Camazotz

The fourth house

The hero twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque go down to Xibalba and are put through a series of houses, each one a night to be survived: a house of darkness, a house of cold, a house of jaguars, a house of bats, a house of blades.

The Bat House is the one that works.

The brothers get through the night by climbing inside their own blowguns and staying there. The bats are above them, moving in the dark, and the twins wait. Near morning, with no way to tell from inside the tube whether the light has come, Hunahpu puts his head out to look.

A bat takes it off.

Why the episode is good

Strip the supernatural out and what is left is a trap built from one true thing about being hidden: you cannot see when it is safe to stop hiding.

The defence works perfectly. The blowgun is sound, the plan is sound, the night passes. The failure is the last five minutes of it, and it is caused not by the bats finding them but by the hero's own need to know whether it is over.

The text does not moralise about this and neither will we. It is simply constructed better than most ordeal narratives, and it is the reason this episode is the one people remember out of the five.

What happens to the head

It is carried off and hung in the ballcourt, where it is used as the ball in the next game.

The Popol Vuh is a text about ball games, and the ball is repeatedly the thing in dispute: the twins' father lost a game in Xibalba before them, and the whole sequence is a return match. Using a decapitated hero's head as the ball is the lords of Xibalba making the point in the most direct form available.

Xbalanque gets his brother through the game with a substitute head and a trick, and Hunahpu is restored. That is the shape of the whole Xibalba sequence: the twins lose rounds, keep playing, and win by not being finishable.

What the name says

Kame is death, sotz' is bat. The compound is as plain as it sounds, and in the text it is applied to the inhabitants of the house — a category of dangerous bats rather than one named individual with a biography.

This matters because the single-monster reading is the version in circulation. Popular accounts turn Camazotz into a named bat god with powers and motives. The Popol Vuh gives a room full of them and one decisive bite.

Bats elsewhere

Bats are everywhere in Maya art, across centuries and media, and a bat emblem is associated with the Kaqchikel. That is a genuine and interesting context, and it is not evidence about this story.

Keeping those apart is the whole discipline of this section of the site. Images in art, emblems in lineage names and episodes in a sixteenth-century narrative are three different kinds of thing, and merging them is how a creature acquires a thousand years of history it cannot document.

What we illustrate

Not a bat monster. The text's horror is architectural — a dark enclosed house with something in it — and that is what the pictures here show: the chamber, the blowgun at first light, and the empty court where the next scene happens.

Sources

Popol Vuh in Dennis Tedlock's translation (1985; revised 1996), which is also explicit about where the text is obscure. The surviving manuscript is the Ximénez copy of around 1701, now in the Newberry Library.

• Dennis Tedlock (translator), Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life (1996). Simon & Schuster, revised edition; first edition 1985
• Francisco Ximénez, Popol Vuh manuscript (Ximénez transcription and Spanish translation) (1701). c. 1701–1703; Newberry Library, Chicago