The Maya Classic Period is the one era of ancient Mesoamerican religion that can be read in the words of its practitioners. Its kings put up carved monuments recording accessions, births, marriages, wars and rituals, dated to the day against the Long Count, and the decipherment of the script across the twentieth century turned those monuments from decoration into documents.
Michael Coe and Stephen Houston's survey traces the decipherment and what it produced. The picture is of a religion in which the king was a ritual specialist as much as a ruler, holding a title usually translated as holy lord, and in which his own body was an instrument. Bloodletting by the ruler and his consort, drawing blood from the tongue or elsewhere and burning it on paper, is depicted on monuments as the act that opened communication with ancestors and gods.
Vera Tiesler and Andrea Cucina's work on skeletal evidence has refined what can be said about sacrifice and about the treatment of bodies, replacing a good deal of earlier speculation with directly observed data. Behind the royal record stands a wider cosmology of the maize god, of the underworld called Xibalba, and of a calendar that tied every act to a position in cycles of days.