In the game, earthly reality becomes fleeting, a moment thrown behind the shoulder and folded into the past. The mind loosens its habitual boundaries and prepares to accept the unimaginable, stepping into a realm governed by different laws. Here it is relieved of the weights that bind it to ordinary life and becomes, if only for a while, free, unbridled, and touched by the divine (Hugo Rahner).
Unrestrained passions, crowd-madness, and the ecstatic swings between euphoria and wrath appear most vividly in the collective dramas of politics, war, and competitive sport. They also surface in religious gatherings and musical concerts, where the psychic temperature rises and the emotional field becomes charged. The danger always lies in the splitting of affect—whether the crowd collapses into the dualistic moral categories of us and them, heroes and enemies. Once this bifurcation takes hold, the group is seized by archetypal forces that can overwhelm individual consciousness.
Ball games have long been one of the principal cultural vessels for these strong energies. For millennia they have offered humanity a symbolic container in which the primordial struggle between life and death, order and chaos, light and shadow, may be enacted. One might therefore ask whether the ball game and religion share a deeper kinship. Do they both serve, in their own ways, the development and enlargement of consciousness? And is this still true today?
The oldest archaeological evidence of ball games comes from Central America and reaches back more than 3,000 years. Yet the Maya likely played the game known as pitz as early as four and a half millennia ago (Ekholm, 1991). Similar traditions appear in Egypt and Mesopotamia only later. But these ancient ball games were not sports in the contemporary sense. Although crowds filled specially constructed arenas, the games were primarily sacred rituals. Their purpose was to initiate participants into the mysteries of the cosmos, to appease the deities, and to stimulate the fertility of the earth.
The etymology of the word game itself hints at this older sacred function. In many Indo-European languages, the root behind play is connected to ritual movement, dance, or the turning of a wheel—gestures that symbolize cyclical time and the eternal recurrence of creation and destruction. The ball, spherical and complete, is one of the oldest images of the totality of the psyche, thus the existence, the unus mundus (united world). Its movement across the court evokes the dynamic interplay of opposites that forms the essence of life.
In Mesoamerican traditions the ball itself was often identified with the sun, and the game dramatized the eternal combat between light and darkness. To keep the ball in motion was to keep the cosmos alive. The court represented the axis mundi, the meeting place of the underworld, the earthly realm, and the heavens. Whoever entered the game stepped symbolically out of profane time and into mythic time—a movement akin to entering the temenos of the psyche, where one may encounter The Self (Das Selbst) in its numinous, terrifying, or transformative aspects.
The ball game was also an expression of the fertility rite, a reenactment of the original creative act. By participating in it, humans engaged directly in the maintenance of cosmic order. These rituals mattered. The wellbeing of the community, the ripeness of the fields, and the favor of the gods were believed to depend on their proper performance.
In Mesoamerican thought, creation was not a single event in the distant past but an ongoing process requiring continual renewal. The cosmos had to be “kept alive,” nourished through symbolic repetition of the acts by which the gods first shaped the world. The movement of the ball—its rhythmic rise and fall, its passage through the narrow court, its symbolic descent into and ascent from the Underworld—mirrored the cycles of death and regeneration upon which all fertility depended. The game thus served as a dramatic imitation of cosmic processes: the journey of the sun, the seasonal return of rain, the renewal of vegetation.
In this sense, the players stood in for divine beings, embodying forces greater than themselves. Their exertion was not merely athletic but sacramental. If the game went well—if the cosmic drama was reenacted successfully—life would flourish. If it failed, the balance between humans, gods, and the natural world risked disruption.
Such beliefs were not arbitrary. In an environment where agriculture depended on unstable climate cycles, linking ritual performance to cosmic harmony provided a psychological and social framework for managing anxieties, fears and uncertainty. By engaging in the ball game, the community reaffirmed its place within a living universe, participating in the eternal dialogue between creation and decay.
