Itzamna

← Encyclopedia

On a leaf of bark-paper folded like a screen, surviving by an accident of looting and exile in a library in Dresden, two figures sit facing each other across the ninth page. One is the young lord of maize, his head the green shoot of the corn. The other is an old man — slack-cheeked, his mouth fallen in over absent teeth, a great curved nose riding above a wrinkled face — and the scribes who painted him meant for the eye to read age itself, the oldest thing in the world bent toward the youngest. The aged figure is Itzamna, and the matter passing between the two, in the reading of those who have studied the page, is the making of human life. It is a small scene, a few square inches of pigment. It carries the weight of the first god.

The first and the oldest

In the Maya order of things Itzamna is reckoned the high god, the lord above, the one before whom the count of divine generations starts. The Classic-period scribes wrote his name with a glyph now read Itzamnaaj, a reading its students still hold open for confirmation; the Yucatec sources of the colonial centuries call him Itzamna, or simply Zamna. Before any of these names had been recovered, the German catalogers of the codices labeled the figures of the gods with letters of the alphabet, and the old man of the books became God D — the placeholder that scholarship still uses when it wants to speak of the iconographic type rather than the name. The letter and the name have since been joined: God D is Itzamnaaj, the aged sky-lord.

His name resists a clean translation, and the resistance is itself instructive. An older guess parsed it as “lizard house” — itzam, iguana, joined to na, house — and that reading has been set aside. The morpheme that scholars now weigh is itz: the word reaches across the secretions of living things, dew and sap and the milk of plants, the substances that ooze and bless, and it reaches as well toward sorcery and toward divination, the drawing-out of hidden things. An agentive form built on itz would name something like an asperser or a conjurer, one who sprinkles the sacred fluid or works the sacred art. Whatever the exact derivation, the cluster of meanings sits well on a god of the sky’s moisture, of blessing, and of knowledge.

He is the lord of the heavens, of the day-sky and the night-sky both, dwelling above. He did not begin as a god of one domain who later rose; the sources present him already enthroned, the elder of the pantheon, and the lesser powers belong to a world he has already set in order. The K’iche’ creation narrative preserved in the Popol Vuh — written down in the Latin alphabet in the highlands of Guatemala in the mid-sixteenth century — gives the creator the names Tepeu and Q’uq’umatz and tells of gods deliberating the shaping of the world and of humankind; the lowland Yucatec figure of Itzamna is not identical to those highland creators, but he stands in the same office, the deviser who thinks the world into its order rather than a power who wins it in battle. He is a god of order and of knowledge. He has, the sources are careful to record, nothing to do with war, with violence, or with the costliest of offerings.

Detail of Dresden Codex page 9: the aged Itzamna (right) facing the young maize-god, a scene read as the creation of human life. From the 1932 reproduction by William E. Gates; FAMSI digitization. Public domain (Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0).

The body of the sky

To picture Itzamna only as the old man of the codices is to see one register of him. At the scale of the cosmos he is something far stranger: the itzam, the great celestial caiman or sky-monster whose body is the heavens themselves. On the pages of the Dresden Codex the aged head of the god appears within the open jaws of a two-headed reptile that represents the earth; scholars have read this composite — sometimes named Itzam Cab Ain, the caiman of the earth — as the god’s own transformation, the lord become the saurian frame of the world. The Classic monuments carry a related being that epigraphers call the Starry Deer Crocodile, a vast cosmic reptile spangled with the marks of stars and of the planet Venus, its body arched into the band of the sky. The heavens, in this idiom, are not a void above an animal; they are the animal, the scaled and starred hide of a creature whose head is the god of knowledge.

He has an avian aspect as well. Perched in the world-tree, crowned with the same diadems and jewels that mark the old man’s brow, is the great bird the Classic scribes show again and again — the Principal Bird Deity, an Itzamna in feathers, who bears upon his wings the signs of day and of night. Where the bird is, the god is near; where the god sits enthroned, the bird is somewhere in the scene. Old man, sky-caiman, celestial bird: these are not three gods confused but one lord seen in his several bodies, the way a king is at once a man, a throne, and a name carved in stone.

