Acat: The Mayan God Of Tattooing And Scarification
Pain and sacrifice for a brutal pantheon
Tattooing has been many things to many peoples, and there’s evidence of tattooing from more than 5,000 years ago in Europe, but even this is likely to be an huge underestimation. Today people get tattoos mostly for aesthetic reasons, but for the Mayans, it was all about blood, sacrifice and power.
The Mayans
As with a great deal of Mesoamerican history, much of what we know comes from the Spanish. Multiple waves of conquistadors subjugated the peoples of Meso-America in the 16th century, bringing with them not only death and disease but Christianity too. A great many monks, friars and priests joined these expeditions, and it’s from them that we get many of our first-hand accounts of the Mayans and other Mesoamerican peoples like the Aztecs.
The accounts, as one can imagine, contain a heavy amount of bias, particularly in regard to religious practices, and though modern scholars have worked to counter this, there remains a great deal of speculation regarding their beliefs.
