The Maya
The burial customs of the Yucatec Maya, included a period of fasting and mourning, especially for the husband and wife of the deceased. The corpse was wrapped in a shroud, with maize gruel and a precious bead placed in the mouth. The body was then interred in the house floor, which then was usually abandoned.
People of high rank were often cremated. In this case, the Mayan elite may have been evoking Central Mexican burial practices. Although cremation is generally rare in the Mayan region, it is well documented for the Aztec.
The bead placed in the mouth would serve as money in the afterlife or it may have been that the stone signified the life spirit, as in the case of the Aztec, who considered the mortuary bead as the symbolic heart of the deceased.
(In royal funerary rites in highland Guatemala, a precious bead was passed before the mouth of the dying king to capture his expiring breath soul.)
In ancient Maya art, this breath soul is commonly portrayed as a jade bead or flower floating before the face. Moreover, one of the more common death expressions appearing in Classic Maya texts concerns the expiration of a floral breath soul.
The Yucatec Maya conceived of two afterlife realms, the dark underworld known as Metnal and a paradisal place of plenty, where the souls would be shaded by a tree in the center of the world. The underworld was the foul realm of the skeletal death god Ah Cimih, also know as Cizin.
Aside from the planting and growth of corn, the dawn rising of the sun was another basic metaphor for resurrection and rebirth in the Maya religion. The underworld was known as Xibalba, or "place of fright." The lords of Xibalba were malevolent gods of death and disease who, although deceitful and cunning, were eventually defeated by a mythic pair of hero twins.
In Classic Maya thought, the burial and resurrection of the deceased was compared to the planting of the moribund maize kernel, temporarily buried but destined to reemerge.
One extraordinary carved vessel, commonly referred to at the "Death Vase," portrays both metaphors of death and resurrection. On one side of the vase three anthropomorphic cacao trees rise out of the skeletal corpse. The central tree is clearly the Maya maize god. The opposite side of the vase portrays the maize god as a supine, bundled corpse. Floating directly above the corpse is a solar disk, quite probably denoting the ascension of the soul into the sky.
In Classic Maya art, deceased kings are commonly shown in solar disks or apotheosized as the sun god. Given the identification of the Maya sun god with war and warriors, the Classic Maya may have conceived of a celestial paradise similar to that of the later Aztec, a brilliant, flower-filled realm of heroic kings and warriors.
