Here are 100 books that Star Gods of the Maya fans have personally recommended if you like
Star Gods of the Maya.
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I’ve been fascinated by Maya religion since college—ever since I took my first class on Maya hieroglyphics at Tulane University. At first, I was drawn to the visuals accompanying the glyphs: women running ropes through their tongues, men holding hands with gods, and animals (spirits) wielding sacrificial knives. Then I began chasing the meanings of those visuals until I found myself specializing in ancient Maya mortuary behavior and receiving a PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University. I am happy to say that I am still on the chase, having written or edited five books (with two more on the way). I hope you enjoy this list!
If I were talking about this book over coffee with a friend, I would say this: you cannot understand the ancient Maya without reading it. The Popol Vuh is the written version of an oral, indigenous creation myth more than two thousand years old. There are many English and Spanish translations of the Popol Vuh; but this one is my favorite because it is approachable and precise at the same time. For example, you can choose to ignore the footnotes and their implications. However, if you decide you want to go down the rabbit hole (as I always do), you will not be disappointed. I learn something new every time I pick up this book—it is that good.
The Popol Vuh is the most important example of Maya literature to have survived the Spanish conquest. It is also one of the world’s great creation accounts, comparable to the beauty and power of Genesis.
Most previous translations have relied on Spanish versions rather than the original K’iche’-Maya text. Based on ten years of research by a leading scholar of Maya literature, this translation with extensive notes is uniquely faithful to the original language. Retaining the poetic style of the original text, the translation is also remarkably accessible to English readers.
Illustrated with more than eighty drawings, photographs, and maps,…
I’ve been fascinated by Maya religion since college—ever since I took my first class on Maya hieroglyphics at Tulane University. At first, I was drawn to the visuals accompanying the glyphs: women running ropes through their tongues, men holding hands with gods, and animals (spirits) wielding sacrificial knives. Then I began chasing the meanings of those visuals until I found myself specializing in ancient Maya mortuary behavior and receiving a PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University. I am happy to say that I am still on the chase, having written or edited five books (with two more on the way). I hope you enjoy this list!
When I think about ancient Maya religion, the first thing that comes to mind is pageantry; I imagine kings performing in front of a crowd, or perhaps nobles bloodletting for a small audience inside a palace. Magic and witchcraft are an afterthought. They are front and center in this book—as they were in ancient Mesoamerica. This collection of essays forced me to abandon the habitual boundaries between magic, religion, and witchcraft in the Maya area (and I am better for it). If you are looking for a book where rulers summon monsters and witchcraft is a way of life, this is the place to start.
I’ve been fascinated by Maya religion since college—ever since I took my first class on Maya hieroglyphics at Tulane University. At first, I was drawn to the visuals accompanying the glyphs: women running ropes through their tongues, men holding hands with gods, and animals (spirits) wielding sacrificial knives. Then I began chasing the meanings of those visuals until I found myself specializing in ancient Maya mortuary behavior and receiving a PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University. I am happy to say that I am still on the chase, having written or edited five books (with two more on the way). I hope you enjoy this list!
The ancient Maya viewed many things that we would consider inert as animate: objects had agency, even personality. As a result, I often tell my students that the artifacts they hold were once alive. Unfortunately, I rarely have time to tell them just how they came to live—or how they died (sometimes violently). This fascinating book explores not only animism but also the ways in which artisans literally brought objects to life. Read this book and then go to an exhibit on the ancient Maya; then try to decide which things in the exhibit are still (technically) alive. The exercise may be disconcerting—but it will offer a completely different take on the museum experience.
For the Classic Maya, who flourished in and around the Yucatan peninsula in the first millennium AD, artistic materials were endowed with an internal life. Far from being inert substances, jade, flint, obsidian, and wood held a vital essence, agency, and even personality. To work with these materials was to coax their life into full expression and to engage in witty play. Writing, too, could shift from hieroglyphic signs into vibrant glyphs that sprouted torsos, hands, and feet. Appearing to sing, grapple, and feed, they effectively blurred the distinction between text and image.
I’ve been fascinated by Maya religion since college—ever since I took my first class on Maya hieroglyphics at Tulane University. At first, I was drawn to the visuals accompanying the glyphs: women running ropes through their tongues, men holding hands with gods, and animals (spirits) wielding sacrificial knives. Then I began chasing the meanings of those visuals until I found myself specializing in ancient Maya mortuary behavior and receiving a PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University. I am happy to say that I am still on the chase, having written or edited five books (with two more on the way). I hope you enjoy this list!