Even the first Olympic Games in 776 BCE were held in the precinct of the Temple of Zeus, linking athletic competition with the presence of the divine. And in Rome, the ball game celebrated during the festum fatuorum around 200 BCE likewise served as an expression of divine glory, echoing the ancient understanding that the play of humans mirrors the play of the gods.
Sport?
The word sport comes from the Latin de(s) porto, meaning to be carried away, deported. Carried where? Into realms beyond the world of the body, into the sphere of gods and of the underworld. And why? The Greek root of to play points toward paideia (childlike spontaneity, improvisation, freedom) and agon (struggle, contest, the agony of effort). The Latin ludus evokes not only skill but also danger, risk, and chance. In play, conditions arise in which the outcome is never predetermined. The player is, for a moment, lent qualities that allow him to bend the ordinary laws of the profane world. It is as if the destiny allotted to humanity by the gods were itself placed in play. The game shows, at least symbolically, that a human being does not always have to lose against the gods. In the arena, the player becomes a hero who dares to challenge divine fate.
The question of human freedom—how far human destiny is fixed by forces greater than oneself—is among the most elemental themes contemplated by mythology and religion. One need not recall only the biblical Adam and Eve, but also the tragic myth of Oedipus or the fairytale of Sleeping Beauty. If we set aside philosophical or theological interpretation and focus instead on its experiential dimension, a practical question arises: how does a person, or more precisely the human will, loosen itself from the grip of blind instinct? The psychic development of a human being is, by its nature, a sequence of such liberations—a gradual emergence of consciousness from its original unconscious state.
This important idea, appearing in Mesoamerican mythology, is also the subject of the ritual ball games of the Maya and Aztecs. Long before the Aztecs and the Maya, however, the Olmecs—flourishing as early as 1500–400 BCE—shaped the earliest known form of the Mesoamerican ballgame, endowing it with sacrificial and cosmological meaning. The Zapotecs at Monte Albán, beginning around 500 BCE, and the Mixtecs, whose richly painted codices span the first millennium CE, portrayed the game as a rite of kingship, ancestral renewal, and communion with the dead. The Toltecs (ca. 900–1150 CE) linked the game with Quetzalcoatl and the regeneration of cosmic order, while the great city of Teotihuacan (100 BCE–550 CE) integrated the ballcourt into its solar and underworld theology. Thus, by the time the Maya elaborated their own version of pitz, the game already carried a long heritage of cosmological, sacrificial, and initiatory meaning across Mesoamerica.
Beyond Mesoamerica, the Tarascans played their fiery pelota purépecha—a burning ball symbolizing the sun’s eternal struggle with darkness. In Egypt, ball games were associated with fertility festivals dedicated to Hathor and the cyclical renewal of life. The Greeks participated in athletic games and contests not merely for recreation but as offerings to the gods, integrating the spirit of agon with divine presence. Even among the Romans, the ludus pilae at times belonged to the ritual life of festivals and public ceremonies.
All these traditions reflect a universal psychic motif: the game as a symbolic arena in which the human being encounters the forces that shape fate. Through play, humanity reenacts the cosmic struggle between creation and destruction, light and shadow, freedom and necessity. In this sense, the ball game becomes a ritualized dialogue between human consciousness and the powers that surround and transcend it—a rehearsal of the timeless conflict between the ego and fate, between the finite mortal and the gods.
Ball Game
For the Maya, the ball game was not merely a game but an essential part of religious ceremony. In their world, cultural life and religious life were identical expressions of one indivisible Cosmos. The great cities of the Maya contained imposing architectural complexes—stadiums or ritual courts—constructed with extraordinary seriousness and aligned with solar cycles and the rising of Venus. These were not recreational arenas but cosmic instruments, calibrated to the heavens and to the Underworld, places where tribal customs, family traditions, myth, ritual, and the collective psyche converged in order to hold the affect and humanize raw instinctual forces. Their long narrow shape, often flanked by slanted walls, echoed the passageway between worlds, evoking a stone corridor through which celestial bodies travel and through which the soul descends and ascends in its own transformations.
Jaguar
Each court included two chapels: one reserved for the ruler, who served as the axis connecting human and divine realms, and one for the spectators. The players wore leather garments modeled after the jaguar—an animal revered for its nocturnal sight and its ability to move between day and night, surface and depth, consciousness and dream. Among the Maya, the jaguar was not merely a powerful creature but the very embodiment of shamanic authority, associated with rulers, priests, and those capable of navigating altered states of consciousness. It was believed to traverse the porous boundary between the living and the dead, stalking both the forest floor and the Underworld. In this sense, the jaguar served as a psychopomp, a guide through liminal zones, and its presence in the game underscores that pitz was also a journey into the symbolic Underworld—a passage in which players temporarily assumed the attributes of those who could move safely through darkness and return transformed.
The spectators participated actively. During the match, they placed precious jewels and offerings along the pyramid steps to honor not only the athletes but the divine forces acting through them. This immediate bestowal of gifts points to an ancient understanding that the ritual was not symbolic alone: the gods were present and watching, and the actions on the court were part of an ongoing negotiation with fate.
The ball, made from the resin of the guamul (Calonyction aculeatum), weighed about three kilograms (almost seven pounds!). With no use of hands or feet allowed, players relied solely on hips, thighs, and elbows. The game demanded extreme physical mastery and endurance, turning the match into a sacred ordeal. Archaeological studies show that players often wore heavy protective belts, and many suffered broken ribs, bruised limbs, concussions or even traumatic head injuries. This physical intensity aligns with other world’s initiation rites in which bodily trial accompanies spiritual passage.
Hunahpú and Xbalanqúe
The consequences of defeat were profound. The captains of the losing team were often sacrificed by decapitation, and their heads displayed on the tzompantli—the skull rack common throughout Mesoamerica. The iconography frequently depicts the ball as a human head. These two images—ball and head—merge into a single symbolic equation. Psychologically, the head signifies thought, awareness, spirit, and the fragile flame of consciousness. Thus pitz became not only a ritual of physical skill but a drama concerning the birth, risk, and renewal of consciousness itself.
This re-enactment was rooted in the central cosmogenic myth of the Maya, preserved in the Popol Vuh, their Book of Wisdom. The myth tells of the Hero Twins, Hunahpú and Xbalanqúe, whose father and uncle—renowned pitz players—were defeated by the Lords of Xibalba, the gods of death, disease, and destruction. After sacrificing the father, Hun Hunahpú, the Underworld gods hung his skull in a barren tree as a sign of divine supremacy. Yet when Xquic, daughter of an Underworld deity, approached the tree, the skull spat into her hand, impregnating her miraculously. In mythological terms, life sprang directly from death, new consciousness from the bowels of the unconscious.
Twin hero motifs appear across cultures—Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Romulus and Remus, Castor and Pollux—figures who mediate between worlds and embody psychological doubles: ego and the Self, persona and shadow, mortal and divine, daylight consciousness and nocturnal instinct. The Maya Hero Twins belong to this lineage. Their descent into Xibalba mirrors the nekyia, the night-sea journey described in Jungian psychology: an encounter with the powerful forces of the unconscious.
Skilled and cunning, the twins challenge the Underworld gods to the ball game and win. For the first time, a god—not a human—is sacrificed. Cosmic hierarchy shifts. Fate is no longer absolute. In Jungian terms, this is the moment when the ego, developed through ordeal, stands against overwhelming unconscious powers and gains autonomy. Individuation begins with such moments of inner contest.
After their own sacrificial deaths, the twins ascend in transformed form: Xbalanqúe becomes the Moon, embodying its reflective, cyclical, and feminine character, while Hunahpú becomes the Sun, radiant, decisive, and sovereign. Their eternal positions in the sky guarantee perpetual victory in pitz and establishes a new cosmic order in which light triumphs, again and again, over the depths.
Scholars, such as Miller, point out that many Mesoamericans saw the ball game as a living metaphor for the movement of celestial bodies—the Sun, the Moon, Venus. The ball represented the Sun on its daily journey between the Underworld and the world of humans. The playing field became a cosmic slit, a liminal gateway through which the divine light passed. In that corridor of stone, humans stood face to face with the rhythms of creation.
Recent research suggests that the game also served as a means of political negotiation—symbolic conflict resolution between city-states, a controlled ritual alternative to warfare. This added yet another layer: the game became a space where fate, diplomacy, and communal tension found regulated expression in this symbolized form (transactional space).
In this way, the pitz court was an axis mundi—a world center akin to Greek temples, Egyptian ceremonial fields, Roman circuses, and even modern stadiums where collective emotion surges and individual identity dissolves into a temporary collective Self. Everywhere humans gather to “play with fate,” the same archetypal pattern emerges: through ritualized contest, humanity reenacts the cosmic struggle between life and death, consciousness and instinct, freedom and fate.
Xibalba
If we view the ritual through the lens of depth psychology, we can understand the descent into Xibalba as a journey into the psyche itself, into that inner borderland where unconscious and consciousness, instinct and will, body and soul intersect. In the Popol Vuh, Xibalba is not merely the realm of death. It is a vast, multilayered psychic landscape: rivers of blood and filth, houses filled with obsidian blades, scorpions, jaguars, and absolute darkness. Each chamber mirrors an archetypal trial—an encounter with the inner dangers that arise when consciousness descends toward the depths of the unconscious. The father of the Hero Twins is overwhelmed by these forces; he is swallowed entirely by Xibalba.
The brothers, however, represent the first truly human figures in the mythic cycle—those in whom consciousness has achieved a degree of autonomy sufficient to face the Underworld without disintegration. They do not win by brute strength alone but by intelligence, improvisation, and trickster-like creativity. Trickster energy, which Jung regarded as an early, undifferentiated form of the emerging Self, serves here as an indispensable ally. It is often the trickster impulse—cunning, playfulness, unpredictability—that enables the ego to survive encounters with the overwhelming powers of the unconscious.
Where the gods reign absolutely, human freedom is absent. Jung notes that the domain of the gods begins where consciousness ends; beyond that threshold, the human being is at the mercy of natural and psychic forces that decide survival or destruction. In Jung’s theory, the gods are projections of archetypes—transpersonal psychic energies belonging to the collective unconscious. A “victory” over the gods therefore does not mean their eradication but the establishment of a conscious relationship with these energies. Full domination of the archetypal realm is neither possible nor desirable. Whenever the ego attempts such domination, the unconscious tends to return with destructive force, as if to restore balance.
In the Mayan conception, the ball is associated with the head, with the Sun, and with the human world. The head symbolizes consciousness, thinking, and the emergence of spirit; the Sun corresponds to clarity and illumination; and the human realm represents the fragile sphere where consciousness must be continually renewed. Mayan cosmology held that consciousness itself was precarious—it had to be maintained through ritual, courage, and cyclical renewal, much like the Sun must rise again each morning from the depths of Xibalba.
This constellation corresponds in Jung’s psychology to the archetype of the Self (Das Selbst), the inner center of consciousness and the unconscious psyche. The Self represents wholeness, the living balance of opposites. Without such a center, neither stable consciousness nor a coherent experience of reality can emerge. Without some degree of self-realization, the individual remains captive to fragmentation, illusion, and instinct.
In this sense, pitz becomes a symbolic enactment of the drama of life. The Self is not literally but symbolically in play. The ballgame enacts the struggle for the emergence of the Self as the inner center capable of holding together the opposing forces within the psyche. Although players could indeed die in the ritual, the deeper meaning of “victory” and “defeat” concerns the life of consciousness itself—its formation, growth, regression, or dissolution. Victory corresponds to development and integration; defeat suggests stagnation or reabsorption into the archetypal unconscious. The decapitated head—often depicted as the ball—evokes the alchemical caput mortuum, loss of reason: the old state of consciousness that must be symbolically sacrificed for renewal.
