Alux

The offerings go out at the edge of the cornfield onto a low altar dressed with fresh green branches, thirteen cups of thin white corn gruel arranged across the table and hung in the arch above it. Then a fourteenth is set down on the bare earth by the leg of the table. The thirteen are for the rain lords and the guardians of the four directions. The fourteenth, along with a loaf of layered bread pushed underneath where nobody has to look at it, belongs to the small ones who live in the low hills at the field’s edge. The reasoning is not mystical. Leave out the fourteenth cup and the machete walks off by morning.

They are knee-high. That is the one point every account agrees on. Past it the descriptions settle into a picture of small bearded men in hats and plain traditional dress, roughly a foot tall, moving around after dark through a landscape they know considerably better than the people farming it. Most of the time nobody sees them, because invisibility is nearer their resting state than visibility; appearing is a decision, and it is usually made in order to frighten somebody. When a farmer in the village of Chan Kom turned one up in its hiding place in the 1930s, the detail he gave Robert Redfield and Alfonso Villa Rojas was about colour. The creature, he said, was the colour of clay.

That word carries weight in Yucatán. In Yucatec Maya, k’at means potter’s clay and it also means dwarf. Another word for dwarf, áak, doubles as the word for turtle, whose shell was the old image of the earth itself. There is a coarser one, hkis luum, which comes out as something like earth farter and points at the swollen bellies ancient Maya artists gave their dwarfs. The vocabulary is a fossil record of a story. Yucatec creation narratives describe a world before this one, peopled by a race of dwarfs the gods shaped out of mud so there would be someone to worship them. The dwarfs had eyes that could see to the ends of space and time. They used them to make pottery, write books of prophecy and raise buildings of cut stone, and never got round to the worshipping. The gods drowned the world. Some of the dwarfs saw it coming and climbed onto ledges inside the caves of the Puuc hills to wait it out, and when they came back into the light the new sun baked them solid. A great many Yucatec Maya say the small clay figurines that come out of the ruins are those refugees.

Whether the ancient Maya had anything they called an alux is a separate question, and the honest answer is that nobody can prove it. Dwarfs are everywhere in Classic-period art: attending lords in painted palace scenes, dancing with the Young Corn God, carrying torches and feathered fans on stelae at Calakmul and along the Usumacinta. On a stair riser at Yaxchilan two of them watch from inside a cave while the king plays ball. One tiny figure on a vessel holds a mirror up for a ruler to look into, and a mirror is a door to the spirit world. It is a suggestive pile of evidence and it is not a lineage. What can actually be documented begins in the 1930s, with ethnographers sitting in villages writing down what farmers said about the beings in the hills.

A guard at the ruins of Dzibanche fell asleep on night duty and woke to a dwarf and a pack of wild dogs coming for him. He ran. Archaeologists who sleep at sites describe much the same reception, stones landing out of the dark, whistling that seems to circle the tents, and a night with no rest in it.

An alux can also be acquired on purpose. When a farmer opens new ground he builds a small house of stone and clay with a palm roof at the edge of the plot, a kahtal alux, and stocks it with maize kernels, a little honey, sometimes a measure of balché, the fermented bark drink. In the version told most often now, a j-men, the Maya ritual specialist, shapes a small figure and works over it for a set number of days until the thing inside the house is awake. The arrangement runs seven years. At the end of it the farmer is supposed to shut the doors and windows and seal the alux in, because one left loose with no obligations turns to mischief and stays that way. Sealed shrines of exactly this kind stand all over the Yucatán countryside. What their builders originally intended by them is not on record.

In February 2023 the president of Mexico posted a photograph online that an engineer had taken near the Maya Train works, saying it appeared to show an aluxe and that everything in that country is mystical. The image was picked apart within hours and had reportedly circulated two years earlier under a different caption. The reflex was the interesting part: a head of state reaching for the alux as the obvious reading of something strange photographed at night beside a rail cutting driven through Maya land.

What they do for a farmer who keeps his side of the bargain is specific rather than vague. They patrol the milpa after dark and whistle animals and thieves off it. They pull the east winds, the ones that carry rain, across the fields at the right season, and turtles are said to feel those winds coming before anything else does. In the ruins they guard the tombs of the ancestors against looting, and the stones and dogs and screeching that drive off a trespassing archaeologist work equally well on a man with a shovel and a buyer waiting for figurines.

Their power is also the shape of their limit. An alux belongs to a place, a hill, a cave, a stone, a stretch of field, and will not simply follow a man who moves on unless offerings coax it into somewhere new. They have no wives, so there are never more of them than there already are. They can be shut in behind a sealed door. And everything they give runs on exchange: food, drink, tobacco, a cup set on the ground where the ground can reach it. Withhold that and an alux does not weaken, it becomes a problem, hiding tools, throwing pots out into the yard, playing a guitar badly outside the house all night until somebody works out what was forgotten.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an alux?

An alux is a knee-high guardian spirit in Yucatec Maya belief, found across the Yucatán Peninsula, Belize and Guatemala. Aluxo’ob live in hills, caves, stones and cornfields, are invisible most of the time, and protect the land they belong to in exchange for offerings. They are neither gods nor ghosts, but small local powers with wills of their own.

What does an alux look like?

An alux is usually described as a small bearded man about a foot tall, wearing a hat and traditional Maya dress. They are generally invisible and take visible form by choice, most often to frighten someone. One farmer who accidentally uncovered an alux in the 1930s said the creature was the colour of clay.

How does a Maya farmer get an alux to guard a field?

The farmer builds a small stone-and-clay house with a palm roof at the edge of the plot, called a kahtal alux, and leaves offerings in it such as maize kernels, honey and balché. In the account told most often today, a j-men shapes a figure and performs rituals over it for a set number of days to bring the alux to life. The arrangement is said to last seven years, after which the doors and windows are sealed to shut the alux in.

What do aluxo’ob do to people who ignore them?

An alux that is neglected turns from guardian to nuisance. Aluxo’ob hide tools, throw household belongings into the yard, screech through the night, pelt intruders with stones and summon strong winds. At archaeological sites they are blamed for driving off looters and sleeping guards, in one case with a pack of wild dogs.

Are aluxo’ob genuinely ancient, or a modern belief?

The belief is documented from the 1930s onward by ethnographers working in Yucatec Maya villages, and it remains active in rural Yucatán, Quintana Roo, Campeche and Belize today. Dwarfs appear constantly in Classic Maya art, attending rulers and dancing with the Young Corn God, which suggests deep roots, but there is no direct evidence that the ancient Maya used the name alux. The continuity is an argument from imagery rather than a documented line of descent.

Related Entries

Chac, Kukulkan, Ix Chel, Itzamna, Camazotz, Xibalba, Ixtab, Chaneque, Nagual, Duende, Duwende, Curupira, Menehune, Tomte, Nain Rouge