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Two teams of dark-skinned, short men face one another on a plaster-covered ballcourt somewhere in lowland Guatemala. Torches send dancing flames over their slick, sweat-drenched bodies; their skin shimmers in unholy light. Between them lies a thick, well-worn rubber ball, sitting atop a large engraved coverstone in the center of the court (Fox, 1996, 485). All around them rise the bleachers, filled with the residents of their large city-state. The night is filled with tension and an aura of holy reverence, for on this night, the ball game is to be played. Men will win and men will lose, but these words do not mean what they do in our day and age. For in one sense of the word, the winners will be sacrificed, a bloody offering to the savage gods of Mayan lore. They will accept this fate with heads held high, however, for not only are they here to culminate years of training and hardship, but they are also here to participate in a ritual as old as the Maya themselves, a ritual engrained in their mindset and in their religion. Honor is steeped upon these men this night, and they shall savagely compete for the greatest honor: to be sent to Xibalba.

This is the attitude of the Mayan civilization, and many other related groups in lowland Mesoamerica. According to ancient Mayan lore, such as the Popol Vuh, the ballcourt is not only a place of social gathering and political importance (Fox, 1996), but it is also a direct pathway to the test-filled underworld. In ages long past, the great heroes One and Seven Hunahpu and the warrior twins, Hunahpu and Xblanque played here before journeying to Xibalba to challenge the lords of death and blood (Tedlock, 36-39). It is here, in this sacred ballcourt, that life and death intersect in the Mayan mindset, and it is this intersection of ritual, religion, sport, life, and death that I choose to focus this paper on. The relationship between the ballcourt and death, however, is a complicated one.

To better understand the significance of the ballcourt and ballgame as part of Mayan ritual and mythology, a basic understanding of Mayan architecture and religion is required. In the Mayan worldview, concrete things such as archaeology were intimately tied to traditionally abstract things such as religion, because they did not perceive spiritual happenings as entirely separate from the physical world (Fox, 1991, 217). This interaction between the physical plane and the world of the gods and spirits underlies the symbolic nature of the

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