Dear Dave and Justin,
yes, the Vase of the Seven Gods is discussed in our paper. Since I am
writing my Ph.D. dissertation about a possible cognitive approach to
god concepts in Classic Maya culture (I meanwhile prefer the
designation "counterintuitive agents", gods, deities, ghost are
european concepts and phenomenology of religion is dead!!) - the main
topic of my research is the study of K'UH in all its contexts - I agree
with Dave that the representation of deities are not refering to an
individual, specific agent, but to a group of agents that are related
with the object, subject, place expressed in their name phrase: CHAB,
CHAN, IK' "JEWEL" TAN. My list of X-K'UH is still growing. The latter
one is interesting: it is a group of deities associated with IK'
"JEWEL" TAN - the place of origin (one of the place or course) in the
Palenque Creation texts. A study of all context reveals that in each
group of agents, we find a specific number of individual agents
identifiable with their proper name, as for example the 3 agents of the
Palenque Triade - variations of that concepts can be found in Caracol
and elsewhere, a more intense discussion will follow in my
dissertation.
Best wishes,
Christian
Kawil wrote:
> Dear Christian and Justin,
> Christian -- thanks for the reference. I will be very interested to
> read the newly published paper.
> Justin, yes the Bolon Yookte'' K'uh glyph is in both texts (Vases of
> Seven Gods and Eleven Gods). Perhaps Christian and Marcus have
> addressed this in their paper, but I think that the god names listed on
> these two Naranjo vessels are best seen as categories or groupings of
> gods. We already find these three transparent collective terms for the
> gods who are "ordered" on 4 Ajaw 8 Kumk'u (leaving out the ones that
> are hard to analyze):
> Chan-al K'uh, "the heavenly gods"
> Kab-al K'uh, "the earrthly gods"
> Ux ? K'uh (the Triad title), "the three ? gods"
> So, I simply wonder if Bolon Yookte' K'uh can be seen as a similar
> gouping of nine deities, even if these get to be collapsed as a more
> individual entity (a very mesoamerican concept of divinity, we know).
> certainly the impersonation of Bolon Yookte' K'uh by rulers, as on that
> Bonampak-area panel or stela, implies a more concrete individual. The
> question becomes: how do the "sets" of gods on the naranjo vessels
> correspond to the portraits? I have long been bothered by this, for
> there is no neat correlation between name glyph and image. The newer
> Vase oif the Eleven Gods makes this ambiguity all the more obvious. I
> suspect that what we are seeing are potraits of one or more
> "representatives" of the sets, such that the artist could pick and
> choose from quite a variety.
> - Dave
