When the Mayans played ball

In a game like basketball and rooted in mythology, losing meant death

A thousand years ago, Central America was home to the Mayan civilisation. And they loved to play a ball game in a stadium the size of a football field. The court featured two steeply sloping parallel stone walls inset with round disks or rings set high on the walls at right angles. Two teams competed in a contest to pass a rubber ball through such a ring.

The game was very much like basketball with two crucial differences: first, the ball could not touch the ground and had to be bounced off the walls and second, only elbows, knees and hips could be used by the players. Winning was not easy. Losing lethal. For often, the loser was sacrificed to the gods.

The story goes that long ago a pair of twins called One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu played this game of ball. It disturbed the twin lords of hell, One Death and Seven Death, who invited the twin heroes to the underworld to play a game of ball. The twin heroes accepted the invitation.



Unfortunately, during the games, the lords of hell cheated the twin heroes, defeated and finally decapitated them. One of the two heads was placed on a tree as a warning to all mortals not to mess with the lords of hell. A young girl called Blood Moon found this head and was surprised to find that it could talk.

The head asked the girl to hold out her hand. She did and the head spat on it. The girl became pregnant. This made her father so angry that he decided to kill her but she managed to give him the slip. She found her mother-in-law, and in her house, delivered a pair of twins, Hunahpu and Ixbalanque.

These twins possessed many magical powers and were expert hunters. One day, they discovered their father's ball court and decided to play. Like their father and uncle, they disturbed the lords of hell who once again invited them to the underworld to play ball. The junior twins accepted but unlike the senior twins, they were so smart that they repeatedly outwitted the lords of hell. Ultimately, they managed to kill the lords of hell. For this service, the junior twins were made the sun and the moon.

This story comes to us from the Popol Vuh, a book that was to the Mayas what the Bible is to the Christians and the Koran is to Muslims.

It contained the word of the gods. It was also a book that explained how the world came into being. It contained a list of divinely ordained rules and rituals and a foundation history of the Mayan people which gives the Mayan kings a heavenly mandate and links them to a list of gods.

But for the Popol Vuh, scholars know little of the Mayans. They were not really an empire in the modern sense of the term. The civilization thrived between 150 BC to around 900 AD.

They were a collection of about 90 city states, with different languages, who created farms in clearings in the rainforest and grew tomatoes, peanuts, avocados, tobacco, beans many plants that were unknown to the rest of the world until Columbus and those who followed him took them to Europe and beyond in the 16th Century.

There was clearly some form of government and religion which led to the building of pyramid-like temples, full of complex carvings. Mayans were the first American cultures to develop an advanced form of hieroglyphic writing. They made great strides in astronomy and mathematics and produced remarkable architecture, painting, pottery and sculpture.

The cities were basically temple complexes where priests served the ritual needs of the local communities. People came to this village to appease the gods through plant, animal and human sacrifices. People also came to cities to market, to play, dance and be entertained.

The Popul Vuh informs us that the Mayans lived in a fragile world that had been created five times and destroyed four times. Blood sacrifice was one way to delay the eventual and inevitable world-destroying flood. It was a world of fear where natural death took man to hell. Heaven followed violent deathu00a0either during childbirth, during war or following sacrifice.

To obtain help of the gods, Mayans fasted, prayed and sacrificed deer, dogs, turkeys and humans, atop limestone pyramids. To nourish the gods, priests and noblemen often pierced their lips, ears, tongue, penis and other body parts; the blood was splattered on pieces of bark paper or collected in bowls. The gory rituals were essential to please the gods, maintain the cosmic balance, and ensure fertility.