The sun belongs to this cluster too. The colonial Yucatec sources name Kinich Ahau — the sun-faced lord, the day-sun — and at times they hold him beside Itzamna and at times fold the two together, so that the sun is read as Itzamna’s solar face, the burning eye of the sky-lord by day. (The same sun has his terrible night-form, the jaguar who crosses the underworld between sunset and dawn; that aspect is treated under Kinich Ahau.) As consort the sources set beside Itzamna the great goddess of the moon and of the loom and the birthing-mat, Ix Chel; one tradition has the pair beget thirteen sons, two of whom complete the making of the earth and of humankind. How many goddesses the name Ix Chel covers, and how firmly she is to be married to Itzamna, are matters still argued — her own entry, Ix Chel, takes up the question — but the pairing of the aged sky with the moon is one of the recurring shapes of the Maya divine household.

The gift of the letters

What sets Itzamna apart from every other power of the Maya world is not that he made it but that he taught it. He is the giver of culture itself, and the gifts are named with precision in the colonial record.

He invented writing. The chronicler Diego Lopez de Cogolludo, drawing on older Yucatec memory, records that Itzamna — under the form Hun-Itzamna — devised the priestly art of the letters, the hieroglyphs in which the gods and the kings and the dead were set down. This is no small thing to credit to a single god. The Maya built, alone among the peoples of the ancient Americas, a full writing system: a script of several hundred signs, part logographic and part syllabic, capable of recording any sentence of their language, fit to carry theology, dynastic history, astronomy, and the names of the dead. That such a system should be ascribed to the high god is the tradition’s own judgment on what it valued. The science of the scribe — the aj tz’ib, the one of the writing — descended from the lord of the sky.

He invented the count of the days. The Maya kept time in interlocking cycles of formidable reach: the 260-day ritual round called the Tzolk’in, woven against the 365-day solar year; and above these the Long Count, which numbered days in an unbroken chain from a zero-point in the deep past, reckoning in units up to the b’ak’tun of some 144,000 days and beyond. (The mechanics of that count are set out under the Long Count calendar.) To devise such a calendar is to devise a theology of time, for in the Maya world each day was a god and each cycle a procession of divine burdens carried in turn. Itzamna, the deviser of the count, is thus the first day-keeper — the aj k’in, the one of the days, the priest whose office is to read the calendar and tell the people which god rules the hour. The friar Diego de Landa records that in the month called Uo the priests invoked Kinich Ahau Itzamna as “the first priest,” the founder of their own order; in the month of Zip they called on Itzamna among the gods of medicine. The god of writing and the god of the calendar is therefore also the first of the priesthood and a patron of healing, invoked over the sick, at the turning of the year, and in old age. Writing, the calendar, medicine, the working of the fields: the world history of the Maya pantheon sets these down as his gifts, and marks him the god of priests and scribes and kings and scholars — the learned, where the rain-god Chaac was the god to whom the farmer in his field prayed each day.

There is a logic to the bundle. A god who is the sky’s own knowledge, the body of the starred heavens, is fittingly the one who gives the instruments for reading that sky and writing down what is read. The calendar is the sky made legible; the script is the calendar made permanent; the priest is the man who holds both. All three run back to the aged lord, and to invoke him over a sickbed or at a year’s turning was to call on the one who knew the order of things from the beginning.

Pages from the Dresden Codex — eclipse and multiplication tables and a flood scene — a screenfold bark-paper book of the kind the scribes of Itzamna made. SLUB Dresden reproduction; public domain.

A library in ashes

The standing of Itzamna as the lettered creator is bound up with the strangest fact of his reception: that the books he was said to have invented were almost all destroyed, and that the man who destroyed them is also the man who wrote down what we know of him.

The Maya made real books — screenfold volumes of beaten fig-bark coated with lime plaster, painted in red and black and color with glyphs and the figures of the gods. By the time the Spanish came in the sixteenth century, the libraries of these books were a living institution. On the twelfth of July, 1562, in the town of Mani in northern Yucatan, the Franciscan friar Diego de Landa held an auto-da-fe — a public act of faith — and burned the gathered books of the Maya, by his own count some twenty-seven of them, along with thousands of carved images. He judged the books to hold falsehood and the work of the devil. His bonfire was one act in a wider campaign, and it encouraged the clergy who followed him to destroy what remained, so that of the entire literature of a civilization with a full writing system, only some four pre-Columbian books are known to survive — the codices kept now at Dresden, Madrid, and Paris, and the battered fragment called the Maya or Grolier codex. The page on which the old god converses with the maize-lord is a leaf of that near-total wreck.

