The statement is also significant, that the Bacabs were supposed to be the victims of Ah-puchah, the Despoiler or Destroyer,[1] though the precise import of that character in the mythical drama is left uncertain.[2]

[Footnote 1:  Eopuco I take to be from the verb puch or puk, to melt, to dissolve, to shell corn from the cob, to spoil; hence puk, spoiled, rotten, podrida, and possibly ppuch, to flog, to beat.  The prefix ah, signifies one who practices or is skilled in the action which the verb denotes.]

[Footnote 2:  The mother of the Bacabs is given in the myth as Chibilias (or Chibirias, but there is no r in the Maya alphabet).  Cogolludo mentions a goddess Ix chebel yax, one of whose functions was to preside over drawing and painting.  The name is from chebel, the brush used in these arts.  But the connection is obscure.]

The supposed Holy Ghost, Echuac, properly Ah-Kiuic, Master of the Market, was the god of the merchants and the cacao plantations.  He formed a triad with two other gods, Chac, one of the rain gods, and Hobnel, also a god of the food supply.  To this triad travelers, on stopping for the night, set on end three stones and placed in front of them three flat stones, on which incense was burned.  At their festival in the month Muan precisely three cups of native wine (mead) were drained by each person present.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Landa, Relacion de las Cosas de Yucatan, pp. 156, 260.]

The description of some such rites as these is, no doubt, what led the worthy Hernandez to suppose that the Mayas had Trinitarian doctrines.  When they said that the god of the merchants and planters supplied the wants of men and furnished the world with desirable things, it was but a slightly figurative way of stating a simple truth.

The four Bacabs are called by Cogolludo “the gods of the winds.”  Each was identified with a particular color and a certain cardinal point.  The first was that of the South.  He was called Hobnil, the Belly; his color was yellow, which, as that of the ripe ears, was regarded as a favorable and promising hue; the augury of his year was propitious, and it was said of him, referring to some myth now lost, that he had never sinned as had his brothers.  He answered to the day Kan. which was the first of the Maya week of thirteen days.[1] The remaining Bacabs were the Red, assigned to the East, the White, to the North, and the Black, to the West, and the winds and rains from those directions were believed to be under the charge of these giant caryatides.

[Footnote 1:  Landa, Relacion, pp. 208,-211, etc. Hobnil is the ordinary word for belly, stomach, from hobol, hollow.  Figuratively, in these dialects it meant subsistence, life, as we use in both these senses the word “vitals.”  Among the Kiches of Guatemala, a tribe of Maya stock, we find, as terms applied to their highest divinity, u pam uleu, u pam cah, literally Belly of the Earth, Belly of the Sky, meaning that by which earth and sky exist. Popol Vuh, p. 332.]