Kings of the Cenote

Question: I was rereading your K'uh supplement, and I was wondering why you decided to make Yum Cimil/Cizin a god rather than a titan of Xibalba. After all, he is, well, from Xibalba. Is it because you had to fill the RAW Scion ideas of having an Overworld, Underworld, and Titanrealm for your pdfs, and you needed to put someone in charge of Metnal? Or is there some other reason that he fits more as a god than as a Titan?

Yum Cimil is a very interesting (and weird) dude when it comes to researching Maya mythology, so I'm glad you asked about him! Let's talk about all his unsightly, rotting problems.

Yum Cimil/Yum Cimih, depending on the era of your scholar's translations, is generally better known by letter as are many of the Maya gods; his codical designation is God A, as he's the first identifiable deity appearing in the Yucatec codices, where he often hangs out with God A', his equally skeletal buddy. When the two of them appear together, they are extremely similar in iconography and doubled symbolism to the Lords of Xibalba mentioned in the Popol Vuh, which would lead to the natural conclusion that they're probably the same guys. This is all pretty legit, so you're not wrong about wondering why he's appearing separately from them in the supplement.

The problem with Maya mythology is that it's very fragmented. We have mythology from various different time periods and various different smaller groups within the Maya, not all of which agree with one another; the Classical Maya civilization was very different from the much later K'iche civilization from which we got the PV, and even yet more different were various semi-isolated Maya kingdoms in the jungles of the Yucatana, Belize and Guatemala. Some were so isolated that they even survived relatively late into the modern era, such as the Tzotzil or Lacandon people, who also had their own evolved myths from the same base. And, of course, some of these places and times have more, better, or simply different mythological information than others; for example, the Classical Yucatec Maya mythology we have is largely culled from reliefs, paintings and codices, but lacks any storytelling to interpret the gods and scenes we are seeing, while much farther south you have the PV with its Guatemala-specific flavor and elsewhere you have modern Maya beliefs that have begun to absorb influence from Christianity and/or other Mesoamerican cultures.

So whenever we try to figure out what the "Maya pantheon" looked like, we're facing a pretty giant challenge rating in attempting to not only untangle all of those sources but also to make them make coherent sense with one another. All of the gods in the supplement, and in Maya studies in general, suffer from scholars sometimes just having to make a call and run with it, at least until better evidence surfaces.

But anyway, back to Yum Cimil. Calendrical God A is an ugly son of a bitch, in keeping with the general Maya dislike of death, but nobody can say he doesn't look like he enjoys his job.

His buddy, A', is no more of a joy to look at, and generally even more violent in his death imagery - he's usually committing suicide whenever he appears, which is weird, but that's death gods for you. The dual gods of the underworld seem like shoo-ins to be identical to the twin Lords of Xibalba in the K'iche tradition, but because Yucatec Maya myth is so much harder to interpret, there are also enough differences to cause us to pause when writing. A and A', to begin with, are far more important and active in ritual and life than the Lords of Xibalba; they appear as hunters chasing various uay and mortals, and are present in scenes depicting the Jaguar God of the Underworld (probably K'inich Ahau in his nighttime form), suggesting that they are involved in some way in his carrying of the sun through the netherworld. Some scholars also believe that A at least may be a lunar god, based on his appearance in various sacred calendar texts and the prevalence of a crescent-moon symbol associated with him.

By contrast, the Lords of Xibalba from the PV are purely creatures of death. They do not leave the underworld, have no connection to any celestial or divine powers outside their own realm, and are purely antagonistic toward gods and heroes that are not under their power, which is pretty obviously illustrated by their massive superiority complex and attempts to utterly crush the Hero Twins for basically not a whole lot of concrete reasons. As far as we can tell - which isn't super far, because apart from the PV, which is no doubt not in even its original K'iche form much less the form it might have appeared in earlier Maya civilizations - they have no connection to other deities, locations or powers. They are the dead, and they are pleased to wield their terrible power over the living without any need for further functions.

These aren't necessarily enough differences to definitively decide that A and A' are different people from Hun Came and Vucub Came, but they are still real details and suggest that alternative interpretations might be very possible. In particular, the fact that A and A' don't always appear together and aren't as identical as the Lords (A' in fact seems to be less important than his supposed twin) suggests that they may be more their own bags of bones, and the K'iche story of the Lords' defeat and permanent barring from the affairs of the world seems heavily at odds with A and A', who clearly nobody likes but who also seem to be effective and influential divine figures.

