Maya religion in the context of "Mesoamerican religion"

Diego de Landa Calderón, O.F.M. (12 November 1524 – 29 April 1579) was a Spanish Franciscan bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Yucatán. He led a campaign against idolatry and human sacrifice. In doing so, he burned Maya manuscripts (codices) which contained knowledge of Maya religion and civilization, and the history of the American continent. Ironically, however, his work in documenting and researching the Maya was indispensable in achieving the current understanding of their culture, to the degree that Mayanist William Gates asserted that "ninety-nine percent of what we today know of the Mayas, we know as the result either of what Landa has told us in the pages that follow, or have learned in the use and study of what he told". He also described that "it is an equally safe statement that... he burned ninety-nine times as much knowledge of Maya history and sciences as he has given us".

Maya cities were the centres of population of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica. They served the specialised roles of administration, commerce, manufacturing and religion that characterised ancient cities worldwide. Maya cities tended to be more dispersed than cities in other societies, even within Mesoamerica, as a result of adaptation to a lowland tropical environment that allowed food production amidst areas dedicated to other activities. They lacked the grid plans of the highland cities of central Mexico, such as Teotihuacán and Tenochtitlan. Maya monarchs ruled their kingdoms from palaces that were situated within the centre of their cities. Cities tended to be located in places that controlled trade routes or that could supply essential products. This allowed the elites that controlled trade to increase their wealth and status. Such cities were able to construct temples for public ceremonies, thus attracting further inhabitants to the city. Those cities that had favourable conditions for food production, combined with access to trade routes, were likely to develop into the capital cities of early Maya states.

The political relationship between Classic Maya city-states has been likened to the relationships between city-states in Classical Greece and Renaissance Italy. Some cities were linked to each other by straight limestone causeways, known as sacbeob, although whether the exact function of these roads was commercial, political or religious has not been determined.

This is a list of deities playing a role in the Classic (200–1000 CE), Post-Classic (1000–1539 CE) and Contact Period (1511–1697) of Maya religion. The names are mainly taken from the books of Chilam Balam, Lacandon ethnography, the Madrid Codex, the work of Diego de Landa, and the Popol Vuh. Depending on the source, most names are either Yucatec or Kʼicheʼ. The Classic Period names (belonging to the Classic Maya language) are only rarely known with certainty.

Relación de las cosas de Yucatán was written by Diego de Landa around 1566, shortly after his return from Yucatán to Spain. In it, de Landa catalogues Mayan words and phrases as well as a small number of Maya hieroglyphs. The hieroglyphs, sometimes referred to as the de Landa alphabet, proved vital to modern attempts to decipher the script. The book also includes documentation of Maya religion and the Maya peoples' culture in general. It was written with the help of local Maya princes. It contains, at the end of a long list of Spanish words with Maya translations, a Maya phrase, famously found to mean "I do not want to." The original manuscript has been lost, but many copies still survive.

The first published edition was produced by Charles Etienne Brasseur de Boubourg in 1864 under the title Relation des choses de Yucatan de Diego de Landa. Texte espagnol et traduction française en regard comprenant les signes du calendrier et de l’alphabet hiéroglyphique de la langue maya accompagné de documents divers historiques et chronologiques, avec un grammaire et un vocabulaire abrégés français-maya précédés d’un Essai sur les sources de l’histoire primitive du Mexique et de l’Amérique centrale, Etc., d’après les monuments égyptiens et de l’histoire primitive de l’Égypte d’après les monuments américains. Colonialist scholar John Woodruff has suggested that one passage in particular stands out as the principal basis for the belief that late post-classic Maya had numerous written books: