercial fear” the fear of losing your material goods or bank savings and the life that you “had”.
How a society such as The Ancient Maya could came to be, then? It is my strong belief that these leaders of the society, the ones who fed, traded, counted and observed the skies were the ones who started this whole thing.
Whenever this sedentary peoples became aware of their cyclical creation, (cycles of time, weather, crops and plants, animal mating cycles, etc), also by living within the tropics with clearer skies and only two seasons, and when they could start to pinpoint events in the sky, is when this “Maya Elite” started to be formed.
This elite reached the point of knowledge of the sky elements and they utilized their mathematical system to predict that same event or others. Even the prediction of solar and lunar eclipses, throughout history, “knowledge has been power”, and “power is kept by fear”. They used their astronomical knowledge to cause fear on the population.
An improvised example would be “if you don’t build this temple for me and my ancestors, the skies will get dark again. They have spoken to me”. Maybe nobody listened nor believed, but when the eclipse happened, their perspectives could have changed. Hence, this ceremonial activity being constant.
That ritual communication with the ancestors who by that same knowledge had created corn, life and everything else was essential to keep the sun and all creation running. That being was the link between the super natural, the sacred and the material existences as well as a link with time and their bloodline. They descended from the creators, the so called “gods” in our western concept of their religion.
This assertion can be supported by the few specific things we know about their ancient ritual system. We understand they conceived The Moon as a female, for its 28 and a bit day cycle such as menstruation; the Sun was a male: The creator couple.
We tend to believe that the Ancient Maya were polytheistic, which is the belief in many different gods. Consider also where the source comes from and at the time it did. Spanish priests and soldiers during the Inquisition. The best definition is deities; they were physical or spiritual manifestations of the divine.
I was personally raised catholic as a child and Catholicism teaches you that God is omni-present, he created everything, knows everything and punishes everything but always forgives. “Mayanism” taught them that the creators were personified in the material world as well as in the spiritual one, parallel worlds existing at the same time: The Underworld and Creation.
That “King”, as we call him, was a descendent of the creators, a shaman. They believed that they themselves had been created out of corn by those same creators. During a battle, the “king” was in front row to raid his enemies with his army, unlike our “kings” today.
I agree with the mayanists who state that there is no evidence of physical slavery in the Ancient Maya society. And I agree because I conceptualize that relationship of ruled and ruling by a spiritual type of religious slavery.
If the king “convinces” me about his link with the ancestors by delivering prosperity and well being, I would build his temples, plant his fields and fight his wars. He would keep me and my family safe and “blessed”. There seems to be evidence of scattered “independent” settlements with trading relations, in the early stages of the civilization at least.
This entry was posted on Monday, May 31st, 2010 at 1:14 pm and is filed under Deconstructing the Ancient Maya. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Carlos Alfredo Bendfeldt