![]() Nearly identical spotted gods shoot their blowguns at the Principal Bird Deity. Museo Maya de Cancún, Quintana Roo, Mexico. Detail of the Blom Plate, Late Classic, lowland Maya area. I started thinking that the ancient Maya knew versions of this myth, which may or may not have featured the god’s fiery death. Sometimes surrounded by red halos, the spots of the Maya god were indeed close to the pustules or buboes that afflicted Nanahuatl, the miserable god who became the sun in Postclassic Aztec myths. Since they are also found on death gods, the spots are commonly associated with decomposing flesh. 300 and 900) had black spots on the face and body. In addition, modern Maya peoples, including the K’iche’ and Tzotzil, preserve oral narratives of pre-Hispanic origin, such as Miguelito’s story of the origin of the sun.Įxamining numerous representations of mythical characters in Maya art, I noticed a fairly obvious, but tantalizing clue: a young god that was frequently portrayed in Classic Maya ceramic vessels (created between A.D. Chief among them is the Popol Vuh, a literary masterwork composed around 1550, which recorded a wealth of mythical narratives from the K’iche’ Maya of highland Guatemala. Regrettably, our sources are very limited, and our best records of Maya myths come from texts that were written in the early colonial period. I was interested in the correlates between the mythical characters represented in ancient Maya art and those of early colonial and modern narratives. A couple of years ago, I came across his report and realized the importance of Miguelito’s tale for my research on ancient Maya religion and mythology. But how to explain the myth’s persistence among the Tzotzil Maya in this remote village? Was it introduced by the conquering Aztecs, who expanded their empire into southern Chiapas in the late fifteenth century? Is there any indication that the story was known to the Maya in more ancient times?ĭíaz de Salas’s premature death relegated much of his work to obscurity. ![]() Nanahuatl absorbed all the heat and came out as the sun, while the humiliated contender threw himself in the tepid ashes and became the moon. ![]() In those versions, the sickly god Nanahuatl (whose skin was covered with pustules and whose very name means “ buboes”) proved to be the only one capable of throwing himself into a blazing pyre, after a handsome and rich rival had failed in the attempt. He came to realize that this was a version of a myth about the origin of the sun that he knew from narratives compiled in early colonial Mexico, some of them written in the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs. The boy answered, “from the old people.” The ethnographer may have wondered whether modern school teachers might have introduced the story to the village, but he noted that his young informant had never attended school. Surprised and fascinated, Díaz de Salas asked Miguelito where had he heard the story. A little boy, who was the son of the moon, came and threw himself into the pyre, and emerged as the sun. In his field diary entry of October 30, 1960, ethnographer Marcelo Díaz de Salas wrote down a brief story that he’d been told by Miguelito, a young boy about 11 years old, in the Tzotzil Maya village of Venustiano Carranza (located in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico): When the world was in darkness, the old men were seated around a fire, but didn’t dare to throw themselves in the flames.
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