Mesoamerican Religion

A shared religious world of temples, calendars and feathered serpents across three thousand years of Mexico and Central America.

c. 1500 BCE – 1521 CE · Mexico and Central America · Indigenous & Animist

From the Olmec onward, Mesoamerican peoples shared a 260-day ritual calendar, pyramid temples, a sacred ball game and gods of rain, maize and the feathered serpent. The Maya, Zapotec, Teotihuacanos, Toltecs and Mexica each shaped this inheritance in their own way until the Spanish conquest.

Key figures

• The Feathered Serpent
• Rain gods (Chaac, Tlaloc)
• Maize deities

Texts

• Painted codices
• Carved stelae and calendars
• Later written sagas

Beliefs

• Time turns in great calendar cycles
• The gods must be fed with offerings to keep the world going
• Maize is sacred, and people were made from it

Rituals

• Calendar festivals
• The ritual ball game
• Bloodletting and sacrifice

Grew from

• Indigenous American Traditions

Connections in the atlas

• R. Gordon Wasson
• Tikal
• Teotihuacan, Pyramid of the Sun: date sunrise:02-11
• The Codex Borgia
• Nahual
• Parallel texts: The tower that reached for heaven
• Aztec Sun Stone
• The Persona
• Maya sky-reckoning
• ? Who built Teotihuacan, and why was it abandoned?
• The Nahua
• Into the Americas