Question: Hey, this is Jacob, sending you a question from the Yucatan! There are a lot of things referencing Yum Kaax, and the Mayan supplement is taking its time coming into existence, so I was wondering if you could tell me about him?
The Maya are taking their time, but they are in progress, I promise. Some pantheons demand a lot of attention to detail, and this is definitely one of them.
Yum Kaax/Yum Caax is a fertility god of the Maya, most definitely, but like a lot of Maya deities we're not really sure of many other details about him. He's a god of the wilderness, particularly the jungle, and therefore the patron of those who have to work and live in it, especially hunters and foragers. He's also in charge of wild game, especially within the forest, and therefore can aid hunters in catching their prey or hide it from them, or even cause the hunter to become the hunted if his wrath is provoked.
Because Yum Kaax is often shown with maize, indicating that he's a god of fertility and growth, he's been frequently confused with the Maize God, especially in older scholarship when it was thought that Yum Kaax must just be one of his names. At this point, modern Maya studies are moving toward the idea that Yum Kaax is more likely his own deity, a less-important god of the forests as opposed to the Maize God as the all-important god of fields and rebirth. Older books on the Maya will frequently say that Yum Kaax is the Maize God, and individual games will have to decide whether or not they want to use that particular conflation. (As a very small spoiler, we'll probably be considering them separate gods in our Maya supplement.)
Like a lot of Maya gods, he's otherwise something of a mystery. We know about his associations with the wilderness, growth and wildlife because of iconographical evidence and art that shows it, but we don't know any stories about him, and we don't have any strong concept of what his cult or worship rituals might have been like. He was obviously important - which makes sense, as he was in charge of the dangerous wilderness and human ability to get food out of it! - but we don't know a lot about exactly how or why.
Sorry I didn't have more to tell you about him, but since you're in the Yucatan right now, you're in a better position than we are! If you learn anything locally, we'd be psyched to hear about it!
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ReplyDeleteI didn't mean to remove that comment, damn.
Delete(unless you can somehow restore comments I will just repeat it)
What I learned on my vacation was that any kid can be a Scion of Quetzalcoatl.
http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y13/desireofeden/kukulkids_zpsb000ce8e.png
Scion Babies!
I can't restore it if it was removed by the author, but no worries! I'm not surprised you couldn't embed - sadly, Blogger doesn't allow HTML in comments other than links.
DeleteIt's adorable! I want to be a Kulkulkid!
My question is, would this set him up as a God, or as a Titan Avatar instead? Important, old, unknown, etc...
ReplyDeleteWell, there's kinda an issue with the 'unknown' part when you're dealing with cultures like the Maya or the Hittites or the Etruscans. Basically anyone we don't have a lot of written material for.
DeleteMaya writing isn't totally understood yet and there are big, big gaps in our records of them. Bigger than the gaps in the Aztecs and those are pretty huge.
It's very hard to say that God K wasn't involved in Maya society because we don't have records of him being involved... since we may not know anything about him at all except what we can figure out from pictures of him. There may be no written descriptions at all.
With the less well recorded cultures, the divide between Titan and God becomes quite difficult since we have so very, very little to go on *at all*. It's a balancing act between fact and fiction when you work with cultures like that since you need to provide enough material to make them playable, but a lot of that is going to be inferences and reconstruction if not straight up invention and guesswork.
What Source J said - sadly, there's a lot we still don't know about the Maya gods, and despite the veritable army of ethnographers and archaeolinguists trying to figure it out, what we do have is mostly based on educated guessing from images and what glyphs we do have translated, and material reconstructed based on the beliefs of the Maya tribes that survived the conquest. With the exception of the Popol Vuh - which is really a tenth-century Guatemalan version of the story, and thus likely to be different from the earlier versions, not to mention the Yucatec ones - we don't have much in the way of direct stories about any of the gods, even the ones we know were very important.
DeleteI'd lean toward playing Yum Kaax as a minor god. He's got too strong a positive rapport with humanity, from what we know, to make a good fit as a Titan.