Abstract
This book strives to give a concise and up-to-date overview of religion of the Pre-Columbian Maya civilization both for students and for the educated public. It moves from a wide historical and cultural introduction to a survey of metaempirical beings and core myths of the Maya culture towards rituals, cosmology, and spatio-temporal context of the sacred, including the wide and often complicated scholarly debate that surround these topics.
One of its other goals is to show the particular, local and immanent character of Maya religion, thus distancing itself slightly from attempts to sketch a synthetic "pan-Maya" religion and culture, which is necessarily a mere academic construct. Finally, the book intends to shed some light on some recent New Age influences that can be discerned in the Maya studies, thus contributing to a much needed scholarly debate in nascendi.