Buluc Chabtan

Maya · deity · cosmogonic · deity

The codices show him doing the thing rather than presiding over it: a god with a torch in one hand, setting the roof on fire, and a knife in the other. Classic Maya warfare was in large part a matter of burning a rival's town and taking captives for sacrifice, and the god is a picture of exactly that and of nothing more abstract. In a corpus that held Maya rulers' war records not at all, and the war god not at all, this and the Jaguar God are the two that make the eighth century legible.

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