Underworld Symbolism

It was believed that when people died, their souls faced a journey through this treacherous place. If they succeeded in defeating the forces of death and evil during the journey, they were reborn into the heavenly realm, where the ancestors and celestial bodies dwelled. Monuments at other Maya sites show dead rulers dancing victoriously out of Xibalba to take their place alongside distinguished ancestors and preparing to guide their descendants still alive in the Middle World. In the event that someone died a violent death, their soul was believed to go straight to the heavens.

Like many other peoples around the world, the Maya had a myth to explain death and prepare people for this fearsome journey. A version of the story survives in the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the K'iche Maya of the Guatemala highlands. The two protagonists are the Hero Twins, who descend to the underworld and defeat the gods of death after surviving a series of trials. Much of the underworld symbolism on Copan's structures recalls scenes from the Popol Vuh, and scholars suspect that versions of the myth were passed down from ancient times among many Maya groups. Certain buildings in the East Court have themes that appear to relate directly to the different houses in which the Hero Twins are said to have endured trials. The houses are described as abodes where sinister underworld creatures challenged victims with tricks and evil tactics. As I wrote twenty years ago, I believe these East Court buildings might have functioned as theaters for reenactments of the timeless tales.

Nine exhibits on the ground floor of the Copan Sculpture Museum include symbolism incorporating the underworld theme. Their placement on the lower level of the museum is meant to give the effect of being below ground, where the lords of death are said to dwell. The exhibit's dark accent colors further echo the somber underworld. Some sculptures are direct representations of underworld themes, and others are related to the conjuring of ancestors and spirits into the otherworldly and nightly realms.

The underworld journey begins with Structure 16 (exhibits 4, 5, and 7), a Copan building whose sculpture makes abundant references to death, warfare, and sacrifice (67). It continues with an exhibition of carvings of skulls and defleshed bones from Structure 230 (exhibit 8) and supernatural imagery from Structures 21A and 21 (exhibits 10-12). The journey concludes with a remarkable inscribed floor marker that once covered a tomb beneath Structure 26 (exhibit 13) and a menacing death bat (cama zotz) from Structure 20 (exhibit 14).

Exhibits 4, 5, & 7: Structure 16

The tallest structure on the Copan Acropolis was Structure 16, or 10L-16, using its precise Copan Valley map designation. It was the last pyramid built over the many layers of construction at this sacred place honoring and enshrining the founding royal ancestor, K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo', and his long-lived dynasty. The stairway on the west side of the pyramid, leading up to the temple at its summit, was punctuated by three decorated platforms. Their symbols represent, successively, death and human sacrifice, the resurrection of K'inich Yax K'uk'Mo' as the warrior sun god, and an underworld mountain cave of origin. All three of these imposing features have been reconstructed and are displayed in the museum. Because of space limitations, the lowermost and middle platforms form exhibit 7, and the uppermost platform, the cave, stands apart in exhibit 4 (68).

Because these rectangular, blocklike platforms were outset from the steps, appearing as planar surfaces, most of the cut stones and sculptures that composed them collapsed over time and fell to the plaza floor. But the fallen blocks left clearly visible cavities in the intact stairway that revealed the platforms' original dimensions and placement. A few sculptures even remained in their original places, where they served as reference points when we began to reconstruct the platforms for display in the museum.

Reconstructing the stairway platforms was a challenge requiring many years and the work of many people. From 1988 to 1990, during the Copan Acropolis Archaeology Project (PAAC), student assistants Joel Palka and Donna Stone first cataloged and studied the huge sculpture blocks scattered about the base of Structure 16 (69). Rudy Larios and I recorded the blocks that were still in place on the lowermost and middle platforms on the west staircase while its restoration was in progress. I made initial photographic and drawing reconstructions of these cataloged sculpture blocks. Later, Juan Ramón Guerra oversaw the transfer of the blocks to the museum and engineered their reassembly and installation there (70). Karl Taube assisted me in the final stage of the museum assembly work. He and Jorge Ramos analyzed the sculpture on the platforms, identifying and rematching many broken fragments and writing about the sculptures' interpretation. Carlos Jacinto, Hernando Guerra, Rufino Membreño, and Concepción Lazaro fit together the many broken pieces of sculpture that had become separated over the centuries before they were transferred from the site to the museum (71).

