Page:Mexican Archæology.djvu/286

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MEXICAN ARCHÆOLOGY

a relief at Palenque, and a fresco at Santa Rita in British Honduras, show a figure with a head-dress in which a hand appears as the central feature. It 1s stated further that his name implies association with the dew and clouds, and that pilgrimages were made to his oracular shrine from Tabasco, Chiapas and Guatemala.

The sun-god proper in Yucatan was, as stated before, Kinich-Ahau, and at his temple in Itzamal the deity was supposed to descend at midday to consume the offerings "as the macaw with its variegated plumage." The simile is interesting, since it recalls at once the reliefs showing the offerings made to birds perched upon conventional trees (wrongly termed crosses) at Palenque (Fig. 49), and the similar emblems surmounted by birds held by some of the figures at Menché. Still more interesting is the statement, found in the works of Burgoa, that at Teotitlan in the Zapotec country was a temple with a celebrated idol which was said to have come from heaven in the form of a bird in the midst of a luminous constellation. One of the glyphs identified with practical certainty is that of the sun, and figures or heads of deities with his glyph, "kin," upon the forehead are found in the manuscripts and upon the monuments. Such is Schellhas' God G, who differs from Itzamna only in the presence of the kin-mark and of a peculiar curved nose-ornament (Fig. 47, b). On the monuments this god is invariably shown with peculiarly filed teeth, a characteristic which persists even when the kin-mark is absent (see Fig. 72; p. 316, and the cover-design), and a long beard-like appendage beneath his chin which probably represents the rays of the sun (Fig. 55, e; p. 251). But at the date at which the manuscripts were inscribed, as in later Yucatan, the personalities of Itzamna and the sun-god proper were rather confused, and the tendency can be observed even upon the monuments. The association of the sun with war is not so evident among