Ah Puch

Ah Puch is one of several names, drawn from colonial-period Yucatec sources, for the Maya god of death, the deity whom modern scholars, working from the surviving Maya books, label God A in the codices, and who is also known by the name Yum Cimil, Lord of Death. It is worth being precise about how he is known: much of our knowledge of the Maya gods comes from the handful of screenfold bark-paper books that survived the burning of the Maya libraries after the Spanish conquest, together with sculpture and painted pottery, and scholars have assigned letters to the recurring deities before their ancient names could always be securely read.

In the codices the death god appears as a skeleton or as a bloated, decaying corpse marked with the black spots of putrefaction and hung with bells, sometimes with an owl, a bird of ill omen and death across Mesoamerica, as his companion. He belongs to Xibalba (Metnal in Yucatec), the Maya underworld, a place of fear and disease imagined in some detail in Maya thought. As the personification of death, decay and the diseases that bring it, he stands opposed to the gods of life and maize, and Maya art sometimes pairs the two, life and death, the maize god and the death god, as the poles of existence. The Maya are a living people, and death and the ancestors remain meaningful in contemporary Maya communities; the skeletal god of the ancient codices, however, is known to us chiefly through those old books and the scholarly reconstruction of the religion they record, and honesty requires acknowledging that his ancient name and full character are only partly recovered.

The label God A, still used for Ah Puch in modern scholarship, comes not from any ancient Maya source but from a nineteenth century German scholar, Paul Schellhas, who in 1897 devised a simple alphabetical system to identify the recurring deities pictured in the surviving Maya codices at a time when almost none of the accompanying hieroglyphic captions could yet be read.

Schellhas assigned a letter, A, B, C and onward, to each distinct figure he could isolate by its consistent visual attributes, deliberately choosing a neutral, provisional labeling system precisely because the deities' actual ancient names were unknown to him, intending scholars to replace the letters with real names as decipherment progressed. More than a century of subsequent work on Maya hieroglyphic writing has succeeded in reading actual ancient names for a number of Schellhas's lettered gods, but God A has proven to be one of the more resistant cases: while colonial Yucatec sources supply the name Yum Cimil and the related term Ah Puch, and further south the Lacandon Maya, a people who maintained aspects of pre-conquest religious practice into the modern era, use the name Kisin for a broadly comparable death deity, epigraphers have not achieved full consensus on how, or whether, these various colonial and ethnographic names map cleanly onto a single consistent Classic-period hieroglyphic name for the god pictured in the codices.

Ah Puch's continued identification by the old Schellhas letter, even after so much progress elsewhere in Maya decipherment, is a useful reminder of how much nineteenth century scholarly convention still structures the modern study of Maya religion, more than a hundred years after its original, deliberately temporary purpose.