The pitz court thus resembles a stone mandala, a ritual enclosure where the movement of the ball traces the circular rhythm of integration. Many spiritual traditions create similar liminal spaces—the Egyptian Duat, the Greek Hades, the Mesopotamian Kur, the Tibetan mandala, and even modern stadiums where powerful collective emotions surge. Each serves as an axis mundi, a world-center in which individuals and communities confront the forces shaping their destiny. Archaeological research notes that many pitz courts were constructed with unusual acoustics: a single clap could echo seven times, creating the impression that supernatural forces were answering human action. Psychologically, this mirrors the phenomenon of synchronicity, moments when inner and outer worlds appear to respond to one another.
The opposing teams in pitz often represented cosmic dualities: day and night, life and death, wet season and dry season, order and chaos. The game dramatized the necessity of balancing these polarities. It was Jung’s profound insight that psychic wholeness emerges only through the union of opposites.
The Mayan pitz player was above all a warrior—yet not only in physical endurance. Warriorhood here means courage in the face of the unknown, readiness to descend into darkness, and willingness to confront the unpredictable. The Hero Twins belong to a global family of mythic twins—Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Romulus and Remus, Castor and Pollux—who mediate between death and rebirth, conscious and unconscious, human and divine. Their descent into Xibalba is a classic nekyia, the night-sea journey that Jung regarded as fundamental to individuation.
By identifying with the hero on the court, the spectators also participated in this inner drama. Their collective emotion condensed into a temporary unity, forming a kind of communal Self. Personal anxieties and private stories merged into a larger mythic pattern. In this sense, the pitz game facilitated a form of collective individuation, a moment when the entire community symbolically confronted its own shadow, struggled with its tensions, and glimpsed the possibility of transformation.
Thus, while only a few players moved the heavy ball across the stone alley, the entire city engaged in a parallel contest within the arena of the soul. The pitz game became not only a cosmological reenactment but a communal psychological event—a moment in which an entire people sought, however symbolically, the balance and integration represented by the Self.
Ego vs The Self
The game served as a symbolic image of what takes place within ego-consciousness when it is exposed to the influence of archetypal energies. When these energies surge upward, they do not enter the ego gently. Jung writes that consciousness is “a blossom which grows only through the tearing open of the unconscious” (CW 11). Such tearing-open is never mild; the ego’s first reaction is usually defensive. The psyche splits. What cannot be endured internally is projected outward, while the positive pole of the archetype is claimed as one’s own. Subjectively, it appears as though the archetype itself has two poles—bright and dark. Whitman therefore speaks of the bipolarity of the archetype (and of the complex), in which part of the energy is projected while another part is identified with (J. W. Perry, 1970; W. Whitman, 2007). Marie-Louise von Franz reminds us that when archetypal contents break into consciousness without sufficient symbolic containment, they tend to lead either to inflation or panic.
The Mayan warrior, identifying with the hero who battles the forces of darkness, enacts this psychic process. Because pitz is a ritual, both players and spectators experience this encounter with archetypal force in a symbolic setting. Through living out the drama, they learn not only to handle the fierce energy but also to accept its opposite pole. In doing so, the archetypal power becomes less an external god and more an embodied psychological quality. Aggression can be refined rather than acted out blindly. In this respect, the ritual cultivated the beginnings of consciousness by teaching the community how to endure and integrate archetypal intensity. Mircea Eliade’s insight that “every ritual is a return to the beginning, to the moment when the world was created” applies here: pitz brings participants back to the primordial struggle out of which consciousness itself arises.
