Reincarnation is a game changer to your relationship to life and death

Can the human sacrifice of the ancient Maya soothe our anxieties around death and help us uncover our purpose?

Many of the contemporary, motorbike-riding Maya of Yucatán live in villages like Tinum. Their spirituality blends Catholic elements with ancient Maya cosmology—saints and Christian holidays are often linked to Maya rain gods, agricultural cycles, and ancestral spirits. While Honorio and his family practiced traditional baptisms and agricultural rituals, they defined themselves as catholic. To learn more about the ancient Maya, I visit Chichen Itzá—once a thriving urban center from around 600 to 1200 CE, now one of Mexico’s most visited archaeological sites. Towering above the complex is the Temple of Kukulkan, a pyramid designed with astronomical precision: during the equinox, its steps cast a shadow that mimics a serpent slithering down the staircase—a stone choreography of light and myth. The feathered serpent, Kukulkan, is one of the main deities in Maya cosmology, linked to wind, rain, and the planet Venus. It reminds me of Falkor, the dragon that I named my boat after, and I make it mean that I’m aligned with my life’s purpose.

My guide, Pablo, is from a nearby village. His father had worked at the site for decades, and for Pablo and his brother, these monumental ruins had once been a childhood playground. “We used to play tag on the pyramid steps,” he says, with a sheepish smile. Growing up, the monuments were nothing out of the ordinary. Only later, especially through guiding tourists, did he begin to grasp the deeper meaning of what had always been there. It seems that tourism, for better or worse, has reignited a sense of cultural pride among the Maya.

The priest in Xkeken told me that he believed in reincarnation. Underpinning this belief is the idea that our lives are learning opportunities: we come, we learn what we intended before our arrival, and then we leave. This seems like a prerequisite for the human sacrifices that the ancient Maya performed. Or at the least it makes them more understandable—not the act of dehumanised savages, as the colonisers would have us believe, but of people who viewed death as a transition, not an end.

There was a scene in the ball court of Chichen Itza. It showed a warrior chief bowing to be decapitated. Archaeologists speculate that the winner of the ball game was offered in sacrifice to the Gods. They argue that it shows the Maya offering their best warriors for sacrifice. But what if it was not just an offer to the Gods, but also the honorable departure of a master spirit that had learned what he came here to learn and was ready to leave this world, victorious? Maybe the ball game was just the Maya way of ending it while on a winning streak. Or maybe it was their way of stepping out of duty. Or maybe it was both.

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