Camazotz, the name means death bat or snatching bat, is a monstrous bat of Maya myth, best known from the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Kiche Maya of highland Guatemala. In that great narrative, the Hero Twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque must survive a sequence of deadly ordeals set for them by the lords of the underworld, Xibalba, each night spent in a different house of terror.
One of these is the House of Bats, filled with shrieking, snatching bats; and it is here that Camazotz, coming down in the darkness, strikes the head clean from the body of Hunahpu. The severed head is carried off and hung up by the underworld lords to be used as a ball in their ballgame, and the twins must contrive, by a trick involving a substitute head, to recover Hunahpu and restore him, one of the many episodes in which the twins are killed or maimed and rise again. Although the Popol Vuh as we have it was written down in the Roman alphabet in the sixteenth century, after the conquest, the death bat is not a colonial invention: bat imagery of exactly this menacing kind appears in Maya art of the much earlier Classic period, and a fearsome bat-being belongs to the genuine ancient religious imagination of the region, associated with caves, night, blood and the underworld. Camazotz stands as one of the most vivid of the monstrous powers of Xibalba, the death that comes flying in the dark.