The three dramatic platforms can be seen as stopping points on the ascent up the staircase to the sacred temple honoring the founder. Through their symbolism, onlookers relived his mythical triumph over the underworld and his resurrection and rebirth as the warrior sun. K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo' emerges from the fiery solar realm to empower warriors to take captives in his honor and that of the storm god, Tlaloc. The sacrificial victims are present in the form of a skull rack and a captive in the mouth of the cave, which is visually located at a place labeled by pu signs, thought to signify Tollan, the mythical place of origin.

The pairing of the sun and storm gods is as old as Mesoamerican religion and finds its best-known expression in the twin temples of the Aztec, one of which was devoted to the worship of Tlaloc and the other to Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec's tribal war god, who was promoted to the status of sun god just as K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo' was at Copan. Bill Fash suggests that Structure 16 is an early example of a building combining these two forces of nature. The Copan rulers sought to legitimate their right to rule by aligning their ancestral warriors with a mythical place of origin and the most potent forces in their world. These imposing displays reinforced in the inhabitants of Copan the perception that the cult of ritual warfare was needed to appease the gods and ancestors, in order to perpetuate the natural world, especially the solar and agricultural cycles.

At the top of Structure 16, a person ascending the west stairway reached a two-story temple. Peering into its first-story chamber, the viewer saw an interior niche framed by a serpent's mouth, and inside the niche, a sculpture of the seated K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo'. The dramatic stairway, followed by the seclusion of the inner temple shrine, prepared visitors for a momentous encounter with the spirit of the founder.

A photograph taken by Alfred Maudslay in 1886, during the first excavation of the temple, shows the inner chamber in its best-known state of preservation (72). The body of a human figure, an unusual one in which the person's crossed legs are covered with animal skin and claws, suggested to be from either a bird or a jaguar, is seen intact. Its long, rigid-looking upper body is decorated with a bar pectoral and a beaded collar (73). The costume represents an affiliation with an older warrior cult that was also followed in other Maya regions, as is attested by a ruler depicted in similar attire on Stela 16 from the site of Dos Pilas in Guatemala (74). It dates to A. D. 735, roughly 40 to 50 years earlier than Structure 16.

The head in the Maudslay photograph, on the ground to the right of the torso, wears goggles over its eyes and may be the head to the figure, although Maudslay did not associate the two. If the two pieces are put together, the figure appears to represent K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo' wearing shell goggles, as he does on Copan's Altar Q (see sidebar, p. 46). The now broken torso and legs of the figure have been identified among the sculpture fragments at the Peabody Museum, while the head lies across the Atlantic in the British Museum. At some point, we hope to rejoin them and verify the hypothesis. The split serpent framing the niche was badly damaged over the centuries, and by 1989, when Ricardo Agurcia re-excavated the temple, only portions of a few fangs and incisors were still intact.

Ancient Maya artists decorated the exterior of the temple on the summit of Structure 16 with an array of façade sculptures continuing the themes of ritual warfare, sacrifice, and ancestor worship. Some examples of these sculptures are displayed in exhibit 5 in the museum (75). Maudslay described small effigy heads still projecting from the cornice surrounding the inner room about 7 feet above the floor. Several of these were Tlaloc heads with knotted "Mexican year signs" in their headdresses. One that survived and was found during excavations in 1989 is displayed in the exhibit. Also in the display is an anthropomorphic Tlaloc brandishing a serpent shield (76) identical to the one K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo' carries on Altar Q. The humanlike Tlaloc with shield was repeated four times on each side of the temple façade. One example of a goggle-eyed owl mask surrounded by year signs is shown at the top of the exhibit panel. The owl, or kuy in Mayan, was considered the harbinger of death. The mask was probably originally connected to a binding or headband in the upper register of the building, possibly along the cornice molding.

Plain Tlaloc masks that flanked the doorways and decorated the corners of the lower register of the temple are partially restored on the temple's exterior walls (77). We were able to do this because in a few instances the excavation team found pieces still in place on the walls, giving us clues to the masks' exact locations. The curved faces of many elements of these masks indicate that some of them were intended for corners.

A striking design of interwoven bands with alternating k'an symbols, or equal-sided crosses, and heavy-lidded eyes may originally have been placed above the temple's doorways. A segment of this motif is reconstructed at lower left in exhibit 5. Other large k'an crosses (exhibit center), rectangular shields, and hieroglyphs forming the name K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo' formed part of the temple façade. When Structure 16 collapsed, the temple sculptures fell a great distance down the sides of the pyramid to its base. Because of this, we can only make educated guesses about the precise placement of most motifs on the façade. As of this writing, analysis is ongoing for other sets of sculptural motifs from Structure 16, including witz monsters, twisted rope, claws, and bands of feathers (78).

