National Geographic: Lost Kingdoms of the Maya Page #2

---

in the fertile Copan valley.

They were corn farmers.

Their lives were ruled by the rhythms

of the natural world,

planting and harvesting,

birth and death.

But around A.D. 400,

at about the time Rome

was starting to collapse,

a change swept through the valley.

On a lazy bend in the Copan River,

buildings made from stone were rising

from the jungle floor.

Brilliantly colored buildings

surrounded a whitewashed central plaza

where thousands of people could gather

There was trade in shells

and cacao beans,

tobacco, jade, and feathers.

At the center of the city

stood the ball court.

The object of the ball game seems

to have been to keep

the heavy rubber ball in motion,

without using hands or feet.

Stone carvings at some sites show

ballplayers with severed human heads

dangling from their belts.

But no one knows if they depict

what actually happened to the losers,

or illustrate something more symbolic.

The ball was supposed to be a metaphor

for the movement of the sun

and by extension, also the moon

and the stars.

And you wanted to make sure that there

was regularity in that movement.

They thought that if they played

the game in the right way,

and honored the gods in the right way,

that they would ensure the

agricultural cycle

and enable the sun to rise

and the rains to come on time

and for there to be

a bountiful harvest.

In the secret world of

the Maya

the gods were the source of all life,

and only the kings had the power

to intervene with them.

The gods sustained the

physical universe with sun and rain

and expected humans to nourish them

in return.

The supreme source of

that nourishment was blood.

When the Maya wanted to acknowledge

the sacredness of the moment or

an important event,

they would let blood.

Blood was the vehicle that carried

a quality that they called chu'lel,

which means their soul.

It was something that not

only permeated human bodies,

it permeated buildings,

it permeated the trees, the sky.

It permeated all things sacred

in the world.

And when they gave blood,

what they were doing was

they were activating the chu'lel.

It's like George Lucas's the "Force."

If you can think of Obi-wan-Kenobi,

you know,

calling the "Force" out,

or Luke, as he guides the plane in

you know, in the final Death Star battle.

That's what the Maya were doing

by these rituals.

They were touching what they

considered to be

the living force

of the universe and it's still here.

On special occasions

the king himself would give blood.

This was one of the most

secret rituals in Maya life.

After days of fasting

and spiritual preparation,

the king would pierce his foreskin

with a stingray spine

and let the blood drip

onto paper strips.

With this act of sacrifice

a doorway to the gods was opened.

When the paper strips were burned,

the Maya believed they could see

their gods in the rising smoke.

Today,

the descendants of the ancient Maya

still live much like

their ancestors did.

The myths they remember

and the ceremonies they perform are

all part of a tradition

that the Maya say God gave them

at the beginning of time.

Casimiro Sagajau is a Maya priest

who blesses the fields at harvest time

We are Cakchiquels, direct descendants

of the ancient Maya.

Our religion is from a long time ago.

I learned as a child

from the Maya priests.

In dreams we learned

from the Maya gods

when to plant and when to harvest,

when to set the fires,

and when to do the corn ceremony.

The Maya passion for ritual

was one of the first things

Spanish missionaries observed

when they arrived in Yucatan

almost 500 years ago.

When the Catholic Church banned

traditional forms of worship,

the old ways went underground.

Today the religion the Maya follow

is a blend of these two ancient faiths

The Maya have clung tenaciously to

many aspects of the old culture.

In the highlands of Chiapas

and Guatemala

their unique dress not only defines

them as Maya,

but identifies the particular village

where they live.

It is said that when a Maya woman

puts on her traditional blouse,

called a huipil,

her head emerges at the very center

of a world woven from dreams,

just as the great tree of life

emerges from the earth.

In the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico,

Chip Morris had been working

with weavers for 20 years.

The weavers have always said that

their designs come from the beginning

of the world,

meaning the beginning of their culture

When I started looking at

the archeology of the sculptures

and the statues, the things that show

what the weaving was like,

there are a number that are all

but identical to the weavings of today.

What's in the designs is a map

of the Maya world,

but not the surface of the earth,

not where we are standing now,

but it's the dream world.

It's that world where the gods are,

where the beings that control rain,

where Angel, the lightning bolt lives.

There are no trucks,

there are no houses on a blouse.

It's all images of that

sacred universe that creates rain,

that creates life,

that maintains the world.

In a world where the line between

the secular and the sacred

is almost imperceptible,

everything is more than is seems.

Pyramids symbolize sacred mountains

where the ancestors dwell.

Doors represent the mouths of caves

passageways into the mountain's

dangerous underworld.

The Maya believed they went to

that underworld when they died.

They called it Xibalba.

It was the "place of fright"

a watery realm of disease and decay

that ordinary people

had little hope of escaping.

How the Maya treated their dead

is being investigated here

at a site 130 miles north of Copan.

These are the ruins

of a city called Caracol.

Once it was a prosperous

administrative center.

Today it is remarkable for the scores

of tombs discovered here.

I think we'll leave the rest

of this until we move the rocks.

Okay.

Arlen Chase is a potter expert.

Diane Chase is an authority

on human bones.

They're trying to understand

how the Maya thought about death.

We tend to think of things

in Westernized terms.

The Maya were not a Western society;

they didn't do anything

the way Europeans do.

It's so hard for our own society

to understand how the Maya lived.

I mean we don't have dead living

with us, you know, every day.

We don't put them in a room

in our house and maintain them there.

Well, the Maya essentially did that

in their living groups.

Okay. Oh, this is nice. Arlen.

This is real nice.

We've definitely got a royal tomb here

Ordinary people were usually buried

under the floors of their houses.

The vessels are nice

and they're in good shape.

The elite were placed in tombs.

This polychrome over here

is in better shape on the back

than the front side.

What about the bone?

Bone? There's a lot of bone.

There are at least two individuals

whose heads are to the south.

They're in pretty good shape.

Someone else's legs are up

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes