Sting Like a Bee... or Not

Question: Is there anything that you can tell us about the Maya bee god Ah-Muzen-Cub?

Question: Hi! So recently I've been reading up as much as I can on various Mesoamerican myths and deities. What I'd love to know is if you know anything (stories, descriptions, etc.) about Ah Muzen-Cab, the Maya bee god. Besides it apparently being a he, I've got squat.

Ah, the bee god. You're not alone in not being able to find out much about him; he isn't included in the adventures in the Popol Vuh and is generally enigmatic in art, so most of what we know about him is reconstructed from art and iconography or recorded by Europeans who mentioned some local practices or customs for posterity.

Ah Muzen Cub is subject to a lot of theory, like most Maya gods who don't have specific stories to tell us what they're up to. Because he often appears in what Maya scholars call the "diving" position, possibly because bees dive into flowers, there's conjecture that he might be the same as the so-called Diving God, a collective name for the popular Maya deity that frequently appears upside-down in art.

However, other scholars heavily dispute this and instead claim that the Diving God, who usually appears with maize and other plants, is more likely to be an example of the corn god Hun Nal/Hun Hunahpu, who went down into the Underworld in myth, which might explain the diving position. The diving position is also theorized to have to do with fertilizing the earth, and about a bajillion other things that basically boil down to "we don't know, we're trying to guess". Trying to identify anything meaningful about a religion from just art is pretty challenging, as I'm sure you can guess.

Bees do of course also fertilize the earth by pollinating plants, but it's hard to tell if that's why Ah Muzen Cub shows up upside down or if we're all just fooling ourselves. However, we can do a little more solid guessing about his purpose in life from the Maya love for honey, which was one of their most important luxury foods. It was the only sweetener available to them (they didn't have sugars) and thus used liberally in many dishes as well as being a major ingredient in balche, the local form of alcohol. Not surprisingly since it was the only sweet thing they knew, the Maya also ascribed magical and healing properties to honey, which was used to treat a large range of diseases; and since honey is naturally antimicrobial, this was actually surprisingly successful, which only increased the importance of the precious golden liquid to the ancient Maya. And, the bees of the Maya kingdoms are actually stingless, which meant that beekeeping was considered a noble profession with no more hazards than farming any other kind of animal, and became an important part of their trading, medical and religious life.

So with all this love of bees and honey going on, not to mention the local bees being shockingly friendly by the standards of everyone else in the world who has been stung by an angry hive, it seems likely that Ah Muzen Cub was, if not super important, at least major enough to be the patron of the bees themselves and by extension the honey farmers and physicians who depended on them. We have no stories of his exploits and thus would not consider him to be very powerful, probably only Legend 9 with Animal (Bee) as his sole association, but he's still a neat character to have available if you're playing with the K'uh or just generally interested in apian pursuits.