The Maya - People of the Maize

The Great Flood washed away the mud people and ended the Mayan First Age of Creation. For the Fourth Age of Creation, the maker gods, Xpiyacoc and Xmucane created sturdier beings who could withstand the forces of nature. They mixed maize with water and from that mixture formed mankind for the purposes of caring for nature and, more importantly, worshiping the gods. The maize became flesh and the water became blood. Then the gods provided nourishment to mankind by bringing the rains that nourished maize crops.
Mankind paid for this nourishment in human sacrifice and bloodletting. Their violent religion was responsible for state sponsored terrorism and wars against other city-states for the purpose of capturing sacrificial victims. They decorated their temples with human skulls, ripped the hearts out of living sacrificial victims, and pierced their own bodies to release blood to sustain the gods. They believed that everything contained a soul—even manmade objects. And, they believed in human to animal transformation. They also believed in an after life as well as the possibility of reincarnation.
The Ballgame was their national sport and the losing team was sacrificed to the gods in the hope that by their willing sacrifice, they’d be redeemed in the eyes of the gods.
Against this background of bloodletting, human sacrifice, and terror, the Maya excelled in the areas of mathematics, astronomy, art, and the calendar. They were the first to use zero as a place holder and calculated extremely large and complex numbers. They charted the heavens, noted the passages of the planets and the constellations in the Milky Way and planned their wars around the path of Venus.
They had phonetic writing, wrote thousands of books, and created paint pigments that withstand the passage of time and whose elements have only recently been determined. Most notably, the shade of blue called Mayan Blue. The background of the inset picture on the cover is an example of Mayan Blue.
Their cities had larger populations than most of the European cities of the same time period and their stone temples, built without the use of metal tools, beasts of burden, or the wheel, still soar high above the jungle canopy and are orientated according to the solstices, the equinoxes, or the cardinal points.
The Mayan trading routes were extensive, crisscrossing all of Mesoamerica and equal the excellence of the roads built by the Romans.
But, in the end, the Maya decimated their own civilization.
The Mayan Long Count Calendar begins in 3113 BCE and no one knows what that date signifies, except that it’s the beginning of the Fourth Age of Mankind and this age will end on December 21, 2012. On December 22, 2012 the Fifth Age will begin. Rumors and predictions abound as to whether this Fourth Age will end in a world catastrophe. Most Mayan experts feel that December 22, 2012 will simply be a peaceful beginning of a new cycle and that the public has nothing to fear.

Author’s Note
This handbook is general overview of the Maya and their pre-classic and classic civilization. Volumes of work have been published about the Maya and the World Wide Web offers much, much more. At the end of this book I’ve listed additional reading material for those readers who wish to know more about this era in Mesoamerican history.