[Aztlan] Name for Fer-de-lance

[Karen Bassie]

In my volume Maya Sacred Geography and the Creator Deities, I have 
presented evidence that the highland stories that refer to the elopement 
of the young deity Thorn Broom and the corn goddess Basket Grass were 
based on the marriage of One Hunahpu and his first wife Lady Bone Water. 
The Classic Period parallel of One Hunahpu is the corn deity One Ixim 
who is portrayed wearing a jade costume. The only known sources for jade 
in Mesoamerica are the mountains on either side of the eastern Motagua 
River. The highest jade mountain in this area is Raxon Mountain 
(literally blue-green mountain). In the contemporary stories, Raxon it 
is thought to be the manifestation Thorn Broom who has all the 
attributes of One Ixim/One Hunahpu including a corn goddess wife. In the 
Popol Vuh, the first tribes of humans climbed their respective sacred 
mountains to await the rising of Hunahpu and Xbalanque. While they 
prayed and waited, they saw the morning star, rejoiced and began to burn 
their incense in thanks. Before the hero twins rose up as sun and full 
moon, they adorned their father, and told him that humans would always 
worship him first. The Classic period version of this event shows One 
Ixim/One Hunahpu being dressed in his jade jewelry. The Dresden Venus 
tables indicate that the first rising of the morning star occurred on 
the date 1 Ajaw (One Hunahpu), and deities were frequently named for the 
day they were first manifested. The adorned One Hunahpu was the morning 
star that humans first saw just before the rising of the hero twins. 
Thorn Broom's name refers to the grass used to create brooms. In 
Mesoamerican mythology, the morning star is thought to sweep the path 
for the rising sun.

Basket Grass was the daughter of a powerful deity called Xucaneb whose 
cave house was on the highest mountain in the Alta Verapaz region. 
Basket Grass spent her days making beautiful weavings on the patio of 
their house. One day, she was seduced by Thorn Broom who had journeyed 
to Alta Verapaz to hunt deer. Thorn Broom convinced her to elope with 
him, but these were serious breeches in social customs because marriages 
required costly negotiations on the part of the groom's family and a 
final bride price paid in cacao beans. Xucaneb pursed the fleeing 
couple, and killed his daughter for this inappropriate behavior. She was 
killed by a thunderbolt as she was crossing a body of water, and her 
remains were placed into 13 jars. Thorn Broom then made amends with 
Xucaneb (presumably by paying his belated bride price), but when he 
opened the first 12 jars he found that Basket Grass' remains had 
transformed into various animals such as snakes, insects, worms, 
lizards, spiders, scorpions, caterpillars and toads. Thorn Broom dumped 
these animals into a canoe filled with water and tobacco, and as Edwin 
Braakhuis has demonstrated, this tobacco was the source of the venom now 
found in these animals (the word may is used for both tobacco and poison 
especially venom). These noxious animals then escaped into the world, 
but the 13th jar contained the restored Basket Grass. The young couple 
began their life together, but Basket Grass later died during 
childbirth. Basket Grass' remains then turned into the corn seeds of 
Paxil Mountain.

The first animal to emerge from the 13 jars of Basket Grass' remains was 
a snake called ic bolay "black bolay". In the highlands, Ic bolay can be 
used to refer to poisonous animals in general, but it is a specific name 
for the Bothrops asper (a.k.a. fer-de-lance, tommygoff, yellow jaw, 
barba amarilla). The Bothrops asper is one of the most commonly 
encountered snakes around human habitations and milpas, and it is the 
most feared because of its deadly venom and aggressive behavior. In 
addition to the ic bolay snake, the elopement stories refer to a variety 
of other poisonous snakes found in the jars including a chac bolay. A 
number of early Yucatec Maya sources refer to a chac "red" bolay, a k'an 
"yellow" bolay and sak "white" bolay. Bolay is used as a generic term 
for animals that kill while chac bolay is defined as an evil spirit, 
serpent, jaguar, cougar, or spotted wild cat. In the Chol region, the 
ik'bolay is a kind of jaguar. These definitions raise the possibility 
that this goddess had both a feline and fer-de-lance form.

Ic bolay was also the indigenous name for the lower Chixoy river system 
which is today named the Usumacinta River, and the term is still used as 
the name for a tributary of that river (Feldman 2000:25, 155, 240). As I 
discuss in my volume, the Chixoy River was the model for the Milky Way 
river, and its water was closely associated with corn goddesses. In one 
of the elopement stories, a school of silvery fish collected the remains 
of Basket Grass, and these fish later became the river of the Milky Way.