And then the paradox sharpens. Sent back to Spain to answer for the brutality of his methods, Landa wrote, in his defense and in fascination, the Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan — an account of Maya language, calendar, ritual, and gods that became, and remains, a foundational source for the study of the very religion he had tried to burn out of the world. It is from Landa, and from chroniclers like Cogolludo who drew on the same Yucatec memory, that much of what is said here about Itzamna’s offices descends. The reader is owed the warning that comes with such a source: it is colonial testimony, gathered by a hostile and interested hand, decades after the conquest, about a religion already under assault — and how far Landa is to be trusted is itself a question scholars weigh. The destroyer became the recorder. The man who lit the fire at Mani left the chief written key to the gods whose books he burned.

The recovery of the name

For three and a half centuries after Landa, the glyphs themselves stayed silent. The surviving codices and the carved stone monuments could be drawn and cataloged, the figures of the gods sorted by their letters, the calendar partly worked out from the numbers — but the script could not be read as language. The dominant view through the first half of the twentieth century, associated with the British scholar J. Eric S. Thompson, held the writing to be essentially symbolic, a system of ideas rather than of recorded speech.

The wall broke in the 1950s. The Soviet linguist Yuri Knorozov, working in Leningrad far from the ruins, argued that the script was in large part phonetic — that the signs spelled syllables, that a Maya word of the common consonant-vowel-consonant shape was written with two syllable-signs, the vowel of the second left unsounded. His proposal was resisted, then vindicated. Beside it came the work of Tatiana Proskouriakoff, who showed by patient structural analysis that the dated monuments recorded not abstract ritual but history — the births, accessions, wars, and deaths of named human kings. Between the phonetic key and the historical reading, the inscriptions began to speak, and over the following decades the script was substantially deciphered. It was the recovered glyphs that gave back the name Itzamnaaj and tied the lettered old man of the codices to the god named on Classic monuments built a thousand years before Landa’s fire.

The goddess Ix Chel as figured in the Dresden Codex. Public domain (Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0).

The lettered god and the living people

A note on the calendar is owed wherever Itzamna’s count of days comes up, because his gift was lately turned into a rumor of the world’s end. When the Long Count rolled over its thirteenth b’ak’tun on the twenty-first of December, 2012, a wave of popular fancy read the date as a Maya prophecy of apocalypse. It was nothing of the kind. The thirteenth b’ak’tun was a cycle’s turning, a great odometer reaching a round figure, and the Maya themselves carved dates reaching far beyond it into a future their calendar had no trouble counting. The day-keeper’s art measures time; it does not foretell its stopping.

Nor are the keepers of that art a vanished people. The Classic lowland cities lost their dynasties and their dated monuments across the eighth and ninth centuries, in the transformation conventionally called the collapse — regional, staggered, and argued over as to its causes, but real, and emphatically not the disappearance of a population. The northern Yucatec kingdoms and the highland K’iche’ and their neighbors carried on; the last independent Maya kingdom, the Itza capital on a lake island in the Peten, did not fall to the Spanish until 1697. Today some six to seven million people speak Mayan languages across Guatemala, Mexico, and Belize. They survived the conquest, the colonial centuries, the nineteenth-century Caste War in Yucatan, and, in the Guatemalan highlands, the genocidal violence of the late twentieth-century civil war; in 1992 the K’iche’ activist Rigoberta Menchu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The day-keeper’s calendar is still kept in highland communities, and the old gods are not all gone from the hills.

Among them the aged lord holds a particular place, because his domain is the one the conquest most nearly succeeded in destroying and the one the modern centuries have most labored to recover. He is the god of the books, in a tradition whose books were burned; the god of the letters, whose letters fell silent for three centuries and then were made to speak again; the first priest and the first day-keeper of a people who built, alone in the ancient Americas, a writing fit to hold their gods and their kings and their dead. The old man bent over the maize-lord on the ninth page of a salvaged book is the figure the whole long effort runs back toward — the one who, in the Maya reckoning, gave them the means to write down that he had.

→ Related: Kukulkan · Chaac · Ix Chel · Kinich Ahau · Maya Civilization · Popol Vuh · Maya Long Count Calendar · Chichen Itza · Palenque · Tikal · Yaxchilan · Bonampak · Caracol · Coba · The Quiche · The Yucatec Maya · The Itza · Lacandon Maya · Divination · Soul