Camazotz

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.

The bat that Camazotz represents was significant enough in Maya self-understanding that entire peoples took their name from it. The Tzotzil Maya of highland Chiapas derive their own name from the Mayan word sotz', meaning bat, an ethnonym still used by well over half a million speakers of the Tzotzil language today, and Maya oral and documentary tradition associates a bat emblem or patron with this lineage's origins.

The Popol Vuh itself, in its account of the founding lineages of the Kiche and related highland Maya peoples, names a group called the Zotzil among the tribes descended from the first created humans, tying a bat-associated lineage directly into the same foundational narrative that elsewhere features Camazotz as a monstrous underworld antagonist, so that the bat in highland Maya tradition carries both a fearsome, death-associated mythic charge through Camazotz and a proud lineage or clan identity through peoples and groups who claimed the bat as their own emblem rather than only as a monster to be feared. This dual character, dangerous underworld predator on one hand, respected ancestral emblem on the other, mirrors the real behavior of the vampire bats native to the region, animals that are genuinely dangerous to livestock and can transmit disease, yet also a familiar, integrated part of the nocturnal cave-dotted landscape in which highland and lowland Maya communities have always lived. The Tzotzil Maya remain a living people today, primarily in the Mexican state of Chiapas, and their name is a linguistic monument to how central the bat, in both its frightening and its emblematic aspects, has long been to Maya identity.