A Colonial Term and a Modern Symbol, Not an Ancient God

Hunab Ku (roughly the One God or Sole God in Yucatec Maya) is a name with a complicated and much-misunderstood history, and one that illustrates how carefully the sources on Maya religion must be read. The term does not appear in any pre-conquest Maya inscription, codex or monument; it is found only in colonial-era documents written after the Spanish conquest, Yucatec dictionaries and catechetical texts compiled by Franciscan missionaries, where it was used to render the single supreme God of Christianity in the Maya language as a tool of conversion.

Many scholars therefore regard Hunab Ku, understood as a supreme creator-deity, as largely a product of the colonial encounter rather than an attested god of the independent Maya, though the underlying words are genuine Maya and some relate the term to the creator Itzamna. Separately, the modern circular Hunab Ku symbol popular in New Age and pan-Maya spirituality is a twentieth-century creation, adapted in the 1980s by the writer Jose Arguelles from a colonial-era Aztec (not Maya) design, and has no ancient Maya provenance. The honest summary is that Hunab Ku is real as a colonial term and a modern symbol, but not as a documented deity of the pre-conquest Maya, and the confident claims that the ancient Maya worshipped a single supreme god by this name go beyond the evidence.