Kinich Ahau

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The sun-sign in Maya writing is a four-petaled flower, k’in, and it is also the word for “day” and the word for “time.” Where it is carved into the body of a god — set into the brow, the cheek, the thigh — it marks that figure as the sun made into a person. He has a name in the Yucatec recorded after the conquest, Kinich Ahau, and a name in the Classic inscriptions of a thousand years earlier, K’inich Ajaw: the lord whose face is the sun. He is shown as a man not young and not old, with great squared eyes drawn slightly crossed, a high curved nose, and a single filed tooth, T-shaped, in the upper jaw. A cord, the “cruller” of the iconographers, loops down over the bridge of the nose and around the eyes. By these signs he is known across centuries of carved stone and painted clay, and by them he is known when he is not himself by day at all, but a jaguar going through the dark.

The sun-eyed lord and the old sky-god

In the lettered shorthand that early students of the codices used before the glyphs could be read — Paul Schellhas assigned the gods of the surviving manuscripts plain letters in studies of 1897 and 1904, a deliberately noncommittal scheme that has stuck — the sun god is God G. The naming was cautious because a god could carry several names, and Schellhas did not want to claim more than the pictures showed. What the pictures show is consistent enough to be unmistakable: the k’in infix, the squared eyes, the filed incisor, the looping cruller. The sun god appears throughout the Dresden Codex, one of the four Maya books that escaped the colonial burnings, where his image stands beside the astronomical tables that the Maya kept of the moon and of the planet of the morning and evening star.

His genealogy in the Maya order does not run along a single descent the way a Greek god’s might. It runs, rather, by a kind of overlapping of faces. The sun god shades into Itzamna, the aged high god of the sky, the first scribe and the source of writing, who is figured as an old man with sunken cheeks and a toothless or near-toothless mouth. Kinich Ahau is sometimes taken as the daytime aspect of Itzamna, the supreme sky-lord seen in his blazing form; in the colonial Yucatec record the two names are joined into one invocation, Kinich Ahau Itzamna, called upon as the first priest in the ceremonies of the ritual year. The relation is not strict subordination and not simple identity. It is the Maya habit of treating the great powers as faces that turn into one another — the sun a face of the sky-god in his radiance, the sky-god a deepening of the sun into age and origin. Where the line falls between them is one of the things the tradition leaves mobile, and a reader should hold the two as near-neighbors rather than as a god and his portrait.

Maya funerary urn representing the sun god Kinich Ahau, Late Classic (600–900 CE), Museo de América, Madrid. Photo by Jerónimo Roure Pérez (Dorieo), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The sun god keeps the company a sun would keep. He is reckoned the patron of the day-unit itself, the k’in, and of the number four — the four directions across which the sun’s rising and setting box the world. In the round of feasts he stands at the head of the solar year. His consort, in the colonial accounts, is the moon, the goddess Ix Chel; the pairing of sun and moon as a married couple is among the oldest things the Maya tell, and it sets the two great lights in the sky as the two halves of a single household. Around him stand the other powers of the lowland world — Chaac the rain who breaks the dry season, the feathered serpent Kukulkan of the later northern cities — each with a domain, the sun’s domain being the sky’s own measure, the count of days that is light.

The day-sun and the night-jaguar

The heart of what the Maya made of the sun is a journey, and the journey is a death. By day Kinich Ahau is the radiant lord, climbing out of the east at dawn, standing at the zenith at noon in his full power, and falling to the west at evening. There the day ends, and the sun does not simply go out. It goes down — into Xibalba, the underworld, the place of fright, where the dead go and where the powers of decay hold their courts. To cross that realm the sun changes shape. It becomes the jaguar.

The Jaguar God of the Underworld is one of the most charged figures in Classic Maya art: a fanged face with jaguar ears and the same looping cruller over the nose, and — the detail that ties the two together — the k’in sun-sign set into his body. That sign is the proof. The fierce spotted night-creature carrying the mark of the sun on him is the sun himself, traveling the underworld in a form that can endure it. Scholars have given him more than one reading; the Mayanist Karl Taube connected the cruller to the cordage of fire-drilling and read the jaguar as a god of terrestrial fire as much as of the night sun, and the picture is complicated by scenes in which the fiery jaguar is himself burned with torches. The dominant understanding, held since the mid-twentieth century, is that this is the night sun — the shape the day-sun takes when he sinks below the western horizon to pass through the land of the dead.

So the sky’s plainest fact, that the sun goes down and comes up again, is read by the Maya as a daily dying and a daily return. The lord of light descends into the realm of decay, walks it as the jaguar through the hours of the night, and rises again in the east at dawn, undefeated. The pattern is the same one the Maya tell at length of the Hero Twins, who go down into Xibalba, are killed there, and come back to defeat the lords of death and rise into the sky; the sun’s nightly passage is that story written into the turning of every single day. To watch the sunset, in this frame, is to watch the most powerful image the Maya made of death faced and survived. The jaguar is not a punishment and not an underworld captivity. It is the form courage takes when the light has to go through the dark to be light again.

The sun god Kinich Ahau seated with flares, detail of a Classic Maya painted vessel. From Justin Kerr, “The Maya Vase Book,” vol. 6. Public domain (Wikimedia Commons).

