Itzamna

Itzamna is among the highest gods of the ancient Maya, a supreme creator and sky deity and the patron of writing, learning and priestly knowledge. In the classification of the Maya codex-gods devised by Paul Schellhas he is God D, shown as an aged figure marked with the features of great age and wisdom, and the colonial-period Yucatec sources present him as a benevolent lord of the heavens credited with giving humankind the arts of writing, the calendar and medicine. He is closely associated with the sun-god Kinich Ahau, of whom he is sometimes treated as an aspect, and is paired with the goddess Ix Chel.

In the surviving Maya codices, chiefly the Dresden Codex, God D, identified with Itzamna, is shown as an aged figure with a sunken, toothless mouth and a distinctive curved Roman-nose profile, often seated on a celestial throne marked with sky-band glyphs or emerging from the open jaws of a great celestial serpent, a composite creature sometimes called the cosmic monster in modern scholarship, which appears throughout Classic and Postclassic Maya art as a boundary between the earthly and heavenly realms. This imagery ties Itzamna visually to the sky itself rather than to any single earthly location, consistent with his role as the highest and most encompassing of Maya deities.

Reconstructing Itzamna is a case study in the difficulties of Maya religion. Much of what is said of him comes from colonial-era sources, above all the writings gathered by Spanish clergy such as Diego de Landa, which record Maya belief only after the conquest and through a Christian filter, and these must be read alongside, and checked against, the pre-conquest evidence of the codices and the Classic-period inscriptions, which scholars are still deciphering. The name and its written forms, and the relation of the colonial Itzamna to Classic-period sky-and-creator deities, remain subjects of active scholarly work rather than settled fact. What is clear is his standing as a chief creator-and-wisdom god in the Yucatec Maya world at the time of European contact.

The Yucatecan city of Izamal preserves Itzamna's name directly and was, according to colonial-era accounts, the site of a major shrine where the god was consulted as a healing oracle, standing beside the massive pyramid now known as Kinich Kakmo; after the Spanish conquest Franciscan friars built a large monastery, the Convento de San Antonio de Padua, directly atop or immediately beside the pre-Hispanic religious complex, using stone quarried from the Maya structures themselves, a physical layering of the new faith over the old that is repeated at many Mesoamerican sites and makes Izamal a documented case study in how colonial Catholic building practice appropriated existing indigenous sacred ground.