Cizin- Maya GodDeity"Stinking One"

The Stinking One

Cizin's name translates as "the Flatulent One" or "the Stinking One," derived from the Yucatec Maya word for flatulence. Maya artists depicted him with a body marked by black death spots, the mottled discoloration of flesh in decay. Flames lick from his swollen form. He is not a clean skeleton but a bloated, putrefying thing, a god who smells like what he governs.

He inhabits the deepest regions of Xibalba, where he tends an eternal fire. His domain reeks of burning flesh and sulfurous fumes that seep upward through volcanic vents and earthquake fissures into the surface world. When the ground shook in the volcanic highlands and sulfurous gases escaped from cracks in the earth, the Maya recognized Cizin's breath. The earthquakes themselves were his doing: the death god dancing on his victims or stoking his fires below.

The Burning of the Wicked

Cizin's fire was not indiscriminate. Diego de Landa recorded the Maya belief that evildoers descended to Cizin's realm of fire and suffering after death, while those who had lived properly passed to a more peaceful afterlife. The wicked faced his stinking fires without end. The righteous might escape them.

His punishment had a physical specificity that made him feared. He did not simply collect the dead. He burned them, and the living could smell the evidence rising from the ground beneath their feet.