Icelaca, Lord of Time
Lenca · deity · Lenca traditional religion; continuing · deity
Icelaca (also Icelacam) is the Lenca god of time, whom the old highland Lenca are reported to have called the 'lord of time' and the holder of the knowledge of past and present. Surviving carved statuettes, preserved in museums in Comayagua and Tegucigalpa, represent the deity with multiple eyes, a feature read as expressing this all-seeing command of the seasons and of memory. Standing third in importance after the Great Father and the Great Mother, Icelaca is the calendrical and oracular member of the small attested Lenca pantheon, and is known almost entirely through the colonial-derived ethnographic record and the surviving images rather than through native-language texts.
Domains
- time seasons
- knowledge memory
Powers
- to measure time and turn the seasons
- to know the past and the present
Epithets
- Icelacam
Sources
- Doris Stone, 'The Northern Highland Tribes: The Lenca,' in Handbook of South American Indians, vol. 4, ed. Julian H. Steward, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 143, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1948, pp. 205-217.
- Anne Chapman, Los hijos del copal y la candela: ritos agrarios y tradición oral de los lencas de Honduras, 2 vols., Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1985-1986.