“This is the beginning of the Ancient Word, here in this place called Kʼicheʼ.”
The opening line of the Popol Vuh (a text recounting the mythology and history of the Kʼicheʼ – one of the Mayan peoples).
The opening scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark inspired me to set most of The Palantir in the Mayan world. I thought that finding hidden treasures in a jungle was such a cool idea that I had to include the Mayans in my book. But, until I started researching my book, my images of the Mayan, Aztec, and Incan cultures were shaped mostly by movies and fiction books that included the cruel leaders making human sacrifices atop their pyramids to appease their angry gods.
I found the historical reality much more complex and fascinating than I’d imagined. I took some literary license in Ixchel’s backstory (the young spirit in Lamanai with the blue-tinted skin), but sadly what happened to her happened in real life to many other young children.
Hers was not the only type of human sacrifice the Mayans made. In actuality, the Mayans practiced bloodletting, which included sacrificing humans in all sorts of gruesome ways and rulers and religious leaders drawing their own blood to appease the gods.
To most people nowadays, it doesn’t make sense. But most Mayans believed that the road to the Mayan Underworld, Xibalba, was a series of terrifying obstacles (crossing rivers of blood and scorpions, chambers of knives and jaguars) overseen by a dozen capricious and cruel gods. If that’s what you believe happens after death, then you can start understanding why they would be so eager to appease the gods. The only people to escape the hellish Underworld were those who died in childbirth. And the Mayan gods of the living world were equally capricious and cruel.
One other topic I wish to discuss in this post is the Popol Vuh – the Mayan creation story. Even though they had a writing system, they did not write it down until the sixteenth century CE. No one knows if the original still exists, but luckily a Spanish priest had the foresight to copy it in the original Kʼicheʼ and translate it into Spanish. Sadly, it was one of the few documents that survived the Mayan Inquisition, led by a Dominican priest named Diego de Landa, who ordered the destruction of all written Mayan works. The Church punished him, but not for the destruction of the Mayan history, nor the people tortured and killed, but for starting an inquisition without approval. His punishment – house arrest in Spain, where he could contemplate his sin. Afterwards, the Catholic Church promoted him to Bishop.
We didn’t see any sacrificial tables in any of the Mayan sites we visited, but we did see an Incan sacrificial site that sits above Cusco, Peru. The stone table is set inside a jumble of huge rocks. The reddish discolorations on the rock are stains from human blood. The light you see in the background is daylight coming through a small hole above. The sacrifices would occur when the sunlight came through the opening and hit the table.
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