Death of the Children, Part II: The Mayan Connection

[WARNING: Not light reading for a full stomach.]

As we draw to the end of the Mayan calendar today, I thought it worth reflecting on an aspect I’ve not seen discussed. In the back of most peoples’ minds is some notion of the Maya as fairly brutal (though the Aztec were worse), but I doubt the average person understands just how brutal. Here’s just a small sample:

The usual method of [Mayan]… sacrifice was decapitation in a public ceremony. Aside from decapitation, the favored method… [was] the removal of the heart. Women and children were sacrificed just as often as men. The intended victim was stripped and painted blue before being led to a courtyard or temple where the victim would be placed face-up [just as in a modern abortion] over a convex altar-like stone also painted blue.

The arms and legs of the victim were held by specially designated priests while a fourth, called the nacom, would penetrate the victim’s chest with a flint knife just below the left breast. Reaching inside the chest cavity, the nacom would pull out the still beating heart [again, note the similarities to a surgical room for abortion] and hand it to another priest, who would then smear the blood on that idol to which the sacrifice had been made.

If the sacrifice had taken place on the top of a pyramid, the corpse would be thrown to the courtyard below [dumpsters are a common means of abortion disposal] where priests of lower rank would skin the victim except for the hands and feet. The skin would then be worn by the officiating priest who would solemnly dance among the spectators. [Note the similarity to the Nazi practice of making human-skin lampshades.] If the victim had been an especially brave warrior his body might be butchered and eaten by the nobles and other spectators. [Derivatives from aborted children have made their way into any number of pharmaceuticals and cosmetics.]

Few are willing to acknowledge how the same kind of brutality (albeit dressed-up in surgical attire) has made its way into our own culture. As such, I couldn’t help drawing some parallels between the end of the Mayan calendar and the gluttonously barbaric slaughter in Newtown, Connecticut, as well as watershed-historical slaughters of children in the Bible, as we reviewed in a post earlier this week.

So, without fanfare, here’s a little ‘pop quiz’:

1. What do the Sandy Hook Elementary School slaughter, apostate ancient Israel, Pharaoh, King Herod, the Obama agenda and ‘Planned Parenthood’ and Mayan Civilization all have in common?
2. What was the highest test of obedience in faith ever given to any man (Abraham) and, simultaneously, the one thing YHWH was adamant that Abraham would not be allowed to consummate and thus that His people must never do?
3. What was the greatest demonstration of God’s love?

Answer (to all three): Child sacrifice. What’s radically different about the third (see John 3:16) compared to all of the others is that God Himself reached down and voluntarily sacrificed His own Son in our place rather than men taking their own initiative to sacrifice one another in an attempt to appease gods of their imagination.

REUTERS (January 23, 2008): Maya priests in the city of Chichen Itza in the Yucatan peninsula sacrificed children to petition the gods for rain and fertile fields by throwing them into sacred sinkhole caves, known as “cenotes.” … Archeologist Guillermo de Anda from the University of Yucatan pieced together the bones of 127 bodies discovered at the bottom of one of Chichen Itza’s sacred caves and found over 80 percent were likely boys between the ages of 3 and 11… children were often thrown alive to their watery graves to please the Mayan rain god Chaac. Some of the children were ritually skinned or dismembered before being offered to the gods, he said. 

Here are some pictures, from National Geographic. I marvel at the irony of how some take great offense when confronted with such grisly pictures from the present era. Here’s a video apologetic for the Maya sacrifices, trying to set them in some kind of relativistic context rather than simply calling them what they are: evil.

Equally fascinating is this short (1:22) Discovery Channel video illustrating some of the similarities between the Egyptians and the Mayans regarding worship of the dead, and practices of human sacrifice.