Chilam Balam
Chilam Balam, the 'Jaguar Spokesman,' was a Yucatec priest and prophet said to have lived at Maní in the years just before the Spanish Conquest. A chilam was an interpreter of the gods who prophesied lying prone in a trance, and Balam ('jaguar') was his lineage name. He is famed in the surviving tradition for having foretold the coming of bearded strangers from the east and of a new religion. After the Conquest, communities across northern Yucatán compiled manuscripts in the Maya language and Latin script that gathered calendrical lore, katun prophecies, myth, medicine, and history; these took his title collectively as the Books of Chilam Balam, named for the towns that kept them, above all Chumayel, Tizimín, and Maní. He stands between historical memory and legend, a named prophet whose person is now inseparable from the corpus that bears his name.
Domains
- prophecy
Powers
- prophesy the coming of a new faith
Epithets
- Chilam Balam — the Jaguar Priest / SpokesmanThe Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, trans. Roys (1933) (primary)
Sources
- Chilam Balam was a Yucatec priest-prophet of Maní, remembered as foretelling the coming of a new religion, whose title gives its name to the community books of Yucatec Maya lore and prophecy.: The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, trans. Ralph L. Roys (1933), Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication 438 (primary); Munro S. Edmonson, Heaven Born Merida and Its Destiny: The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel (University of Texas Press, 1986) (secondary)