This is held as a truth of the world and not as a figure of speech. The night belongs to the jaguar-sun in the same way the rain belongs to Chaac. The Maya kept exact astronomical tables — the Dresden Codex records the sun, the moon, and the planet of the morning star to a precision that took generations of observation — and the precision did not dissolve the gods into mechanism. The sun whose returns could be counted to the day was the same sun who died each evening into Xibalba and rose each dawn from it. The two registers, the measured and the lived, ran together: the count of days that the Maya tracked across the Long Count calendar was the count of the sun’s victories, each dawn one more crossing survived.

The king as the sun’s image

No Maya god is bound to kingship the way the sun is. The Classic kings took the sun’s own word into their names. The element k’inich — built from k’in, sun, and a sense of “eye” or “face,” the sun-faced or sun-eyed — was prefixed to royal names across the lowlands as a title of solar authority, marking the king as the sun’s likeness on earth. The most celebrated of all Maya rulers bore it: K’inich Janaab Pakal of Palenque, whose name reads roughly “Sun-faced Shield,” buried in the seventh century in the jade-furnished tomb beneath the Temple of the Inscriptions; his son and successor K’inich Kan Bahlam; and K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’, the founder of the dynasty at Copán in what is now Honduras. The title appears early — among the first secure instances is its use by a Palenque king in the late sixth century — and it spread until it was the ordinary mark of a holy lord.

The logic was exact, not ornamental. The king stood at the meeting-point of the human and the divine, the axis through whom the order of the cosmos was kept turning; and the sun was the plainest daily proof that the cosmos did turn. A ruler who was k’inich was the sun’s image precisely in this: he too would climb to a zenith of power, he too would fall, and he too — the inscriptions and the tomb art insist — would not simply end. The kings were shown in death descending along the world-axis and rising again, seated within solar cartouches, made into the sun’s own at their apotheosis. To be buried as the sun was to be set on the sun’s path, the daily death promising the daily return. The deepest of these images is on Pakal’s sarcophagus lid at Palenque, where the dead king is carved at the moment of his fall into the underworld and his rebirth from it — a scene wrongly famous, in modern fancy, as a man at the controls of a machine, and in fact a statement of exactly the solar passage the sun god makes each night.

The sun’s tie to rule sets him apart from his near-neighbor Itzamna. Itzamna is the broad creator and the patron of writing and the priesthood, the old sky over everything; the sun is the particular face of divine order that a living king could be. A king did not claim to be the creator. He claimed to be k’inich — to carry the sun’s light, to make the sun’s circuit, to die and rise as the sun does. The whole weight of Maya kingship rests on that single transferable image: the lord whose face is the sun.

Stone mask of the sun god Kinich Ahau on a structure at Kankí, Campeche, Mexico. Photo via Lugares INAH, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Recovering the sun, and the sun that did not set

For a long time the sun god was visible mainly through a colonial keyhole, and the keyhole had a strange shape. The Maya wrote real books, screenfold manuscripts of bark paper, and in the sixteenth century the great libraries were burned: Bishop Diego de Landa’s auto-da-fé at Maní in 1562 consigned the books of the Yucatec to the fire as the work of a religion the friars meant to destroy. Only four Maya codices are known to survive. And it was the same Landa who, afterward, wrote the fullest early account of Maya religion and the calendar, so that much of what the colonial record preserves of the sun god comes from the hand that helped destroy the books — the destroyer turned, by an awful turn, into the principal source. What he set down must be read as a Spanish churchman’s report of a faith he was suppressing, the names sometimes garbled, the framework his and not the Maya’s.

The fuller recovery came from the stones themselves, once they could be read. Through the twentieth century the Maya script was deciphered, and with the reading came the sun god in his own contemporary setting: the k’inich titles in the royal names, the solar cartouches in the tomb art, the jaguar-sun with the k’in on his body crossing the underworld on the painted vessels that the looting and the museums and Justin Kerr’s photographic archive brought to light. The sun god was no longer a colonial summary. He was legible in the inscriptions the Maya carved while he was still openly their god.

A page of the Dresden Codex, one of only four surviving Maya books, carrying deity figures and astronomical tables. Public domain (Wikimedia Commons).

The solar drama did not end with the cities. The Maya are a living people — several million speakers of Mayan languages across Guatemala, southern Mexico, and Belize — and the sense of the sun’s daily course, its rising and its descent, persists in the modern Maya ordering of the day and the year. Among the southern Lacandon a tradition is told in which the sun god, the elder brother of the high god, will one day bring the world to its end by sending down the jaguars to consume humanity — the same jaguar that walks the night, given the last word. The sun god they figured was not a god of endings. He was the god of the thing that ends every evening and begins again every dawn — the lord who goes down into the dark as a jaguar so that he can come up out of it as light, and the model the kings chose when they wanted to say that they, too, would rise. Among the peoples of the Maya world, from the K’iche’ of the highlands to the Yucatec of the peninsula, the sun is still the one who keeps the count.

→ Related: Itzamna · Chaac · Ix Chel · Kukulkan · Maya Civilization · Popol Vuh · Maya Long Count Calendar · Palenque · Tikal · Chichen Itza · Yaxchilan · Bonampak · Caracol · Coba · The Quiche · The Yucatec Maya · The Itza · Surya God · Amaterasu · Sin Moon God