Sacred territory: human body and nature in Mayan thought

This work aims to elucidate the attitude of the Maya culture towards its environment. Its sources are: the representation of the landscape in a few sculptural, pictorial and architectural examples; the colonial Maya texts - specifically the Popol Vuh, the books of Chilam Balam and the Ritual of the Bacabes - and the ethnographic reports of the 20th century. It states that the human body is conceived as an integral part of the geographical environment and is even considered a scale reproduction of the cosmos. The inhabited territory is a coherent whole within which men, animals, plants, stars, geographic orientation and time course play a specific role and in which all are interdependent; nature has an order whose center is the human being. Likewise, the intimate relationship of man with his environment is assumed as a religious duty, it is considered that all the elements that compose the world are "alive", that is to say, endowed with a "heart", possessing a divine essence. The human population coexists with the plant, animal, mineral and meteoric population in a biological exchange that is expressed in specific myths and rituals. For Maya thought, body and nature are a single territory, the territory of the sacred.