My Oh Maya

This past weekend I took advantage of our local library's grant trips to the Twin Cities. This time around we loaded up a bus to see the Maya: Hidden Worlds Revealed exhibit at the Science Museum, and once again I found myself struck by the uniformity of religious belief even amongst cultures that could never have encountered one another. In fact, I took notes on particularly striking parallels.

Astrology
The Maya, like the various pagan cultures of Europe and the Middle East (especially Mesopotamia) saw their destinies written in the stars. It's no secret that the Maya produced astonishingly accurate astronomical observations and calendars, but I found it interesting that those in the Western hemisphere, no less than those in the Old World, attributed divine status and influence to the celestial lights. Indeed, the only notable difference seems to be that the Maya took Venus to be the planet of war rather than Mars.

Pyramids
Human nature (the collective unconscious?) seems to seek out theophanies upon mountaintops. At times they also seem to build the mountains. Like their Egyptian counterparts, Maya pyramids evolved from royal tombs. (Just how much rock and earth does it take to keep a mighty king beneath the ground, anyway?) Unlike the Egyptians, the Maya built temples at the top for their sacrifices. We find similar burial mounts and pyramids in China, Japan, and ancient North America, not to mention Celtic fairy mounds.

Sacrifice & Bloodletting
Polytheists of every stripe, from the worshippers of ancient Olympians to modern voodooists, seek out ways to bargain with the Powers That Be. This most often takes the form of sacrifice: offering up food, drink, incense, and the like. Animals prove more valuable to humankind, and so are assumed to purchase more influence with the spirits. Human sacrifice, then, logically proves the most valuable of all. Human sacrifice is found in every culture; even the noble Greeks resorted to it when things really hit the fan. The Maya, and later the Aztecs, simply engaged in it on an industrialized scale.

Hellmouth
Everybody has an underworld, and entrances to it always come in caves. For the Maya, the underworld was not only the place of death and decay but, paradoxically, of new birth and life-giving waters. This parallels the Enuma Elish and other creation epics that assume evil to be not a lack of good but an intrinsic part of the cosmic order -- a sort of Zoroastrian dualism. What I found particularly striking is that the Maya, like medieval Europeans, imagined the entrance to Hades as a hellmouth, a motif quite prevalent in their art.

Cats & Death
At night, when the Mayan sun god passed from the sky into the underworld, he became the jaguar god. As a creature that hunted both night and day, traversing the sky (tree branches), the land, and the underworld (caves), jaguars were spiritual boundary crossers. I could not help but think of the Egyptian connection of cats with the underworld, and wonder at the coincidence.

World Tree
Here's another ubiquitous symbol. The World Tree shows up in Greco-Roman, Teutonic, and Mayan myths alike. It unites the three-storey universe, with its branches in heaven, its trunk on the ground, and its roots stretching deep into the underworld. World Tree motifs show up in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, modern neopaganism, and of course in Christianity, where the Cross of Christ becomes identified with the Tree of Life in Genesis, and bridged Heaven, earth, and Hell.

Royal Dwarves
Dwarves and hunchbacks inevitably became courtiers for Mayan royals, just as they did in Europe. How bizarre is that? Could it simply be nobility's obsession with novelty and distraction? We shouldn't judge too harshly, I suppose, given that modern little people find work as onscreen Hobbits.

Deification of Rulers
Mighty kings, the upholders of divine order, themselves ascend to godhood upon their deaths. It may well be that the entire population of the Viking, Greek, Celtic, Egyptian, and Mayan pantheons were once mortal warlords around whom great legends accrued. Certainly this was the opinion of many Christian euhemerists. The Maya prove no different. This universal human need to see the greatest amongst us (and by extension ourselves) rise to divine status finds its ultimate fulfillment in the Cult of Saints.

Heavenly Serpents
Dragons rule the heavens. This is true in the Far East: China, Japan, India, Indochina. This is true in the West, with the rise of Quetzlcoatl in the postclassical Mayan period and subsequent rise of the Aztecs. But keep in mind that it's also true in Judeo-Christian tradition, since the seraphim, the highest of all the angelic choirs, are often described as "fiery serpents," and the fallen one of their number is himself described as a serpent and dragon.

Choas Gods, Hero Gods
In the beginning were gods of chaos: Tiamat for Mesopotamians, Titans in Greece, Jotuns in the Norse sagas, and the demon-gods of Xibalba in Mayan mythology. Even the Indian deities assembled the cosmos from the dismembered corpse of a gigantic primordial man. Again mirroring the Enuma Elish, a generation of younger Mayan hero-gods slaughter the denizens of Xibalba and establish world order. The Creation account of Genesis Chapter One was written specifically to contrast against this notion of chaos as strong, active, and primary. But this rival worldview shadows the entire Bible, and has found new life in persistent pagan and upstart neopagan cosmologies.

Strange, isn't it, the parallels between us all? Vampire largely look the same in every culture, as do ghosts, shape-shifters, dragons, gods, and monsters. Yes, variation exists, but not so much that we can't recognize the same assumptions, same actors, same worldviews across continents and millennia. When Eugene Dukes wrote his magisterial history of black magic, he marveled at the uniformity of evil throughout human cultures, and pointed to this as evidence of evil's single source. Perhaps we do share a collective unconsciousness, or have simply been shaped by evolutionary psychology to interpret the world via hardwired patterns. But to be honest, I rather suspect that our stories prove so similar simply because we all keep encountering the same unseen reality.