Representation of Deities of the Maya Manuscripts

by Paul Schellhas

The symbols of the death-god are also found with the figure without a head on Dr. 2 (45)^a, clearly the picture of a beheaded prisoner. Death symbols occur, too, with the curious picture of a hanged woman on Dr. 53^b, a picture which is interesting from the fact that it recalls vividly a communication of Bishop Landa. Landa tells us, the Mayas believed that whoever hanged himself did not go to the underworld, but to “paradise,” and as a result of this belief, suicide by hanging was very common and was chosen on the slightest pretext. Such suicides were received in paradise by the goddess of the hanged, Ixtab. Ix is the feminine prefix; tab, taab, tabil mean, according to Perez’ Lexicon of the Maya Language, “cuerda destinada para algun uso exclusivo”. The name of this strange goddess is, therefore, the “Goddess of the Halter” or, as Landa says, “The Goddess of the Gallows”. Now compare Dr. 53. On the upper half of the page is the death-god represented with hand raised threateningly, on the lower half is seen the form of a woman suspended by a rope placed around her neck. The closed eye, the open mouth and the convulsively outspread fingers, show that she is dead, in fact, strangled. It is, in all probability, the goddess of the gallows and halter, Ixtab, the patroness of the hanged, who is pictured here in company with the death-god; or else it is a victim of this goddess, and page 53 of the manuscript very probably refers, therefore (even though the two halves do not belong directly together), to the mythologic conceptions of death and the lower regions to which Landa alludes.

7. Lastly the owl is to be mentioned as belonging to the death-god, which, strange to say, is represented nowhere in the pictures realistically and so that it can be recognized, although other mythologic animals, as the dog or the moan bird, occur plainly as animals in the pictures. On the other hand, the owl’s head appears on a human body in the Dresden manuscript as a substitute for the death-deity itself, for example on Dr. 18^c, 19^c, 20^a and 20^c and elsewhere, and forms a regular attendant hieroglyph of the death-god in the group of three signs already mentioned ([Fig. 5]).

Among the antiquities from the Maya region of Central America, there are many objects and representations, which have reference to the cultus of the death-god, and show resemblances to the pictures of the manuscripts. The death-god also plays a role, even today, in the popular superstitions of the natives of Yucatan, as a kind of spectre that prowls around the houses of the sick. His name is Yum Cimil, the lord of death.

B. The God With the Large Nose and Lolling Tongue.

The deity, represented most frequently in all the manuscripts, is a figure with a long, proboscis-like, pendent nose and a tongue (or teeth, fangs) hanging out in front and at the sides of the mouth, also with a characteristic head ornament resembling a knotted bow and with a peculiar rim to the eye. [Fig. 7] is the hieroglyph of this deity. In Codex Tro.-Cortesianus it usually has the form of [Fig. 8].

God B is evidently one of the most important of the Maya pantheon. He must be a universal deity, to whom the most varied elements, natural phenomena and activities are subject. He is represented with different attributes and symbols of power, with torches in his hands as symbols of fire, sitting in the water and on the water, standing in the rain, riding in a canoe, enthroned on the clouds of heaven and on the cross-shaped tree of the four points of the compass, which, on account of its likeness to the Christian emblem, has many times been the subject of fantastic hypotheses. We see the god again on the Cab-sign, the symbol of the earth, with weapons, axe and spears, in his hands, planting kernels of maize, on a journey (Dr. 65^b) staff in hand and a bundle on his back, and fettered (Dr. 37^a) with arms bound behind his back. His entire myth seems to be recorded in the manuscripts. The great abundance of symbolism renders difficult the characterization of the deity, and it is well-nigh impossible to discover that a single mythologic idea underlies the whole. God B is quite often connected with the serpent, without exhibiting affinity with the Chicchan-god H (see [p. 28]). In Dr. 33^b, 34^b and 35^b, the serpent is in the act of devouring him, or he is rising up out of the serpent’s jaws, as is plainly indicated also by the hieroglyphs, for they contain the group given in [Fig. 10], which is composed of the rattle of the rattlesnake and the opened hand as a symbol of seizing and absorption. God B himself is pictured with the body of a serpent in Dr. 35^b and 36^a (compare [No. 2] of the Mythological Animals). He likewise occurs sitting on the serpent and in Dr. 66^a he is twice (1st and 3d figures) pictured with a snake in his hand.

God B sits on the moan head in Dr. 38^c, on a head with the Cauac-sign in Dr. 39^c, 66^c, and on the dog in Dr. 29^a. All these pictures are meant to typify his abode in the air, above rain, storm and death-bringing clouds, from which the lightning falls. The object with the cross-bones of the death-god, on which he sits in Dr. 66^c, can perhaps be explained in the same manner. As the fish belongs to god B in a symbolic sense, so the god is represented fishing in Dr. 44 (1). His face with the large nose and the tongue (or fangs) hanging out on the side in Dr. 44 (1)^a (1st figure) is supposed to be a mask which the priest, representing the god, assumes during the religious ceremony.

Furthermore the following four well-known symbols of sacrificial gifts appear in connection with god B in the Dresden manuscript; a sprouting kernel of maize (or, according to Förstemann, parts of a mammal, game), a fish, a lizard and a vulture’s head, as symbols of the four elements. They seem to occur, however, in relation also to other deities and evidently are general symbols of sacrificial gifts. Thus they occur on the two companion initial pages of the Codex Tro.-Cortesianus, on which the hieroglyphs of gods C and K are repeated in rows (Tro. 36-Cort. 22. Compare Förstemann, Kommentar zur Madrider Handschrift, pp. 102, 103). God B is also connected with the four colors—yellow, red, white and black—which, according to the conception of the Mayas, correspond to the cardinal points (yellow, air; red, fire; white, water; black, earth) and the god himself is occasionally represented with a black body, for example on Dr. 29^c, 31^c and 69. This is expressed in the hieroglyphs by the sign, [Fig. 9], which signifies black and is one of the four signs of the symbolic colors for the cardinal points.