No list of books on the Maya religion would be complete without The Blood of Kings. This was the first book on the topic I ever saw—and from the moment I did, I was hooked. Like most people at the time of its publication, I had never seen so many gorgeous photographs, line drawings, and religious concepts in one place. Even though many of the hieroglyphic translations are dated (particularly the royal names), the book remains a treasure trove of general information. Visually, this is the book by which all exhibit catalogues on the Maya are judged—and essential to anyone wanting an introduction to Maya religion.
"[A] work as remarkable for its text as for the photographs and drawings that illustrate it."―Octavio Paz, The New York Review of Books
A comprehensive guide to the Maya which reveals kingship rites, ritual warfare, with a vast array of color plates and drawings. 122 color plates, 300 drawings and 50 black-and-white illustrations
I consider myself a seeker. Several experiences, such as experiencing the buzzing that Robert Monroe mentions, seeing objects with my eyes closed, and meeting a spirit guide, led me to realize that the universe is more mysterious than what science can explain. Perhaps we will develop the technology to measure these phenomena someday. Or maybe we already have? The US Army's “Stargate Project,” deemed as unhelpful, is one example, but what about the projects they haven't declassified? It’s fun to think about. Combined with a huge interest in astronomy, I enjoy learning from a variety of sources, never holding anything tightly, because what we know is always changing.
One of the more thought-provoking books on fringe science that I’ve ever read. I won’t say I necessarily believe everything that David talks about here, but he makes a compelling case that DNA information could be transmitted as a wave, that life is abundant in the galaxy, and technology once existed that we lost eons ago. It’s a wild ride, and you may be able to spot an idea it inspired in my book.
Prepare yourself for a revealing tour through the most incredible scientific mysteries of the world with your guide David Wilcock, the New York Times bestselling author of Awakening in the Dream.
More than two million people have seen David Wilcock's incredible tour of the 2012 prophecies in his Internet documentary, The 2012 Enigma. Now, he expands his vision with a cutting-edge investigation into alternative sciences with deep insights into what is coming in our immediate future. A stunning synthesis of hidden science and lost prophecies, The Source Field Investigations exposes DNA transformation, wormholes, ancient conspiracies, the Maya calendar, and a…
I started my career as a New York magazine editor and cynical journalist writing about art, celebrities, and show designers. Eventually I had an existential meltdown where I realized I was trapped in reductive materialism. I didn’t believe in a soul or a spirit or anything that wasn’t tangible. I decided to explore psychedelics and wrote my first book, Breaking Open the Head, after visiting indigenous cultures in Africa and South America where I took Iboga, ayahuasca, and mushrooms in initiation ceremonies. I learned we are facing an ecological and geo-political meta-crisis. I tried to find the roots of this, hoping to save humanity from extinction by unifying us around a mystical realization of oneness.
The Mayan Factor had a huge influence on me when I read it after reading Jose’s other amazing books, Earth Ascending and Time and the Technosphere. He makes the case that the classic Maya civilization of the Yucatan was related to a galactic civilization that travels across the universe as patterns of information transduced into DNA so they can incarnate at particular junctures to perform a cosmic ritual of “synchronization.” The Mayan calendar is an artifact of this “Galactic Maya” who wanted us to understand we were starting to enter a new dimensional portal with the end of the 5,125 year Long Count on December 21, 2012. While reading this book, I had a crazy experience of the Galactic Maya entering into me and looking out through my eyes at our turbulent reality. Jose argues that a new calendar could shift us from chaos to harmony. A fabulous visionary excursion!
This is the extraordinary book that initiated the Harmonic Convergence in August 1987 and awakened the world to the Mayan Calendar. In it, Jose Arguelles revealed three revolutionary ideas: that a great moment of human transformation awaited us as we approached 2012: that there are galactic "seasons" and that the Maya accurately recorded them; and that each person had the capability to connect directly with the energy of a beam emanating from the galactic center that contains the power to awaken the higher mind.
I started my scientific career as an Astrophysicist. However, I have always been interested in Archaeology. This finally led me to conjugate the two passions when I started working in Archaeoastronomy, in 2003. Working in Archaeoastronomy first means having a direct experience of the sites (preferably, of every single stone, although in places like Giza they count in the millions…). So I have made fieldworks in Italy, Egypt, Cambodia, and, recently, on Chinese imperial necropolises. I currently teach Archaeoastronomy as a professor at the Politecnico of Milan. I have always been interested also in scientific communication on TV and social media, and my introductive Archaeoastronomy course is available for free on the Coursera platform.
The last two books I suggest are of fresh press and testify to the modern approach to archaeoastronomy as a multi-disciplinary science. In this book, the aim is to approach Greek religion as a complex mix of rituals, cults, and architecture, identifying the connections with the sky and, more generally, with the “cosmos”. Relevant examples are discussed in detail.
