Considered as an intermediary between gods and men, the shamans were one of the most important characters of the Mayan people. They came to play a decisive role as healers, diviners and repositories of ancestral wisdom; which allowed them to occupy a privileged place within their social organization, constituting the powerful priestly class.
For these and other reasons, not everyone could act as a shaman, since it was considered a hereditary profession transmitted by shamans of the highest level or «Ah men» to their children. These, among other knowledge, They taught them, in addition to healing and divination techniques, the writing of the codices, the organization of religious ceremonies, as well as the secrets of astronomy and the occurrence of the seasons. These last two aspects of great impact on the Mayan civilization, given their importance for the development of agriculture and the sustenance of life.
Although, wisdom was obtained from their ancestors, to obtain supernatural powers such as transforming into an animal and the ability to communicate with the gods and spirits, the shamans had to go through an initiation ritual in which they sought to separate the body and the spirit, one way of achieving this being the ecstatic trance. A state that is accessed after eating plants and mushrooms with a hallucinogenic effect, although it was also possible to achieve a similar effect through insomnia, fasting, meditation or sexual abstinence, among others.
However, another way in which this separation could be achieved involuntarily was through dreams; This method would have been used by the greatest shamans in Mayan history, who according to found stelae would have been the ancient rulers. Through dreams they were able to learn to communicate with the gods and to develop their divinatory and healing arts.
Given the plethora of functions they performed, in Mayan society there were various types of shamans, such as: the «Ah kin», who were in charge of carrying out all the preparations to make the sacrifices; the «chilan», well known for being the diviners and interpreters of the will of the gods or the «kas bac» specialists in the treatment of dislocations and bone fractures. Likewise, the women stood out, being the «x alanzab» in charge of assisting in childbirth and guessing when the birth would occur.
Although for the Mayans a shaman could have many functionsthe main one was to maintain in perfect harmony the spirit and the body, of each of the inhabitants of his town, thus becoming the healer par excellence. A task that he fulfilled using various treatments, among many of them the famous medical incantations to cure madness or burns and in the case of diseases caused by divine punishment such as epidemics, he proceeded with self-sacrifice or communal atonement.
Despite the destruction of much of the medical knowledge, when the Spaniards arrived, the naguales, as the Mayan shamans are originally known, even today continue with their work as diviners and healers, only now their people are not constituted only by the Mayans that still exist, but now it is the whole world.