These psychic processes are closely mirrored in the body’s hormonal response. Testosterone is released in situations such as anticipation of a stressful event, competition and success in competition, an increase in social status, anticipation of sexual activity and success in it, and anger. Conversely, testosterone levels fall during defeat, humiliation, loss of status, failure, the prevention of sexual activity (the Lysistrata phenomenon), isolation, and punishment. These fluctuations parallel the psychic experience of inflation and collapse: the heroic pole swelling with energy, the defeated pole collapsing into impotence. In ritual form, this somatic and psychic surge is contained, shaped, and given symbolic meaning.
Across cultures and millennia, this function has changed very little. James Hillman notes that for many societies, the initiation of youth—especially young men—into a conscious relationship with the violent inner god we call Mars was essential. Without such rites, litima, the unbound and volatile energy of youth, remained primitive and dangerous. The Maori spoke of growing into a person—kia tupu koe hei tangata—meaning precisely entering into a conscious relationship with one’s inner powers. The Spartan agoge served a similar purpose: to temper thymos, raw spiritedness, into andreia, disciplined courage. The Mayan pitz player stands firmly within this lineage of warrior-initiation archetypes.
Even today, it is mostly the young—particularly young men—who participate in ball games and identify with the players. The players become heroic figures, often treated like gods; the opposing team becomes a dark and reprehensible force; the stadium becomes a secular initiation ground. Though the religious dimension of modern sports has faded, the numinous energy surrounding them remains unchanged. Neuropsychological research shows that participation in group sporting events activates the same circuits involved in ritual bonding and warfare: oxytocin for cohesion, adrenaline for risk, dopamine for victory. The psychological function also remains: to integrate unconscious autonomous energies through identification with heroic figures who symbolically confront the archetypal field.
Here René Girard’s theory of mimetic violence clarifies the mechanism: groups under emotional charge naturally polarize, seeking an “enemy” in which to lodge the disowned half of themselves. The opposing team becomes the vessel for the archetype’s projected negative pole. The stadium thus becomes what Hillman calls a “projection field,” an arena for psychic discharge in which the community attempts—sometimes successfully, sometimes disastrously—to metabolize instinctual energy.
However, when the symbolic container of the ritual collapses, the process becomes too concrete. Instead of uniting opposites, the psyche fractures. The energy does not refine itself; it erupts into violence. We see this particularly among youth whose inner Mars remains unconscious and undifferentiated. Football rowdies and hooligan gangs flourish in this psychological gap. Their destruction, often spilling beyond stadium walls, demonstrates what Jung meant when he wrote that archetypes possess an “overwhelming actuality” and behave as if they have “intentionality and will” (CW 9i). When the ego fails to hold its ground, the archetypal field takes over.
In such cases, a person can lose the symbolic battle with the gods and, like Hun Hunahpú in the Mayan myth, sacrifice his head—losing consciousness, judgment, and moral orientation. What was meant to be an initiation becomes possession. What was meant to integrate becomes fragmenting. The ritual slips from a symbolic encounter with the Self into a literal enactment of the ego’s defeat.
Yet it is precisely this danger that reveals why such rituals arose in the first place. In Jungian terms, the symbolic arena protects the ego from being overwhelmed by archetypal forces by giving instinct a form, a rhythm, and a container. When the game remains within its symbolic frame, it channels aggression, rivalry, and primordial emotion into a structure that consciousness can hold. The raw heat of Mars is transformed into courage rather than violence; anger is moved into the realm of image and ritual rather than acted out in the streets.
At their best, ball games contribute to the growth of consciousness: they offer a communal temenos in which shadow, instinct, and competitive drive can be encountered without destroying social bonds. They allow a society to dramatize conflict without collapsing into it. They give form to tension, enabling communities to maintain peace precisely because the darker energies of the psyche are acknowledged rather than repressed.
Thus, the ancient wisdom embedded in pitz still speaks: only when instinct is granted a symbolic field can it be integrated; only when the gods are honored can they be humanized; and only when the Self is allowed to emerge through play can the ego withstand the forces that would otherwise tear it apart.
References:
Vlado Šolc
