Astronomical foundations of Maya religion and parallels with Christianity
By the time the Maya met the Europeans, the religions of Mesoamerica had been developing for three thousand years and were moving towards the idea of monotheism. The trouble is that the Spaniards came upon these religions at one particular stage, and it is that stage which they recorded in their own conception of it.
The Maya's complex religious conception was built upon astronomy. Quetzalcoatl, or Kukulkan, is the feathered serpent, identified with the Milky Way, which crosses the firmament and the circle of the zodiacal constellations. In the zodiacal circle, on one side of Quetzalcoatl are the mammals, and on the other the animals that link worlds, travelling between them: scorpions, birds and suchlike.
An astronomical subtext is found not only in the religion of the Maya but in Christianity too. Jesus is born together with the newborn winter sun, dies by the archaic cyclical lunar calendar of Egypt, and is resurrected once more. For the Maya, as for Christians, the beginning of our era matters, when the sun, with its precessional oscillations, passes from one constellation into another.
