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.