Taken as a whole, the amazing array of sculptures on Structure 16 reveals that this lofty pyramid and temple were constructed by the latest ruler or rulers of Copan as a sacred mountain to honor the founder of the dynasty, K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo', and to glorify him in his resurrection from the underworld as the sun god and archetypal warrior. The scenes on the three stairway platforms set the stage for the viewer's meeting with the statue of K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo' in the inner temple. The ancient people of Copan knew that the founder had been buried deep below the surface, many centuries earlier, in this exact place. The temple was a shrine consecrating this sacred spot, the axis mundi of a long-lived Classic Maya kingdom. Together with Altar Q, Structure 16 celebrated the power and glory of the rulers in the dynasty of K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo'. The multiple images of Tlaloc reaffirm the ruling dynasty's ties to the great capital of central Mexico, Teotihuacan. Through this symbolism the rulers legitimated their right to rule and gained power over life and death through practices of ritual warfare and sacrifice.

The size and grandeur of Structure 16 and its predecessors covering the sacred burial spot raise questions about both the rulers who sponsored the pyramids and temples and the workers who built them. Were the builders pleased and willing to honor the founding dynasty, or were they forced into submission through fear of the warrior cult? Were the ancient Copanec rulers proudly displaying their might to their contemporaries in surrounding regions? Or were they weak and fearful of revolt from within or conquest from without, now that Teotihuacan no longer existed to lend legitimacy to their proclaimed right to rule? The sculpture alone does not answer these questions. Gathering and piecing together the archaeological data and deciphering the hieroglyphic texts may help provide insights into these enduring mysteries.

Exhibit 8
Structure 230

Structure 230 (or 10L-230), excavated in 1986, was built onto the south side of Temple 26 on the Acropolis. The majority of the sculptures from it that have been found are carved human long bones and skulls that were heavily disturbed after falling off the building (79, 80). For the Maya, these motifs not only signified death but also implied the next step in a continuous cycle, rebirth. We know that the ancient Maya revisited the tombs and burial places of their deceased because archaeological evidence shows that on these occasions they removed the bones or cleaned and then replaced them, sometimes adding a coating of red ochre or cinnabar to them. Rather than considering Structure 230 another building dedicated to sacrifice, I think this small structure was used for rituals involving the treatment of bones and the subsequent reburial of deceased rulers and perhaps their family members. Recalling an altar from Tikal where such a ritual seems to be taking place, my colleagues and I decided to display the skulls and bones in a similar stacked arrangement (81).

Exhibit 10
Structure 21A

Not long before Structure 16 was completed, a small temple called Structure 21A was built on the north side of the East Court as a small addition between two larger, neighboring buildings (82). A hieroglyphic stone bench found inside it dates to 9. 16. 12. 5. 17, or A. D. 763. It commemorates Yax Pasaj Chan Yopaat's accession as Ruler 16, making it one of his earliest works. The building façade was decorated with motifs related to rituals that conjured up supernatural beings carrying associations with both underworld darkness and celestial brilliance. The bench inscription, still in place at the site, consists of 16 glyphs separated by three star signs. The star signs and other cutout geometric shapes beneath the text may have been inlaid with a precious material such as obsidian, making this a reflective display in a darkened room. The inscription records the act of placing the bench in the building and speaks of a ritual in which Yax Pasaj impersonated four patron deities, K'uy-(Undeciphered) Ajaw, Mo'witz Ajaw, Tukun Ajaw, and Bolon K'awiil, probably protectors that inhabited local caves, mountains, and springs. More than 100 years ago, members of the Peabody Museum expedition made a plaster cast of the inscription, which preserves many details now lost to erosion (83). In 2004, the Peabody donated a resin copy of the inscription, made from its plaster cast, for display in the Copan Sculpture Museum.