At this point, we could have tipped either way, honestly. We think it's almost beyond question that even if the Lords are basically different figures from A and A' at this point, that they came from the same original root, so deciding when or if to separate them is as tricky as it ever is when considering continual evolution within a religion. We might well have decided to just conflate them and assume that their differences were cosmetic interpretations of different areas of the same religion...

...if it weren't for the Lacandon and others of their ilk. The Lacandon Maya people were possibly the longest-surviving Maya civilization that avoided contact with Europeans and Christianity until the beginning of the twentieth century, thanks to living in generally impenetrable jungle and having little interest in what white people were up to in their general vicinity. The Lacandon had (and still have) the latest and most long-running version of Maya religion still being practiced widely among them, and their death god, Kisin/Cizin, was absolutely not identical to the Lords of Death (although it's still likely they had common roots). As a sole ruler of the underworld, he was the sometime-antagonist to Hachakyum, the lord of the heavens, and both feared as a terrible representative of death but also understood to be the ultimate final authority over most of those who had died. Kisin has a whole slew of myths that are purely unique to him, including the story of his banishment to rule the underworld and subsequent tantrums in which he shakes the world with earthquakes, his treatment of the dead in which the worthy are purified by his horrific torture and the unworthy utterly destroyed, and his creation of animals (and possibly even uay) to parallel Hachakyum's creation of mankind. He doesn't fit with the Lords of Xibalba at all, especially because he performs a duty (however unpleasant) for the souls of mankind, but he does have a few things in common with God A, most especially the belief that he hunts the underworld for the spirit twins of humans who are meant to die, which might be the very scene that our unexplained artwork of A on the hunt is depicting.

So, we've got these Lords of Xibalba, and they are definitely A Thing. And we've got Kisin, and he's definitely A Thing. And then we've got A and A', and while they are Things, they are probably Things that belong aligned with one or the other, and whose information just isn't as easy to interpret as it is for some other gods. Trying to align Lacandon mythology, which had a couple of extra centuries to evolve past other Maya beliefs, with any other religion is tricky anyway, but in this case we're looking at a bunch of deities who are probably very firmly related but not necessarily all exactly the same.

So, based on all of that, we saw no option but to let Kisin, in all his gross-smelling, bad-attitude glory, be the main man of the underworld as he obviously is in Lacandon myth, while the Lords of Xibalba, clearly Titans defeated by the Hero Twins in Guatemalan myths that had no parallel with Kisin, were separate beings. And while we could have aligned A and A' with the Lords instead of Kisin, we found their differences too intriguing and the possibilities for connecting them with Kisin (and possibly his brother Sucuncyum, even) too compelling. Since we wanted to keep the pantheon using their Yucatec names wherever possible, we refer to him as Yum Cimil, the calendrical god A's name, but retained for the vast majority of his characterization the stories of Kisin and his fractious relations with the rest of the cosmology of death in the Maya universe.

The difference between Metnal and Xibalba, by the way, is a whole ball of wax all its own - both are clearly places of the dead, but depending on the material and the scholar, different people consider them the same place, separate places that are linked, that one is inside the other, or even that one is not an underworld at all but merely a place where terrible deathly things reside. Metnal being the Yucatec death-realm (with a name that most likely has a linguistic connection to the Aztec Mictlan as well) and Xibalba the K'iche, we decided to associate the first with Yum Cimil as the representative of Yucatec interests, and the second with the Lords of Death, whose realm to control it clearly is.

I could probably give a pretty massive dissertation on all the gymnastics we did to try to align as much material from various different Maya peoples together to make it both gel into a usable worldview but also still preserve its unique character and mythology wherever applicable, but that would be a whole lotta words. Suffice it to say that, after intense research, consultation with others and thorough consideration, we as writers made a call that Yum Cimil was more likely his own man than merely a manifestation of the Lords, and went from there.

The one thing we weren't doing here, though, was worrying about making sure to have a playable death god in charge of the underworld because that's what Scion always does for every pantheon. As I'm sure you might have noticed, we tend to wave our middle fingers cheerfully at Scion's arbitrary cosmology rules whenever they get in the way of representing a culture's myths in a more fun or accurate way - hell, the supplement for the Alihah didn't even have an underworld. We obey the RAW in areas where we have to in order for people to be able to use our supplements in a compatible way with their current games, but that's pretty much the only way we feel obligated to do so.