4. A human figure, possibly representing the priest of the death-god (see
Dr. 28, centre, Dr. 5b and 9a). The last figure is a little doubtful.
It is blindfolded and thus recalls the Aztec deity of frost and sin,
Itztlacoliuhqui. A similar form with eyes bound occurs only once again in
the Maya manuscripts, namely Dr. 50 (centre). That this figure is related
to the death-god is proved by the fact that on Dr. 9a it wears the
Cimi-sign on the middle piece of the chain around its neck. Furthermore
it should be emphasized that the Aztec sin-god, Itztlacoliuhqui, likewise
appears with symbols of death.
5. An isolated figure, Dr. 50a (the sitting figure at the right). This
wears the skull as head ornament, which is represented in exactly the
same way as in the Aztec manuscripts (see Fig. 6).
6. Another isolated figure is twice represented combined with the
death-god in Dr. 22c. This picture is so effaced that it is impossible
to tell what it means. The hieroglyph represents a variant of the
death's-head, Cimi. It seems to signify an ape, which also in the
pictures of the Mexican codices was sometimes used in relation to the
death-god.
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.
53b, 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. 18c, 19c, 20a and 20c 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.
[Illustration: Figs. 7-10]
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. 65b) staff in hand and a bundle on his back,
and fettered (Dr. 37a) 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. 33b, 34b and 35b,
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.
35b and 36a (compare No. 2 of the Mythological Animals). He likewise
occurs sitting on the serpent and in Dr. 66a he is twice (1st and 3d
figures) pictured with a snake in his hand.
God B sits on the moan head in Dr. 38c, on a head with the Cauac-sign in
Dr. 39c, 66c, and on the dog in Dr. 29a. 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. 66c, 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. 29c, 31c 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.
God B is represented with all the _four cardinal points_, a
characteristic, which he shares only with god C, god K, and, in one
instance, with god F (see Tro. 29*c); he appears as ruler of all the
points of the compass; north, south, east and west as well as air, fire,
water and earth are subject to him.
Opinions concerning the significance of this deity are much divided. It
is most probable that he is Kukulcan, a figure occurring repeatedly in
the mythology of the Central American peoples and whose name, like that
of the kindred deity Quetzalcoatl among the Aztecs and Gucumatz among the
Quiches, means the "feathered serpent", "the bird serpent". Kukulcan and
Gucumatz are those figures of Central American mythology, to which belong
the legends of the creation of the world and of mankind. Furthermore
Kukulcan is considered as the founder of civilization, as the builder of
cities, as hero-god, and appears in another conception as the rain-deity,
and--since the serpent has a mythologic relation to water--as serpent
deity. J. Walter Fewkes, who has made this god-figure of the Maya
manuscripts the subject of a monograph (A Study of Certain Figures in a
Maya Codex, in American Anthropologist, Vol. VII, No. 3, Washington,
1894), also inclines to the belief that B is the god Kukulcan, whom he
conceives of as a serpent-and rain-deity. This view has been accepted by
Förstemann (Die Tagegötter der Mayas, Globus, Vol. 73, No. 10) and also
by Cyrus Thomas (Aids to the Study of the Maya Codices, Washington,
1888). The same opinion is held also by E. P. Dieseldorff, who, a
resident of Guatemala, the region of the ancient Maya civilization, has
instituted excavations which have been successful in furnishing most
satisfactory material for these researches (see Dieseldorff: Kukulcan,
Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1895, p. 780). Others have considered god B
as the first parent and lord of the heavens, Itzamná who has a mythologic
importance analogous to that of Kukulcan. Itzamná is also held to be the
god of creation and founder of civilization and accordingly seems to be
not very remotely allied to the god Kukulcan. Others again, for example
Brasseur de Bourbourg and Seler, have interpreted the figure of god B to
represent the fourfold god of the cardinal points and rain-god Chac, a
counterpart of the Aztec rain-god Tlaloc. The fact that this god-figure
is so frequently connected with the serpent and the bird is strongly in
favor of the correctness of the supposition, that we should see in god B
a figure corresponding to the Kukulcan of tradition. Thus we see the god
represented once with the body of a serpent and with a bird near by
(Cort. 10b), while B's hieroglyph appears both times in the text. God B
is also pictured elsewhere repeatedly with a serpent body, thus for
example on Dr. 35b, 36a. On pages 4-6 of the Codex Cortesianus he is
pictured six times and each time in connection with a serpent.
The accounts we have received concerning the mythology of the Maya
peoples are very meagre and owing to the uncertainty respecting the
origin of the Maya manuscripts, it cannot even be determined which of
these accounts are applicable to the Maya manuscripts, or, indeed,
whether they are applicable at all. For it is by no means positively
proved that these manuscripts did not originate in regions of Maya
culture, regarding which we have received no accounts at all. As our
present purpose is purely that of description and determination, it
remains quite unimportant which of these recorded figures of gods shall
be regarded as god B.
God B is nearly allied to, but in no wise identical with, the deity with
the large ornamented nose, designated by K, who will be discussed farther
on. God K is an independent deity designated by a special hieroglyph, but
like C he stands in an unknown relation to God B (for details see K).
Finally it should be mentioned, that god B never appears with death
symbols. He is clearly a deity of life and creation, in contrast to the
powers of death and destruction.
His day seems to be Ik (aspiration, breath, life). (Compare Förstemann,
Die Tagegötter der Mayas, Globus, Vol. 73, No. 10).