Exploring the Depths of Mayan Cosmology: A Journey Through Life and Death
- Dec 31, 2025
- 5 min read
Updated: Jan 23
For Lovers of Story
Stories are one of the oldest ways humans have made sense of the unseen. Long before written language—before borders, names, or fixed histories—story was how knowledge moved: carried in breath, gesture, memory, and firelight. Through story, we learned where we came from, how the world was shaped, and what waits beyond the edges of life.
Much of my work begins here—not with illustration, but with story as a way of entering a worldview. Myths, cosmologies, and ancestral narratives are not things I aim to recreate or explain; they are places I visit, landscapes I walk through, voices I listen to while making art. They shape the emotional and symbolic terrain from which my images emerge.
For Lovers of Story is a space to share these journeys in their raw form. Not polished explanations or academic retellings, but lived imaginings—stories stepped into, inhabited, and carried forward through creative practice. What follows is one such passage: an imaginative telling rooted in ancient cosmology that became the foundation for a painting.
The Land of Quiché
I come from the land of Quiché. Stories of life after death have been passed through generations— inherited from the ancestors of this land, traded among enemies and neighbors, and passed on to those that come after us. Olmec, Toltec, Maya, Aztec. We live in the abundant forests and deserts of what will someday come to be known as Mesoamerica. As all stories seen through the mists of time, there are variations and shifts in how they are told. But I stand here today, at the crossroads of death, and know only what I know.
I stand under the great Yaxche—The Tree of Life, The Green Tree, The First Tree. You will know it as Ceiba Pentandra. This place, this tree, is the axis mundi: the center of the universe. It is the channel through which spirits and gods travel between the realms. The trunk is wider than I am tall, and I cannot reach its lowest branches. I stand here on middle Earth, on the back of a great beast—a turtle or crocodile—that floats in the watery expanse of existence amid the water lilies. This is where the people live, where I spent the days that passed from birth to death.
The Journey of the Soul
There are four other trees like this one that hold up the heavens. I look first to the East—the red lands where the sun rises—then to the West, the black lands of the setting sun. If I had died as a warrior—either in battle, as a sacrifice, or in childbirth—I could have traveled this black road, the road of the sun and the Milky Way. This death would have been the most esteemed. But I was not so lucky in my death.
I look to the White North, where the tree’s branches reach into the heavens. This is the land of the Gods, and no one travels here except the gods. The first branches touch the clouds. This is where the moon travels her path, closest to the mortal realm. Above this, in the second heaven, is the realm of stars—the Milky Way—and an array of gods and goddesses of the night sky. Tonatiuh, the sun, lives and travels through the third region to his home in the west before journeying through the underworld at night to rise again the next day. The land of the Goddess and Venus—that bright morning and evening star I could always find in the sky—rests above the sun.
The fifth heaven is where the smoking stars streak across the sky. The sixth and seventh are obsidian black-green and blue: the realms of night and day. The eighth is where storms rage. Above this are the white, yellow, and red heavens, where many gods dwell. At the top—the dual realms of the twelfth and thirteenth—is Omeyocan, home of the supreme deities, generators and founders of the universe. They are great serpent-owl birds who shine brighter than the sun and nest in the tallest branches of the tree.
Trials of the Underworld
I clutch the amulet my family buried with me to aid me on the journey ahead, and I turn now to the South. This is the Yellow land, Xibabalba—the place of fear. If I had died by drowning, lightning, or an illness of the waters, I could have swum out into the waters. But I died an ordinary death, and I follow the path that most of us will take. I will spend the next four years in trials set by the nine Lords of Night as I pass through their realms—a warrior in death, since I was not one in life.
I begin my journey down the roots beneath me, descending into the deep river that separates the world of life from the world of death. The chill of the cold water envelops me as I take my final breath and submerge. I pass between the great mountains, their immovable stature flanking the way forward and casting their long shadows in crushing weight. Next, I must climb the dark, obsidian mountains, my hands cut by sharp bladed stone, to reach the land of icy winds. I do not remember warmth as my air freezes in my lungs, each breath a painful stab.
The next trial is less physical, but fear trembles beneath my skin as I pass through the land of waving flags. Who is this Lord of Night who must proclaim himself with banners stretching as far as the eye can see? His warning foreshadows the next lord, who pierces me again and again with arrows as I walk through his domain. And worse still is the lord who follows, who sets his wild beasts upon me to hunt me down and devour my heart.
Finally, the end comes into sight as I reach the narrow path of stones where the dead gather at the journey’s end, before finding peace in Mictlan—the place where smoke has no outlet. Here, I may either dissolve into eternal repose or rise again with the dawning sun.
This was an imaginative telling of the Mayan cosmology of life after death. My painting, Ceiba, is rooted in these myths. Below are sources if you wish to explore this cosmology directly.
Itzel Almaguer, “Yaxche: The Tree of Life,” HistoricalMX, accessed December 31, 2025, https://historicalmx.org/items/show/141.
“Sacred Ceiba Tree of Life, the World Tree of Maya Religion and Cosmology.” Owls in Maya & Teotihuacan Art, FLAAR, Jan. 2008.
Timothy W. Knowlton, “Hybrid Cosmologies in Mesoamerica: A Reevaluation of the Yax Cheel Cab, a Maya World Tree.”
Mythology of the Americas Cottie Burland, Irene Nicholson, Harold Osborne
The Lost Kingdoms of the Maya National Geographic Society
Mythology: The Illustrated Anthology of World Myth & Storytelling C. Scott Littleton
Popul Vu: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings Dennis Tedlock