| Wakah-Chan Mythology |
| Mayan words have
changed in form or meaning since the scribes of the Classic period wrote their texts. The
connections between words and concepts of the past and the present open wonderful bridges
between the ancient Maya world and the modern one. The pathway connecting ancient words, concepts, images, historical analogs, and their modern counterparts are particularly evident in the striking resemblance between the World Tree, Wakah-Chan, and the modern Christian-Maya cross. The first Europeans who saw the images of Wakah-Chan at Palenque called the buildings housing them the temple of the Cross and the Temple of the Foliated Cross. Wakah-Chan is elaborately decorated with carvings of ancient trees and reflective mirrors. It was written with the number six prefixed to the phonetic sign ah and the glyph for "sky," because the sounds of wak, the word for six, and ah means "raised up." The base of Wakah-Chan is a deified offering plate that holds a cross made from a double-headed serpent. Classic artisans and lords depicted Wakah-Chan as a luxuriant maize plant heavy with ripe ears of corn, often depicted in personified form as the face of the Maize God. |
| Return to the picture of the Wakah-Chan image |