Wacah Chan

Also Known As: also Wakah Chan, Wakah-Chan, Wak Chan; “Six Sky” or “Raised-Up Sky”, from Classic Mayan wak, six, and chan, sky; Yucatec Maya yaxche’ and imix yaxche’, “green tree”, “first tree”; Yax Cheel Cab, “first tree of the world”; the same image at Palenque has since been read as Uh Te’, “Jade Jewel Tree”
Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Mayan Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Places
Mythical Attributes: It stands at the centre of the world and holds the three levels of the cosmos open to one another, its roots in the water below and its crown in the layered sky.
Role in Mythos: It is the axis the four quarters are measured from and the road along which gods, kings and the dead pass between the levels.
Relation to Humans: Yucatec farmers leave the ceiba standing when they burn and clear a field, and the colonial books set a coloured ceiba of abundance at each quarter of the world as shelter for the bee gods. No source describes a living person climbing it; the passage belongs to gods, to kings, and to the dead.

In the middle of a burned milpa in Yucatán, where everything else has been cut and fired to open ground for maize, one tree is left standing. It is a ceiba, and nobody in the village needs the reason explained. The bark is pale grey and studded with hard conical spines, the buttress roots flare out from the base like low walls, and the crown sits so far overhead that its branches seem to be having different weather from the field. Cicadas ratchet in the heat. The farmer works around it and says nothing about it at all.

Above that field, in the way the Maya laid the world out, the same tree runs from the bottom of everything to the top. Its roots go down into the water of the underworld. Its trunk is the middle world, the one with the fields and the villages in it. Its branches hold up the sky, which has layers, and a bird sits in the highest of them. The English name for this is the World Tree. The name printed in almost every book on Maya religion published since 1990 is Wacah Chan.

That name has a history, and it is worth knowing before anything else. It is not a phrase somebody wrote down from a Maya speaker pointing at a tree. Linda Schele and David Freidel proposed it in A Forest of Kings in 1990, reading a glyphic expression, wak chan, “six sky” or “raised-up sky”, as the proper name of the cross-shaped tree carved on the tablets at Palenque. It took hold quickly and completely. It has also been challenged. In a 2006 reappraisal of the Palenque cross written for the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Donald Callaway devoted a section to what he called the Wakah-Chan misnomer, arguing from a cache of 107 jade and shell fragments out of Temple V in Palenque’s North Group, pieces David Stuart recognised as a mosaic of the cross, that the Maya knew the object by a different title: Uh Te’, the Jade Jewel Tree, a thing that came from the east rather than a mythical axis standing at the centre. The headword on this page is a modern scholarly proposal, and it is still under argument.

What the record itself gives is both older and stranger. The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, the Yucatec Maya manuscript Ralph Roys translated for the Carnegie Institution in 1933, opens with a ritual of the four world-quarters that reads like an inventory of a divided cosmos. The red flint stone is the stone of the east, and the red ceiba tree of abundance is the arbor set there. In the north, white flint, white ceiba, white-breasted turkeys, white corn. In the west, black flint and a black ceiba. In the south, yellow. Red wild bees live in the east and a large red blossom is their cup. The Maya phrase behind “ceiba tree of abundance” is imix yaxche’, and Roys noted in his footnotes that yaxche’ carries both meanings at once: the green tree and the first tree of the world. Four coloured trees at the corners, and a green one at the centre.

The Classic-period artists did not draw it as a tree. On the inner sanctuary tablet of the Temple of the Cross at Palenque, and again on the sarcophagus lid of K’inich Janaab Pakal, the thing is cruciform, with squared arms and a mask worked into the shaft, and everything hangs on it rather than grows from it. A double-headed serpent is laid across the lower arms like a bar carried by a priest. A great bird with heavy wings occupies the top. At the foot sits a bowl bearing the sign for sun, and below that a head with a beaked nose, square eye sockets and a lower jaw stripped to the bone. Schele and Freidel read the sap running in such a tree as its blood, which is not a metaphor anybody had to invent; several Mayan languages call tree sap exactly that, and copal smoke still smells like the inside of a church.