In this book, Efrosyni Boutsikas examines ancient Greek religious performances, intricately orchestrated displays comprising topography, architecture, space, cult, and myth. These various elements were unified in a way that integrated the body within cosmic space and made the sacred extraordinary. Boutsikas also explores how natural light or the night-sky may have assisted in intensifying the experience of these rituals, and how they may have determined ancient perceptions of the cosmos. The author's digital and virtual reconstructions of ancient skyscapes and religious structures during such occurrences unveil a deeper understanding of the importance of time and place in religious experience. Boutsikas…
Ryan Murdock is Editor-at-Large (Europe) for Outpost, Canada’s national travel magazine, and a weekly columnist for The Shift, an independent Maltese news portal. His feature articles have taken him across a remote stretch of Canada’s Northwest Territories on foot, into the Central Sahara in search of prehistoric rock art, and around Wales with a drug squad detective hunting for the real King Arthur.
Far from being an extinct people swallowed by the jungle-like their famous temples, the Maya make up a significant percentage of the population of southern Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize, with vibrant ancient languages that are still spoken today. This beautifully written account of contemporary Maya culture will help you understand a remarkable people who explored the world through arithmetic and time.
"Cut Stones and Crossroads" and "On Fiji Island" are previous books by Ronald Wright, author of this book concerned with the Maya, who in the first millennium AD, created the most intellectually and artistically advanced civilization native to the Americas. Despite a mysterious collapse in the ninth century and Spanish invasion in the 16th century, some five million people throughout Guatemala, Belize and south-eastern Mexico still speak Maya languages and preserve a Maya identity today. Ronald Wright set out to discover the roots of the Maya and the extent of their survival after centuries of invasion and a recent civil…
I’ve been a lifelong horror reader, really since first stumbling onto Stephen King in the 9th grade. There’s something about that genre that has held a particular fascination for me through the years, probably because the best works are some combination of suspenseful, well-written, and cathartic, as they really get your mind racing as to what you might do yourself in a given situation. If you’re lucky, they might even have something to say about the human condition as a whole. But given this prolonged interest and exposure to horror, it’s only natural I would eventually progress to giving it a stab myself.
This is always the first one that leaps to mind for me when I’m thinking of a relentlessly paced novel that is nonetheless extremely well written. It’s a simple yet relatable premise, which to me makes it all the more horrifying. Smith is a master of economy here, as he keeps the plot moving (with no chapter breaks!) throughout, yet his style is a fairly literary one and he develops the characters well.
Craving an adventure to wake them from their lethargic Mexican holiday before they return home, four friends set off in search of one of their own who has travelled to the interior to investigate an archaeological dig in the Mayan ruins. After a long journey into the jungle, the group come across a partly camouflaged trail and a captivating hillside covered with red flowers. Lured by these, the group move closer until they happen across a gun-toting Mayan horseman who orders them away. In the midst of the confrontation, one of the group steps inadvertently backwards into the flowering vine.…
I grew up in Valladolid, a semi-rural city of Yucatan. My parents loved the history and archaeology of the Yucatan peninsula, which not long ago was a single cultural and linguistic entity. I grew up dreaming of becoming an archaeologist. With time, I became fascinated with people and sociality within and beyond Yucatan, so I became an anthropologist. I trained as an anthropologist in Mexico and Canada, and have done research in Canada, Italy, Mexico, and Spain. I live and work in Yucatan, as a professor of anthropology. Good ethnographies are what anthropology is about, and those I write about here are some of the best.
There are two Ek’ Balam settings in Yucatan state: One is an outstanding, mesmerizing archaeological site, with a well-preserved representation of the mouth to the infra-world, and angel-like figures suspected to represent dancers.
The other one is a little village of the same name, next to the archaeological site, where people attempt to catch and enchant tourists who look for an alternative experience.
Life is hard in rural villages of the Yucatan peninsula, and tourism is promoted by the national and state authorities as a way to bring development to local settings. This book shows the incredible resilience and good humor characterizing Maya-speaking peoples in Yucatan.
Following a single family and their engagement with tourism through several years, this book endears the inhabitants of Ek’Balam to the reader, and also manages to place their ordeals within the larger literature regarding the tourist industry and its daily effects on people’s lives.
On Being Maya and Getting By is an ethnographic study of the two Ek’Balams—a notable archaeological site and adjacent village—of the Yucatán Peninsula. When the archaeological site became a tourist destination, the village became the location of a community-based tourism development project funded by the Mexican government. Overt displays of heritage and a connection to Maya antiquity became important and profitable for the modern Maya villagers. Residents of Ek’Balam are now living in a complex ecosystem of natural and cultural resources where the notion and act of “being Maya” is deeply intertwined with economic development.
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