Buluc Chabtan

Also Known As: also Buluc Ch’abtan; buluc is Yucatec Maya for “eleven”, and the name is usually glossed “eleven fasting” or “eleven penance”; God F in Paul Schellhas’s 1904 list of the gods in the Maya books, and God R in the later revision of that list
Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Mayan Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Buluc Chabtan is the god of war, human sacrifice and death by violence in the painted books of the Yucatec Maya, known by the number eleven in his name sign and the dark mark at his eye.
Role in Mythos: He is the destroyer in the almanacs of the Maya priests, shown burning houses with a torch, breaking them down with a spear, fighting the black god of the merchants and keeping company with the god of death.
Relation to Humans: For the people in the pictures he is the fire in the thatch and the spear through the wall. No prayer, offering or festival addressed to him has come down, so how the Maya dealt with him is not recorded.

The torch goes into the thatch first. On three pages of a Maya book now kept in Madrid, a man-shaped figure with a black stripe down his face holds fire to the roof of a house with one hand and drives a spear into it with the other. The paint is some five or six centuries old, laid on fig-bark paper over a skin of white lime. Nothing in the scene suggests he is in a hurry.

This is the god most often called Buluc Chabtan, and almost everything that can be said about him comes from pictures like that one. Only a handful of Maya books survived the Spanish conquest of Yucatan. They are named for the European cities that ended up with them, Dresden, Madrid and Paris, and they are working manuals for priests: almanacs of lucky and unlucky days, each day’s fortune shown by a small painted god. Among those gods one face keeps coming back with a line drawn through its eye.

He was noticed, and numbered, by a German scholar named Paul Schellhas. Working through the books at the turn of the twentieth century, Schellhas could not read the gods’ names, so he gave each recurring figure a letter. The one with the black line became God F. Schellhas counted his appearances, found him often enough to rank among the more important deities, and described what he was doing. He burned houses and knocked them down. He stood close to God A, the skeletal lord of death, and at times was plainly a relative of his. He fought God M, the black-painted god of the travelling merchants. Schellhas called him the god of war and human sacrifice, perhaps of every death that comes by violence, and thought he resembled Xipe, the Aztec lord whose victims were flayed.

The line on the face is the whole of his portrait. Usually it drops straight down past the eye, like a stroke of soot drawn by a thumb. Sometimes it bends across the cheek. Sometimes it shrinks to a circle around the eye, and once or twice it becomes a double row of dots. Otherwise he is drawn like a man, and that is the unsettling part. The death god beside him is all bare ribs and bells. The war god has an ordinary body and one dark mark.

His name sign is a small head carrying the same mark, with a bar and dots in front of it that make the number eleven. That numeral is where the name comes from. Buluc is the Yucatec word for eleven, and the name Buluc Chabtan, usually glossed as eleven fasting or eleven penance, was matched to the figure on the strength of it. The books never spell the name out beside him. It is a fair guess. It is still a guess.

Later scholars decided that Schellhas had folded two gods into one. In the revised list published by Karl Taube in 1992, God F is divided into God Q and God R, and the numeral eleven goes with God R, a deity of war and sacrifice whose eye is wrapped in a dark curl. That curl is the sign the Maya used for the earth. So the god with eleven in his name may have had more ground under him than the burning houses suggest, though what the earth meant to him is not explained by any picture.

One small scene shows what set him against the world of ordinary trade. The merchant god comes down the road with his carrying frame, black from head to foot, a spear in his hand because the roads were never safe. The god with the line through his eye meets him with a weapon raised. No caption says who won. The pair simply face each other on the page, the man who moves goods from town to town and the one who burns the towns.

His story is missing. No myth of his birth survives, no parents, no wife, no tale of a war he won or a punishment he suffered. The great Maya narrative that did survive, from the K’iche’ of the Guatemalan highlands, is full of lords of death and has no place for him. He belongs to the lowland books, and the books are calendars, not stories. They record that on certain days he was the power in charge, and that those days were bad ones.

His powers are the ones the pictures give him. He brings fire to roofs and a spear point to walls, he presides when a captive is killed, and his days carry death by violence the way other gods’ days carry rain or maize. He keeps the death god’s company without being a skeleton himself, which suggests a god who makes the dead and does not have to live among them.

His limits are harder to see, and that is a finding of its own. He does not rule the count of days. He takes his turn in it, and the turn passes to gentler gods. He can be met and fought, since the merchant god stands up to him armed. And his hold on later memory was weak. The rain god and the death god kept their names in Maya speech for centuries after the conquest. The god of the black line kept a number.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Buluc Chabtan?

Buluc Chabtan is the Maya god of war, human sacrifice and death by violence. He appears in the painted Maya books from Yucatan, where he is shown burning houses with a torch and breaking them down with a spear. Scholars also call him God F, or God R in a later revised list.

What does the name Buluc Chabtan mean?

Buluc is the Yucatec Maya word for eleven, and the name Buluc Chabtan is usually glossed as eleven fasting or eleven penance. The name was matched to the god because his name sign in the Maya books carries the number eleven. The books themselves never spell the name out beside his picture.

What does Buluc Chabtan look like?

Buluc Chabtan has the body of a man with a single black line running down his face through or beside the eye. The line sometimes curves across the cheek or forms a ring around the eye. In the revised list of Maya gods, the figure with the number eleven has a dark curl around the eye, which is the Maya sign for the earth.

Why is Buluc Chabtan called God F?

Buluc Chabtan is called God F because the German scholar Paul Schellhas could not read the gods’ names in the Maya books and gave each one a letter. Schellhas described God F as the god of war and human sacrifice. In 1992 Karl Taube divided God F into God Q and God R, and the number eleven belongs to God R.

Are there any myths about Buluc Chabtan?

No myth about Buluc Chabtan has survived. No source names his parents, his wife or any story of his deeds. He is known from pictures in the Maya almanacs, where he burns houses, fights the black god of the merchants and appears with the god of death.