Bacab

The Bacabs are, in Yucatec Maya tradition as recorded in colonial-period sources, four divine brothers set at the four corners of the world to hold up the sky. Each is assigned one of the four world-directions and its associated colour, commonly red in the east, white in the north, black in the west and yellow in the south, and each bears his own name (Hobnil, Cantzicnal, Zaczini and Hozanek, in the list given by Diego de Landa). They are closely connected with the Chaacs, the four rain-gods of the directions, and with the Pauahtuns, the wind-gods, the several fourfold sets of directional deities overlapping in the Maya scheme of a cosmos ordered by its quarters.

The Bacabs are often pictured as aged sky-bearers, sometimes wearing the shell, net or spider's-web of the Pauahtun, and they governed the days and the fortunes tied to their directions in the divinatory calendar. As with much colonial-era Maya religion, the fullest descriptions reach us through post-conquest sources and must be weighed against the pre-conquest imagery.

A striking category of Mesoamerican sculpture has long invited comparison with the sky bearing Bacabs, though scholars are careful to keep the comparison provisional rather than settled. At both Chichen Itza in the Yucatan and Tula in central Mexico, Toltec and Maya-Toltec builders carved rows of standing stone figures, warriors with upraised arms, sometimes called Atlantean columns after the Greek Titan Atlas because of the obvious visual parallel, which were set beneath temple roofs and altars to appear as though physically supporting the structure above on their raised hands. The columns at Tula, in particular, are massive basalt warrior figures that once held up the roof of a temple platform, and the general idea they express, human or divine figures literally holding up the built or cosmic sky, maps naturally onto the directional, sky bearing role colonial sources assign to the four Bacabs, standing at the corners of the world with the sky resting on their shoulders.

Specialists in Mesoamerican archaeology generally decline to claim that the Tula or Chichen Itza column figures specifically depict the Bacabs by name, since no accompanying inscription identifies them and the two sites belong to Toltec and Maya-Toltec traditions rather than directly to the Yucatec Maya sources, chiefly Diego de Landa's account, that name the Bacabs themselves. What can be said more safely is that the underlying idea of sky supporting figures, quartering the ordered cosmos and holding its roof aloft, recurs independently in Mesoamerican sculpture, of which the Bacabs as described by Landa are one clearly named textual instance among a wider and older visual tradition of divine world-bearers.