Structure 21A may have been one of the last buildings erected in Copan by Yax Pasaj Chan Yopaat. It pays homage to his accession to the throne and may even allude to the completion of the Copan dynasty. Studying the bench inscription and the temple's facade sculpture together yields a more complete idea of the building's message, which seems to refer to Yax Pasaj's ability to bring forth the ancestral patron deities through fire-drilling rituals. Fire-drilling was the ancient method of starting a fire by rapidly rotating a wooden stick, and it was often a sacred part of a foundation ritual. Perhaps the ritual calling forth the deities was carried out in the inner chamber and recorded on the hieroglyphic bench in an effort to ensure a prosperous reign for the sixteenth and final ruler and to bring light to a place of darkness. The similarity of the symbolism on neighboring Structure 21, discussed next, suggests that Structure 21A was Yax Pasaj Chan Yopaat's addition to extend the earlier building.

Exhibit 10 shows a selection of motifs from the exterior of Structure 21A. Although the sculptures have almost no incised designs and seem rather plain to viewers today, it is possible that originally they were colorfully painted.

Exhibits 11 & 12
Structure 21

What remains of Structure 21, the towering temple to the east of Structure 21A, is only a fraction of this once imposing building. Much of what we can reconstruct of the temple and its sculpture comes from photographs taken at the turn of the twentieth century, when Structures 20 and 21 still stood at the northeast corner of the East Court (84). In subsequent years, the Copan River took a course straight for the Acropolis. As it gradually ate away at the stone, mortar, and plaster built up over the centuries, the structures at the edge crumbled and were swept away. The Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia and PAC I initiated stabilization of the river cut at its southern end in 1979, with funding from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI). In 1989 the Proyecto Arqueológico Acrópolis Copán (PAAC) and the Asociación Copán procured funding from the Honduran Fund for Social Investment (FHIS) to resume further stabilization. Although much has been lost in the last hundred years, the river cut provides us with an unprecedented cross section in which to view the history of construction at Copan (85).

It is believed that Structure 21 was built after A. D. 715, possibly during the reign of Ruler 15, K'ahk' Yipyaj Chan Yopaat. It was once a marvelous temple brimming with dynamic sculpture. Considering that more than half the building was lost to the river, it is amazing that more than 1,000 sculpture blocks were uncovered during excavations, and in excess of 100 more were found in sculpture piles. PAAC archaeologist Julie Miller supervised these excavations during the 1989-91 field seasons and, not surprisingly, spent the majority of her time cataloging sculpture (86).

Much of the Structure 21 sculpture is from motifs and masks so huge that it is difficult to understand the individual blocks, long since separated from one another. We have been able to reassemble only some motif elements that e composed a unified pattern covering this lofty structure. These make up exhibits 11 and 12.

Patient detective work in retrieving and piecing together motifs on the surviving sculpture has enabled us to propose tentative reconstructions for motifs from Structure 21 (87). The temple's abundance of obsidian and of cross-hatched signs, signifying black and darkness, coupled with lancets and warrior figures, suggests that it was a structure akin to the chay-im na, "obsidian knife house," one of the places in which the Hero Twins were kept during their underworld trials as described in the Popol Vuh. Vinelike serpents decorated with butterfly wings, with Tlaloc warrior figures emerging from their open maws, probably encircled the building. This supernatural creature, related to visions, sacrifice, and death, may be a Classic period representation of what became known in Postclassic Mexico as Itzpapálotl, or Obsidian Butterfly. Adorning the corners of the temple were lancets labeled with cross-hatching as black or obsidian. Such lancets were used for ritual bloodletting, an act that enabled the spirits to awaken and emerge from their supernatural realm. Obsidian eyes glinted in the sunlight from the recesses of the twisted, umbilical-like serpent body. The droopy eyes are reminiscent of the half-opened eyes that represent stars hanging from the darkened sky in Maya books, or codices (88). The starry sky was thought to be the realm of the jaguar deity of the underworld.

The most common motif on the building was the interlaced eye design with attached butterfly wings (or "fans"). Several styles of wings and droopy eyes appear, one of which has an eye gouged into a deep circle. Amazingly, a pupil block was recovered with an obsidian disk still embedded in it, which we put on display. This fondness for inset disks of black obsidian to symbolize an underworld connection probably inspired the same technique on Structure 21A, and it occurs again on the upright, grinning dancing jaguars in the East Court.

The interlaced eyes may form sections of twisted vines or cords that lead into a split serpent head and open mouth, similar to Structure 16's serpent mouth. The serpent's large incisors, not on display, perhaps formed a base for the seated figure in exhibit 12 (89).

