[Aztlan] Rats

[Karen Bassie]

This is an excerpt from my volume Maya Sacred Geography and the Creator 
Deities that refers to rats:
            After many adventures on the surface of the earth, including 
the defeat of a triad of dangerous earth-dwelling gods and the 
subordination of their own elder brothers, the hero twins clear a 
quadrilateral space on the earth's surface for corn cultivation. Because 
they are great sorcerers, the hero twins do not physically clear the 
milpa themselves, but have their tools magically perform these tasks. On 
the first day of clearing, they station a turtledove on a tree stump and 
tell it to sing out and warn them when their grandmother approached with 
their midday meal, for they do not want their grandmother to know that 
they are not doing the work themselves. In Yucatan, such birds as the 
white-winged dove, white-fronted dove, and red-billed pigeon are the 
birds of the deities who guard the cornfield (Redfield and Villa Rojas 
1934:208). By instructing the turtledove, the hero twins establish the 
role of these birds in the milpa. When Xmucane delivers their lunch, she 
establishes the tradition of women bringing the midday meal to the milpa.

            On the second day, the hero twins return to the milpa to 
resume their clearing and discover that the vegetation has been 
miraculously restored. They magically clear their milpa again and later 
that night return to see who is undoing their work. They discover that 
all the wild animals have gotten together and brought the vegetation 
back to life. They try to catch the animals but only succeed in 
apprehending a rat (ch'o). In pursuing the milpa animals, the hero twins 
set up a model for hunting in the milpa at night (Girard 1979:163).

After the hero twins capture the rat in a net, they punish him by 
burning his tail and making his eyes bulge (Christenson 2003a:150). The 
rat tells the boys not to kill him, and in exchange for their providing 
him with food, he informs them that their destiny is to be ball players 
and that the gaming equipment of their father and uncle is hidden in the 
house rafters (Christenson 2003a:150<n>51). As a reward, the hero twins 
tell the rat he may have any discarded maize, squash seeds, chile 
peppers, beans, pataxte (a type of cacao), and cacao from the house. 
When the hero twins go to retrieve the equipment, they place the rat in 
the corner of the house and he scurries up into the thatch where the 
ball is hidden.

After seeing the ball in the rafters of the house, the hero twins send 
their grandmother and mother to the river to fetch a jar of water, 
because they know the women do not want them to play ball. To delay the 
women, they send a mosquito to pierce a hole in the jar. The rat then 
gnaws through the lashings of the ball-game equipment, and it drops to 
the floor. With the ball-game equipment safely hidden on the road 
leading to the ballcourt, the hero twins go down to the river, patch the 
water jar, and returned to the house with the women. Then the hero twins 
journey to the Nim Xob' Karchaj ballcourt, sweep it out, and begin 
playing ball together.

            Rats and mice are natural inhabitants of Maya thatched roofs 
because they are attracted to the household food, and they are a 
particular nuisance in houses that have attics for storing corn. These 
rodents are notorious for running along the longitudinal members of the 
roof frame, and these roof purlines are actually called "the road of the 
rat" in Yucatec Maya, K'iche', Kaqchikel, Tz'utujil, Mam, Jakalteko, 
Q'eqchi' and Poqomchi' sources (Wauchope 1938:49). The hero twins, in 
effect, transform the rat from a field rodent to a house rodent, and by 
doing so, they establish its role in the household. It is odd that the 
hero twins trap the rat in their field because this is not a common 
practice of the Maya. They do, however, trap gophers in this manner 
(Redfield 1945:57; Hunn 1977:206; Hostettler 1996:283). This fact 
suggests that the hero twins actually transformed a gopher, which has 
small eyes and a hairy tail, into a rat, which has bulging eyes and a 
hairless tail. The T757 glyph for bah, "gopher," and the T758 glyph for 
ch'o, "rat," also reflect the difference in the eyes of these two 
creatures: the T757 symbol has small eyes, while the T758 symbol has 
large eyes.

            The transformation of these animals is also seen in the 
Kaqchikel town of San Antonio Palopó, where there is a belief that rats 
turn into gophers (Redfield 1945:57). The close association between 
gophers and rats is reflected in the word taltuza (tlalli, "earth," 
tozan, "rat"), the Mexican name for a gopher. A gopher-rat is 
illustrated in Classic Period art. This supernatural rodent is named in 
the accompanying text as the k'an bah chok, "yellow gopher rat" (Grube 
and Nahm 1994:699). On the Tonina stucco facade, the yellow gopher rat 
carries a ball with One Ajaw's head on it. This association with the 
ball surely can not be a coincidence. Given the association of k'an with 
the center, it is likely that the k'an sign in the gopher-rat's name, 
k'an bah chok, refers not only to his yellowish color, but to his role 
as the rat of the center house. As noted in chapter 1, the Maya begin 
clearing their fields at the full moon, which suggests that the hero 
twins trapped their gopher-rat at this time. This is supported by the 
Q'eqchi' belief that gophers come out during a full moon to eat but hide 
at new moon (M. Wilson 1972:398). The close association between rats and 
twins is seen in a Tz'utujil belief that the rat is the caretaker of 
twins (Woods 1968:209).