Myth and butchery went together in the Maya world, but “Treasures of Sacred Maya Kings” admits only myths. The new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art presents beautifully crafted artifacts of Maya civilization severed from the tribal practices that sustained it.

A box-office expedient, the “treasures of” trope aestheticizes totems of cruelty and the insignia of a suffocating cosmology without telling us anything significant about the society that created them.

Originating in Los Angeles, the exhibition explores sacred kingship (“among the Maya and their descendants”) wholly in terms of royal spectacle.

The accompanying scholarship airbrushes a pre-modern belief system common to history’s numberless despotisms. We end up with a visually compelling but sanitized effort at designer anthropology that does more to flatter the romantic primitivism of La Raza than to illumine Maya culture.

Brutal and resplendent, Maya civilization was a high-Neolithic theocracy that rose out of tropical forests and peaked around 900 C.E. A loose federation of warring city-states, it occupied some 125,000 square miles, extending through Yucatan, Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize to eastern Chiapas. By the time the Spaniards landed in 1511, it was already in decline, for reasons still debated.

On display at the Met are objects dating mainly from 200 B.C.E. to 600 C.E., on loan from public collections in Mexico, Central America, Europe, and the United States. Emphasis is on recently excavated objects – stelae, vessels, incense burners, plates, pendants, scepters, portrait sculpture – exhibited in this country for the first time. Many come from renowned Maya sites: Copan in Honduras, Tikal in Guatemala, and Mexico’s Calakmul. Included are Maya jade objects from tombs in the famous Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan, in central Mexico. All objects bear mythological references, the legitimizing symbols of rule-by-lineage. Several modern textiles and a wood-carvings illustrate the presumed continuity of traditional ways.

The Maya were master builders and architects, gifted potters and carvers of jade and wood. Their artists worked in fresco and in watercolor; they were great stone sculptors in relief and in the round. Priest-astronomers charted the planets – crucial to seafaring traders – and created a calendar more precise than that of the Greeks or Egyptians.The Maya were one of three civilizations (Babylonians and Hindus were the other two) that independently invented the zero as a placeholder in mathematical calculations.

Much of the civilization’s beauty (royal burial pottery, interior temple, and tomb decoration) was created only for the eyes of the gods and their human mediators. Punishment awaited artists – or dancers, singers, and musicians – who deviated from protocol. In a culture that played ball games for keeps and beheaded losers, incentives for good workmanship were strong.

The Maya were also prisoners of their own mythology. Every fault lay in the stars. Knowledge for its own sake was unthinkable. Literacy was jealously guarded, a symbol of sacred knowledge. The Maya created fine roads but had no wheeled vehicles, no dray animals, no plows. Prosperity was sustained by peonage and slave labor. Everything – from limestone blocks to timber and produce – was carried on human backs. Warfare supplied captives for the indigenous slave trade.

Divinities were numerous and hungry for human sacrifice. Propitiating a galaxy of gods was the job of an extensive priestly caste, a dynastic aristocracy and its reinforcing bureaucracy. Land belonged to the gods; only priests and princes could access the secrets of distribution, among other matters of ancestral wisdom.

Either the exhibition’s Los Angeles organizers are dishonest or they do not know what to be honest about. Either way, the result is a package of evasions that transfigures whatever was nasty, savage, stagnant, or pathological in tribal culture into something estimable on the basis of artistry alone. Popular misconceptions of the Maya as peaceable agrarians remain intact. Museum-goers stroll admiringly from delicately carved femurs to funerary effigies, incised masks, gorgeous ceramics, and headdress ornaments. The elaborate refinements on view conjure a Rousseauean cultural fiction while historical realities shrivel to objets d’art. Suddenly the Stone Age looks good.

Royal Maya tombs were “lavishly furnished with grave goods,” we learn. No one mentions that those goods included the kings’ slaves, killed for the occasion.

A carved altar is displayed for its acrobat iconography; omitted is recognition of its function as a slaying stone. On altars like this, a sacrificial victim was laid on his back, arms and legs held down, while an executioner carved out the living heart. The corpse was rolled down the temple steps and flayed, its bloody skin worn in dance by a priest. (The son of a modern Maya priest, featured in the catalog as an exemplar of tradition, makes do in a deer skin.) Since rain gods were fond of small things, children were prized oblations, hurled into deep wells still living or with their hearts torn out.

Curatorial tact winks at the dubious particulars of bloodletting and skips ritual murder. Commentary takes refuge in the catch phrase “ritual activity” and concentrates, instead, on the pronunciation of Maya glyphs.

Maya temples were places of worship and prayer “like modern churches, synagogues and mosques,” the catalog intones. References to the Sistine Chapel or Sainte-Chapelle in Paris insinuate an equivalence between Christian and Maya habits of piety. Yet radical differences exist between worship of a god who frees man from cosmic necessity, and, say, Xipe, the god of flaying, or Ikal Ahau, who savors raw human flesh.

An exhibition that ignores or denatures these differences tells us nothing worth knowing about history. Or art.

Until September 10 (1000 Fifth Avenue at 82 Street, 212-570-3951).