Another interpretation I propose is that the obsidian eyes are representations of seeds, and the butterfly wings are modeled after stylized flowers (90). Seeds from datura or morning glory plants were used for their hallucinogenic properties in Mexican warrior cults. After ingesting preparations of the plants, warriors felt invincible. Classic period costumes of warriors and related war imagery conflate a jaguar and a serpent with butterfly attributes in a creature Karl Taube calls the War Serpent. The symbolism appeared earlier at Teotihuacan and might have been related to militarism, the watery surface of the underworld, and fertility rituals. In central Mexico, warriors' souls were believed to be transformed into butterflies after death. Although there are no written accounts of this belief in the Maya area, the widespread use of butterflies and obsidian in warrior motifs at Copan and other Classic Maya sites lends support to the existence of a similar cult.

Exhibit 13
The “Motmot” Floor Marker

The fascinating and important Motmot floor marker, so called after its association with the building given that name, is unique at Copan. It is the oldest dated monument from Copan found still in its original place. It is also the only one carved in limestone, which came from a nearby mountain; all others were carved in the locally abundant volcanic tuff. When it was discovered in 1992 in a tunnel excavation beneath the Hieroglyphic Stairway of Structure 26, the carved circular surface of the marker was all that was visible because the irregular part of the stone was embedded in the stucco floor. It was placed directly in front of a building that was given the field name Motmot, after the iridescent blue-green trogon bird species that abounds at Copan. The marker served as a tombstone for a circular crypt beneath it. The tomb was associated with one of the earliest temples (known as Yax) buried underneath the Hieroglyphic Stairway. The marker's hieroglyphic inscription commemorates the important calendrical period ending of 9. 0. 0. 0. 0 (December 10, 435) and the sealing of the tomb approximately seven years later.

The marker was covered by a dedicatory offering, the remains of which included charred feathers, seeds, and colorful areas of yellow and burnt umber alternating with spots of fine pinkish gravel (91). It is possible that the pigments in the offering constituted a design that became compacted and altered during the 1,500 years between its burial and its uncovering. It appears that the offering was laid out replicating the ancient Maya worldview. Four jadeite spools were placed in the four cardinal directions, and three stones symbolizing the three hearthstones were placed in the middle with a charred sacred bundle of material including feathers and woven elements.

Once the floor marker was lifted, a sizable offering of mercury and the remains of a sacrificed deer came to light. This confirmed the reference to a deer sacrifice recognized in the floor marker's text. Lower still was the circular crypt, which held the remains of a woman in her early twenties, accompanied by ceramic offerings, jade, shell, a deer antler, and the skeletons of several animal companions. Three decapitated human heads were found in different levels of the burial. We do not know the identity of the woman or the beheaded victims, but she might have been a young shaman associated with three ballplayers who were sacrificed after losing a game commemorating the celebrated period ending. Cylindrical crypts were not previously known at Copan, but they are common at Teotihuacan. This raises more questions about the nature of interaction between Copan and Teotihuacan during the formation of the dynasty of K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo'.

The Motmot marker is also significant because it shows the earliest known portrait of the founder. In all later portraits, he wears the central Mexican warrior costume and has goggles over his eyes. Here, he is dressed in a more conventional Maya fashion. Two distinctly Teotihuacan features imply that K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo' did have ties with the ancient Mexican capital: this cylindrical tomb and the early building called Hunal, deep beneath Structure 16, that appears actually to hold the founder's remains. Hunal was built in an architectural style known as talud-tablero, which was typical of Teotihuacan. Perhaps K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo' is being "Mayanized" in this portrait dedicated by his son and successor, who built many structures, including Motmot itself, in the lowland Classic Maya style.

Exhibit 14
Sculpture 20, Bat Sculpture

In the 1930s, the Carnegie Institution retrieved several bat sculptures from Structure 20, one of the large East Court Acropolis temples lost to the river cut (92). An underworld house of trials mentioned in the Popol Vuh is the Zotzi-ha, or House of the Killer Bat, the cama zotz. A curious feature of Structure 20 is its cord holders on the outsides of the rooms, by means of which doors or curtains were secured. This led to the idea that the building might have functioned as a jail, perhaps holding captives. Because the Hero Twins were locked inside the Bat House as one of their underworld trials, it is conceivable that the bats on the roof of this building label it as such a place. A leaf-nosed bat is also the main sign for Copan's emblem glyph (93).