This bird[41-1] belongs to the death-god as his symbol and attendant. Its hieroglyph ([Fig. 56]) contains the numeral 13; other forms are [Figs. 57-59]. It is pictured in Dr. 7c, 10a, 11a, 16c, 18b, and its hieroglyph without the picture is seen in Dr. 8b. A realistic representation of the whole figure of the moan as a bird, occurs on the head of the woman in 16c (1st figure) and 18b. God B sits on the head of the moan in Dr. 38c; the third hieroglyph of the accompanying text refers to this representation. Just as in Dr. 16 and 18, the moan bird appears in Tro. 18*c on the head of a woman. Its character as an attribute of the death-god is expressed by the Cimi-sign, which it wears upon its head (e. g., Dr. 10a), and also by the regular occurrence of symbols of the death-god in the written characters, which refer to the moan bird. In the same manner the sign of the owl, [Fig. 5], also occurs frequently with it.
The moan confers name and symbol alike on one of the eighteen months of the Maya year, and thus, as Förstemann conjectures (Die Plejaden bei den Mayas, in Globus, 1894), has an astronomic bearing on the constellation of the Pleiades.
According to Brinton the moan is a member of the falcon family and its zoological name is Spizaetus tyrannus.
This is one of the most common and most important mythological animals, and is closely related to different deities, as has already been more fully discussed in connection with the individual cases. Apparently it has no independent significance as a deity. Its most important personification is that in god B, Kukulcan, the feathered serpent. Hence a fixed hieroglyph designating the serpent as a deity, as a mythologic form, does not occur, though there are numerous hieroglyphs which refer to serpents or represent individual parts of the serpent, as its coils, its jaws, the rattles of the rattlesnake, etc. The serpent appears in the mythologic conceptions of the Mayas chiefly as the symbol of water and of time. In the great series of numbers of the Dresden manuscript, certain numbers occur which are introduced in the coils of a large serpent (compare in regard to this, Förstemann, Zur Entzifferung der Mayahandschriften, II, Dresden, 1891). The serpent is very frequently represented in all the manuscripts, sometimes realistically and sometimes with the head of a god, etc. In the Dresden manuscript it occurs in the following places: 1a, 26, 27, 28c, 35b, 36a, 36b, 37b 40, 42a, 61, 62, 65c 66a and 69. It is prominent also in the Madrid manuscript, occurring for example in Cort. 4-6, 12-18, Tro. 25, 26, 27 and elsewhere.
[Fig. 60] is its hieroglyph. It is the symbol of the death-god and the bearer of the lightning. The latter follows quite clearly from the picture in Dr. 40b where the god is distinguished by its hieroglyph. This animal is again represented in Dr. 7a, 13c on the right, 21b with its hieroglyph, 29a, 30a (forming a part of 31a, where god B holds the bound dog by the tail), and 39a without the hieroglyph, 47 (bottom) with a variant of the hieroglyph.