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Mesoamerican cosmovision or cosmology is the collection of worldviews shared by the Indigenous pre-Columbian societies of Mesoamerica.The cosmovision of these societies was reflected in the ways in which they were organized, such as in their built environment and social hierarchies, as well as in their epistemologies and ontologies, including an understanding of their place within the cosmos ...
The Aztecs abandoned their rites and merged their own religious beliefs with Catholicism, whereas the relatively autonomous Maya kept their religion as the core of their beliefs and incorporated varying degrees of Catholicism. [6] The Aztec village religion was supervised by friars, mainly Franciscan. Prestige and honor in the village were ...
The term 'theatre state' , originally coined for the Hindu kingdoms of Bali, could also be used for describing the Classic Maya kingdoms; it suggests the cohesion of the state to be dependent on elaborate royal rituals through which status differences between aristocratic families could find expression.
The Maya gods included Kukulkán (also known by the Kʼicheʼ name Gukumatz and the Aztec name Quetzalcoatl) and Tepeu. The two were referred to as the Creators, the Forefathers or the Makers. According to the story, the two gods decided to preserve their legacy by creating an Earth-bound species looking like them.
A theme in Inca mythology is the duality of the Cosmos. The realms were separated into the upper and lower realms, the hanan pacha and the ukhu pacha and urin pacha.Hanan pacha, the upper world, consisted of the deities of the sun, moon, stars, rainbow, and lightning while ukhu pacha and urin pacha were the realms of Pachamama, the earth mother, and the ancestors and heroes of the Inca or ...
The tensions between Europeans, indigenous peoples, and African slaves and their descendants shaped South America as a whole, starting in the sixteenth century. Most of Spanish America achieved its independence in the early nineteenth century through hard-fought wars , while Portuguese Brazil first became the seat of the Portuguese empire and ...
Maya mythology or Mayan mythology is part in of Mesoamerican mythology and comprises all of the Maya tales in which personified forces of nature, deities, and the heroes interacting with these play the main roles. The legends of the era have to be reconstructed from iconography. Other parts of Mayan oral tradition (such as animal tales, folk ...
Important rituals such as the dedication of major building projects or the enthronement of a new ruler required a human offering. The sacrifice of an enemy king was the most prized, and such a sacrifice involved decapitation of the captive ruler, perhaps in a ritual reenactment of the decapitation of the Maya maize god by the death gods. [348]