Tecumbalam

Also Known As: Tucumbalam in the K’iche’ manuscript; rendered Tearing Jaguar by Dennis Tedlock
Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Mayan Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: Tecumbalam breaks the bones and sinews of the dead and grinds what remains into powder.
Role in Mythos: It is the fourth and last of the four destroyers sent against the wooden people in the Popol Vuh, arriving after the eyes, heads and flesh have already been taken.
Relation to Humans: Tecumbalam was loosed on a failed prototype of humanity rather than on people as they exist now, and it makes no appearance in the world that follows. Nothing in the K’iche’ record shows it being invoked, appeased or feared in daily practice.

Resin fell first. It came out of a black sky, hot and clinging, and it landed on the heads of people who had been carved out of wood, and they had no idea why. They had never had much idea about anything.

They were the second attempt. The gods had already tried mud, which slumped and softened and dissolved in the water before it could be given a name. So the Maker and the Modeler cut the men from the wood of the tz’ite, the coral tree, and shaped the women from the pith of bulrushes. The result walked, talked, married and filled the earth with sons and daughters. It also had no blood, no sweat, no fat. Their faces were dry and crusted, their arms and legs stiff and badly finished, and their hearts held nothing at all. Not once did they say the names of the ones who made them.

So the Heart of Sky, whose other name is Hurricane, sent water down on them, and then sent something worse. Xecotcovach came and gouged out their eyes. Camalotz came and took off their heads. Cotzbalam came and ate their flesh. Then came Tecumbalam, and Tecumbalam broke their bones and their sinews, and ground and crumbled what was left.

The order matters. By the time the fourth one arrives there is nothing standing. The eyes are gone, the heads are off, the meat is stripped, and what lies on the wet ground is a field of frames. Tecumbalam moves through them and the sound is not tearing but snapping, sharp and dry and repeated, with a duller noise running under it, the long slow reduction of splinter into powder. Nothing is left in a shape that could be recognised, counted or put back together.

What it looked like while it worked, no source will say. The Popol Vuh gives four names and four actions and not one line of description for any of them, which has left three centuries of readers guessing. Francisco Ximenez, the Dominican friar who copied and translated the K’iche’ text in the early eighteenth century, took Tucumbalam for another name of the danta, the tapir: a heavy, low-slung forest animal with a short mobile snout and a body built like a battering ram. The ending of the name pulls in a different direction. Balam is jaguar in K’iche’, and it sits inside Cotzbalam as well, which is why Dennis Tedlock’s translation gives the two of them as Crunching Jaguar and Tearing Jaguar. Eduard Seler went somewhere else entirely, matching the four destroyers to the four monstrous figures on plate 44 of the Codex Borgia and reading this one as a shark or a crocodile, the beast of the west, the one that tore off a foot.

Even the name at the top of this page is a traveller’s copy. The K’iche’ manuscript reads Tucumbalam. Tecumbalam is the form that reached English through Lewis Spence in 1908, working from Brasseur de Bourbourg’s French, and Spence made all four destroyers birds: the bird Xecotcovach, the bird Camulatz, the bird Cotzbalam, the bird Tecumbalam that broke their bones and sinews and ground them into powder. Nothing in the K’iche’ says bird. The line stuck anyway, and most of this creature’s English afterlife descends from it.

Then the household joined in, which is the part of the story nobody forgets. The water jars spoke, and the griddles, and the plates, and the cooking pots, and the dogs and the turkeys, all of them queuing up to settle accounts. The grinding stones had the loudest grievance: every day, every day, in the dark and in the dawn, that scraping and rasping across their faces, and now they would grind flesh instead of maize. There is a grim tidiness in that. Tecumbalam had already done the milling; the metates only wanted the credit. The hearthstones came straight out of the fire at their heads. The wooden people ran for the roofs and the roofs came down on them, ran for the trees and were thrown off, ran for the caves and found the caves shut in their faces. Whatever survived is said to have become the monkeys in the forest, which is why monkeys look like people.

Tecumbalam’s power is narrow and absolute. It does not hunt, stalk, bargain, tempt or possess. It reduces. Bone is the last architecture a body owns, the part that outlasts rot and fire and burial and is still there to be dug up centuries later, and grinding it to powder is the difference between killing a thing and unmaking it. Everything else in that destruction leaves something behind: a corpse, a skeleton, a story with a body at the end of it. Powder keeps nothing.

Its limits are just as narrow. It has no cult, no offerings, no temple, no festival and no myth of its own. It does not exist before the flood and it does not exist after. It cannot move at all unless the Heart of Sky judges that a creation has failed, which makes it less a monster than a tool with teeth. Camalotz at least has a sequel, since the death bat that later takes the head of one of the Hero Twins carries the same name. Tecumbalam gets nothing. When the gods finally succeed and build people out of yellow and white maize, ground nine times over by the grandmother Xmucane, the bone-breaker is not called for, because this time there is nothing to correct.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Tecumbalam in Mayan mythology?

Tecumbalam is one of four destroyers sent in the Popol Vuh to annihilate the wooden people, the failed second attempt at humanity. Its specific task was to break their bones and sinews and grind the remains into powder. It acts last, after the other three have taken the eyes, the heads and the flesh.

What did Tecumbalam look like?

No source describes it. The Popol Vuh names the four destroyers and states what each one did, but gives no physical detail whatsoever. Francisco Ximenez read the name as a term for the tapir, Dennis Tedlock translates it as Tearing Jaguar, and Eduard Seler identified it with a shark or crocodile figure on plate 44 of the Codex Borgia.

Why were the wooden people destroyed?

They were destroyed because they had no hearts and no memory of their makers. The Popol Vuh says they walked, spoke and multiplied but never once named the gods who formed them, so the Heart of Sky sent a flood, a rain of resin, and the four destroyers. Their own tools, pots and animals then rose up and finished them.

Is Tecumbalam the same as Tucumbalam?

Yes. Tucumbalam is the form in the K’iche’ manuscript, and Tecumbalam is the spelling that entered English through Lewis Spence’s 1908 retelling, which worked from Brasseur de Bourbourg’s French version. Spence also called all four destroyers birds, a detail with no support in the original text.

Does Tecumbalam appear anywhere else in the Popol Vuh?

No. It appears only in the destruction of the wooden people and is never mentioned again. Camalotz, the head-taker, resurfaces in the second part of the book as the death bat that beheads one of the Hero Twins, but Tecumbalam has no further role once the wooden people are gone.