Yucatec Maya

Yucatec religion in the colonial and modern periods keeps a set of figures that can be traced back into the classic period. The Chaacs, rain deities associated with the four directions and each with a colour, are addressed in the ceremony a village holds when rain is late, conducted by an h'men, a specialist who works with prayer, offering and a table set out for the purpose. Karl Taube's study of the major gods of ancient Yucatan connects those figures to the deities of the codices and the monuments.

The world tree, a ceiba standing at the centre with four coloured trees at the directions, orders space, and the cenotes, the sinkholes that are the peninsula's only surface water, are entrances to what lies beneath. The great cenote at Chichen Itza received offerings of objects and of people, which is one of the places where archaeology and the colonial reports agree with one another.

The books of Chilam Balam are the tradition's own colonial literature: manuscripts kept in Yucatec towns and recopied over generations, mixing prophecy, chronicle, calendar, medicine and material taken from Spanish books. They are why the Yucatec calendar and its cycles are known in such detail. Matthew Restall and Amara Solari's study shows how one of those cycles was turned into a global apocalypse by outsiders in 2012.

Yucatec is the language usually meant by plain Maya, and it is spoken by something close to three quarters of a million people today across the peninsula and into Belize, which makes it one of the strongest indigenous languages in the Americas.

The colonial record here is dominated by one man. Diego de Landa, a Franciscan and later bishop, conducted an investigation into continuing idolatry at Mani in 1562 in which people were tortured and books were burned, and then wrote an account of Yucatec life and writing that is the single most important colonial source on the Maya. His alphabet, a misunderstanding of the script that he recorded anyway, gave Yuri Knorozov the key to decipherment four centuries later. Eric Thompson's introduction to the writing represents the era before that decipherment was accepted.

The Caste War of Yucatan, beginning in 1847, was a Maya rebellion that held much of the peninsula for decades and produced its own religious institution: the cult of the speaking cross at Chan Santa Cruz, which issued orders, and whose successor shrines are still maintained by the Cruzob communities. It is a Maya Christian movement founded in the middle of a war, and it is the clearest case in the region of a religion made during a political emergency rather than inherited from before one.