Mesoamerican Religion

Mesoamerican religion is the umbrella term for the group of indigenous religious traditions native to Mesoamerica in the pre-Columbian era, sharing a common cultural and ritual matrix even though each civilization within the region, among them the Aztec, Maya, Zapotec and Nazca, maintained its own named pantheon and religious practice. Widely shared features across these traditions include a ritual calendar used to schedule ceremonies and divination, ballgames with religious significance, bloodletting and sacrifice offered to sustain the cosmos, and a layered cosmology of heavens and underworlds. In this atlas, the label is used for a member entity recorded generically as belonging to a Mesoamerican religious tradition rather than to one specific named Mesoamerican religion such as Aztec Religion or Maya Religion already live in this atlas; this entity represents the general concept and category, not any single Mesoamerican civilization's own distinct religion.