Camazotz

All night the bats kept council overhead, saying quilitz, quilitz, until the sound became a kind of weather. Two boys lay on the floor beneath them, each sealed inside his own blowgun, breathing through a tube of wood. Then the squeaking stopped. The silence that followed was the most dangerous thing in the room.

The house was Zotzi-ha, the Bat House, one of the ordeal chambers the lords of Xibalba kept for guests they had no intention of releasing. Hunahpu and Xbalanque had already walked out of the house of cold, where hail filled the air until they burned old logs and drove it off. They had walked out of the house of jaguars, which they bought off with a scattering of thrown bones. They had walked out of the house of fire, where the coals and the wood burned and the twins did not. Xibalba was running out of rooms. What waited in the next one had a name.

That name is blunt to the point of rudeness. Kame is death. Sotz’ is bat. Put the two together in K’iche’ and you have the death bat, and that is very nearly all the Popol Vuh is willing to say about him. The book lingers over the wit of a rabbit and the grumbling of a grinding stone, but about its most famous monster it offers only that he was a large animal, that his weapon for killing was like a dry point, and that anyone who came into his presence perished at once. The early translators took the dry point to mean something hardened in fire and sharpened to a tip. No wingspan. No face. A blade, a room, and a result.

The bats themselves crowded the vault of that house in their hundreds, dropping and settling and dropping again. When they went quiet at last they pressed themselves against the mouth of one of the blowguns and held still, packed close as fruit in a basket, waiting for the wood to open. It did. Xbalanque asked whether the light had come yet. Hunahpu said he would look, and put his head out to see whether the sky had gone grey, and Camazotz took it off him in a single motion. The body did not move again. Xbalanque called his brother’s name into the dark and got nothing back. Messengers carried the head away to the ball court and hung it there on the order of Hun-Came and Vucub-Came, and all Xibalba was delighted.

What follows is one of the strangest rescue operations in any mythology. Xbalanque summoned every animal he could reach and asked each what it ate, and they came bearing rotten things and grasses and stones and handfuls of earth. Out of that gathering a substitute head was made and set on his brother’s shoulders, and the eyes were fashioned into it, and the hair came out well, and the thing could speak. Translators disagree over what it actually was, some reading a turtle, others a carved squash, which may say more about sixteenth-century K’iche’ than about the object. Huracan, the Heart of Heaven, came down and soared over the Bat House while the work was done, and a buzzard spread its wings across the horizon to hold back the dawn a little longer. In the morning the twins went down to the court, sent a rabbit bouncing out of an oak grove as a decoy, and while the lords of death chased it Xbalanque swapped the false head for the real one. The false one hit the stone floor later and burst apart like seeds.

Camazotz had already appeared once before this, at the very beginning of the world, though under a spelling that has caused two centuries of argument. When the gods drowned the wooden people for failing to speak to their makers, four destroyers came down through the black rain: Xecotcovach gouged out their eyes, Camalotz cut off their heads, Cotzbalam ate their flesh, and Tucumbalam ground their bones to powder. Adrian Recinos, translating in 1950, took that Camalotz to be the same great vampire, the bat of death, doing at the dawn of things exactly what he would later do to Hunahpu. He is a specialist. He removes heads.

Everything beyond the text gets slippery, and it is worth knowing why. In the 1890s Eduard Seler looked at a painted vessel that Erwin Dieseldorff had dug up at Chama in Guatemala, saw bats on it, and called them camazotz. Nobody checked. The label stuck so hard that for the next century almost every bat in Maya art was captioned with the name, which is how a creature with three paragraphs of text acquired an entire visual empire. James Brady and Jeremy Coltman went back through the material in 2016 and could find no ancient image anywhere of the Hero Twins inside the bat chamber, which is a peculiar absence for a scene supposedly central to Maya thought. Bats do crowd the art, but they are doing other work: standing as the emblem of a place or a lineage, carrying messages, hovering over flowers and fruit, and above all appearing as wahy beings, the bestial forms that epigraphers now read as personified diseases. The fire-breathing bat on Dieseldorff’s vessel belongs to that last group. Seler’s identification, they argue, should simply be dropped.

Real bats mattered enormously to the people who told these stories, which is probably why the misreading went unquestioned for so long. A bat head sits in the emblem glyph of Copan. Among the Cakchiquel, the bat was the totem of the Zotzil, one of the two families that held the kingship in turn, and Brinton records that their chief god Chamalcan was imaged as a bat. The Tzotzil town of Zinacantan in highland Chiapas carries the animal in its Nahuatl name, the place of bats. Guatemala’s caves hold leaf-nosed bats and the big-eared woolly bat, a heavy, quiet predator that takes small vertebrates out of the dark, and vampire bats that open a wound so cleanly the sleeper does not wake.

His powers follow from the room he lives in. In the closed dark of Zotzi-ha nothing needs to be hunted, only waited for, and the kill takes no longer than a swing. He is also plural in a way the text never bothers to explain, sometimes a swarm and sometimes one named killer, and at the critical moment another Camazotz drops in from the sky to flush the target into the open. His limits follow just as neatly. He cannot reach what he cannot see, and a hollow length of blowgun wood is enough to defeat him for an entire night. He does not pursue. He does not leave the house. And the victory he wins is oddly provisional, since a head taken is a head that can be carried off, hung up, played with and then quietly stolen back by a brother with a rabbit and a good sense of timing. Camazotz was never beaten. He was simply worked around, and by morning the twins had gone.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Camazotz?

Camazotz is the death bat of K’iche’ Maya myth, a killer who lives in Zotzi-ha, the Bat House of the underworld Xibalba. He appears in the Popol Vuh, where he beheads the hero Hunahpu. The name combines the K’iche’ words kame, death, and sotz’, bat.

What happens in the House of Bats in the Popol Vuh?

The lords of Xibalba shut the Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, in the Bat House overnight. The twins survive the bats by sleeping sealed inside their own blowguns, but when Hunahpu puts his head out to check whether dawn has come, Camazotz cuts it off instantly. The head is hung over the ball court on the orders of Hun-Came and Vucub-Came.

How did Hunahpu get his head back?

Xbalanque called together the animals and had a false head made overnight, which the translations render either as a turtle or as a carved squash. During the next day’s ball game he sent a rabbit out of an oak grove as a decoy, and while the lords of Xibalba chased it he swapped the false head for his brother’s real one.

Is Camazotz the bat shown on ancient Maya pottery?

Probably not. Eduard Seler identified the bats on a vessel from Chama, Guatemala, as camazotz in the 1890s, and the label spread to almost every bat in Maya art without ever being tested. A 2016 study by James Brady and Jeremy Coltman found no ancient depiction of the Hero Twins in the bat chamber at all, and argued that most such bats are wahy beings, the animal forms of personified diseases, rather than the Popol Vuh’s death bat.

Does Camazotz appear anywhere else in the Popol Vuh?

Yes, most likely at the destruction of the wooden people, where a figure called Camalotz cuts off their heads while three other destroyers take their eyes, flesh and bones. Adrian Recinos, in his 1950 translation, identified that Camalotz as the same death bat who later decapitates Hunahpu.

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Vucub Came and Hun Came, Camulatz, Xecotcovach, Tecumbalam, Huracán, Vucub Caquix, Zipacna, Itzamna, Kukulkan, Chac, Ixtab, Vision Serpent, Alux