On the lid, Pakal is falling. He is tipped backward at the base of the tree with one knee raised, sliding into the open jaws beneath it, and the bird is already above him in the branches.

The tree’s other great appearance is at a beginning rather than an end. Stela C at Quiriguá, raised in 775, carries the fullest surviving account of the last creation: on 13.0.0.0.0, 4 Ajaw 8 Kumk’u, three stones were planted. A jaguar throne stone was set by the Paddler Gods at a place called Na Ho Chan, First Five Sky. A snake throne stone went up at Earth-town. The text credits the whole episode to a lord whose name carries the same six-sky element that Schele and Freidel took for the tree. Those three stones are a hearth, and the identification is not obscure: they are the three stars below Orion’s belt, and they are also the three stones a Maya cook still sets her pot on.

What the place does, then, is carry traffic. It is the one vertical line in a cosmos otherwise laid out flat in four coloured quarters, and it lets things that belong to one level arrive at another. Souls go down it. Gods come up. A king on a throne at the centre of his city sits where the trunk would be, which is the practical reason so much Maya architecture is arranged the way it is.

Its limits are severe and mostly unstated. No one walks to it. The ceiba in the milpa is not the tree, it is the tree’s local likeness, and the texts that describe the coloured trees at the quarters are colonial while the carvings are seven centuries older, and the two bodies of evidence do not join up as neatly as the drawings in popular books suggest. There is a harder problem underneath. In a 2016 study in Ancient Mesoamerica, the botanist J. Andrew McDonald examined the morphology of the plant the Maya actually carved and painted, and concluded it is not a ceiba at all but a white water lily of the lowland swamps, Nymphaea ampla, with the convention already fixed in the murals at San Bartolo by the first century BC. If he is right, the most famous tree in the Americas is a flower.

The ceiba in the field stays standing either way.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Wacah Chan?

Wacah Chan is the name commonly given to the Maya World Tree, the cosmic axis standing at the centre of the world with its roots in the underworld and its branches in the layered sky. It is usually identified with the ceiba, Ceiba pentandra, a giant lowland tree with a spined grey trunk and flaring buttress roots. The name translates as “six sky” or “raised-up sky”.

Where does the name Wacah Chan come from?

The name was proposed by Linda Schele and David Freidel in A Forest of Kings in 1990, from a glyphic expression read wak chan, and applied by them to the cross-shaped tree carved on the tablets at Palenque. It is a modern scholarly reading rather than a phrase recorded from a Maya speaker. A 2006 reappraisal by Donald Callaway disputes it and argues the Palenque cross was known instead as Uh Te’, the Jade Jewel Tree.

What does the Maya World Tree look like in Maya art?

In Classic Maya carving it appears as a cruciform trunk rather than a naturalistic tree, with a mask set into the shaft, a double-headed serpent laid across the lower arms, and a large bird in the upper branches. At its base sits a bowl marked with the sun sign, and beneath that a head with a fleshless lower jaw. The best-known examples are the tablet in the Temple of the Cross at Palenque and the sarcophagus lid of K’inich Janaab Pakal.

Are there four world trees or one?

Both. The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel sets a coloured ceiba of abundance at each of the four quarters, red in the east, white in the north, black in the west and yellow in the south, with a green tree at the centre. The centre tree is the axis usually meant by Wacah Chan, and the four directional trees are its quarters.

Is the Maya World Tree really a ceiba?

That is disputed. The ceiba identification rests largely on colonial Yucatec sources, where the tree is called yaxche’, the green or first tree. A 2016 botanical study by J. Andrew McDonald in Ancient Mesoamerica argues that the plant actually depicted in Maya art is a white water lily, Nymphaea ampla, rather than a ceiba, with the convention already established at San Bartolo by the first century BC.