Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [220]
Hunab The remote Creator deity, Hunab renews the earth three times after flooding it. Once he repopulates earth with dwarfs, the second time with an obscure race, and finally with the Mayas, who are destined to be overcome by a fourth flood. Hunab may also have been the father of the chief god Itzamna.
Itzamna The greatest deity of the ancient Maya, Itzamna is lord of the heavens—the god of day, night, and moon, who brings writing, religious rituals, and civilization to the Mayas. Far from an awesome Zeus-like figure of power and glory, Itzamna is portrayed as a wizened, toothless old man. But don’t be misled. Itzamna is also lord of medicine, with healing powers that allow him to banish fatal illness and raise the dead.
According to some scholars, Itzamna is never responsible for anything bad—unlike his wife, Ixchel or Lady Rainbow, who is loathsome and frightening. Depicted as an angry old woman with great power, Ixchel is the goddess of pregnancy, midwifery, and childbirth, and can tell the future. But she is also the storm goddess, who creates disastrous rains and floods—presumably the connection to her Rainbow epithet. She is often depicted wearing a skirt decorated with crossed bones, and a snake on her head. This snake is the Sky Serpent, which contains all the waters of heaven in its belly. In most artistic renderings, Ixchel holds a water jug, the vessel of doom, from which she can pour a destructive torrent at any time.
Ixtab An unusual goddess, Ixtab is often depicted hanging from a tree, partially decomposed, and is said to be the goddess of suicide, who takes the souls of those that die by hanging to eternal rest. The Mayas were preoccupied with death, especially violent death, and may have believed that suicide was an honorable way to enter the afterworld. Ixtab takes the souls of suicides, fallen warriors, sacrificial victims, and women who die in childbirth, to eternal rest.
Kinich-Ahau The ancient Mayan sun god Kinich-Ahau takes different forms in much the way Egypt’s Re does. As Kinich-Ahau travels across the sky during the daytime, he appears old and young. During the nighttime, he is transformed into the jaguar god. The largest and most powerful Central American cat, the jaguar was feared and admired by the earliest people of Mexico and is one of the region’s oldest gods. Jaguar also rules the underworld and is a symbol of power, fertility, and kingship. In order to show that they possessed these qualities, Mayan priests typically wore jaguar skins.
Pauahtun A god with four incarnations, Pauahtun stands at the four corners of the world holding up the sky. In spite of this very important job, he is thought of as a drunkard and the unpredictable god of thunder and wind.
THE MYTHS OF THE AZTECS
The name “Aztec” is widely but somewhat inaccurately applied to the people who settled in the Valley of Mexico sometime in the 1200s and founded the city of Tenochtitlán, on the site of present-day Mexico City, in 1325, according to Aztec traditions. A huge, oval basin about 7,500 feet (2,300 meters) above sea level, the valley is in the tropics but has a mild climate because of its altitude. Technically, all of the people speaking a language called “Nahuatl” in the Valley of Mexico are “Aztec,” while the tribe that came to dominate the area was a group called the Tenochca, a division of the larger group called Mexica, a word the Spanish transformed into “Mexico.” According to Aztec legend, the ancestors of the people who founded Tenochtitlán came to the Valley of Mexico from a place in the north called Aztlan, from which the name “Aztec” derives. By the early 1400s, they