Sacrifice was a religious activity in Maya culture, involving either the killing of animals or the bloodletting by members of the community, in rituals superintended by priests. Sacrifice has been a feature of almost all pre-modern societies at some stage of their development and for broadly the same reason: to propitiate or fulfil a perceived obligation towards the gods.A Human sacrifice was far less common, being tied to events such as ill fortune, warfare and the consecration of new leaders or temples. The practice was also far less common than in the Aztec societies. When it did occur, the Maya people would sacrifice their prisoners, who were most often from neighboring kingdoms.

The Mayas engaged in a large number of festivals and rituals on fixed days of the year, many of which involved animal sacrifices and all of which seem to have involved blood letting. The ubiquity of this practice is a unique aspect of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican culture, and is now believed to have originated with the Olmecs,^[] the region's first civilization.Ritualised sacrifice was usually performed in public by religious or political leaders piercing a soft body part, most commonly the tongue, ear or foreskin, and collecting the blood to smear directly on the idol or collecting it on paper, which was then burned.^[4] In what is today Nicaragua, the blood was smeared on maize, distributed to the people and baked into sacred bread. The blood could also be collected from the non-elite, often from the foreskins of youths , or from high-ranking women.The site of collection was of obvious ritual significance. Joralemon notes it is "virtually certain" that blood from the penis and the vagina were the most sacred and had "extraordinary fertilizing power" and that such rituals were essential for the regeneration of the natural world, particularly cultivated plants.^[6] In one dramatic variant men and women "gathered in the temple in a line, and each made a pierced hole through the member, across from side to side, and then passed through as great a quantity of cord as they could stand; and thus all together fastened and strung together, they anointed the statue [the Spanish considered to be sun worship of "Baʿal"] from the bible.^[]" But auto-sacrifice could also be an everyday event, with those passing by an idol anointing it with blood drawn on the spot as a sign of piety.^[6]Blood sacrifice to the Maya gods was vigorously opposed by the Spanish clergy as the most visible sign of native apostasy, as De Landa, who was later to become the second bishop of the Yucatán, makes clear:

Both blood and human sacrifice were ubiquitous in all cultures of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, but beyond some uncontroversial generalisations there is no scholarly consensus on the broader questions (and specific mysteries) this raises. Most scholars agree that both practices arose among the Olmecs at least 3,000 years ago, and have been transmitted to subsequent cultures, including the Maya. Why they arose among the Olmecs is unknown, and probably unknowable, given the paucity of data.

Blood, and by extension the still-beating heart, is the central element in both the ethnography and iconography of sacrifice, and its use through ritual established or renewed for the Maya a connection with the sacred that was for them essential to the very existence of the natural order. Julian Lee’s observation that the Maya "drew no sharp distinction between the animate and the inanimate"^[22] and the remarks by Pendergast^[19] and others that sacrifices "ensouled" buildings and idols indicates a social meaning, as Reilly suggests, most akin to Transubstantiation^[23] – a literal rather than symbolic transformation on which the fate of the world and its inhabitants depended.

As with all known theocratic societies, it is likely the Maya political and religious elites played mutually reinforcing roles in supporting the position of the other and ensuring the social stability essential for both, with sacrifice rituals functioning as the performative centrepiece of communal integration. But on likely divergences of interests between different social groups in regard to sacrifice rituals, including within these elites, the historical record has so far been silent.

The traditional view is that the Mayans were far less prolific in sacrificing people than their neighbours. Bancroft notes: "An event which in Mexico would be the death-signal to a hecatomb of human victims would in Yucatan be celebrated by the death of a spotted dog."(p. 704) But mounting archeological evidence has for many decades now supported the chroniclers' contention that human sacrifice was far from unknown in Maya society.^[13][14] The city of Chichen Itza, the main focus of Maya regional power from the Late Classical period, appears to have also been a major focus of human sacrifice. There are two natural sinkholes, or cenotes, at the site of the city, which would have provided a plentiful supply of potable water. The largest of these, Cenote Sagrado (also known as the Well of Sacrifice), was where many victims were cast as an offering to the rain god Chaac. A 2007 study of remains taken from this cenote found that they had wounds consistent with human sacrifice.^[15]

Bancroft describes one procedure:

A long cord was then fastened round the body of each victim, and the moment the smoke ceased to rise from the altar, all were hurled into the gulf. The crowd, which had gathered from every part of the country to see the sacrifice, immediately drew back from the brink of the pit and continued to pray without cessation for some time. The bodies were then drawn up and buried in the neighboring grove. (p.705)

There is no consensus on why these sacrifices took place, their true scale at different times, or even who the victims were.

Because Maya society was organised as independent city states, the local political and religious elites could independently initiate human sacrifices as they saw fit. De Landa notes that a common cause for temple sacrifices in many cities was the occurrence of "pestilences, dissensions, or droughts or the like ills". (p. 91) In such cases, slaves were usually purchased and after a variety of rituals were anointed with blue dye and either shot with arrows through the heart or held on an altar while the priest swiftly removed the heart using a ceremonial knife. In either case the heart was presented to the temple idol, which was also anointed with blood.^[16] According to Bancroft, one tribe sacrificed illegitimate boys twice a year, again by removing the heart, but collecting the blood in a bowl and scattering it to the four cardinal compass points within the temple.

Capturing prisoners after a successful battle also provided victims for sacrifice, presumably to propitiate whatever deity had promised victory in the first place, although there is no record of the Maya initiating conflicts solely for this purpose as was apparently the case with the Aztecs. Modern analysis of the ancient Maya art indicates a large number of representations of prisoners of war that are now understood to be sacrificial victims: "The analysis of the representations and sometimes of their context shows that the crossed-arms-on-the-chest gesture is associated with the concepts of submissiveness, captivity and death — in a word, sacrifice."^[17]