Zapotec Religion

Zapotec state religion was centered on Monte Alban, the ceremonial and political capital that rose above the Oaxaca Valley in southern Mexico to become one of the largest religious and political centers anywhere in Mesoamerica, construction there beginning as early as the eighth century BCE. Its state cult was built around Cocijo, a lightning and rain god whose favor was vital to an agricultural society dependent on seasonal rainfall, worshipped alongside a wider pantheon governing maize, earthquake and the underworld. Ancestor veneration ran through the whole of Zapotec religious life. Rulers and nobles were interred in elaborately painted tombs beneath their own residences and temples rather than in a separate burial ground, and genealogical registers carved directly into stone recorded royal descent as a standing claim to both religious and political authority, the two never fully separated in Zapotec practice. Zapotec priests also maintained a two hundred and sixty day ritual calendar, the piye, used both to time ceremonies through the year and to read the character of a person born under a given day sign, a calendar shared in its underlying structure across much of ancient Mesoamerica.

Much of what is known about Zapotec religion comes not from any surviving scripture, since none is known to exist, but from inscriptions, tomb paintings, carved stelae and the architecture of Monte Alban itself, and the reading of that evidence has genuinely shifted as scholarship has advanced. The clearest case is the roughly three hundred carved reliefs at Monte Alban known as the Danzantes, literally the dancers, a name given to them on the strength of their contorted poses when they were first studied. Scholars now generally read those same poses differently, as depictions of sacrificed, tortured or diseased captives rather than performers, a reinterpretation that changes what the reliefs say about Zapotec state religion and its relationship to captive taking and sacrifice. The pre-Hispanic religion centered on Monte Alban is also a distinct and much older layer from the devotional life of Zapotec communities today. Contemporary Zapotec people in Oaxaca number in the hundreds of thousands and practice Catholicism, often blended with local custom, a living tradition this page distinguishes explicitly from the extinct state cult described here. The Zapotec state also developed one of Mesoamerica's earliest writing systems, a logosyllabic script carved onto stelae and tomb walls alongside the calendar dates it recorded, a written record scholars continue to work at fully deciphering.